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Some of you may remember my blog a month or so back about visiting a Young Offenders Detention centre. It was a research trip for a new project, and I had a certain amount of concern about the morality of our visit, in that the producer and I just dipped in and sucked up as much of the young offender’s lives as we could as raw story material.

Well, my producer has spent some of the time since then done compiling video diaries for the teenagers, and he went back to present some of her work. He got a shock. Of the seven youths we spent two days with, only one was left.

Three had been sent to prison, properly, for their various crimes, and one wouldn’t be out until he is over 18, which means he will go in a youth prison, to be transferred to an adult prison half way through his sentence.

Another three had absconded from the scheme. Two of those had dropped out of sight completely - technically they are now on the run. The other had just decided he would rather stay in bed for the day, which actually meant a trip straight to prison for breaching the conditions of the scheme. A very expensive lie-in.

The remaining boy kept coming in. But apparently he was stoned the day my producer was there.

13, and stoned.

It made me think hard about what I would be writing.

What had happened to these boys, the fact that the real world had caught up with them in a very real way, makes me determined that, more than ever, I would write something that felt truthful, to do them justice.

Of course, that’s a tricky concept in itself. Who am I to do them justice?  Haven’t the courts decided on their justice? What does ‘justice’ mean in this context?

Well,  there’ s no-one to guide me, so I decided for myself.

I’m not going to go for polemic. I’m not going to blame anyone, or anything, for what has happened to my characters. I’m not going to explain it as an absence of support from the government, or the social services, or the doctors who diagnose unruly children as ADHD at the age of 6 and doom them to a life of medication, or parents who would rather get drunk than be a parent.

All of these things contribute, but none of them dominate. There’s something about being human that means we look for causal links. I’m not convinced it’s so easy.

So. I’m going to try to write the simplest, most truthful thing I can. I’ve promised myself a few things:

• I’m not going to invent any incidents, I’m going to create a narrative shape out of things that actually happened, or that we were told by one of the boys we interviewed.
• I’m going to try to find every single line of dialogue in the hours and hours of interview tapes we have.
• I’m going to tell an overall story that feels utterly true to the people who helped create it. It’s probably going to be a small story, and it’s probably going to have a very slight narrative.  It’s going to have flashes of violence, and flashes of confusion where an emotional snowstorm descends and blocks out all intention. Just like life.
• I’m going to have to order these events to create some idea of ‘meaning’, otherwise the script wouldn’t be drama, but the meaning I’m going to create is not going to be black, or white, or necessarily easily articulated.

It’s going to be rather different from a lot of the drama I’ve been paid to write before for the bigger TV shows, which often rely on a constant delivery of a precise, unchanging formula that can’t miss hitting certain buttons.

I’m going to be helped by the fact that it’s a radio drama. I’ve never written for radio before, so it’s a great technical challenge.  I’m very used to telling stories visually, so the absolute absence of pictures is going to make me reinvent certain things, and I still don’t know how I’m going to achieve what I want to achieve. One crucial difference is that I’ve been told the great screenwriting sin of voice over is actually encouraged on radio. I’m interested in this - I think that means the script can act a little more like a novel, in that it allows grant us direct access to a person’s thoughts.

I suspect that radio in the UK has a lot more of an open mind than television. I suspect that there isn’t nearly the same intervention from executive producers and researchers. I suspect that, unlike television, it is a place where the individual voice can still be individual, and tell some kind of truth that is unfamiliar.

For the sake of what I want to do for the teenagers I met, I hope so.

First meeting with the exec tomorrow, to discuss the first draft of the treatment.

I’ll keep you posted.