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Salman Rushdie writes sci-fi The Next People for TV
Novelist praises Mad Men and West Wing as he writes his own sci-fi drama
At the grand old age of 63, Salman Rushdie, author of Midnight's Children and The Satanic Verses, has discovered television. He has been commissioned by the US cable network Showtime to write a sci-fi drama called The Next People.
It is Rushdie's first experience of writing for TV since he worked as an advertising copywriter in the 1970s, coming up with such slogans as 'irresistibubble' (for Aero chocolate), 'Naughty but Nice' (for fresh cream cakes) and 'That'll do nicely' (for Amex).
He appears to have discovered the attractions of the medium after watching such recent American television successes as Mad Men and The Wire.
"In the movies the writer is just the servant, the employee," he said in an interview with the Observer. "In television, the 60-minute series, The Wire and Mad Men and so on, the writer is the primary creative artist.
"You have control in the way that you never have in the cinema. The Sopranos was David Chase, West Wing was Aaron Sorkin," he went on.
"Matthew Wiener on Mad Men writes the entire series before they start shooting, and if you have that, then what you can do with character and story is not at all unlike what you can do in a novel."
The Next People will apparently be a drama about the fast changes occurring in society in terms of politics, sex, religion, science and technology. Although filming has not yet begun, the pilot has already been given what Rushdie describes as "an almost feature-film budget" by Showtime.
While Rushdie's enthusiasm is welcome, one drama producer told The First Post this morning: "You'd think Rushdie was the first decent writer to discover television. Luckily for us, writers like Tom Stoppard, Malcolm Bradbury and William Boyd have known for a very long time that writing for television is always an option."
By coincidence, the BBC has just announced that Stoppard has been working an adaptation of Ford Madox Ford's great WW1 quartet Parade's End, to air next year.
Rushdie turned to the medium partly because of the frustration of getting a big-screen version of Midnight's Children, to be called Winds of Change, off the ground. "You have no idea how hard it was to raise the money for Midnight's Children," he told the Observer.
"[My agents] said to me that what I should really think about is a TV series, because what has happened in America is that the quality – or the writing quality – of movies has gone down the plughole." ·
