This one was huge. Early in 2020 I was packing to fly to New Zealand with producer Neil Zeiger. We were heading out to meet with film commissioners, to scout locations, and to begin putting together a diverse writing team appropriate to our subject. The subject was the historic meeting of two cultures, told from multiple points of view instead of the usual colonial perspective. Our base would be Aotearoa but our theatre would be spread all across the Southern Pacific.

I had a tin of Kendal Mint Cake to give to the Maori King. I mean, major diplomacy.

Then Covid closed the borders, and everything went on hold.

It had begun when I was asked for my take on the life of Captain James Cook. Right away my research suggested that there was a bigger, bolder, more faceted and largely untold story there, and that became my pitch. It blossomed into a 10-hour epic in which Cook would feature as one of the players in a much wider and more layered Pacific drama.

Lockdown was a setback. We lost ground but we regrouped. Ultimately the core team was Neil and myself along with veteran NZ producer John (Whale Rider) Barnett and director Lee (Once Were Warriors, Die Another Day) Tamahori.

Click on the button and you’ll see my detailed treatment. This was the show’s foundation document; concept, teaser, main characters and full narrative blueprint for a ten-hour season of period TV. I was aware of being a European, an outsider; Lee, of Maori heritage, didn’t see that as a concern. I knew it wasn’t my personal tale to tell but my aim was to be the builder of a framework into which other, more directly connected voices could be invited for the telling. To establish the material’s factual credentials I took the unusual step of colour-coding the text; what little I had to invent stands out in blue, while everything else is from the historical record.

The setbacks did for us in the end. Our time ran out. The backer of Neil’s company pulled out of the film business, causing a new delay while Neil negotiated to keep the project rights. Then John Barnett died in August 2025. I didn’t see it coming. I see now that he was 80, though from his energy you’d never have guessed it. Lee Tamahori died three months later, not long after returning from the festival circuit for his final movie The Convert (starring Guy Pearce, and recommended).

Well, that was it. I donated my research library to Oxfam books. Made them four hundred quid, at last count.

Developed for Simon Maxwell at Red Arrow, this was a true-life South Africa story pitched to a meeting of the heads of Fox International Channels in LA and subsequently to FX. “When a mugger in a Johannesburg air terminal picks the wrong man to steal from, the act sets off a chain of international consequences leading to the exposure and jailing of the massively corrupt head of Interpol, the world’s leading organisation of police forces.” It’s quite the tale and had we gone ahead, I’d have been pushing for Pierce Brosnan for the role of former MI6 agent Paul O’Sullivan. it’s a story that involves blackmail, terror, murder, home invasion, armed robbery, gangland execution, and a crack police investigative unit with a cool name. Airport crime is only the tip of the iceberg. The trail will lead O’Sullivan to the highest levels of international politics, to those who seized every advantage on offer as they stood in Nelson Mandela’s reflected glory. It ends in triumph for O’Sullivan with Jackie Selebi, Chief of Police and head of the world’s most famous global security organisation, facing fifteen years in jail.

Based on research gathered by Tendeka Matatu and Ralph Ziman from a comprehensive range of sources including court records, witness statements, email exchanges, phone recordings, contemporary reporting, and O’Sullivan’s own dossier.

The recent Paramount+ adaptation of Treasure Island brought this one to mind. Sky had enjoyed success with a rather decent adaptation of Stevenson’s novel with (then) Eddie Izzard in the role of Long John Silver. They wanted a follow-up, and Izzard was keen to reprise the role. Producers Kindle Entertainment optioned Andrew Motion’s novel Silver and asked me to take a swing at it.

I picked up a copy and hit the first snag. I wrote: “If the aim is to produce a sequel to Treasure Island with Eddie Izzard at the heart of it, then the character’s almost complete absence from the novel—appearing only once at the beginning, blind, decrepit, and dying—is, to say the least, an obstacle to adaptation.”

In Silver, the Memo you can see my analysis and first thoughts on how to move forward. And, how you can solve a problem like no Silver. As ever, CFX to unlock the protected file.

This led to meetings, pitch drafts, and notes flying back and forth. At the time Kindle’s offices were on the upper floor of a brick building in the middle of Hackney City Farm and meetings there were always a delight. Money was spent, effort was invested, problems were addressed, and then at that point Sky decided that they weren’t inclined to a sequel after all.

Izzard was still on board, though, and the process began of trying to place the project elsewhere. Always a disheartening task, made harder when you like the people because walking away would feel like a betrayal. But a challenging sell was made even harder by it being a sequel to someone else’s show.

Eventually Izzard moved on, and so did we all.

Sometime around 2004 Rupert Murdoch’s Sky TV (again) made it known that they were looking for ‘a British Buffy’. Every production company in town kicked into gear and Carnival passed the challenge to me. After three seasons of BUGS and the Oktober miniseries I suppose I was a likely choice.

My concept was a generational family of Park Rangers charged with keeping the ‘hidden folk’ in line, facing a crisis when a drained reservoir exposed an ancient woodland and released its angry Elementals. My log line was, ‘Hunting fairies with pickup truck and cattle prod’.

Sky took in the pitches, gave them all equal consideration, and handed the commission to Elisabeth Murdoch’s company. In retrospect I’m thinking that they were more interested in Buffy’s strong female representation, and the audience that would bring with it, than in a fantasy show per se.

By then the idea had taken life to an extent that I couldn’t let it go. Of course I couldn’t, or it wouldn’t have been worth pursuing in the first place. I had a much bigger plan than you’ll see in the pitch document, which is just the start of a conversation.

Eventually I drew on the work to create a novella for one of my Christmas chapbooks, covering much of the ground of the original pilot. It’s out there, you can buy it. The rest lurks under the surface; waiting, like the story’s Elementals, for the chance to be let loose.

Or to be optioned. That works, too.

You’ll find that the above link takes you not to a script or a treatment, but to the Subterranean Press page for a Hard Case-style novella titled The Next Thing You See When You Die. Here’s why:

Risen was a pitch that I made as part of the development deal I had with Bruckheimer TV, back when we were making Eleventh Hour for CBS. The logline: while a former undercover officer struggles to reconnect with his home life, a young woman from his criminal past seeks vengeance for the ghosts of those he betrayed.

I’ll be honest, out of all the material we discussed it was the one I really hoped they’d go for. But after two tries I backed off and we went with something else, which in the end the studio didn’t like. But that’s another story.

This one stayed with me and the only way to shake off the spell was to write a spec pilot. No one wanted it, no one was waiting for it, I just needed to do it. Nothing much happened until Simon Maxwell at Red Arrow read the script and fell for it. He took Risen to MIPCOM in Cannes and pitched it hard to a number of potential partners. I was in Lisbon picking up the European Science TV Award for my Silent Witness when I learned that we were moving into a deal with ABC Signature, a production arm of Disney’s ABC Network (and yes, it was just as exciting as that all makes it sound).