Think of this as a kind of anatomy display. Looking at the stuff under the skin, but it’s my TV scripts and pitches.

It started when I had the notion of adding an online archive to this website. I’d been looking back over some old material; some original ideas, or my take on something or other. Quite eloquent little essays, all dead in the water for their various reasons and it seemed a shame just to let them rot.

Up until now I have never let anything go. Often a busted pitch would end up in the fabric of something else. A plot gimmick from Sexton Blake was recycled into Danziger and ended up in my Silent Witness. I’ve kept everything as my personal slate, reckoning that to expose unproduced stuff is to take it off the market. But some of it’s been overtaken by history—The 39 Steps, The Midwich Cuckoos—while my interest in some of the subjects has waned.

So I started a list—dead pitches for public sharing, as opposed to IP worth keeping in play. I’m following the example here of Middleman creator and Children of Tendu podcasterJavier Grillo-Marxuach, who’s created a downloadable archive of his own scripts and pitches which he’s made available to all.

The files in this list will be password protected in a (probably vain) attempt to shield the material from IP-thieving bots. But not from you, of course. Use the 3-letter code in the accompanying image to open the documents.

We’ll kick off with my take on John Buchan’s classic adventure novel The Thirty-Nine Steps. Often I’d come away from a general meeting and sit down to work out my thoughts some promising subject we’d discussed. How would I approach it? How would I handle it? Writing is thinking. As an example, Eleventh Hour came out of a discussion about human cloning in which I’d railed at all the misconceptions that needed to be swept away to separate the reality from the pseudoscience. I sat down to lay out my thoughts and in the process, I found the show.

In the following case, the springboard was a chat with producer Archie Tait. No, we couldn’t find a broadcaster willing to entertain the idea of a new production. And yes, one of them went on and commissioned one. From somebody else.