Our first City of Literature Summer School! Over one intense, action packed week in August, a small team of young people were challenged to create the world, characters and story lines for their own Norwich-based, literature-themed soap. There was tension, drama, shocks and twists as the students hurtled towards their own cliff-hanger question: would it be a yes from the panel of industry experts, or was it all just a lot of froth?

Read the plot synopses for their soap opera, ‘The Flat Pack’. 

Discover some of the action from behind the scenes. 

Explore extracts from The Flat Pack soap bible, including character profiles, location and episode tasters.  

Read the headline page of ‘The Flat Pack’, by Billy White 

The Tutor

Lilie Ferrari has written scripts for many popular television series and serials, including Casualty, Holby, EastEnders, Peak Practice, Dangerfield, and has been a script consultant/story adviser on Playing the Field, EastEnders, Finnish soap opera Kottikatu and French soap opera Bellerive. She was a script editor in the BBC Drama Department for three years, and before that she was Television Projects Officer at the British Film Institute. She has published various works relating to the study of television, including Brookside Close Up (University of StrathClyde), Wham! Wrapping: Teaching the Music Industry (BFI Education Department), and has contributed to The Women’s Companion to International Film (Virago), Parents Talking Television (Comedia) and Film (St. James Press), as well as journalism for The Guardian, New Socialist, Everywoman and Primetime. She has taught at University level and has published four popular women’s fiction novels. Website 

The Judges

Christabelle Dilks is a Screenwriter, Script Editor and Consultant. She worked at Channel 4 during a particularly rich period for drama and was part of the small team commissioning original serials and single dramas from Queer as Folk to Shockers. She worked on several major adaptations, both from novels and real life accounts, such as Longitude, Shackleton and Sword of Honour. At the BBC she storylined adaptations of the first series of the Inspector Lynley Mysteries, and later, storylined and script edited dramas adapted from accounts of historical events: Krakatoa, Lusitania, Suez, Chernobyl, Rome, and most recently, a feature film script adapted from the novel Salt. She has also written two feature scripts. She is also currently a mentor on write2screen’s Script Hot House programme funded by Creative England.

Chris Gribble is the Chief Executive of Writers’ Centre Norwich. After completing a PhD in German Poetry and Philosophy at the University of Manchester, Chris worked in publishing then the cultural sector and was the Director of Manchester Poetry Festival and then Manchester Literature Festival. He is on the Board of Directors of ICORN (the International Cities of Refuge Network), is Co-Chair of the National Association for Literature Development, sits of the Advisory Group for Manchester University’s Centre for New Writing and the Editorial Board of Jon McGregor’s new journal ‘The Letters Page’.

Gary Standley is a Senior Broadcast Journalist and Producer at BBC East. He has worked in radio and TV for over 25 years and is currently based at BBC Voices. During his time at the BBC he has organised events, presented radio shows and made lots of cups of tea. At BBC Voices he runs film training for the public and produces BBC Introducing in Norfolk and the BBC Norfolk New Show. He is well used to writing short pithy, cheesy pieces for radio and BBC websites.