By Nisa Dari
A scriptwriting lecturer at De Montfort University has spoken about how his experiences as a television sitcom producer have helped guide hundreds of students to find their future career paths after studying his course.
Christopher Walker, 73, has been teaching his Writing For The Screen course for 25 years after previously being a television producer for the television sitcom series The Upper Hand which had seven seasons on ITV during the 1990s, with 96+ episodes.
He had previously worked as the head of the script department where he was responsible for overseeing people who sent in their scripts.
“Every word counts in a script,” said Christopher.
“It’s creative and I think students enjoy being able to express their ideas.”
The Scriptwriting lecturer believes his course is beneficial for those going into many types of career.
His students tend to pursue PR or advertising and he said the communication skills they have learnt are transferable and will also be useful to them with other careers.
He is teaching a screenwriting module and said that this week the students are learning about scripts and how to lay out a script.
He originally studied English at university and then worked in teaching English and drama at secondary schools in Birmingham. He was also involved with teaching filmmaking modules.
He used to give guest lectures where he talked about working in TV and later, he started working part-time at DMU until someone approached him because they were interested in starting a more permanent television scriptwriting course.
Leave a Reply