Post by Lauren on Oct 23, 2009 15:45:32 GMT
As copied from Facebook 
The writers of Trinity (Robin French and Kieron Quirke) answer your questions!
Will there be another series?
Robin: We’ve got millions of ideas for the next series, so we hope so. There’s a lot more Dandelion Club mystery to excavate…
Will there be auditions for new parts?
Kieron: Of course! The majority of the characters, though, will be coming back. There’s not going to be a ‘new team’.
Robin: Yes. Also, I am hoping to play Christian Cooke’s butt double so fingers crossed.
Did you get the idea for Bridgeford University from Cambridge and Oxford?
Robin: Yes – from the reality of it and the fantasy. We included some wildly exaggerated versions of things that actually happened to us while we were studying there.
Even more than that though, we were amused by the way the British Press depict Oxbridge – they make it out to be this immensely sinister den of privilege. They had already created this fantasy Oxbridge – we took their construct and set a drama inside it.
Kieron: What we found really funny was a lot of reviewers saying that the writers could have no idea of what Oxbridge is really like. For the record, I went to Oxford and Robin went to Cambridge, and there’s a lot of our experiences in Trinity – albeit massively exaggerated.
Why do they have to guard the Project? Is it kept in Maltravers’ desk?
Kieron: Yes, it’s his Year 3 art Project. Very precious to him.
Robin: If we told you the truth then the whole world would explode.
How did Raj and Angus get into Trinity in the first place?
Kieron: They study maths and computer sciences. Somewhere deep inside those addled minds there are areas of pure logical genius. They just can’t really relate it to the real world.
Robin: Yeah, my mum struggled with this question. We thought that just because somebody is good at one academic subject doesn’t mean they can’t be really stupid in all other areas of their life or be socially completely clueless. But yeah – they are surprisingly and delightfully stupid.
Throw them a bit of mental arithmetic and they’d stun you with their academic agility – but we don’t ever show that…
Is there a DVD?
Kieron: Yep. It’s coming out on the 9th November. We’re told you can order it at a competitive price on Amazon.
Robin: Yeah! It’s what all my family are getting for Christmas.
Kieron: Yours should too.
Where is Trinity filmed?
Kieron: The outer parts of Trinity are at Royal Holloway – a university in Egham, Surrey. For a lot of the insides, we commandeered an old house nearby and turned it into Trinity. It was a fantastic moment when Robin and I first got to walk around it. The art department really did an amazing job.
What inspired the dark mystery in Trinity?
Kieron: No idea. The idea that Maltravers was in some way experimenting on a student was in the show from the very beginning. But no idea where it came from.
Robin: Brutal events in Kieron’s childhood.
Who is playing Dorian on Twitter
Robin: A robot, operated by the Queen of England.
Kieron: Can’t say. But we do regard his pronouncements as ‘canon’ (I think that’s the word), and if anyone’s interested in getting further insights into the show, then he’s worth following.
Who are the best characters to write about and do you have any favourite actors/actresses in the show?
Robin: Everybody evil or nasty is especially good fun to write. For some reason the evil ones write themselves – I don’t know what that says about me and Kieron. We were incredibly lucky with our cast and we love them all - so I wouldn’t want to single anyone out.
Kieron: Obviously, there’s a trio of characters in the show whose nastiness and snobbery and wit sort of define Trinity. I wouldn’t say we enjoy writing them more than the other characters – because there’s an individual pleasure to all of them – but you know when you’re writing for Maltravers or Dorian or Rosalind that the gloves are off - they can say things other characters don’t get to say.
But then there’s the Warden and Dr Lloyd – I love them. And the Charlotte, Theo, Maddy trio are kind of the centre of it. And then there’s Angus and Raj… we love them all.
Which character was the easiest to write lines for and why?
Kieron: Almost no character in Trinity is easy to write for. There’s just so many of them and they all get, if you think about it, very little screen time. So you’re cramming a lot into a short space. And the kind of show Trinity is means you’re always looking for more jokes, more thrills, more little bits of fun. There’s also almost no character from whom some comedy isn’t expected – and comedy, anyone will tell you, is the hardest thing. So yeah – it’s not an easy show to write.
Robin: Easiest, hmmm. Probably Pete the Porter. A very simple man.
Was any part of the show influenced by past university experiences?
Kieron: I once wore black silk underpants. Or saw some.
Robin: I once conducted a series of macabre experiments on a fellow student and then pushed him off a tower – don’t tell anyone.
Where have the ideas for the characters come from?
Kieron: Dorian is based on me.
Because of how the show developed, and because of how we write, I think we were very keen that every character should be funny in some way. And we wanted a show that did everything – high drama, mystery, comedy – the works. When we first started writing Trintiy we used to describe it as a ‘mystery comedy soap’ and I think that sums up how we wanted to mix the genres and why we have this really wide mix of people. Angus and Raj are a particularly strange presence – almost Shakespearean fools, getting on with their own thing at tangents to the action. I think it’s the massive mix that makes Trinity very unique – I mean you may hate it – but I don’t think anyone could claim there’s anything else on telly like it.
Robin: Angus is based on Kieron.
I think we just wanted characters that were big and bold and fun - and because there’s such a mix of genres allowed in the format – it meant we could go for it in a lot of different directions.
Do you think Trinity is more of a drama or a comedy?
Kieron: A drama
Robin: It’s hard to describe it as a comedy because the spine of it isn’t really comic at all. Then calling things a drama is also a bit complicated because I don’t think the kind of drama Trinity is is often done on UK TV – it’s a romp really, it doesn’t want to be taken too seriously. It’s like an excitable puppy, who wants to please.
I always thought of it as a soap – which is a confusing word because it makes you think of Eastenders and it’s nothing like that. But it’s set in one place and we get to follow a lot of different characters around, and it’s serial – so in that way I think it is a soap.
I always loved Neighbours, and my favourite ever show is Twin Peaks. I love the way both of those shows can go from a serious scene to a silly scene and back again – and that’s one of the things we wanted Trinity to do.
How did you get the idea for Trinity?
Kieron: It’s been a long time in the making. There’s been a version of Trinity in development since 2004. The way I remember it is that Robin had for a while been saying that we should do a kind of comedy soap based in Student Halls. Then one day, I was reading the Daily Mail – I was at the parents’ house of my girlfriend at the time - and I saw an outraged feature about the Piers Gaveston society. It’s an Oxford student society that holds drug-fuelled parties, probably about as debauched as your average night out at Manchester Uni.
So I came back to Robin and said we should do the student soap idea but set it in this kind of fantasy Oxbridge-land that the tabloids love. And as if by magic a week or so later we were in a meeting with Vicky Grew (who ended up script editing the show) and she mentioned that Peter Fincham was looking for an Oxbridge drama. So that’s when we first committed the idea to paper…
Robin: Yeah, it started off with the phrase “American Pie set in an Oxbridge College”. I was working as a script editor at a TV company – and I was constantly being sent comedies set in student halls – and it struck me that even though being a student is an extremely formative and exciting part of people’s lives, for some reason, it never seemed interesting in scripts. All the scripts I read were very naturalistic, so there was the thought – what happens if we go much bigger and bolder on it.
Then after that phrase, when we started thinking about it, it began to grow in lots of weird and wonderful ways. That American Pie angle still exists, but it’s next to a lot of other things that Kieron and I dreamt up.
There was also a significant jump when it went from being a half hour show to an hour. Suddenly, the show could be a lot more than we’d first imagined it.
I am interested to understand how you have created these characters, e.g. have you dreamt them up or compiled them from existing 'profiles' of people attending the more wealthy colleges and universities. Some characters seem to be parallels with those I'd expect to see in public schools and so - I find myself wondering how close the actual characters have been moulded.
Robin: Yeah, I think they’re probably inspired by examples in fiction more than reality. Which is probably what makes Trinity so ‘heightened’. I think Dorian’s a bit like the naughty men from Austen and Hardy novels and a bit like the aesthetes in Oscar Wilde.
But you find when you write characters, different parts of your friends and your family bubble up and provide traits for them.
Kieron: A lot’s been made of the way we represent public schoolboys. Some critics accused us of ‘cliché’. Of course, our characters fit into ‘types’. Dorian is obviously in some way a descendant of Sebastian Flyte or the whatever – but if you study him for more than one episode you’ll see he’s very much his own person (certainly nothing like Chuck Bass – that really irritates me). And while Angus and Raj clearly owe a debt to Dumb and Dumber type comedies, we think we’ve added a very British sensibility to them. In the end, every show uses ‘types’. McNulty from the Wire is a maverick cop with a drink problem – the biggest cliché, if that’s the word we’re using, in drama. It’s the decoration you put on them that makes them inteeresting.
Is Dorian a reference to Dorian Gray? Because he has a pursuit for pleasure and is really good looking....?
Robin: Yes, and it was just a gloriously posh name. It seemed to say it all.
Kieron: Of course it is. There are lots of references in the character names actually. One more – we like the fact that Charlotte has the same name as the virginal teen corrupted in Tom Wolfe’s ‘I Am Charlotte Simmons’.
How did you come up with idea of the plot of Trinity it is very intense stuff?
Robin: Yeah, a lot came in one big burst at the end of 2007. I think there were things that I remember (and I’m sure Kieron does) from Cambridge student days – student suicides, all these adverts for medical testing, rivalries between the dons, posh elitist male drinking societies, stoner virgins, naughty posh girls – so all that must have been somewhere there in the back of our minds. I definitely remember being captivated by the idea of a student suicide – finding something spooky about it.
Kieron: We laid out the basic series plot for Trinity when ITV liked the pilot script and asked us to prepare a document sketching out the rest of the series. That was December 2007. A lot of the key ideas were created then. We’ve actually created a lot more ‘story’ than you get to see in the 8 episodes here. Obviously, there’s a lot of history and a lot of secrets– what the Project is, how Maltravers and Richard Arc are involved, what happened between Richard and Angie and Gabriel back in the day. You can get very lost in that and then realise, wait a second, we’re writing about an election today…
It's looking good for a second series then!! YAY!
The writers of Trinity (Robin French and Kieron Quirke) answer your questions!
Will there be another series?
Robin: We’ve got millions of ideas for the next series, so we hope so. There’s a lot more Dandelion Club mystery to excavate…
Will there be auditions for new parts?
Kieron: Of course! The majority of the characters, though, will be coming back. There’s not going to be a ‘new team’.
Robin: Yes. Also, I am hoping to play Christian Cooke’s butt double so fingers crossed.
Did you get the idea for Bridgeford University from Cambridge and Oxford?
Robin: Yes – from the reality of it and the fantasy. We included some wildly exaggerated versions of things that actually happened to us while we were studying there.
Even more than that though, we were amused by the way the British Press depict Oxbridge – they make it out to be this immensely sinister den of privilege. They had already created this fantasy Oxbridge – we took their construct and set a drama inside it.
Kieron: What we found really funny was a lot of reviewers saying that the writers could have no idea of what Oxbridge is really like. For the record, I went to Oxford and Robin went to Cambridge, and there’s a lot of our experiences in Trinity – albeit massively exaggerated.
Why do they have to guard the Project? Is it kept in Maltravers’ desk?
Kieron: Yes, it’s his Year 3 art Project. Very precious to him.
Robin: If we told you the truth then the whole world would explode.
How did Raj and Angus get into Trinity in the first place?
Kieron: They study maths and computer sciences. Somewhere deep inside those addled minds there are areas of pure logical genius. They just can’t really relate it to the real world.
Robin: Yeah, my mum struggled with this question. We thought that just because somebody is good at one academic subject doesn’t mean they can’t be really stupid in all other areas of their life or be socially completely clueless. But yeah – they are surprisingly and delightfully stupid.
Throw them a bit of mental arithmetic and they’d stun you with their academic agility – but we don’t ever show that…
Is there a DVD?
Kieron: Yep. It’s coming out on the 9th November. We’re told you can order it at a competitive price on Amazon.
Robin: Yeah! It’s what all my family are getting for Christmas.
Kieron: Yours should too.
Where is Trinity filmed?
Kieron: The outer parts of Trinity are at Royal Holloway – a university in Egham, Surrey. For a lot of the insides, we commandeered an old house nearby and turned it into Trinity. It was a fantastic moment when Robin and I first got to walk around it. The art department really did an amazing job.
What inspired the dark mystery in Trinity?
Kieron: No idea. The idea that Maltravers was in some way experimenting on a student was in the show from the very beginning. But no idea where it came from.
Robin: Brutal events in Kieron’s childhood.
Who is playing Dorian on Twitter
Robin: A robot, operated by the Queen of England.
Kieron: Can’t say. But we do regard his pronouncements as ‘canon’ (I think that’s the word), and if anyone’s interested in getting further insights into the show, then he’s worth following.
Who are the best characters to write about and do you have any favourite actors/actresses in the show?
Robin: Everybody evil or nasty is especially good fun to write. For some reason the evil ones write themselves – I don’t know what that says about me and Kieron. We were incredibly lucky with our cast and we love them all - so I wouldn’t want to single anyone out.
Kieron: Obviously, there’s a trio of characters in the show whose nastiness and snobbery and wit sort of define Trinity. I wouldn’t say we enjoy writing them more than the other characters – because there’s an individual pleasure to all of them – but you know when you’re writing for Maltravers or Dorian or Rosalind that the gloves are off - they can say things other characters don’t get to say.
But then there’s the Warden and Dr Lloyd – I love them. And the Charlotte, Theo, Maddy trio are kind of the centre of it. And then there’s Angus and Raj… we love them all.
Which character was the easiest to write lines for and why?
Kieron: Almost no character in Trinity is easy to write for. There’s just so many of them and they all get, if you think about it, very little screen time. So you’re cramming a lot into a short space. And the kind of show Trinity is means you’re always looking for more jokes, more thrills, more little bits of fun. There’s also almost no character from whom some comedy isn’t expected – and comedy, anyone will tell you, is the hardest thing. So yeah – it’s not an easy show to write.
Robin: Easiest, hmmm. Probably Pete the Porter. A very simple man.
Was any part of the show influenced by past university experiences?
Kieron: I once wore black silk underpants. Or saw some.
Robin: I once conducted a series of macabre experiments on a fellow student and then pushed him off a tower – don’t tell anyone.
Where have the ideas for the characters come from?
Kieron: Dorian is based on me.
Because of how the show developed, and because of how we write, I think we were very keen that every character should be funny in some way. And we wanted a show that did everything – high drama, mystery, comedy – the works. When we first started writing Trintiy we used to describe it as a ‘mystery comedy soap’ and I think that sums up how we wanted to mix the genres and why we have this really wide mix of people. Angus and Raj are a particularly strange presence – almost Shakespearean fools, getting on with their own thing at tangents to the action. I think it’s the massive mix that makes Trinity very unique – I mean you may hate it – but I don’t think anyone could claim there’s anything else on telly like it.
Robin: Angus is based on Kieron.
I think we just wanted characters that were big and bold and fun - and because there’s such a mix of genres allowed in the format – it meant we could go for it in a lot of different directions.
Do you think Trinity is more of a drama or a comedy?
Kieron: A drama
Robin: It’s hard to describe it as a comedy because the spine of it isn’t really comic at all. Then calling things a drama is also a bit complicated because I don’t think the kind of drama Trinity is is often done on UK TV – it’s a romp really, it doesn’t want to be taken too seriously. It’s like an excitable puppy, who wants to please.
I always thought of it as a soap – which is a confusing word because it makes you think of Eastenders and it’s nothing like that. But it’s set in one place and we get to follow a lot of different characters around, and it’s serial – so in that way I think it is a soap.
I always loved Neighbours, and my favourite ever show is Twin Peaks. I love the way both of those shows can go from a serious scene to a silly scene and back again – and that’s one of the things we wanted Trinity to do.
How did you get the idea for Trinity?
Kieron: It’s been a long time in the making. There’s been a version of Trinity in development since 2004. The way I remember it is that Robin had for a while been saying that we should do a kind of comedy soap based in Student Halls. Then one day, I was reading the Daily Mail – I was at the parents’ house of my girlfriend at the time - and I saw an outraged feature about the Piers Gaveston society. It’s an Oxford student society that holds drug-fuelled parties, probably about as debauched as your average night out at Manchester Uni.
So I came back to Robin and said we should do the student soap idea but set it in this kind of fantasy Oxbridge-land that the tabloids love. And as if by magic a week or so later we were in a meeting with Vicky Grew (who ended up script editing the show) and she mentioned that Peter Fincham was looking for an Oxbridge drama. So that’s when we first committed the idea to paper…
Robin: Yeah, it started off with the phrase “American Pie set in an Oxbridge College”. I was working as a script editor at a TV company – and I was constantly being sent comedies set in student halls – and it struck me that even though being a student is an extremely formative and exciting part of people’s lives, for some reason, it never seemed interesting in scripts. All the scripts I read were very naturalistic, so there was the thought – what happens if we go much bigger and bolder on it.
Then after that phrase, when we started thinking about it, it began to grow in lots of weird and wonderful ways. That American Pie angle still exists, but it’s next to a lot of other things that Kieron and I dreamt up.
There was also a significant jump when it went from being a half hour show to an hour. Suddenly, the show could be a lot more than we’d first imagined it.
I am interested to understand how you have created these characters, e.g. have you dreamt them up or compiled them from existing 'profiles' of people attending the more wealthy colleges and universities. Some characters seem to be parallels with those I'd expect to see in public schools and so - I find myself wondering how close the actual characters have been moulded.
Robin: Yeah, I think they’re probably inspired by examples in fiction more than reality. Which is probably what makes Trinity so ‘heightened’. I think Dorian’s a bit like the naughty men from Austen and Hardy novels and a bit like the aesthetes in Oscar Wilde.
But you find when you write characters, different parts of your friends and your family bubble up and provide traits for them.
Kieron: A lot’s been made of the way we represent public schoolboys. Some critics accused us of ‘cliché’. Of course, our characters fit into ‘types’. Dorian is obviously in some way a descendant of Sebastian Flyte or the whatever – but if you study him for more than one episode you’ll see he’s very much his own person (certainly nothing like Chuck Bass – that really irritates me). And while Angus and Raj clearly owe a debt to Dumb and Dumber type comedies, we think we’ve added a very British sensibility to them. In the end, every show uses ‘types’. McNulty from the Wire is a maverick cop with a drink problem – the biggest cliché, if that’s the word we’re using, in drama. It’s the decoration you put on them that makes them inteeresting.
Is Dorian a reference to Dorian Gray? Because he has a pursuit for pleasure and is really good looking....?
Robin: Yes, and it was just a gloriously posh name. It seemed to say it all.
Kieron: Of course it is. There are lots of references in the character names actually. One more – we like the fact that Charlotte has the same name as the virginal teen corrupted in Tom Wolfe’s ‘I Am Charlotte Simmons’.
How did you come up with idea of the plot of Trinity it is very intense stuff?
Robin: Yeah, a lot came in one big burst at the end of 2007. I think there were things that I remember (and I’m sure Kieron does) from Cambridge student days – student suicides, all these adverts for medical testing, rivalries between the dons, posh elitist male drinking societies, stoner virgins, naughty posh girls – so all that must have been somewhere there in the back of our minds. I definitely remember being captivated by the idea of a student suicide – finding something spooky about it.
Kieron: We laid out the basic series plot for Trinity when ITV liked the pilot script and asked us to prepare a document sketching out the rest of the series. That was December 2007. A lot of the key ideas were created then. We’ve actually created a lot more ‘story’ than you get to see in the 8 episodes here. Obviously, there’s a lot of history and a lot of secrets– what the Project is, how Maltravers and Richard Arc are involved, what happened between Richard and Angie and Gabriel back in the day. You can get very lost in that and then realise, wait a second, we’re writing about an election today…
It's looking good for a second series then!! YAY!
