Why great speeches are made for stage and screen

Curious thing, writer’s block. If you believe it exists. Terry Pratchett didn’t. ‘There’s no such thing,’ he said. ‘It was invented by people in California who couldn’t write.’ He had a point. Writers write, period. But there is a syndrome in my house known as Not Starting Anything New Through Fear Of It Being Not Very Good. Less catchy than ‘writer’s block’, but arguably a more accurate description of the condition.

My Covid-induced version of the above involved endlessly ‘honing’ an already completed play about my mother to devastatingly little effect and musing on the oldest creative question of all: is there a formula for writing success, and if so what is it?

The short answer, despite the many how-to-write-a-hit books (Robert McKee, Christopher Booker et al. ), is of course ‘no’. But something that might tilt the odds in your favour is to base your story around a famous speech.

The story of the genesis and execution of a history-making speech is a potential play, film or TV drama waiting to happen. There are legions of examples. George VI’s stammer-free 1939 declaration of war broadcast formed the basis of The King’s Speech, which won several Oscars. As did Darkest Hour, the story behind Churchill’s ‘We shall fight them on the beaches’. Martin Luther King’s ‘I have a dream’ has provided the climax to both films and plays, as has Mandela’s 1964 Rivonia speech with its stirring, this-has-got-to-be-a-movie final line: ‘It is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.’ Colonel Tim Collins’s exhortation before the 2003 Iraq war — ‘I know of men who have taken life needlessly in other conflicts. I can assure you they live with the mark of Cain upon them’ — was the foundation for the film Mark of Cain, proving that even if the cause is suspect, a film or play can still ensue, provided the speech is good enough or important enough.