Starting out as a primary school teacher, or making it through the national BBC writer’s room competition to the dozen, writing for the Cbeebies/CBBC classics like Horrible Histories probably wasn’t on the list when Jen Wakefield first realised that she wanted to work in screenwriting.

Jen initially worked as a primary teacher, a job she still thoroughly enjoys to this day. However, knowing that she wanted to go into drama and how much she enjoyed organising the productions and the school plays, she eventually found herself working in the drama department at a school in London. From then on, Jen’s path started to branch out.

I started to meet people in the media and people who were doing comedy and sort of using that to perform themselves. I thought, oh, do you know what? I’ll give that a go.

“I did some improv, did some courses. Then I decided to do stand up and sketch comedy and basically do Edinburgh Fringe. I did that for like three or four years, and that was really good fun.  

“Basically, someone came up to me and asked – do you want to be in a production? That’s kind of what happened for my first TV show that’s been on Channel 4. After that, I kind of got TV experience and acting experience there, and got my agent.  In COVID, I took a teaching job again, which was lucky because performing was kind of  not as fruitful. Afterwards I got my first job in Horrible Histories. Once I got that, writing opportunities came from there.”

Creating a collaborative approach

Jen now works in children’s television, across various shows, and appreciates the environment created by her fellow colleagues.

“What’s great about animation is that you get to meet people who’ve been in it for like, 30 years. As writers it means you can learn from each other, and some of them have been on legendary shows that you used to watch when you were young, which is really cool. I love the mixture of ages, like with the staff in primary school, it’s a nice range of people that you can bounce ideas off of.”

The writing process for Jen depends on the show – but it always comes back to the world they have already created and sticking by those principles.

“For a series that is already in their second or third series, and has a whole world that’s been built. That’s the writer’s bible –  even on  a new show,  they’ll have it, but it might be less developed. So they share that beginning, they share the writer’s Bible, what the world looks like, and who the characters are.

With the best shows I’ve worked on that had really good head writers, they usually pair you up or put you in groups to come up with ideas. So you take it in turns to work out what you’d call a story spring.

A story spring is a top line sentence of an idea that you had before you came into the room. Then they’ll develop it, you sort of work in pairs to develop it and then come back and share it. After that, you use those to pick the episodes, and it goes from there.”

Linking with other people

It’s not just her fellow screenwriters Jen works with though. Other people involved in the production have to collaborate with her, and the writers room, to make sure each episode is high quality.

“Animators will pitch into a writer’s room and say for example, if we want to use an animal, they might be like, we can reuse this animal to create this asset to make something else. It might also be like, if you want an octopus, that can be really, really hard for animators. It will add on like a few weeks and more budget. So things like that really help because you forget that all these things are not just sitting there drawing a quick shape. It actually takes extra time and money to create more complex things. The head writer is really key.

“So a lot of your ideas will shift and change along with the head writer when they get information from the channel, they might say, we can’t show this character hanging off a building because it’s imitable, so you would have to change that in your script. In the writer’s room, sometimes having less of an idea can be quite cool, because at first I used to want to go in and have all these developed ideas and not be vulnerable and not kind of show that I was a new writer.”

BAFTA-winning

Jen’s work is all about pouring herself into each script she works on. The proof is in her BAFTA-nominated short “The Main Part”.

“There was a new talent competition that the BBC did every now and again, I was whittled down from 200 entries to seven entries. I actually wasn’t going to, I was busy with a school play at the time. I just shot off an idea to them that I didn’t really plan much about, but it’s exactly what they wanted. It was based on experience of being mixed race. When I was a comedian, it was quite interesting how they box you up into, Brown, not Brown, Asian, not Asian. There’s no nuances really.

“Due to being mixed British and Indian, it feels like I have this nuanced upbringing, also coming from a single parent household, I wasn’t too sure where I fit in. In comedy it was a bit of a checkerboard experience, if I went into rooms, they just have an idea of who they want you to be. A lot of those similar experiences went into this.”

“I just want to tell the truth with my work, and the truth with this short was that there’s a lot of stuff in the world talking about identity, saying, ‘this is who I am, why can’t people notice it? why can’t people understand it?’ but the truth is, I’m not that. I’m not the person you want me to be, and this is how I was raised.”

Jen has forged out a career for herself that has brought her creativity and wit to the forefront of television. But she’s never forgot her identity, who she is and what that means to her and her work. 

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