Frankie goes to Hollywood: a comedy script

BACKGROUND TEXT is an independent refereed journal which publishes a wide range of research, reviews and debates on creative and professional writing and the teaching of writing in academic and industry contexts. In this work Batty combines his background as a screenwriter, script editor and script consultant with his curent role as academic teacher andreseacher. This parody script is inspired by scholarly work relating to the field of reality television. More specifically, it is a creative expression of arguments relating to the 'characterisation' of subjects, presenters and experts that were made in a recent scholarly book chapter by the author, for a collection entitled Celebrity Cultures and Real Lives. Drawing on the work of Beattie (2004), Lewis (2008), Thirkell (2010) et al., this work is situated within a creative space infused by film, television, media and cultural studies. CONTRIBUTION The book chapter that inspired this work is innovative in that it discusses how reality television shows are 'strategically' put together: how they are structured, cast, emotionally engineered, etc. No other scholarly work does this, from a practice-based point of view. The work here, then, is doubly innovative in that it interprets the scholarly ideas presented in a creative way. Academic arguments have been transformed into characters and action, and quotations used have been transformed into dialogue. SIGNIFICANCE This script is able to present research-informed ideas in a format that is both innovative (creative theory) and appealing to a wider audience (entertainment, not just critique). It creatively combines fiction with academic research, for both the overall concept (asking what does the script have to say) and the nuances of scene writing (looking at how quotations can be turned into dialogue). It argues for the creative expression of film, television, media and cultural studies in a form that is relevant to its arguments (i.e. parody).