Lunch with... SeaChange TV writer Andrew Knight On the box: writer-producer Andrew Knight says television is enjoying a purple patch. Andrew Knight is on a roll, but that hasn't blunted the dry yet piercing humour that has made him one of the most successful and prolific screenwriters in the history of Australian television. "Careers are something you describe in hindsight," says Knight. I think you sit down and rationalise all the mistakes you've made, the missed opportunities, and then characterise them as positives. Self-deprecation comes easily to Knight, whose credits as a writer and producer, paradoxically, appear on some of Australia's most watched and appreciated programs of the past 30-plus years, from the classic sketch comedies Fast Forward and D-Generation to the mini-series After The Deluge, My Brother Jack, Kangaroo Palace and the much-loved ABC series SeaChange. Before it was sold for a reported $25 million to British media conglomerate Granada, now ITV, Knight and former business partner Steve Vizard ran the powerhouse production company Artist Services. "I've had a lovely time the last few years," Knight concedes. It's been really good, because although I've produced a few things, I don't run a big company any more. I'm not in the least bit interested. I choose things I want to do. It's a joy and a liberation. If something half interests me, I'll potter around it. Greek style: Kefalograviera with date, apple and hazelnuts. We're at A La Grecque in Aireys Inlet, where Knight, half-jokingly, is hiding out during the airing of his latest screen adventures - the third, possibly final, series of Rake and a telefeature of Peter Temple's novel The Broken Shore. While the restaurant's gregarious owner, Kosta Talimanidis, quips that the photographer can't make Knight look handsome, we order a healthy selection of shared mezze dishes: braised cuttlefish, calamari with a nutty skordalia, scallops and the always reliable kefalograviera. Like the best Greek cuisine, the dishes are simply crafted but packed with bright flavours. An inveterate traveller, Knight normally times overseas trips when his shows go to air. I pretend it's that I have no ego, but I probably have a terrible ego. Years later, I'll come back to something and think it's not as bad as I thought, or it was. It's not by accident that I'm hiding down the coast at the moment. Seared scallops at A La Grecque restaurant, Aireys Inlet. Photo: Danie Sprague Together with producer Ian Collie, Knight has become an unofficial custodian of Peter Temple's books, having also worked on a number of adaptations of private detective Jack Irish. Although he is not a big fan of the crime genre, he has always liked Temple's writing and jumped at the chance to make The Broken Shore when Collie discovered that the rights were available. He says he was "overwhelmed" with the responsibility of adapting the award-winning novel, in which Don Hany plays detective Joe Cashin, a physically and mentally damaged homicide police officer who returns to his childhood home and uncovers a terrible crime, the stain of which has corroded generations of white and indigenous communities. [Screenwriter] John Colley once said that books are contemplative and films are immersive. The Broken Shore is a really contemplative book. It's a tone poem, a mood piece. If you do it as a crime thriller you end up with not much at all. Counterintuitively perhaps, given the novel's many subplots and characters, Knight felt that it would work well as a feature rather than a mini-series, as did the ABC, which funded the $4 million project. While the film is faithful to Temple's crisp dialogue and is exceptionally well cast - Anthony Hayes in particular, as the small-town cop Hopgood - hardcore readers will note subtle changes. It's such an unrelentingly dark story that it needed to be softened for TV. An audience can make a cup of tea or walk away from it. I put some humour into it too. Knight felt it was important to amplify the relationship between Cashin and his neighbour, Helen Castleman (Claudia Karvan), and for the audience to sympathise with the tormented victims of the crimes that are at the centre of the mystery Cashin exposes. Knight believes that now "is a great time for television." The catalyst, he believes, is that the premium United States cable channels, such as Showtime, want shorter-run seasons. In the past, broadcasters were trapped in the commercial conundrum of 26-episode runs. In SeaChange, I would say, one-third of the episodes were crap. Not every episode can be good. You're constantly chasing yourself, whereas with eight or six [episodes], you have a real chance to work the craft a bit. It's the collaborative nature of TV that mostly excites him. When I started, writers were in one room, actors in another and directors in another. It's everything that's wrong with [feature] filmmaking, I think. Every writing and drama school you go to craps on about the Campbell story structure. Campbell was describing primitive societies that had 10, 20 stories that would be handed around. When you're making 6000 of these buggers each week, predictability is a bigger threat to filmmaking. That's why I think TV is exciting people, because it's a new form and people are really starting to play with it. It helps, too, that there is now a community of gifted Australian actors who are prepared to return from overseas to be in local productions. This is theatre now. It's the gang show that people get. It's hard to know what to make of Knight's claim that he has only another few years left in the industry. He has four features on the boil, including the big-budget Gallipoli-themed The Water Diviner, starring and directed by Russell Crowe, and no shortage of ideas for TV, including more Jack Irish telefeatures. I think there's a taxi meter running on your brain at a certain point. I'd love to do a couple of big projects a year, but I think there's going to be a lot of new talent coming out of what's happening now. He recalls the moment working on a Jack Irish film when production designer Chris Kennedy returned from a recce with a handful of photos. I said, 'These have nothing to do with what I have in the script'. He said, 'No, nothing at all, but what you had in the script was really boring'. He was dead right. I grew up being incredibly arrogant about what other people did. I thought I was the dominant force. Now I absolutely get that I'm just a part of a process. The Broken Shore is on Sunday at 8.30pm on ABC1. Rake returns on Sunday, February 9, at 8.30pm on ABC1.