Ishy Din‘s journey to his now fruitful and award-winning writing career would make a great script. After a series of unsuccessful attempts at being a businessman, and while driving a cab in his hometown of Middlesbrough, he stumbled across writing, aged 34. His first attempt, a radio play called John Barnes Saved My Life, which he entered for a BBC competition, won and pocketed him £200. Since then, he hasn’t looked back. His play Snookered, produced by Tamasha/Oldham Coliseum/The Bush, toured in 2012. That same year he was the Pearson Writer in Residence at the Manchester Royal Exchange and in 2013 Snookered won Best New Play at the Manchester Theatre Awards.
Among Din’s many other writing projects is a half hour standalone comedy drama Doughnuts, broadcast on Channel 4 as part of the Coming Up season, a short film Our Lad, produced and directed by Rachna Suri, which was selected for multiple international festivals, and In 2014 his monologue for Company TSU played in a double bill called Beats North at Edinburgh Fringe Fest. If that wasn’t enough to wind you, he is developing an original drama pilot under the BBC’s Original Drama scheme called Midnight Dreams, has been commissioned to write on The ABC for The Forge/Channel 4, and is developing an original legal drama with Endor Productions and a feature film with acclaimed director Gurinder Chadha, development funded by Creative England.
Din regales Joy Francis with stories of his early writing years, and explains why he believes his niche is writing about Asian men in confined spaces, the inspiration for his latest historical play Wipers (Khuddadad Khan, the first South Asian soldier to be awarded a Victoria Cross for his extraordinary bravery at the First Battle of Ypres), and why he is excited about making an “Ocean’s 11 set in Bradford”.
Wipers is set in 1914 during the Great War, a time when 70,000 South Asian soldiers joined the allied forces as volunteer fighters. This is a largely untold part of history. What drew you to using this piece of real history to write a play?
Suba Das [director] and Leicester Curve approached me to write the play. It was gratifying that they wanted me to do this. I had an idea that soldiers from the subcontinent came to fight in the second world war, but I didn’t have much knowledge about the first world war. Due to the times we live in, I thought it would be an important story to tell. It’s about contribution, being part of this country’s history and what others have done or haven’t done for this country. It’s really about now, when you consider our current political climate and the current narrative here and in the US. That is what really excited me and what drew me to the story. I could see these contradictions in the narrative. I’ve got a niche: Asian men in confined spaces. I’ve written about them in a snooker hall, now I’m writing about them in a trench.
What impact would you like the play to have?
I would like people to go away with new knowledge and an understanding of the war. To see how it truly was a world war, and how the contribution came from around the world. On some level, I just want people to go away with a sense of our shared humanity, if that doesn’t sound too pompous. The guys in the play are first and foremost human beings with human frailties. We should be able to hook into that, whatever our race, culture or upbringing, and recognise what these guys went through.
Your career started when you wrote John Barnes Saved My Life for Radio 5 Live Sports Short competition, which you wrote when you were a taxi driver in Middlesbrough. Did you believe you would end up having a successful writing career?
The reason I was driving a cab is because I was a really terrible businessman. I had a string of failed businesses behind me. I had family and a mortgage to take care of. I knew I didn’t want to be a cab driver and that I wasn’t cut out to be a cab driver, but I also wouldn’t have been able to cut it as an office junior at 34 years old. When I wrote John Barnes, there was a certain gratification. I had just bought a computer for my daughters. They would play and do their homework on it, and it would just sit there in the evening. I thought, I pumped all this money into it when I couldn’t afford it so I thought it best to use it. I genuinely thought someone at the BBC would read the play and say, what a git. I got a call six weeks later and got £200. I thought, what if I could earn my living as a writer? I wanted to do something with my life that didn’t involve driving a cab or owning a business. It was serendipity. My wife didn’t know I had sent off this script until I had won. There’s this feeling that I’m not supposed to be a writer and that I’m not allowed to be a writer. Writing is what other people. I’m just a British Pakistani boy from Middlesbrough. We don’t write radio plays. For the past 10 to 12 years, my family have been incredibly supportive, but it’s more difficult now as writing demands more of your time mentally, and it’s difficult to pull away from it to just watch TV without me analysing it and driving everyone mad.
You have written quite prodigiously for radio, theatre, TV and now a full length feature film. What kind of writer you would say you are?
There is more than one answer. I see myself as a storyteller. I am ambitious because of the way I came to the profession. I was on an Arvon course as a student and my tutor was Simon Stephens. We had a chat one night and he said, you only achieve what your ambitions are, but you need to have a direction and have them in the first place. It was a profound revelation to me at that time. I thought, I want to do it all then. I want to write for TV, movies and for theatre. I’m a Northern British Pakistani working class writer, and that brings something with it that you don’t usually find in that world. I can only tell the stories that I’m passionate about, in a physical or emotional sense. It just happens there are not a lot of people telling those stories, which is why I’m doing so much. I feel quite blessed and privileged with how things have worked out
Are you now focusing on TV as you a few things in the works for BBC and Channel 4; both original drama?
There’s a mixture of stuff. A couple of them are my original ideas. The thing with TV and film is that it means everything, and it means absolutely nothing. I’m talking about the development process. They can turn around and say they don’t want it or not for the foreseeable future, which means, it’s dead. The Channel 4 show has been green lit. It is set in a school up North that has a mixed population of around 50 per cent non white and 50 per cent white kids. They were looking for writers for the project and someone in the production company approached my agent. It excited me to talk about young people, their existence and their perception of the world around them. It’s a difficult time to be young now, economically, culturally and politically.
What can you say about your feature film and working with one of my favourite directors Gurinder Chadha?
She’s excellent. Everything seems to go back to my play Snookered. She saw the show and we talked afterwards. She said we should work together and I pitched an idea to her which was Ocean’s 11 set in Bradford. We both loved the story; it’s an idea I had before I was a writer. When I became a writer I thought, I’m going to write that movie. It was serendipitous that she saw the show the night I was there, and we hit it off. It is early days. I’ve written the first draft and we are developing the script. It’s such a long journey to get to a cinema screen. It still seems like we are still saying we need these stories since Bhaji on the Beach and my Beautiful Laundrette came out. The difference is that there is a real determination now, thanks to Sir Lenny Henry. Now it’s a demand, not a request. We are more confident in demanding that we be represented in a way that we recognise ourselves, otherwise it’s just voyeurism.
Any advice for budding writers of colour?
Stamina – because it’s hard. I was lucky. I didn’t have any option. I wasn’t really qualified to do anything else, so I had to forge a career as a writer. A lot of times you are knocked down and face obstacles. It’s about having more stamina and doggedness than the man. That I have more heart and fight in me, and I will challenge you and will keep coming back and will keep trying – and it pays off. I carried on driving a cab for 10 more years after John Barnes. I had a laptop under my car seat and I would write when I didn’t have a fare. That’s the case for any writer. It’s not just us who suffer that in the creative world. It’s a hard nut to crack, and it’s getting harder. It’s not that much money and all the internships are taken up. You have to keep fighting away at it.
Wipers is at Watford Palace Theatre until Saturday 23 April 2016.