Best day job ever
I had a bunch of plays on in the Dublin Fringe Festival in 1995. The TV producer Declan Eames liked the dialogue, and asked me to contribute to Fair City, Ireland's main (and sometimes only) prime-time soap opera. It's a very enjoyable gig: like normal writing, but you're working in a gang and getting paid on time. While I take frequent breaks of a year or two, I tend to go back. It's an enjoyable cheque, and a nice bunch of people. The current producer (my fifth) is my wife, so I don't get to go home and bitch about her. A fundamental right of the TV writer, cruelly denied.
I've also worked in sitcoms, winning a year-long bursary with Alomo Productions around the time of Goodnight Sweetheart and working for two years as a consultant with Vera Productions in London. I also wrote for an Irish sitcom, whose name I will not claw out of the mire it has rightly plopped into, and contributed to the dramas Psychos (Channel Four) and Raw (RTE).
