I believe, I believe in Ita...yes I do!

Christopher Lee, scriptwriter of Paper Giants.

It was great to see Paper Giants which was written by Christopher Lee about the heady days of the early 1970s and the Australian women's magazine, Cleo, on TV this week.

It brought back those days really clearly and reminded me of the sorts of stories that were then considered ground-breaking and how so many believed in Ita Buttrose. ("I believe, I believe, at the end of the day, Her magazine'll get me through" as the words of Don Walker's song, Ita, tells us.) He was talking about the Women's Weekly, which she went on to edit.

My only contact with Ita was a few years later when she started her own magazine, Ita (ofcourse) and I wrote a freelance story for her about an incredible woman photographer Hedda Morrison who worked in China before World War Two. I was pregnant with my first child and had Amelia just before the story came out. Ita gave me mothering advice, which I thought at the time was hilarious, remembering all those Women's Weekly editorials mentioning her kids Kate and Ben.

It wasn't until I watched the TV drama that I realised some of her own personal background and what an incredible struggle it must have been to bring up the kids on her own and do that job, and then become an ACP board member (under Kerry Packer).

Good on ya, Ita.

I interviewed Chris a few years ago for Spectrum in the Sydney Morning Herald and he reminded me he was a former journalist.

Chris was also one of the originating writers of the hit series, Secret Life of Us and has long worked with Southern Star producer John Edwards.

He said his first novel,

Bush Week,

had led to a

year's fellowship by the Literature Board of the Australia Council in 1981. This gave him the "permission to get out" of journalism, having worked for eight years for AAP, including stints in Sydney, Darwin, Papua New Guinea and London.

But he abandoned the new novel when he got into the Australian Film and Television School and found scriptwriting was his forte.

Chris told me during the interview that the script is the most important ingredient of a good TV drama:

"It's the script initially, that's what we writers claim, and we're not going to be talked out of it," he said."I find that, immediately after episodes in my life, I can't turn them into fiction because it's too close, but after a few years something happens and I think, 'That's a good story.' It's finally got into a fictional perspective and I'm able to write it."

Although back then he said he was not too sure journalists worked well as TV and film characters, he'd found his own journalistic training has been beneficial for his scriptwriting. In fact, he wished there were more former journalists in the television industry rather than fresh-out-of-film-school writers.

"You meet prime ministers and criminals and desperadoes and injured people. So it seems to me really good background for screen fiction. And the other thing it teaches is the value of a deadline.

"When I arrived, I always delivered on time, always. And [as head writer] I got calls from writers saying, 'I can't deliver because the dog ate my homework' [or] 'because I'm blocked'.

"I thought: 'Imagine if a journalist rang the editor and said, 'I can't deliver my copy, I'm blocked.' The editor would say, 'Well, block yourself out the door.' "

Gotta go now...I'm on a deadline.