Some writers rattle off adaptations with great facility almost as a form of relaxation. Alas I am not one of them and my initial attempts to turn the book into a film were clumsy and heavy-handed. To begin with, Orton’s life was unevenly documented. There was ample material covering the years from his first success as a playwright in 1964 to his death at the hands of his lover Kenneth Halliwell in 1967. Nor was it difficult to write about Orton’s childhood in Leicester, since in period and background it approximated to my own in Leeds. The problem was how to tell the story of the ‘lost’ years, from 1951, when Orton and Halliwell first started to live together, to 1963, when Orton came to the BBC with his first completed play. It was in this period Orton was learning to write. Dramatising the act of writing is never easy: the paper ripped from the typewriter and flung into the waste-paper basket, the overflowing ashtray and the lights burning late into the night … one needs no experience of the pangs of creation to be only too familiar with the screen’s shorthand for it. But how else do you do it?

There was another problem. I never met Orton; he died the year before my first play was produced. I admired his plays, particularly Entertaining Mr Sloane, Loot and The Good and Faithful Servant, but from what I read in Lahr’s biography I had mixed feelings about the man. In fact I didn’t like him, or (it amounts to the same thing) I felt he wouldn’t have liked me. I didn’t object to the promiscuity and the cottaging; what I found hard to take was his self-assurance and the conviction (however painfully and necessarily acquired) of the superiority of his talent. Disliking Orton, I took sides with Halliwell, who, having educated and sustained Orton during years of obscurity, found that when his friend’s talents were at last recognised he himself was left in the shadows, his contribution never publicly acknowledged. Had I met the two of them I am sure my reaction would have been different. Those who did talk of Orton’s fun and charm, the perpetual bickering of Halliwell and his embarrassing bids for attention. But charm does not come off the page, nor does embarrassment, so in the first draft of the script, uncharmed by Orton and unembarrassed by Halliwell, I made the playwright the villain and the victim his friend.