Ben Richards writes about institutions from the inside: the pass office, the operations room, the committee that meets when something has gone wrong. His dramas know how the machinery works and who it grinds down, and they are drama first, whatever the label says.
Fi1m perspective
A researcher in Party Animals (2007) drafts a parliamentary question, tidies it and files it, and it is never asked. That is the Ben Richards scene: the work done properly by someone nobody will thank, one floor below the people who decide things. He was a housing officer before he wrote a word for television, and it shows in how closely his dramas watch who fetches the coffee and who carries the blame. Nobody in a Richards series is running the country. They are photocopying for the people who are.
He came to television from novels, and the route ran through Spooks (2002), where he was lead writer on series two to five and returned for episodes of series eight. We rate the early Spooks highly: fast, glossy, colder and crueller than its surface, and in our view it should have stopped after five. The stretch we like is largely the stretch he led. He has said the series was "completely hammered when it first came out", and he is entitled to the grievance. Party Animals, co-created with Robert Jones and directed by Brian Grant, was his first original series. After it came The Fixer (2008–2009), Outcasts (2011), The Tunnel (2013–2016), which took the Scandinavian The Bridge and moved it to the Channel, COBRA (2020–2023), Showtrial (2021) and The Diplomat (2023), with an adaptation of Strike (2017) along the way.
What he does well is procedure. The intelligence work in Spooks has the look of research rather than guesswork, and Party Animals knows the pass office, the pager going off at midnight and which bar to be seen in. His government office is anxious and his opposition office is hungry, and he understands that the young in Westminster are paid in proximity, and that proximity is not money. When he takes the same instincts to another planet in Outcasts, the politics of the settlement interest him more than the spectacle, which is the right instinct, though he has admitted the series leaned on familiar science-fiction tropes. His weakness is tone. Party Animals is listed as a comedy and keeps forgetting to be funny, and the gap between the label and the thing is where our reservations sit.
We winced more than we expected to at Party Animals, and it was the shouting that did it: people in their twenties dressed down by people only five years older, in corridors where everyone walks at a pace that is nearly a run. Richards has made most of this with Kudos, five series together, and three with World Productions, and Andrew Buchan has appeared in three of them. Start with the Spooks years he led, which hold up. Then Party Animals, if you have ever worked for someone five years older than you and would like to see it done accurately, if not amusingly.
Biography
Ben Richards is a British screenwriter, novelist and television producer. Born in 1964 in England, he worked for three years as a housing officer in Newham and Islington, London, before becoming a full-time writer.
He was lead writer on the BBC series Spooks (2002), contributing 16 episodes between 2003 and 2009. Richards created and wrote Party Animals (2007) for BBC Two, and created Outcasts (2011). He has also written for The Fixer, No Angels, The Tunnel, Fortitude, Strike (2017) and created COBRA and Showtrial.
