Island Life Magazine Ltd December 2015 / January 2016 | Page 15

INTERVIEW

“I wanted to carve my own path, so
after University I started working for a
commercials producer in London.
“I loved the people there, but I found I
didn’t really love the world of advertising.
Now I think it’s marvellous, and I admire
the skill, but at the time I was finding it
shallow and got rather cynical.
“I realised that the one thing I could do
was write, so I started sitting with Ant and
teaching myself to write.
“I left the commercials world and
started reading scripts for £25,
surviving on own-brand beans from the
supermarket”.
He recalls this as rather a lonely period
in his life, when homesickness for the
Island reared its head from time to time.
“I knew everyone on the Island and you
feel you belong somewhere. It’s quite
hard to take yourself away from that. At
Oxford, everyone seemed to know their
way around the world and I felt as if I’d
had a very parochial experience… I didn’t
enjoy being as goofy as I was!”
He found that family support in

London, though, by staying with Anthony
for a while, during the time that his
brother was writing the hugely successful
Truly Madly, Deeply.
“I remember reading the first 10 pages
as they came off the printer, and giving
him feedback” says Dominic.
“If you’re going to go on and do what I
did, that was such a fantastic relationship
and training to have”.

Launching out
Inspired to develop his own writing,
Dominic landed his first job as a writer
on the TV series Hamish Macbeth,
before going on to create the infamous
Doc Martin.
First aired in 2003, the show attracted
around 8 million viewers and went on to
win Best Comedy Drama at the Comedy
Awards.
Dominic (who named the main
character Ellingham, an anagram of his
own surname) worked on the first two
series of the show, before being poached

“I knew everyone
on the Island and
you feel you belong
somewhere. It’s quite
hard to take yourself
away from that.”

by the BBC in 2006 to create and write its
Robin Hood series.
He says it was an ‘incredible privilege’
to have created and worked on Doc
Martin, which is now in its seventh series
and has been remade in Germany, Spain
and France.
And he admits that “the Holy Grail”
would be to come up with another,
similarly successful TV series.
“Comedy-drama shows might look like
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