From soaps to the big screen FRANK Cottrell Boyce started his screenwriting career for the North West-based television drama series Brookside and, in 1991, Coronation Street. Since then his film credits include Welcome of Sarajevo (1997), Hilary and Jackie (1998), 24 Hour Party People, Revengers Tragedy (both 2002), Code 46 (2003), Millions (2004) and Tristram Shandy (2005). He has often worked with Britain's top film directors, most notably with Michael Winterbottom (from Blackburn), Danny Boyle (from Bury) and Alex Cox (from Bebington). New twist on a wartime scheme DURING the Second World War the National Gallery moved its stock to an old North Wales slate mine and this set Frank Cottrell Boyce thinking about the idea behind for his latest children's book Framed, which he has just completed. "Once a month they sent pictures back to London for display at the National Gallery. It was for morale purposes," says Cottrell Boyce. His story, though, is given a contemporary setting and the cause of the pictures' relocation for safekeeping this time is catastrophic flooding in southern England. The Royal Family is now resident in Balmoral and Arsenal's home ground is in Milton Keynes. Cottrell Boyce is fascinated by the notion that people in Blaenau Ffestiniog were closely exposed to this priceless art as the pictures were packaged up for despatch or unpacked to go back into the mine at the height of the war. "Some 45,000 people viewed a Titian when it was back on display in London. The National Gallery gave me access to its former director Kenneth Clarke's wartime diaries and he kept a record of the most popular pictures," says Cottrell Boyce. "I wondered what it was like to have priceless paintings like Van Gogh's Sunflowers stored away under the Welsh mountains - each picture probably worth more than the whole of Blaenau Ffestiniog itself!" Saints: they're obsessive - in a good way SAINTS have a tendency towards clinical barminess, claims Frank Cottrell Boyce, who studied them for his story Millions. He says: "They are madly obsessive, but in a good way. "I've always loved the saints. The saints gave their names to our towns, hospitals and schools, yet people have forgotten them. "St Francis is one of the greatest people who ever lived. But I also like them in a camp way. A lot of them were nutters like Joseph of Copertino who could levitate. "The Celtic ones were always getting into scraps. These are amazing stories full of heroism, eccentricity and bloodiness." In other words, a terrific, untapped source of stories. | 
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