Carys Thomas: From new writing winner to comedy Blap creator

Welsh writer Carys Thomas has been on quite the career journey in the past couple of years. A journey that has seen her go from writing at home alone, to working on her new comedy Misguided, and now having her first Channel 4 Blap (a short-form online comedy pilot) released.

It’s a career journey that Thomas says started gathering pace after winning the 2024 BAFTA Rocliffe New Writing Competition, one of BAFTA’s many talent support programmes. She says: “Basically from BAFTA Rocliffe, I ended up getting the option for Misguided, getting my agent, and now I’m working as a full-time screenwriter. It completely created my career, it changed my life.”

Here, Thomas shares how she took her competition winning idea to screen…

Recently aired Misguided, a “coming of age ensemble comedy” set around a Cardiff Girlguides group, started life as a short script for BAFTA’s new writing competition. Built around a collection of observations and funny memories Thomas had of when she was a Girlguide “at the age where you think you know everything but you really don’t”, it clearly struck a chord with judges.

The comedy writer explains: “I knew that I loved writing, I wanted to try and get into screenwriting but I’d never been to film school and the industry felt like something I didn’t really know how to navigate and I heard about BAFTA New Writing Competition as being an amazing opportunity. I entered it maybe three or four times from beginning screenwriting up to winning, and it really was how I learnt and how I grew in my writing.

“I remember the first time I sent in a comedy sitcom getting the feedback report and hearing from people that read it and getting notes. Then using that to get better each year, and each year I could see that I was kind of getting closer… I can really see the development in my writing and as someone who really didn’t know where to go in terms of wanting to write, wanting to get into the industry, it was a very accessible way for me to start writing to get feedback.”

As a budding writer, Thomas has been quick to take advantage of all the opportunities that have come as a result of being a new writing competition winner. Refining her winning script along the way and delighting in when it was then the work that got made with Channel 4.

She reflects: “I was a writer, I loved comedy, I was fundamentally just doing it from home in my spare time and [competitions were] how I would structure my years. I was like BAFTA Rocliffe comes out here I’ll write something to send in and then I had this idea for Misguided and I wrote it for a comedy submission in 2024. I ended up going on the shortlist and then being one of the winners and the producer of Misguided, Charlie, was a member of the jury so she read the script.

“Before this I’d just been a writer from home, writing comedy enjoying it and then one day Charlie was like oh we’d love for you to come in … and I went in and met Charlie and they wanted to option it.”

For Thomas Misguided has also been a project that has been incredibly close to her heart, drawing on her own experiences growing up in Cardiff. She says: “Wales is where I grew up and so when I had that idea I didn’t picture it anywhere else. I imagined it in the community hall round from my house and it had always been in that place, that specific place where everyone knows each other.

“For me I love Welsh humour and I really wanted something that felt like my teenage years… I love when comedy has a specificity to it, so in writing something that feels very specific to Cardiff and even to the village where I grew up it feels like it could be more universal.”

• Enter writing competitions to hone your craft
  “I remember writing Misguided and then thinking ‘do I send it in, oh I’m not sure’, and then doing it and then everything has come from there… Even if you enter once you’ll get your feedback you can use, and you can enter the next year. It’s a really great way to keep learning and keep growing and I would encourage people to not only enter one year [but] use the feedback, keep coming back, keep writing, because that’s really how you develop as a writer.”
• Embrace feedback to keep developing
  “It’s such a key thing in writing to be able to take feedback and to be able to keep growing and learning and especially when you’re starting out… it really prepared me for that getting into that swing of things of writing a draft, getting feedback and then continually working on it trying to get it better.”

Misguided is available to stream on Channel4.com and YouTube.

• The BAFTA Rocliffe New Writing Competition is a platform for aspiring screenwriters. It is part of BAFTA’s charitable commitment to supporting the next generation of film, games and TV talent, and you can find out more on our programme page.