TomScott
- Writer
- Director
Catapulted to fame after tousles with Prime Minister Robert Muldoon, Tom Scott originally planned to be a vet. In 1986 the celebrated cartoonist and humourist helped turn Footrot Flats into a hit movie. Since then he has chronicled legends Edmund Hillary and David Lange in documentaries and dramas, and co-written Springbok tour tale Rage, black comedy Seven Periods with Mr Gormsby, and political satire Spin Doctors.
Screenography
Biography
Although best known for his cartoons, Tom Scott’s career has also included scripts about teachers, adulterers and neurotic dogs, and documentaries chronicling politicians and mountaineers.
Born in England, Tom Scott grew up in varied parts of the Manawatū. His Irish parents (one Catholic, one Protestant) would later inspire acclaimed stage plays The Daylight Atheist and Joan. After an accident put Tom's leg in calipers for six months, he discovered that if he exaggerated his limp, he could make people laugh. Caricatures of his teachers got the same result. At Massey University he studied to be a vet, but soon downgraded to physiology after getting busy with his "real education as a cartoonist and writer".
Awards
2017 New Zealand Television Awards
Nominated for Best Script - Drama: Hillary
2006 Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit
For services as a writer, journalist and illustrator
“Playwriting and screenwriting, there's no great secret to it. Cartooning is hard. But writing drama, at least in my case, anyway, I found it something that I really enjoy doing ... so I'm now thinking, late in life, in my autumn years, that maybe I should just really do what I enjoy most. And, that's be a dramatist. ”
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