Was the writing process different for you when you were creating Series 2 of The Responder?

Do you know what? It wasn’t. I was expecting it to be, and everyone talks about the difficult second album syndrome, but I think I’m just too stupid to get stressed about it! So it was literally just ‘Do It Again’ – I went into a room and did it again.

Do you have a favourite scene or moment across the two series?

I always say this, and people must be sick of listening to it, but it’s still by far and away my favourite scene, which is in episode 1. It’s Chris (Martin Freeman) and Marco (Josh Finan) in the police car driving along.

One, I love it because it’s beautifully shot. It’s in the dark. It sums up what being a copper is so much about which is you and the person you’ve arrested or the person you’re with and that small fish-tank environment. I love that and I love that they captured that so beautifully, the director . It was the first scene that I wrote and it was me talking to me. I wrote it as an exercise which was me being a copper later in life and me being a scally earlier in life sitting in the back of a car. So it’s very much a conversation between me and me. It’s by far and away my favourite scene.

Were there any new themes that you wanted to explore or existing ones that you wanted to build on with Series 2?

The themes that I wanted to explore and expand upon that were important to me were relationships and love. I think every show – literally every show from right the way up to something like is about love and relationships. It’s the whole thing for me. The Responder is not a crime show, it’s a show about those issues. For me, being a father of a two-and-a-half-year-old I was really interested in Chris’s struggle with being a good Dad and holding that in relation to his struggle with how his own Dad wasn’t a good Dad. It’s about his fears about that and his fears about carrying that mark on him. He’s terrified that he’s going to pass those bad things onto his daughter. Those were the themes that I really wanted to look at – fatherhood, love and relationships. To me those are the most important things.

What do you think made The Responder resonate with people?

I’m still coming to terms with the fact that it did resonate with people! It resonated all around the world. I’m still getting stopped by people who want to talk about series one. It kind of caught fire and took off. I think because everyone was expecting it to be one thing and it turned out that it wasn’t. Everyone thought it was going to be Line of Duty (and I love Line of Duty) but it’s not Line of Duty. And everyone thought if it wasn’t that then it would be something like from years ago, and it wasn’t that either. It’s just a programme about people and I think people are interested in people, so it can only be that.

How important is Liverpool as the setting and what does that bring to the story?

It was massively important to me, if only because the way that I wrote it was very much using the rhythms of speech and the people. The people in the show are almost real, well they are real to me, but they’re almost real. I’ve literally just been chatting to someone who could have been in the show. It was very important to me that I got those people in the show and also I love this city, it means a lot to me. It’s nice to do something in your hometown. I think as well, it gives it an identity that maybe it wouldn’t have had if it was set in, I don’t know… Hemel Hempstead. I might write that show next!

What is it about police dramas that makes them so rich for storytelling?

When I was a copper, very very early on in my career a bobby said to me that we’re never going to knock on someone’s door and tell them they’ve won the lottery. You are only ever dealing with strong emotions and dark emotions. It’s very rare that you just have a bland, boring day. Everything is always very heightened. The minute that you heighten life then any kind of drama that you’re writing about it is exaggerated again and heightened further. It’s just fertile ground for plucking stories out (do you pluck things out of fertile ground?) It’s perfect for it. Big emotions – that’s what you want in a drama.

How did your writing journey start?

A very long time ago… it’s like ‘Once Upon a Time Tony wanted to be a writer…’ When I was a kid, I really wanted to be a writer and used to love writing stories at school. The only class I was interested in was English, that was all I wanted to do. But I failed my English exam and I thought that was it, “Oh well, never going to be a writer”. Thirty-odd years later I’m driving a cab after having a nervous breakdown and quitting the police and a lady got in the cab and said to me that she was the editor of a magazine. I said to her "I’m a writer". I don’t know why I said it, but I just said it. Now I look back and I think that I wasn’t lying really, I’d always been a writer but just hadn’t written anything. Hopefully that’s been born out after three novels and The Responder. She told me to send her some stuff, so I had to go away and start writing again. It was like someone just took the finger out of the dam and suddenly all this stuff flowed out of me. I was a writer, there was a thirty-year hiatus and then suddenly I was a writer again. I think I’m almost qualified to say now that’s what I am.

How important is life experience to your writing?

I think for me it’s very important. For my writing it’s very important. But I do sort of take umbrage with people when they say “ah well you’ve got all that life experience, someone who is twenty-one hasn’t got that life experience”. But they’ve probably just got a better imagination that I have. I don’t think life experience is important for everyone. I don’t believe in write what you know, I believe in write what you can imagine. I think people should just enjoy writing. You shouldn’t wait to start writing.

How do you create compelling characters?

I don’t know! I hope I just do it. I think what I do is not just to write a scene between two people. I’ve got one person here and one person there and information is passing between them – what should a scene do? Pass information. When I’ve written that scene I’ll come round behind this character, and I’ll try and move into their head – this is what I’m doing at three in the morning! I’ll move into their head, and I’ll look at the other character through their eyes. So, I’ve got all the information but when I run that scene again in my head I’m trying to see if there’s anything between them that I can use and build on. It might be their appearance – “look at the state of you, where have you been?’’. It’s a bit of human language. When I’ve done that, I’ll come round the other side and look through the other character’s eyes.

Your scene has got to convey information. If it’s not conveying information, then it shouldn’t be there – that’s what people would say. They’re probably right but I don’t necessarily think that’s true. I think there’s always space for a scene where you don’t have to convey as much information in what people say. Sometimes no words are better than a lot of words. People think to make a compelling character that they’ve got to say a lot. Chris Carson (Martin Freeman) in the show doesn’t really say that much. He doesn’t pass that much information on. Sometimes the compelling nature of the character is in the silence as well and what they’re doing with their hands, or where they’re sitting or what they’re looking at. Get in their head, get behind their eyes and look at the world through their eyes.

Any top tips?

There’s one that I wish I had known which is – Don’t get in your own way. I keep saying this over and over. The one thing that stops writers more than any others is themselves. Get out of your way. Start writing. We talk about self-doubt and block and confidence. It’s all you. You’ve just got to write it. Don’t think that you’ve got to buy a new notepad. I’m guilty of all of this, I’ve got about twenty brand new notepads on my desk, I’m guilty of it and that’s why I can speak with a degree of confidence. Stop telling yourself things like ‘I don’t know how to format a script’, just write it. It doesn’t matter if the format is wrong, or you haven’t got the software.

Jimmy McGovern – well if you’re going to get writing advice go to the boss! Jimmy said to me “Write you”. At the time I thought he meant just write my story but as time has gone on, I think what he was saying was to write what you feel is right, don’t write what you think will be a hit or that people are looking for. Don’t try and tailor your work to the current crop of television shows or films. Be you, you’re individual and unique.

What are the benefits of writer development schemes?

The experience – it’s just that. I was part of the ±«Óãtv Writersroom North group (Voices). You have people coming in to speak to the group who I would never in a million years get the opportunity to listen to. People would come in and talk about commissioning and theatre and radio. It’s also a calling-card if you can get onto those schemes it’s a way of other people getting to know you. One of the first people I met at a ±«Óãtv Writers event was at Stratford in East London (at the writers’ festival). It’s a bit of a hike from Liverpool. I met Helen Black who went on to write Time series 2 with Jimmy McGovern. When I met Helen neither of us had written anything for television but we’re still mates and hoping to collaborate together one day. I’m Britain’s worst networker so it was Helen who came over and put me in a headlock and started talking to me! If you find it difficult to network, just go anyway, you’ll learn stuff, why would you not want to learn stuff?

Can you outline your writing career to date?

Bronágh: I started out as an actor and still am an actor, that was my gateway into writing. I moved from Belfast to London for acting and then when I was over there, I decided to enter the writing competition and ended up getting selected for that. When you’re selected you get to do a performance piece and industry people come along. Luckily ±«Óãtv Northern Ireland were over for it, and they were putting together a team for a new show called 6 Degrees. That led to me going onto the writing team. It started from there really. After that I wrote on lots of C±«Óãtv and other children's dramas before I made the leap into more grown-up drama. The two areas work exactly the same, it’s just for a different audience. That experience gave me so much, I got to write so many scripts. I think that’s the only way to really polish your skills – by writing as much as possible.

Noel: My journey into writing is a bit random in that my previous career was as a police officer. I’ve always loved storytelling, but I was just writing for myself, almost as self-care, it was cathartic. I never imagined that anyone else would ever read it. Then it came to the stage that I had a finished script and I wondered if it was any good. The only person who I knew in the industry was (one of the creators of Blue Lights). He agreed to read the script and reacted to it really positively. That gave me the confidence to take it out, so I contacted who gave me the name of local producers. I contacted who agreed to read it and took it into development and then out to broadcasters. It was literally the first thing that I’d ever written, which was just crazy! From that I ended up getting an agent. The script was taken to the ±«Óãtv and (who was commissioner there at the time) said “we love this, but we’ve committed to a cop show in Northern Ireland already” which turned out to be Blue Lights! That’s something which happens a lot – there will be something else similar on the development slate. I was disappointed at the time but now I’m pleased that’s the way it worked out.

Have you been involved with any of the writer development groups or opportunities offered by ±«Óãtv Writers?

Bronágh: I’ve done development residentials in the past when you were known as ±«Óãtv Writersroom. I remember one of them was when I was writing for a teenage audience. I’d just had a baby and remember it was bliss because I actually got some sleep! It was great just to be mingling with other writers and it did lead onto some work.

Noel: I was on the ±«Óãtv Writers Pilot scheme. It was genuinely brilliant, the best scheme that I’ve done. I got teamed up with a mentor called , this legendary showrunner who also has a foothold in America. It was meant to be a professional mentor scheme but she’s just my mate now. We’re chatting all the time and the advice that she’s given me is unbelievable. She’s put me forward for jobs which have come off. The actual group of writers who were involved in Pilot and being part of that peer group was also great. It’s just lovely being in a group chat and being able to run things past each other. I’m not from the industry, outside of work I’m not involved with people from the industry, so forming that friendship group and being able to ask questions is just so helpful.

How did you become involved with Blue Lights?

Bronágh: I was already working with the production company, , when the first series was happening. , the joint CEO there, gave me my first writing job on 6 Degrees. I was very pregnant when the first series came around and couldn’t also swing getting into the writers’ room, but they said “if it comes back we’ll give you a shout”. I met Dec (Declan Lawn) and he read a spec’ script of mine. Then I was asked into the writers’ room for series 2 with the showrunners Dec, and Noel.

Noel: For me, because Dec had read my police script and I had that USP of having actually done the job, I was brought on board when series 1 was commissioned. I was involved in creating most of the characters and using my experience in shaping the storylines.

Why do you think the show has resonated with so many people?

Bronágh: I think it’s because it very, very cleanly explained aspects of Northern Ireland that people could never get their heads around. I lived in London for 10 years and people were always asking me to explain Northern Ireland, explain Belfast, to explain certain political aspects. People are fascinated by it and there’s only so much you can try and explain when you’re working in a coffee shop to your co-workers who are from Madrid or the north in England. Blue Lights came out and I think people just went "Oh I understand it more now – the layout of the city, the different communities, the trust issues, the differences in the police service". That’s a really hard thing to achieve.

Noel: Blue Lights was character-driven from the start. I remember from day one of the writers’ room that was the plan. On the surface it’s about the police but really, you’re getting to know the characters because they’re thrown into these incredible situations. How they deal with those situations tells you so much about who they are. I think through the fact it’s a police drama you get to know them very quickly and their personality traits – you really get behind them.

For me the best thing about Blue Lights is that it’s unashamedly localised. I think people buy into that. My favourite TV shows are ones that are totally of the place and don’t apologise for it in any way, shape, or form.

How does the writers’ room process work?

Bronágh: Dec and Adam come in with a very clear view of what the overall arc is going to be – the crime story which is always the driving force. That’s not to say that it doesn’t morph and change as time goes on. Within that overall arc we’re free to feed in in terms of guest stories that will come in and out and we do a lot of talking, breaking down our main family of characters and what we’re going to do with them.

At the end of the writers’ room process what do you leave with?

Bronágh: A document, photographs of scribbles on whiteboards, sheets going down the walls! our script editor writes everything up at the end of every day and streamlines it for us. As you can imagine, we’ll be on one episode and then the conversation jumps down the line to another. Sarah has the job of trying to put it all into order so that when we’re reading it over afterwards it’s more organised. I still don’t know how she does that! You leave with a sense of what each episode is – I know this because we walked out with a sense of episodes 1, 2 ,4, 5 and 6 but not so much episode 3 – and I was like ‘great that’s my episode!’ but that was just because we hadn’t cracked it yet in the room, but we cracked it later.

How does it work writing your own episode within the series?

Bronágh: You have an idea of the overall arc of the series, something will stand out with every episode, so you know what that episode is. Your A storyline – in terms of what incident your characters are called out to on the streets in that episode (for example) is still up for grabs and you get to bring that to the table and decide what you would like to do with the main characters within your episode – while keeping an eye on how it falls in the whole thing. That bit is really satisfying.

Noel: We knew from the beginning that Adam and Dec would write the beginning and end of the series, so we knew that episodes 3 and 4 were up for grabs. There’s a big storyline for which the crescendo happens in episode 4. That storyline was inspired by my real-life experience, so I agreed with Bronágh that I’d take episode 4. But before this point all four of us together with the producers had come up with the entire series and knew pretty much what was going to fall into each episode. Once the writers’ room stage is finished it’s about Bronágh and me going off and writing our outlines of what our individual episode are going to look like. Then after that we’ll all work on it together, agreeing and moving stuff around. The script editors are also involved at this stage. Once we get the sign off then it’s off to write the full script.

What are you most proud of about your episode?

Noel: For series 2 I campaigned to have a character who is a cop who’s a bit of a rascal and we’ve got him in a new character called Shane (Frank Blake). I’m proud that in the first draft of my episode, how I’d written him resulted in him being re-written in earlier episodes to get him to that point. Without giving any spoilers there’s a scene that I refer to as the Harry Potter scene – that’s where Shane comes to the fore – that’s what I’m most proud of.

Bronágh: In my episode I got to pitch a big emotional storyline. Everybody calls it the ‘tearjerker’. I got to write for Stevie (Martin McCann), who I just love as a character, and I got to delve deeper with him and into his past – through the job and his relationship with Grace (Sian Brooke). I think it takes things in a slightly different direction.

Why do you think people should watch Blue Lights?

Bronágh: I think it does that thing where it swings a lens onto another area of Belfast – which is such a complicated city. The show is doing this amazing thing of taking an aspect of the city and trying to interrogate it a bit. As Adam and Dec interrogate it the audience get to learn about the inner workings of this place. It can still baffle you – as it still baffles a lot of us who live here, but I think they’re just going deeper and deeper and through this world of policing you get to see so many other walks of life in Northern Ireland. Adam and Dec are journalists, and they know how to do this stuff. It feels great to be in the hands of people who are really good at that.

What’s the best piece of career advice that you’ve been given about writing?

Noel: I did a writing course with and he gave out his top ten tips. Number one was ‘Don’t be an a***hole’ – and I’ve never had any other piece of advice which has surpassed that! Because it’s all about relationships. If people enjoy working with you they are going to come back to work with you again.

Bronágh: For me the best piece was from . She said, ‘Just get it done’. I’d written a first draft and brought it to her with all the typical insecure writer caveats of ‘it’s really rubbish, it’s really bad, I could do another draft etc etc’ and she just took it from me and said, ‘You got it done. That’s the difference between people who want to write and people who write. We can’t collaborate with anyone unless you have something. We can talk all day about ideas (and a lot of the job is doing just that), but at the end of the day we’re going to need a script.’

As soon as you have a script you’ve something to work from, something to polish and to improve. Just get it done!

Watch Blue Lights Series 2 on ±«Óãtv One and ±«Óãtv iPlayer from Monday 15th April

How would you set the scene for This Town?

Steven Knight (writer) - The setting and backdrop for This Town is 1981, Birmingham and Coventry. ‘81 was a time of turmoil and change in every sense - in society, in politics but in music as well. This series opens with a riot and I hope the sense of ‘riot’ continues throughout the whole thing. , it happened in Handsworth, Birmingham and I’ve used that to introduce four very different characters who will come together.

You might say it’s about music or it’s about people who are drawn to a certain type of music, but I’ve tried not to do that. I didn’t really want to do a thing about people who form a band, which is part of what it is, I wanted to create a group of people who have no choice other than to form a band because all the other options are so bleak. Having said that I hope ‘bleak’ isn’t a word that people use to describe this, because what I’m trying to do is meet these people living their lives on big, sprawling housing estates in the early 80s and it’s beautiful. The place is beautiful. The series is not trying to say ‘isn’t it awful’.

Where did the idea for This Town come from and why did you want to write this story?

Steven - It originated with , the production company, who suggested creating something to do with this sort of music. That struck a chord with me because this was the era when I grew up and I’m from similar places to where the music originated.

At the time it seemed completely normal, but when you look back there was a period when in Coventry and then Birmingham that a certain sort of music appeared. Suddenly everyone seemed to come together regardless of differences like race. You’d go to a Birmingham football match and go to the pub after the match and someone would turn up with a record player and plug it in and everyone was united. The point being that it wasn’t deliberate or forced, or anyone at the time said “this is good”, it just happened. Music was everywhere. Not just the younger generation but parents and uncles and aunties would have a party and everyone would turn up and everyone had their song which they did. People were just singing all the time. In pubs people would sing.

I thought it would be interesting to tell a story set at that time. I tried not to tell a story of four people who form a band but four people in very very difficult circumstances which they can only escape from if they form bands.

Music is such a force of hope for so many of us, especially at that time of your life?

Steven - Music appeals to some part of your psyche that isn’t rational or reasonable. The characters are not seeking it out or trying to find it – this thing is finding them. A lot of the character stuff is based on real people’s experiences – the character of Gregory for example. I’m trying to get the reality of people’s lives into the story, the unusualness of reality.

What part does music play for the different characters?

Steven - For each character there is a role for music. For Bardon music for him is this Irish rebel music, it represents what his dad does, the danger, the jeopardy and the thing he doesn’t want. For Dante it’s words and he can’t cope with how they come to him, he needs to get them away. For Deuce, Dante’s dad who is a preacher, there is gospel music which for him is the lifeline to save him from addiction. Estella, Bardon’s mum, could’ve made it in the 60s and 70s, because she is a brilliant singer – and luckily Michelle Dockery is also a brilliant singer. For Estella music is what might’ve been. It’s a different thing for all of them but it fits when they all come together. 

The setting is so vital to the story?

Steven - Yes, there are these two council estates, and you could approach it by saying ‘isn’t it a shame, these poor people’ but for people who live there you don’t think like that. It’s brilliant, it’s glamorous and it’s dramatic. The idea is that those blocks look beautiful.

And all the influences and sounds come together to make this series unique?

Steven - I think so. We’ve been so fortunate with our performers and our director and the people who have contributed music, so I’m really excited about that – by the time you get to episode six it’s on fire!

Paul Whittington - Director

I read Steve’s script a couple of years ago now and I know it sounds like a cliché but it was one of the best scripts I’d ever read. The energy really leapt off the page and the vitality of these characters. Also, it’s interesting that it’s a very personal piece for Steve because actually it felt very personal for me too. The more personal you make something in the writing of it then the more universal it becomes. All the themes of being that age, being a teenager and that search for identity, ‘Who am I? Who is my tribe?’ Expressing that through the music that you listen to and the clothes that you wear – I think that’s something that we can all relate to.

I have a particular nostalgia for it because I remember that time, I’m from the Midlands too. It’s nostalgic but also universal thematically. You could set this story at any stage of history since the invention of the teenager!

How do you recreate those locations at that time?

Paul - Birmingham offers a lot in terms of the locations and people were very welcoming to us. If you say you’re working with the guy who created Peaky Blinders the doors open! The Brummies are rightly very proud of that show.

We found an area called in Birmingham – a sprawling estate with green spaces and woodland and then a location in Coventry that we wanted to be a bit more insular and inward looking – an incredible estate that has a large tower in the centre and four low rise blocks around each side that felt like a fortress. We had these two very distinctive and different locations.

How did you select the music for the incredible soundtrack?

Paul - Steve had written a lot of stuff into the script. Reading the script with a playlist in your head brought a lot to life. We also had a fantastic composer, , who wrote all the original music. He brought that time together with something that feels very contemporary.

Did you think ‘oh no I didn’t get this song in’?

Steven – I really tried not to think about it in terms of, it’s got to be about music or have a forensic analysis of what music was there at the time or even worse, try and be pure about things. It’s not based on the story of any specific band. People were listening to all kinds of different music. That’s why I wanted Leonard Cohen in there – just the last thing you’re expecting.

Steven this is the first production out of your new Birmingham studios isn’t it? How important is that?

Steven - We did it before we were ready, which was good! It’s a project that I’ve been working on for about eight or nine years, to get a studio there in Digbeth which is quite a rough but also cool bit of Birmingham with lots going on. We’ve got 20 acres of land with a mix of industrial warehouses and Victorian architecture. I love it. We’ve got Masterchef moving in and a lot more stuff coming. For me to be shooting in Birmingham was incredibly important. I love I think it’s beautiful! There’s a lot of in this show! I just wanted to take the bits of Birmingham that I’ve always thought are just amazing and great to look at and put them on screen and see if anybody agrees.

When you were writing the show did you have more than one season in mind?

Steven – Yes definitely. I think if you’re going to write a show you have to think that you’re going to be with these people for quite a long time and you’re going to get to the end of their journey. What’s good about television rather than film is that you can have a character who is unsympathetic for a long time and then redeem them. There’s always a thought that these characters are going to mature over quite a long period of time.

What’s the connection to the political context of the time and does it have contemporary resonance?

Steven - I think yes, fracture and destruction of society and pessimism. My intention was to take all of that bleakness and then find out that people will make it through. These characters are in very, very difficult circumstances, not through any fault of their own, and find ways to get out of them. At least you can have a laugh and a song.

Watch This Town on ±«Óãtv iPlayer and ±«Óãtv One from Sunday 31st March

The first series of The Tourist was the most watched drama of 2022. What were the challenges and opportunities of writing the second series?

[Jack Williams] Writing a second series is always hard and when we wrote the first series, we weren’t planning on a second series.

[Harry Williams] It was only when we asked ourselves, what does a second series look like that we realised there's an interesting question at the heart of a second series. Which is, Elliot now knows he’s done this awful thing - what does carrying that around look like? Can you forget something as massive as that? And how does that affect his relationship? The first one was always supposed to be a love story, and this sort of continues in that vein.

How did the themes of the story for series two come about?

[Jack] The idea for season two started with the characters. We talked about what we loved about writing and making the first series, and what we enjoyed as both viewers and writers. For us, that's the relationship between Jamie Dornan’s character and Danielle MacDonald's character. The thing we wanted to write about was “what does that look like if it continued?” With the revelations at the end of series one, can you continue a relationship with something like that? Can you look past the past?

[Harry] Additionally, we wanted to move it to a different country because we felt we had done Australia and none of Elliot’s history is from there. In series two we are asking where did he come from? 

What were your ambitions for series two?

[Harry] The ambitions were to continue what we did with series one, which was to strike a balance between the comedy, thriller, emotive elements of the drama. So, for series two we have dialled it up a bit as we know Jamie and Danielle can handle the balance so well.

What did you want to achieve with the look and feel of this series?

[Jack] Visually, series one was very distinct: we loved the way it looked and felt, our director [] did such a good job, and while obviously we wanted it to have a lot in common with that, it is a new country, it’s a new story. The Australian outback is very different from the very green and rainy country that is Ireland. So, we’ve been trying to take what we did in season one and keep that very cinematic feel, getting some big wide landscape shots and finding a sensibility that works for series two.

What sort of Elliot do we see in this series?

[Jack] After the events of series one we left Elliot in a state of complete despair. Elliot was on his deathbed, and he gets that message from Helen. So, when we pick up in season two, we find him in a relationship, and he is trying to move on and enjoy his life, but he is about to find out across the series that you can't leave things behind that easily. And more importantly can Helen forget his past and accept this new version of him?

What is it about Helen and Elliot's dynamic that you wanted to develop in a new series?

[Harry] I think there's a really unexpected romance in the first series, where Helen is so naive and just such a good person. In the first series, she was pretty much the only nice character. So having Helen with this deeply flawed man Elliot, who is trying to change, and watching their chemistry throughout was endearing. It is something we wanted to see more of and exploring their relationship was exciting. 

Tell us a bit more about the new characters and what they bring to the story.

[Harry] There is Ruairi Slater who's the local Garda, and a little bit like the Helen of series one. He is a new cop character who comes in, but has also got his own story, his own mystery, and is a new flavour that plays into this story of him and Helen. Ruairi instantly likes the look of Helen, and their story gets kind of weird.

[Jack] There’s also the McDonnell family. They're a very important element to this series. We've got Frank, who's the sort of patriarch of the McDonnells,. He’s a slightly sinister, history-obsessed man who believes in the value of knowing your past and where you come from. We also have Frank’s children Donal, Orla and Fergal. We find that the McDonnell clan clearly have some kind of agenda with Elliot, as he's kidnapped by them in episode one. We don't know what it is, but he's done something to seriously upset them. Elliot of course has no memory of it, and that kicks off the events of the second series. On the other side there is the Cassidys where we have Niamh, who is this wild unpredictable, and slightly feral woman.

What should audiences expect from series two?

[Jack] Audiences should expect the same show they enjoyed in series one. The story does continue, but it's also its own new and unique journey. There's more of the thrills, surprises, and offbeat characters. Everything in this series is dialled-up to 11, with a bit more of everything thrown in; hopefully it’s more thrilling, and hopefully funnier.

Please can you sum up series two in one or two sentences?

[Jack & Harry] It’s surprising, funny, Irish, exciting, and offbeat.

Watch The Tourist - Series 2 - from 9pm on New Year's Day on ±«Óãtv One and ±«Óãtv iPlayer

Catch up with Series 1 of The Tourist now on ±«Óãtv iPlayer

Read the scripts for Series 1 of the Tourist in the ±«Óãtv Writers Script Library

Watch an interview with Harry & Jack Williams

Matthew, Can you tell us a little bit about how you got involved with Men Up?

Yes, I received a two-page fact sheet from , laying out that one of the first medical trials in the world happened in Swansea in 1994 and asking whether I would be interested in adapting this as a drama. I was quite busy at the time, so I said to myself, “Well, this is the last thing that I need right now, to read another document!" But then as soon as I read it, I thought, “OK, I have to do this. Why hasn't this been done before?” My first thought was that it's the Full Monty with Viagra. I just thought, “This has to be a drama”.

So it wasn't a story that you'd heard about before?

No, I had no idea that this happened in real life.

What research did you have to do subsequently?

I spoke a lot to Doctor David Price, who is the actual doctor who ran the trial, and who still lives in Swansea. He just retired last year, and he is a brilliant storyteller. Obviously, because of patient confidentiality, we couldn’t talk about specific individual patients. All the stories in the drama are fictionalised. But what was brilliant was just getting the stories of the time. The mad stories that you couldn't make up.

What kind of stories?

Things like that Pfizer had FedExed him over the porn to use in the trial on VHS. And after his kids were in bed and he switched on the video he realised it was pretty crap and, you know, it wouldn't do! So, he called Pfizer and said, "look, this is not very good. I don't think this is going to going to work". And they said, "Well OK then go and buy your own porn". And because, you know, being a fine upstanding gentleman of Swansea, he kind of fled in the middle of the night with his wife to Newport to a sex shop to buy the porn in Newport. So, he would tell us all these stories and it was just incredible. And, you know, a lot of the stuff we didn't have the time to put in the film, but talking to David Price, the doctor who ran the trial was invaluable.

One of the first big things I came across was the ‘Viagra myth’. A lot of men take Viagra and they think once they take Viagra and it works that all their problems are going to go away, but invariably that doesn't happen. So I wanted to be truthful to that as well. I also learned that gay men weren't allowed on the trial. So I thought, what would it look like if a gay man tried to get on the trial? And so, those stories and ideas were the genesis for the fictionalised men in the drama.

Was that a challenge when you were trying to translate the story to the screen?

Not really, in fact it was kind of freeing to go, well, these were the types of men on the trial, these were the challenges they faced. And then to take that and run with it.

We adhered very much to the framework of the trial. So, the different kind of pills they had, whether that was a placebo or the real thing, a double blind trial. But then within that framework, to fictionalise those men was actually really freeing rather than oppressive or daunting.

So how did you discover your five key characters?

I'm from Cardiff, just down the road from Swansea, so I know how these men talk and their rhythms and I was able to write that authentically. But it was also important to show a cross-section of people. So for one person on the trial, I said, well, I want the drug to work and it's really good. And then for another character, I thought, well, I want it to be more complicated and the drug works, but actually it's not going to solve the kind of problems they’re experiencing in their marriage. And then, as I said before, I wanted to include a gay character and I thought if one was a little bit more middle class, that's interesting.

The mid-nineties feel like ten years ago, but it really was another time, you know. here and in America, . So I was just trying to explore a broad cross-section of characters, but predominantly working class, and all Welsh. It was such a joy to talk, to write and write these characters in their authentic voices.

How important is Swansea as a location?

Swansea looks incredible on screen. Dylan Thomas called it an ugly, lovely town and  called it a . You have the sweeping coastline, the beach and it's just stunning. And then in the background, you have the industrial Port Talbot steelworks. This story really happened in Swansea. This drug, which came from this trial is now known pretty much by literally every adult on the planet. So, it was important to honour that. Also just seeing Swansea on screen is brilliant. The opening shot is a drone shot over Swansea. It just looks incredible.

What do you hope people will take away from having watched Men Up?

What I hope people take away is, is that it's OK to talk. This is a drama about the first Viagra trial in the world, but actually it's really a story about mental health and communicating. It's about a group of men who are unable to talk to their partners or to their friends about what's happening to them. And by the end of the film, most of them, if not all of them, are able to do that. And for me, at its heart, that's what it's about. So what I would like people to take away, is that, whether we're talking about erectile dysfunction or mental health, men's mental health especially is still a taboo subject. So, if the audience can come away thinking, well, these five men can end up sitting around talking about what's bothering them, maybe I can do that with my friends as well?

What was your pathway to becoming a professional screenwriter? When did you first even think that was a possibility and what did you do about it?

I was an actor when I was a teenager, and then detoured into reading History and Politics at university and then took another weird detour to get my toe into corporate law, which was just horrible and crazy!

But my proper route into the industry was ±«Óãtv Writersroom. I did the in around 2010 with . We had three months in the classroom. During that time we also wrote an episode of Doctors and then we were put on the shows, EastEnders, Casualty and Holby City, it was sink or swim. My first episode of primetime network television was EastEnders, which was just incredible. That was my pathway into the industry. And I always remind people that I didn't get on the Writer’s Academy the first year I applied but had to reapply.

Before that point were you writing TV spec' scripts or were you writing for the theatre?

Even when I was in uni interviewing to be a corporate lawyer, and that process was ongoing, I knew I didn't want to do it. So, I wrote a script, I pitched a script about a character who was, (you might wonder where this came from!) choosing between a life of law and a life of being an actor. But it was much more fun than it sounds! It was called Friends of Dorothy, and it was set in London. I didn't have a clue what I was doing. I had no idea. But I wrote it and I sent it to , who I had worked with as an actor years ago, but hadn't heard from or spoken to since, and incredibly she came back to me. She'd read it, and she said, “I love it, I'd love to make it”. But it never got made! Actually an element of it became the episode of  I wrote for Nicola and many years later, but that gave me the confidence to go, “Actually, I'm not going to be a lawyer, I'm going to pursue writing". So for the next two years, I was writing stuff on spec and eventually got on the ±«Óãtv writers’ scheme. But I always say if it wasn't for Nicola Shindler, I’d be a corporate lawyer. So thank goodness for that!

Are there any shows that you're particularly proud of writing?

I'd have to say that first episode of EastEnders, which was really special because, you grow up with EastEnders and that writing credit at the end, it's so iconic. So that is a really special moment and just writing ‘Interior Queen Vic’ for the first time was incredible and also writing for , which I loved.

Then I moved to the USA in 2016 and started working more over there. I worked on , the Netflix show for three years and being in a big American writers' room was both brilliant and terrifying. So that was another pivot point.

How would you compare working as a screenwriter in the US to the UK?

It's completely different in Hollywood, in L.A on a show like Sabrina with a big traditional American writers’ room. Even though it’s called a writers’ room not much actual writing happens. Actually it's a lot of talking and pitching. And that is a completely, completely different skill-set. To sit around a table with fifteen people and pitch stories and talk about stories is a completely different thing to sitting in your room alone crying into a computer! So it took me around six months to get up to speed and learn how to verbally pitch stories and keep up with the system.

Do you think that feels unnatural coming from our more reserved British culture?

It's very different, but for me the most reassuring thing was that I had done a lot of Casualty and we did a kind of Casualty mini writers-room for our episodes. In essence the conversations about story and character are completely the same. There's no secret formula. The only real difference is money and the ability to keep those fifteen writers in a room while you're talking about episodes. So with Casualty, there would be, I think, four writers. We could each have a morning or afternoon to talk about our episode, which was great, but would not be enough time for a show like Sabrina. There we would do nothing for two weeks but talk about the episode that we were breaking. Essentially that comes down to budget. But the actual conversations about story and character were exactly the same.

What's the most useful advice you've received on your writing journey?

The two pieces of advice I like the most are that it's a marathon, not a sprint and rewriting is easier than writing.

So, I still do this today. I will write the scene in its worst kind of basic form. For example,

“I hate you.”
“I hate you.”
“Let's get divorced.”
“Okay”

Just so it's on the page and then I can keep going back and rewriting that because I have something set down, even if it's absolutely rubbish.

If anybody saw that ‘vomit’ draft of my script I'd never work again, but there's something on the page to work with. That feels manageable. Whereas if you're staring at a blank page, that can be overwhelming. So just get something, anything, down and then keep rewriting.

Watch Men Up on ±«Óãtv One and ±«Óãtv iPlayer from 9pm on Friday 29th December

Can you tell us about the premise of Time Series 2 and how it relates to Series 1? 

Jimmy McGovern: It’s very different from series one because life is very different inside a women's prison. I am probably speaking out of turn here, but I think it's less imprisoning and restrictive than it is inside a men's prison. You go into a men's prison and it would not be unusual to find men who are banged up for twenty-three hours out of twenty-four. That’s not quite the case inside a women's prison. 

Inside a men's prison, you very much see wings. You know, the old stone walls and cell doors all the way down, a hundred yards or so. It’s very hard to find that inside a women's prison. You might find the odd wing, which is for induction and maybe punitive sort of terms, but the women will tend to live inside a unit, fifteen, twenty, thirty women inside the household units, often with access to a kitchen and showers and things. The front door is always locked, of course, until they're allowed out. 

The biggest difference of all is that men are quite suspicious inside the men's prison. When you go in there and talk to them, they want to know what's in it for you. Inside a women's prison in general they’re quite prepared to talk, because you're from the outside and they can tell you their story and they will. So, it will look different, it will sound different, but it is about imprisonment.

How has that affected the stories you’re able to tell this time?

Inside a women's prison (not all women's prisons, but in our prison in Time) there's an MBU, a mother and baby unit. So, I mean, you get nothing like that inside the men's prison. A man would have no access to his kids except when the kids come to visit. Inside a women's prison you can rear your baby. You can be pregnant in that prison and give birth to your baby and have your baby with you usually up to about the age of around 18 months.

Could you introduce us to the central three characters in Time Series 2? 

There’s Orla (played by Jodie Whittaker) who's in for a short sentence. And that asks the question, are short sentences any good? There's Kelsey (Bella Ramsey) who comes in under the influence of heroin, but it's not the story of a heroin addict having to come to terms with not having heroin because you can get heroin inside a British prison unfortunately. 

And there's Abi (Tamara Lawrance), who has committed what many people would say was an unforgivable offence. And we tell her story of how she comes to terms with that unforgivable offence, but also how the other women have to come to terms with it as well. 

They’re the three stories, but there are other stories as well. There's a nice restorative justice theme, stories of the chaplain, you know, who's played by Siobhan Finneran.

What is it about the prison precinct that is so effective for storytelling? 

It's different in the women's prison from the male prison. But in both there's the very strong notion that you do not grass. Anywhere else if somebody was doing something nasty to you, if somebody was making your life hell, you would simply inform, you would tell a supervisor or an officer or anybody further up the pecking order, the chain of command, that this was happening, and it would be stopped. But you do not do that in prison. If you did do that, your life would be worse, you know? So that's the most interesting thing for me. I think, you know, you strip away things and you become the person you are, almost naked, you have to stand up for yourself in this very strange environment and protect yourself. That's not easily done.

Do you look back on your early career in TV as a kind of apprenticeship? 

Yes it was. I remember the first six months of when I didn't know anything, and I just did exactly as I was told to do by people who'd written for television and I hadn't written anything so of course they knew more than me. I did as I as I was told, and it was dead. Everything I wrote was dead. It took a while for me to invest something of myself in that story, to take a story I was being told to tell but tell that story in my way and inform it with my attitude towards life, my own voice, and become those characters one hundred percent. You need to become those characters and face the situations they are facing, totally concentrating on that and giving of myself, you know. 

It took me a while to learn that, and you've got to learn that because if you don't, then you're no longer a writer, you're a secretary. You're jotting down notes that the producer or the main writer is giving you and slavishly following those notes. That's secretarial. That's not creative in any way. How you listen and still own your story is a big test for any writer. You've got to listen. You know.

How did you end up working on Time Series 2? 

Helen Black: So I was on holiday and told by my agent not to pick up my emails, to have a break. But then I saw that she had e-mailed me! So I picked it up and it said, Jimmy McGovern wants to write series two of Time set in a women's prison, and he'd like a female co-writer and would I like to have that conversation with him in Liverpool? So I said, Yes, I would like that conversation! So I went up to meet him and then he asked me to come on board and we wrote it.

What was the writing process for Time Series 2? How did that partnership work? 

Well, we spent a fair bit of time together. Not in a typical writers’ room, no white boards, nothing that you would see in the other writers’ rooms that I've been in. We were just in a little quiet, dark room above Radio Merseyside, and we would just talk with our producers about what it might be. Jimmy had some ideas, some strong feelings about what he wanted to say. 

And then I told him all my experiences and then we went to visit HMP Styal, part of the women's estate. And then eventually, when you can't put it off anymore, Jimmy wrote episode one, I wrote episode two, and then we switched. And then we kept switching until we were in a position that we were happy with. And then, of course, you get the production notes down the line. So that was pretty much the process.

Was the setting of Time a world that you were familiar with? 

Yes, because when I was a lawyer, I was visiting prisons quite regularly, so I didn't feel uncomfortable visiting jails at all. And I'm from a very working-class background, so just writing about ordinary people felt like an easy and comfortable place for me to be.

You started your writing career as a novelist before writing television. What’s the most surprising thing that you have found out about writing for television? 

That ninety-nine percent of it never gets made! Whereas when you write a book, you write a book. And if you're already under contract there will be a book. It might not do brilliantly, but there will be a book. 

In TV you can be under contract to a producer. You can be under contract with a broadcaster. You can be virtually filming and it can still get axed at any time. And I think that's something that new writers need to know - that having something in development is just a start. There's no promise, but you just have to approach it as if it will get made and it's going to be bloody brilliant. Otherwise, you won't enjoy the process. You might just get a bit cynical and jaded. And so, I would say, just imagine in your mind that this is going to get made and how fantastic that will feel when it's on telly.

Watch Time on ±«Óãtv iPlayer

Read the scripts for the first series of Time in our script library

What compelled you to tell this story?

Primarily it was coming across the real-life stories of the Magdalene Laundries. I just couldn't believe what I was reading. It was Peter Mullins’ film that first introduced me to it. I couldn't believe that it had happened, but I also couldn't believe that I didn't know that all this had happened. Most people outside of Ireland didn't know that this had even occurred. And then I'd read that the last one closed in 1996. And so, primarily, I was inspired to do this just by a sense of outrage, I guess you'd call it. And I wanted to do it in a very particular kind of way where, because it was so unknown, I wanted to kind of cast the net wide, and get the story out there to as wide an audience as possible.

Can you introduce the lead characters, Lorna Brady and Detective Colman Akande?

When we first meet Lorna Brady () in 2015, she has a strange sleepwalking habit, and we're not really sure where it's come from, or how this has begun. In the small fictional town of Kilkinure it’s become weirdly accepted in a way that people just whisper about it happening, and they make fun of her for it, but no one really openly acknowledges it. Her story kicks off when she discovers a dead body in her house and has no idea if she's responsible for what appears to be a murder. Because of her sleepwalking habit and because of her past, she can't fully trust herself, so she’s the ultimate unreliable protagonist. She then comes to learn that this this dead person in her house has a very unique connection to her past and may well hold the key to knowing what happened to her daughter who was taken away from her at birth. She comes to conceal the body and begin an amateur investigation where she's playing both detective and prime suspect – she's sort of investigating herself and whether she was responsible for this woman’s death.

Colman Akande () is a detective from Dublin, who begins our story, investigating what seems to be an unrelated murder case of a priest in Dublin. But when the priest’s car turns up in Kilkinure – the town that Lorna's from – he has to go to Kilkinure for the investigation. It's not long before we realise that the two cases are linked – the dead woman on Lorna's floor and the dead priest in Dublin. So, Colman starts out very much as an antagonist to Lorna, with him being the detective who is after her without even really realising he's after her specifically. But it's not long either before we're going to realise that there is a really personal element to this for Colman too, where it’s revealed that he himself was born in a Mother and Baby home in Dublin. It’s this personal element that's going to be driving him and getting him into lots of trouble, going a bit rogue. 

The Woman In The Wall is multi-layered – examining a horrific tragedy in Ireland’s history, while also telling a compelling whodunit crime drama. Can you talk about how the two elements work side by side, and why you decided to take this approach as a writer?

In order to tell a story about the Magdalene Laundries, I wanted to tell it in such a way that it would reach as wide an audience as possible. And so, I leaned away from doing a straightforward drama or social-realist peace, and I wanted to kind of blend it with genre, partly because that's also my natural sensibility as a writer. That's the kind of stuff I like to write and the kind of stuff that I like to watch. But it also felt like an interesting challenge to try and tell a compelling ‘whodunnit’ crime drama, not just in a way that would sort of get the issues we explore out to as many people as possible, but in a way that it would hold its own too. My hope is that someone in a random corner of the world, someone who's never heard about the Magdalene Laundries is going to sit down to watch this show because they want to watch a heightened type of murder mystery, and it will totally deliver on that and they will be engaged by it but then by the end of all, they've also learned all about the Magdalene Laundries too. So, I wanted to do both of those things to make each element better. 

What were your motivations and inspirations for the series?

There was definitely the subject matter of course, which is the Magdalene Laundries and the Mother and Baby homes, other similar institutions in Ireland which were state-funded and run by the church. It was also partly the fact that very little has been done around these institutions. There was a state apology to the survivors and victims in 2013, and there have been compensation schemes but not much else beyond that. This still isn't taught in the Irish curriculum. We spoke to charities quite a lot during the research process for this series, and when you see the way that these people were treated and the way they're still being treated, it's infuriating. I think there's still a long way to go. When it comes to the tone of the series I was looking at and , filmmakers like , who blend genre really well or do one particular type of genre really well. They were the inspirations for the storytelling, tone and genre.

Despite the fact that the drama is inspired by real-life events, the town and the events that happen to the characters in the story are totally fictionalised. Why did you take that route into the story?

For a couple of reasons. We didn't want to link ourselves to any one particular place, person or series of persons. We wanted to protect the survivors in that sense. It was also to give ourselves the opportunity to collate as many of these stories. By setting it in a fictional town, we could imagine our own Laundry and Mother and Baby ±«Óãtv and could create a whole bunch of new characters who've had experiences very similar to many real different women from across the country. That was the thing that probably excited me most about having a fictional town, that it allowed us to tell as many of those stories from across the country, while still setting it in quite a heightened world. It allowed for our town to be fairly busy, and for there to have been quite a lot of terrible things happen there.

It's such an incredibly dense and delicately layered piece, but with a lot of twists and turns. How was staggering that and structuring a thriller?

Having the writers’ room was a definitely a huge help. We had really cool writers involved, Margaret Perry, Courttia Newland, Miriam Battye, Jamie Hannigan, who helped me do exactly that. The way that I tend to go about it is that from the beginning that I have milestones set in my head. For example, I knew how episode three was going to end before I even started writing episode one. I knew that this scene would be in episode five, and that scene would be the middle of episode six, etc. etc... So, for me, it was setting up these milestones, and then tying up the gaps in between them. The way I tend to work is sometimes I'll think of a moment that just seems really cool or mad to me, and I think, okay, “How can I make this work?”, which is the exact opposite of what you're supposed to do as a writer. You're supposed to allow your characters to take you to that point, and we do do that. But there is something that comes out of just kind of painting yourself into a corner for a moment and seeing if you can work your way out of it. Because if you can, in a way that stays true to your characters and to the tone of the story you're trying to tell, then you get to have your cake and eat it. You have an amazing moment that hopefully feels true to form, and not contrived. Because when that stuff doesn't work, you just throw it out. That's the benefit of being able to throw everything at the wall and think up some mad ideas. 

What was your research process when writing the scripts? Did you speak to any Laundry survivors to gather first-hand accounts of their experiences?

Yes, we did. Initially we did our own research, and we had our own researcher on the project who was amazing. That was a case of trawling through all of the first-hand accounts that were available from these women. Watching all the films, all the documentaries, reading all the books and all the newspaper articles we could find. And afterwards we felt like we had a solid foundation, we then reached out to a number of different charities and groups.

We had a consultant who was incredible, she was able to help guide us a little better and was able to answer our much more specific questions, and when we all felt comfortable we reached out to a few survivors via her and spoke to them first-hand about their accounts. That was just incredible. By that point, we'd read dozens of accounts and we'd watched interviews, but still nothing quite prepares you to hear those stories first-hand from another human being who's actually been through this experience.

What was really inspiring was who they were as people. I feel so fortunate to have been able to speak to them. It was also really, really inspiring for them to just be so behind the idea of the project. 

The Magdalene Laundries began in Ireland in the late 1700s, followed by Mother & Baby ±«Óãtvs in the 1900s. Shockingly, the final Laundry did not close until the late 90s close to when this story is partly-set in the mid-80's. Many people in Ireland will remember these tragic events but why do you think it’s important to tell this story to audiences today?

I would say that while people in Ireland know about this, I would argue that a lot of them still don't fully know all the details as much as they think they do. So, it's important for that reason, of course, within Ireland, to tell this story. You can always know more. But then, for people living outside of Ireland, most don't know about this at all.

When I tell people that last laundry closed in 1996, and the last Mother and Baby home closed in 1998, they can't believe it, because the stories sound so medieval - they are medieval. It's hard to say why people don't know about this. It's interesting that such an incredibly awful, harrowing piece of Irish history that ceased to exist relatively recently, isn't more well known. It’s hard for that not to feel like an active act of repression, or covering this up, or brushing this under the rug. It’s this sense of shame that stopped people talking about this for years, and I feel like it's still stopping people from talking about it. It is still affecting quite a lot of people, and there must be thousands more who don't even know that they've been affected by it.

The further you get into it, when you start reading about illegal adoptions, and falsifying death certificates in order to prevent birth mothers from finding their sons and daughters, this idea of “move on” just isn't tenable.

What is your hope for the series?

If I have one hope, it’s that this will start a conversation about the events that took place. That would be my one hope – as simple as that. I have lots of other hopes, obviously I want people to enjoy the series, I want it to do well, I want people to watch it. I want them to be entertained by it as a thriller and as a detective story and all those things. But mostly, I just want to start a conversation. As I mentioned earlier, I want someone to sit down and watch the series, someone who has never heard about this before, and then I want them to start looking into it, and to start talking to their friends about it, saying “I can't believe this actually happened”. I want it to start a conversation.

There is a lot of dark humour within the scripts, can you tell us about your decision to include it?

I don't know if I’d call that a decision as much as that it's just my natural instinct, my natural way to write - especially when it gets to anything uncomfortable. And this is deeply uncomfortable. Maybe that's an Irish thing in general. It's definitely my natural way of writing, just to go at it with some comedy. I also find that the dark humour, it's weirdly more realistic - in my life experience anyway - than just doing a straight drama. I find that in the most horrific experiences in life, there are always weird moments of humour and things that don't quite belong. Someone saying something the wrong way, or it not coming out quite right - that I think is just realistic. So, I would say it's a natural instinct. But at the same time, if I stop and think about it, it's probably the perfect way to tell a story like this.

Watch the Woman in the Wall on ±«Óãtv iPlayer

Read more interviews with the cast and crew

Can you talk a little bit about the inspiration behind the series?

Penelope: So, we were doing some research around con artists, and we learned that there was a strong correlation between the behaviours, patterns and tactics of con artists and how they operate on their victims and other kinds of abuse, for example domestic violence. And we wanted to write a story which explored that and which put the victims of that abuse at the centre.

Ginny: There are new ways of communicating now, but the way that we con people has basically stayed the same, because it’s about lying and convincing somebody that the world is different than it really is. This is something that happens quite a lot on social media, I think, which makes it quite a relevant story.

What about the title? It’s quite unusual, but it’s perfect. Who came up with that?

Ginny: We went through various options, but that one, which wasn’t our original title, was on the first page of the pitch that we brought to . After we’d been through a number of different titles, none of which quite worked, I think it was Naomi [De Pear] who suggested that we could just use the whole thing as the title. As soon as she mentioned it, it just sort of clicked. It seemed like a really fun idea, and it really fitted the show. It was there from the beginning, hiding in plain sight.

Can you tell us a bit about Alice and Cheryl’s relationship?

Ginny: Well, the problem with Cheryl - the fundamental flaw, in fact, with Cheryl and Alice, is that their relationship is based on a lie that Alice tells right at the start. And so, from then on, even though they are on the same side and working towards the same cause, trust is always going to be a big issue for them.

Penelope: Alice is in a kind of catch 22 as she feels if she exposes the truth about Rob to Cheryl, she may not be believed. So she goes down this path of using the tactics that maybe she’s learned from Rob himself in the past in order to try and expose the truth about Rob and ultimately help Cheryl.

So anyone is capable of conning, it doesn’t have to be as sinister as Rob. Would you agree?

Penelope: You could do it. You might not feel very good about yourself when you’re doing it, but anyone could learn the tactics. There are steps and patterns.

Ginny: But most people with any empathy would choose not to do it because of the damage.

Penelope: Which is part of the journey that Alice goes on in the show. When she sets out, Alice wants to right the wrongs she feels were done to her and her family in the past. But as things go on, she begins to realise the effect that it’s having on Cheryl. And I think she realises that Rob needs to be stopped entirely. When Cheryl finds out that she has essentially been betrayed by somebody she thought was her friend, there’s a moment when she has to decide what’s more important – whether stopping Robbie is more important than her anger towards Alice… you’ll have to see what happens.

The series addresses a variety of topics: family, trauma, depression. Can you talk a bit about some of these key themes?

Penelope: The trauma of being the victim of a con is something that we really wanted to explore, both as an individual and the family around that victim, and even the community around them. Because in the case of Alice, lots of people have given money to that scam, and they’ve persuaded other people to give money to that scam. So, it is very traumatising when you realise that you’ve been complicit in other people becoming victims. And we wanted to look at the trauma in the long-term of being a victim of a scam. It’s something that really can affect your self-esteem, your ability to trust other human beings. We wanted to show that relationship 20 years later, in a way, because this is something that is still affecting them: every day they are still living with the financial, emotional and psychological repercussions of this crime which happened to them, basically, which has never been prosecuted. That’s very common with this kind of crime.

And the cast, of course, is amazing. How involved were you in the casting process for this?

Penelope: Very involved. Lots of online meetings. It was very important to us to cast the three of them together because that triangle, if you like, is such an important part of the whole story, that they all fit together. And we feel very happy with how that went.

Ginny: I think like all really good actors, they take the character and take it to the next level so that they have now occupied our imagination as those characters, and we hear their voices as the voices of the character. Yeah, they’re great.

And the last question, why do you think audiences are so fascinated by crime for entertainment and con man stories? Do you think people take it seriously enough?

Penelope: Con artists break boundaries, don’t they? And they know how to beat the system, and that makes them successful in getting their aims and in achieving the goals.

Ginny: And in this story, Cheryl and Alice have to go outside their comfort zones, break some boundaries, and beat the system in their own way. And that’s what makes it interesting.

Penelope: I suppose that as a society, maybe we don’t take it seriously enough. I do think we’re becoming more aware of the impact of this behaviour on individuals. But it is still really difficult to prosecute, it is still really difficult to gather evidence.

Ginny: The police do take it seriously, but they are also aware of how little they can do. We spoke to the police when we were making the show, and they made it very clear that it’s very difficult to get enough proof, especially when these cons often don’t come to light at the time. It often takes a while for victims to realise that they’ve been conned. And then there’s a lot of shame about coming forward. So, that scene in the police station where Alice comes to terms with what’s happened to her and tells somebody for the first time is important, I think.

Watch The Following Events Are Based on a Pack of Lies on ±«Óãtv One and ±«Óãtv iPlayer from Tuesday 29th August at 9pm

How did you get involved with The Sixth Commandment?

I was contacted by the ±«Óãtv who said they had been brought a really interesting story they would like to talk to me about. So I met with Executive Producers Derek Wax and Brian Woods and they then sent me a huge stack of material - I'm not kidding, it reached from the floor to my ribcage - which were the court transcripts, Peter’s diaries, the Thames Valley police investigation... They also sent me the documentary Catching a Killer: A Diary from the Grave which Brian executive produced. I remembered following the case as it was happening and I could feel it coming to life in my head as a story before I even started going through the research material.

What was it about this case that you found so interesting?

There were so many elements to it. I started out thinking that this was a really twisted, sad story which had a fairy tale quality to it. It’s about an English village into which walks somebody who is entirely predatory but who quickly becomes absorbed into the life of the village - the university, the church, and he was so good at camouflage that nobody saw the wolf's clothing.

It felt like one of those Hans Christian Andersen or The Brothers Grimm fairy tales which everybody thinks are really cute but they're not - they're terrifying. I felt that there was something quintessentially English in this dark, dark fairytale in the sense that you could live in this ordinary place, where everybody knows you, you’re surrounded by good neighbours, and yet you could slowly die in front of them and nobody would know what was happening or say anything. That seemed to me to be the story, that tension between public respectability and private yearning, a sexual desire that you can't speak about that’s at war with your religious beliefs. All those elements drew me to the project.

So it is as much about the victims as it is about the crimes?

It is - I’ve spent a lot of my career writing about murder, and I think the victim is always the most important element. One thing I didn't want to do was to glamorise the killer. A lot of TV programmes give you the sense that you're falling under the spell of the killer, who’s incredibly intelligent, with some grand plan, but I wanted to understand and honour the victims, to give them life and dignity. They were more than just Ben Field’s victims. That backstory was really important for me. Peter and Ann led full, vibrant, intelligent, educated, lives full of curiosity with families, friends, social lives, their love of poetry and theatre and their devout faiths.

Tell us about Peter’s journals and what they revealed?

It was Peter’s diaries that helped the police to crack the case and to identify Field as a killer. He wrote assiduously every day, right down to the smallest, seemingly ridiculous, most tiny detail. When he began to write about falling ill, he didn't know of course that he was writing about his own murder. This man spent so much of his time writing about how kind Ben was being to him, bringing him cups of tea - and how four hours later he fell down the stairs.

What about Ann’s private life?

Ann had also led an extraordinary life. She'd been a model, a teacher and a headmistress. It was vital to me to go beyond seeing a photo of somebody in the paper which is how you then remember them. But there's all the life they’d led before they died, filled with their kindness, their curiosity, their generosity, their open heartedness, their faith, all of which made them a target in this case. It was really important to convey all of that spirit, rather than let Field have the final word, if that makes sense.

There must be a fine line between writing an entertaining script whilst remaining respectful?

Really good TV does something other than entertain, inform and educate, all of which sounds rather dry. I think it draws you into a really deep, dark story which doesn’t just tell you what happened but also how it happened which is just as important. It's about drawing people in, making them really invest in the story. Of course, there’s a fine line to walk but you can't be sententious - you want to tell a love story, because that's what those people believed they were living. You have to understand them and how they might have fallen prey to this man's lies, you've got to make them come to life so that what happens is really shocking. You need to get right under these people’s skins, think about who they are, who they love and what their life means to them; Peter as he writes his diaries or Ann as she walks her dog and looks forward to her family visiting. It was a new experience for me. I didn't want to be prurient but wanted to imagine the richness of their long lives and what they hoped for next. That felt really important to me as a way of driving the story forward, because they were never going to get there now. We also worked closely with the victims’ families, and they had to trust that I was going to do right by their loved ones.

What is it about the story that will appeal to audiences?

I think the appeal is that ultimately justice was done. The trial took place in 2019 so it's very recent. We peel back the layers of that case, which very quickly became about how this young man tricked and inveigled his way into the spotlight. It's about understanding the human cost of this story, not just for Peter and Ann, but also for their families. It’s also about watching exemplary people doing their detective work and finally tracking down somebody who had done terrible things.

How would you sum up The Sixth Commandment?

It's a very emotional and frightening story in a kind of ordinary way. It makes you think about how we live in our own little worlds and what we value in life. We need to look more closely at the people we think we know and realise so many are vulnerable and full of hope. And we need to be more vigilant about the people who come into our lives.

Watch The Sixth Commandment on ±«Óãtv One and ±«Óãtv iPlayer

More interviews with the cast and team behind The Sixth Commandment

Tell us about Champion

Champion is about a brother and a sister. Bosco Champion – a rapper who’s been in prison for the last two years – and Vita Champion his sister. Vita is his long-suffering PA and has been doing everything for Bosco; running around after him, lying for him, covering up for him - everything a PA could do and more. Then you have their parents Aria and Beres Champion, they have their own history in the music industry too from ‘back in the day’, as we find out as the show goes on. Everyone in this family is so invested in music.

When Bosco comes back from prison the world has changed, and the world of music has changed, so what should he do? Vita has been behind the scenes keeping everything going, ready for him to come back. She wants to step up to be his manager now but Bosco wants her to just keep doing what she’s been doing.

Bosco also has a rival, a drill rapper called Bulla. Vita and her friend Honey sing with Bulla and he recognises Vita’s talent… and the show unravels from there.

What are the main conflicts in the series?

Bosco and Vita, obviously, but also their parents Aria and Beres Champion. They’re divorced but Beres is still very much inserting himself into the lives of these people. There is Beres and Lennox, Aria’s new partner, Bosco and Bulla - a musical rivalry. Honey and Vita are best friends who’ve been singing together since they were kids, but Vita makes some choices with their music that Honey isn’t very happy about.

We have so much conflict in every episode. When we were doing the writers room there was one point in the final week where I said we needed to keep a score system. That was the way I made sure every character had their fights and everyone had their wins, and their losses.

What makes this show and the music so special?

I think this show is special in its own right but the music is very close to me. I’m obsessed with music and I always have to listen to something. What got me into this show was the prospect of being able to make music. I’m not a producer but I know the producers and artists that I love, we’ve brought some of those people together to make an amazing soundtrack. Drill, rap, R&B, soul, neo-soul, reggae – we have so many things covered. That in itself was a challenge.

The music team is quite small; me, a music supervisor called Cat Grieves, music consultant Hattie Collins, and Ghetts. He joined as a music exec and writes all of Bosco’s raps working with his own producers. We have Ray BLK, in the show as Honey but also a song writer and music exec for the show, and some amazing music written by Debbie, plus Shola Ama - all of my musical dreams.

What are the themes of the show?

When I watch most TV shows, especially concerning young people I’m always thinking where’s the family, where did they come from? I think where we come from says so much about us. Even if your parents aren’t necessarily around they still make you - what does that absence do to you? When we were making the show I immediately understood that it’d be a family drama. Everyone in that family – Beres, Aria, Bosco and Vita – all have a place, a function and a role - even though the family is fragmented and fragments further throughout the show.

Everyone has to come from somewhere, I love family drama, writing about and observing families. My family in itself is very fractured but I’m always interested in that rather than being sad about it because I can see why it can happen. I can see why when people don’t talk to each other you can have massive rifts that last lifetimes sometimes. Putting that into my work is really important because family is so foundational.

Tell us about the link between the music and the drama?

I didn’t want it to be a musical in that someone breaks into song, I wanted you to see people making songs in their own right. While the song might not adhere to the situation at hand when we were briefing the songs we’d give the context of the storyline. Debbie wrote a song for Vita called My Ones, it’s about hating everyone because they’re taking advantage of you. It doesn’t necessarily name characters but I wanted that feeling in the song and she did such an amazing job. My job overall was to create a sonic world and decide if everything fits.

With Ghetts for example, sometimes we’d give him the brief or sometimes he’d send a song as a suggestion. When Ghetts sent a freestyle we rewrote an episode to have Vita helping Bosco write it, then Bosco recording it in the studio in a later scene.

You have to be very agile, it all works because I’m quite good at remembering the place of everything - where things should work and go. I think it’s because I write novels, you have to know where everything is in a story. I’m good at doing the jigsaw of what is going to work with what.

What are your favourite songs in Champion?

My first is the clash, which is actually four songs in one. It’s amazing and I was in every rehearsal for that because I was specific about it. It’s like a clash but also a rap battle, that’s my favourite musical moment. I really love Bosco and Rusty in episode four when Bosco goes to Birmingham.

Why should people watch Champion?

People should watch Champion because I think we’re doing something people haven’t seen before. Even though I’ve written it when I watch the cuts I get really excited. There is something about what happens with family and music, the heart and pain that comes together really beautifully in this show. We’ve packed so much good stuff into each 45 minutes and it looks really beautiful.

What is the show about for you at its core?

For me, it’s called Champion and it is about fighting because Vita is the person constantly fighting to be seen and to be heard – not just in family but in music, life and as a black woman, this is really important. Champion is about fighting just to exist and exist comfortably and happily.

What is unique about the music in Champion?

In most musicals someone is talking and you feel a song coming up because they’re about to gear up to it, but in Champion all the music is very specific, everything has a point and a place. I really like that we’re not breaking the wall of the drama. We’ve got all these amazing hybrid actor-musicians which is incredible.

The music in the show is written by Ghetts, Ray BLK, Debbie, Shola Ama and more. In terms of producers we have Nana Rogues, KZ, Ten Billions Dreams, Toddla T, so many incredible names. And we have a score being produced by Swindle who is an amazing producer.

And the series wasn’t always called Champion, right?

It was named Star for a while and then I was playing table tennis with Danielle Scott-Haughton - who is one of the exec producers - she won, I said ‘ah, champion’, and everything happened from there.

Who are your five musical GOATs? (Greatest of all time)

That’s really hard…! Chakka Khan, because there is so much emotion there. Ghetts, obviously, it’s been a dream working with him. Vybz Kartel, shady past but great lyricist. Little Sims, I think lyrically she’s absolutely incredible, one of my favourite rappers. The final one is Freddie Mercury who I think is the greatest performer ever to have lived.

Watch Champion on ±«Óãtv One and ±«Óãtv iPlayer from Saturday 1st July

More interviews with the cast and team behind Champion

±«Óãtv Sounds: Obsessed with... Champion - With the help of cast members and celebrity fans of the show, Radio 1Xtra presenter Remi Burgz gets into what makes Champion the ultimate love letter to Black British music

After World War II, more than a million Brits were enticed to . In return they were promised a better house, better job prospects and a better quality of life by the sea in sun-soaked Australia.

When first approached me with the idea of a series about the Ten Pound Poms and asked if it was something I would be interested in writing about, my interest was piqued. You get this sort of thing a lot as a writer and quite often you think “You know, it’s not for me.” But there was something about this that really appealed. I’ve not written a period drama before, for good reason, because they’re generally quite tricky to make good. But I was drawn to the themes of escape, of no matter where we go, we take our problems with us – something which is ever present in my work – and the fact that this was a piece of our history that I didn’t know much about. It’s a period piece that isn’t all bonnets and frocks - and the more I looked into it, the more I thought: “Yeah, there’s definitely a TV series here. I’m in.”

Once I was on board, Eleven decided to hire a full-time researcher who dug around quite intensively for a few weeks and produced a detailed 50 page document and when I started to watch documentaries and read books, it opened up a whole river of imagination and knowledge which I found fascinating. The research offered up so many ideas that it was almost overwhelming; there were so many fascinating and heart-breaking potential stories, so many directions I could go in. I had to choose who was going to come over to Australia, who was already there, what year do we begin, there were lots of important decisions to make early on.

Britain in the fifties was a fairly grim place and many people were tempted by the adverts for Australia as “a great place for families.” The technicolour promo films of the time showed golden beaches, beautiful houses with picket fences and big gardens, attractive, suntanned people water-skiing and playing volleyball. But in reality, many immigrants arrived to gross disappointment. They were housed in post-war steel Nissen huts with outdoor showers, no flush toilets and terrible food. The accommodation was cramped, insects rife, the heat stifling and walls paper-thin.

I decided I wanted to bring over a loving couple with two children. They are trying to change their life because Terry the father is haunted by memories of what he saw in the war and is drinking too much in an effort to blot them out. Bright and ambitious, his wife Annie has always put herself second to the needs of her family. Then there’s Kate, a lone traveller who leaves her fiancé at the port and has a deeply emotional motivation for coming to Australia. At the hostel in Australia, we meet an English family, Bill, Sheila and their twin daughters who have been there for some time. She is desperately homesick and longing to return home.

So that was the core of my series. And they obviously collide with various Australian characters on the compound and in the town, funny, friendly, abusive and embracing. There was a real sense of “Who are these poms, coming here, taking our jobs.”
Australia, like many places in the fifties had issues with racism, sexism and masculine culture. Women weren’t allowed in pubs, indigenous Australians were sent to the back of the queue in shops, children roamed free all day long despite the very real danger of snakes, spiders and dingoes. But there were no class hang-ups and women were encouraged to work whilst families spent time on the beach - and of course the landscapes are stunning.

I’d worked with Michelle Keegan before on the series Ordinary Lies and . Early on there was a discussion with the ±«Óãtv and I asked Michelle if she’d be interested. She loved the idea of Kate’s journey, because she appears to be in a relationship when we first meet her at the port in England, but she arrives in Australia on her own and tells the port official that her fiancé didn’t want to come after all and you immediately think: “Hang on, that doesn’t sit right.” Throughout the series you realise Kate’s on a very personal, heart-wrenching mission, which goes back to the research and some of the things that were happening to single women in the UK at the time. Michelle was perfect for the role – it’s the first time she’s done a period drama and we adapted the script to accommodate some of the things that came out of rehearsals.

Faye Marsay is fantastic as Annie and in many ways she’s the emotional heart of the series as the mother of our lead family. She’s the one who drives the decision to go to Australia when she sees an advert in the paper. Terry is blind drunk and he’s lost all of his money and she announces: “We are going to change our life.” When she arrives, she’s the stereotypical 1950s housewife, like lots of women at that time. She’s brought up the kids, she looks after the home, she’s very much catering for her family. But what she discovers in Australia is an unexpectedly massive opportunity to become something different alongside all of that, which could be a whole new exciting life for her, which isn’t really why they went. So it immediately creates a conflict in the family because everybody’s dynamic is changing quite unexpectedly. Faye, who’s from the north of England, is such a natural actor - she can do so much with an expression, and she looks so believable and real. It’s sometimes difficult to find actors who feel of the period, so you’re looking for actors who are chameleon like. Faye’s really inhabited Annie’s character and takes us on that journey throughout season one.

As for Warren Brown, Terry was one of the first characters who came into my mind when I was creating the series. Our story opens in 1956, eleven years after the end of the Second World War but lots of people in the UK were still processing what had happened and many people who’d fought were struggling. I watched a very good documentary with some first-hand accounts of real Ten Pound Poms and one character stuck in my mind. He was talking about how his experiences of the horror of the war had stayed with him and he was unravelling in the UK. He had PTSD and was finding life very hard. Going to Australia was a way of trying to deal with that. The theme of the show is told through his story which is that you can go and start a new life, but you essentially take your baggage with you; you can never leave yourself behind. He’s still got all this bad stuff in his head, problems with drink and gambling. How can he try and lessen some of that through starting afresh in this new country?

Warren and I had worked together briefly many years ago on Shameless and had talked about doing something together. Terry is a hard role to cast because he’s got to be masculine and physical as a working man and labourer, but he’s also got to be troubled, with a sensitive side, we’ve got to have some humour and it’s difficult finding all that in one actor. Warren looks very good for the period, but he also has that vulnerability whilst being tough. He kind of ticked all of the boxes.

I didn’t really know any Australian actors before we started this process. I was brought up to speed by our brilliant casting director and it became pretty clear to me how much amazing acting talent there is over there. It was a nerve-wracking decision to cast only a small percentage of English actors whilst some would be played by Australians doing an English, Northern accent. The kids, Finn and Hattie, are absolutely brilliant – you wouldn’t know they’re not from Manchester. They’re an amazing find and I’m very pleased. As for the other cast, like Rob (Collins) and Stephen (Curry), they’re just exceptional and we’re very lucky to have them on board.

For much of the production I was in the UK and the time difference is hellish meaning you do most Zoom conversations pretty early in the morning UK time. 8 or 9 in the morning is 5 or 6 o’clock in Australia, so you have a very small communication window which can be challenging. But once we were up and running and the director and executive producer moved to Australia, it became a bit easier on the ground. We have one Scottish director and one from Australia, so we add those different voices into the mix. They’re both superb.

I hope it’s an entertaining story that shines a light on something viewers didn’t know much about. I think Ten Pound Poms is a kind of rare beast these days. It’s unashamedly a character drama. I mean it’s got thriller moments and emotional high stakes but it’s essentially about ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances, their lives and their families and trying to make things work. In a TV landscape awash with cops and crime and high concept whizz bang, it’s a privilege to have the time to do a character piece that feels very rich and emotional. We’ve created a period drama with dirt under its fingernails, a show that doesn’t glamorise the past. It’s about love and hope and following your dreams.

Watch Ten Pound Poms on ±«Óãtv One and ±«Óãtv iPlayer from Sunday 14th May 2023

Watch interviews with Danny Brocklehurst on the ±«Óãtv Writersroom website

Read scripts by Danny Brocklehurst:

Ordinary Lies

Exile

Stone

Is Blue Lights your first original story for the screen?

Adam: For TV yes. was an original short that we wrote that won some awards, an Irish IFTA, but for TV yes.

Declan: The Salisbury Poisonings (watch now on ±«Óãtv iPlayer) was a Factual Drama for TV based on real events. Then last summer we had a film on Netflix, again fictionalised but based on real events, starring James Norton and Gemma Arterton. Blue Lights is our first television foray into pure fiction. We have tried to make it as authentic as possible. We spoke to upwards of thirty serving and retired police officers and we spent two years researching it. But when it comes down to it the characters and the scenarios are fictional.

How did you settle on your choice of characters to tell the story? On the probationers?

Declan: Grace (played by Sian Brooke) came first. , the producer, approached us with the idea of telling the story of someone who joins the police in Northern Ireland a little bit later in life. So Grace is forty-one when she joins. That is not as unusual as you might think. Quite a few people tend to join the PSNI after having had a separate career. People join in their thirties, forties, even their fifties. We were intrigued at that time by this idea of an early middle-aged person leaving behind everything they had ever known, the career that they thought they were always going to have and doing something completely different. Partly, maybe subconsciously, we were intrigued by it because that is what we had just done ourselves! We had just left the ±«Óãtv, I had left my staff job to finish The Salisbury Poisonings. That was a huge gamble and a risk for me so when Louise talked about this scenario there was a commonality that I felt with that character.

Adam: I would also add that Grace is coming from a social work background so it’s an interesting perspective when someone is coming in with huge amounts of idealism, where they’ve done a job where they felt like they could change things and then coming into a job where you feel like you can expand that idealism even further. Then she is met with the pragmatism of everyday policing. Also, through her narrative journey she shakes the people around her and makes them think that there might be a different way to do this job at times. That’s why her character is so valuable in terms of storytelling and narrative development.

We also thought that rather than just having one central protagonist (and I think this is also how Dec and I tend to write - in a more ensemble way) we thought, let’s put a couple more probationers in there who have different approaches. So, you’ve got Annie (Katherine Devlin), she’s from up in the north, the , from an area where people ordinarily would not join the police, historically for religious reasons. In doing so she is forced, through the series, to make sacrifices with her family, with her team, with her team. She has to give things up because she’s worried about the threats it might impose upon them because she is a police officer. This reflects what police officers in Northern Ireland go through every day, this continual threat. This threat is very real.

Probationers are trained in a police college but there’s no transition period. You finish college and then you’re on the street, and here you’re on the street with a gun. It just fascinated us as to how people adapt to that. They are just humans like us. How do you remember all the legislation when there’s a guy shouting in your face?

Declan: All of the characters emerge from research. That doesn’t mean that they are based on particular people, but they are composites of people who we met and things that we heard and second-hand stories that we were told about types of police officers, and so when you get a little hook like that in your brain you think for example “oh that’s interesting, what if you had a cop who is a coward?” Jen (Hannah McClean) in the show is a physical coward, she shouldn’t be doing the job, she’s scared. At one point we heard a story about people who join the job and realise that it’s not for them. They didn’t know it in training college, but actually they are scared of physical confrontation, and those people don’t last very long. That was the genesis of Jen.

The genesis of Tommy (Nathan Braniff) came from hearing a story about someone who had led a very sheltered upper-middle class upbringing. He was astonished at what he saw on the street and couldn’t believe the things that he was seeing. Once you have that one-sentence character trait then Adam and I together, and then in the writers’ room, built out his whole character.

Why did you decide to use a writers’ room in developing the show and how does that process work?

Declan: We had three different writers’ rooms for this series. One of them was on Zoom because the pandemic had settled in but the other two were in Belfast. We did it because we have been part of some writers’ rooms ourselves. We’d been part of a couple that had kind of worked and also a couple that had been really special. We also thought it would be a really good opportunity to bring in other Irish writers because it’s such a contemporary story with a big ensemble cast.

Adam: Part of the concept of Blue Lights was to bring people in and give them the chance of a script, maybe one or two people per season. Our approach was that we would write episodes 1 and 2, 5 and 6 and we’d bring in one or two people and give them the chance of a script. People need a break. Maybe they’d written a script that hadn’t been produced or they had really inspired us when we’d met them. Our show benefits from them and their energy and their talent.

You can end up in places that you wouldn’t if it was just Dec and me. We were inspired by the writers’ rooms of the great shows of America but it’s a very different system there. They run for months and months and months. When you run a writers’ room here it has to be done in a certain way, people have to be given a clear mandate at the start of the week to understand what you are trying to do. In the first writers’ room for Blue Lights we literally talked only about character for the first week. We’d been in rooms where you start chasing plot around and then get to Thursday and people don’t really know how a character will respond in that moment – that’s a room that’s in a bad place. So, we’ve learnt when it works well and when it doesn’t. We tried to make it character focussed. When you know your characters well enough then you can put them anywhere and the plot will revolve around them.

Declan: We also wanted, for example, a female perspective into life. We had in the room who is a crime novelist from Derry who is wonderful. actually ended up writing episode 3 and sharing a credit with us on episode 4. Again, she’s a fantastic writer with brilliant insights. Fran is also from the south of Ireland – Dublin – so there’s an extent to which she was an outsider in Northern Ireland which was extraordinarily helpful to us because the things that she didn’t understand we realised we needed to drill down into. I feel looking back on it that the writers’ room process is very valuable because the more people you can surround yourself with who are different from you then it challenges your writing.

Would you describe Belfast as a character in the show?

Declan: We always say it’s not about Belfast it’s from Belfast! There is a very important difference there. It feels like we’re telling our story about our place and the ±«Óãtv has allowed us to do that. I believe that probably no other broadcaster would just say “Go and tell your story about your place in your own voice”. They really didn’t mess with it too much. I think there’s something about the ±«Óãtv that only the Beeb would do that.

Adam: There’s no greater pressure than writing about your hometown. Not least because we have to live here after it goes out! But the truth is that through our entire lives personally and journalistically we have always attempted to make a creative comment about the place that is home and that we love. This is the reason that we’ve transitioned to drama. We felt that was the most fruitful place in which to make that comment. And only then because the ±«Óãtv allowed us to do it can we make it. It comes with massive responsibility, but Belfast is a place that we know on a very visceral level. We feel very confident in our voice in this place. It’s also a place that is very complicated so there is also a lot of tight-rope walking. You want to speak about the big issues, but you have to be sensitive. It’s a constant balance of “can we push that issue? Is that too on the nose?” So the scripts were very nuanced in that sense.

There are two things that radiate throughout the entire show we hope; one is that we love Belfast very much even though it’s complex and the second is that one unifying thing that ties the show together, that ties this nation together, and that is humour. An acerbic, dark wit that allowed people to live through the dark times of The Troubles and helps a society progress away from that to this day. That’s something that was very important to the show.

When did you make the decision on the tone of the show and the elements of comedy it contains?

Declan: That tone is closest to our actual writing style. If you were to go back and look at our original short film Rough it has a very similar tone of dark comedy. That’s because in the years we spent as journalists that’s how journalists talk to each other about horrific things. They would make dark jokes in sometimes the direst circumstances as a coping mechanism. And then we were surprised when we started talking to cops for our research that they do exactly the same thing. The police were pretty nice about allowing us access and going on ride-alongs in the back of cars and the cops were exactly the same, using dark humour, a certain wry cynicism. It was never malicious or disrespectful but a constant kind of sarcasm to keep them going and to cope. As soon as we heard them talking we thought how much it reminded us of what we were like as journalists so it seemed like the natural tone.

How are food and music important in the show?

Declan: The food thing came about from research. When you’re a cop the food on the job and on the run is terrible. You’re eating sandwich at a filling station but there was a cop we heard about who brought in really good food because he just couldn’t take it anymore. He couldn’t handle the bad diet. He would spend hours at home crafting really nice food – it was a morale thing too; he would give it out to his colleagues. That was a basic research thing where we thought “we’re having that in the show”. For Stevie (Martin McCann) I think food is key. Stevie’s back story is quite tragic and he’s a solitary man. He’s got time on his hands outside of the job and he puts a lot of that time into making something nice that he’s going to enjoy – and that’s food.

When it comes to the music there are a few shows that we’re inspired by that use diegetic music (in the scene). We wanted to do that. And cops listen to loads of music when they’re driving round.

Adam: As Dec says that’s not our idea. The police would argue over who gets to play the song next. Depending which car you’re in, you might have thrash metal or you might have some Country. And we thought that was a great way to represent people’s personalities but also what a wonderful mini-antagonist thing to do to throw people in together and they’ve got these different tastes. When you’re in the car together and you’ve got eight or nine hours of the day of course these little power struggles play out. It’s a beautiful way to illustrate characterisation but also to introduce tonality at different times and little bits of antagonism, which is a great device dramatically.

Declan: The car is their office, it’s their precinct. It’s a little room that they’re in together for nine, ten hours straight. And so how that car is really important to them. The kind of music they play, the food they’re eating, the coffee. These little things are super important when you’re jumping out of the car to face things that sometimes are deeply, deeply traumatic. When you’re dealing with horrific events, you’re going to take every little comfort that you can.

Adam: You also need to come back from that craziness into routine. Routine is – put a song on, get a cup of coffee. It’s not that you’re trying to forget what you’ve just seen but you’re trying to re-calibrate your emotional psyche because you need to go on and do the next call so you can’t have the hangover. You need the way to switch out of it. I think the music helps them just jump out of it.

It feels quite shocking to see the police routinely carrying guns as we’re not used to seeing that in most UK cop shows.

Declan: It’s a huge difference between their colleagues in Great Britain and the south. Every officer in Northern Ireland is issued with a firearm. And not only do they carry it on duty, but they take it home with them. It serves as a personal protection weapon both when you’re working but also because of the nature of the threat here.

What has your writing journey been to this point? Did you always want to write fiction for the screen?

Adam: Declan and I met around 2009/10 working on ±«Óãtv Panorama. Before that I had a career as a photo-journalist and made my way into documentary film-making and Declan was a reporter for ±«Óãtv Spotlight and then Panorama. We made a few films together, and then we realised that we had this ‘want’ in us to do something different creatively. We loved documentaries and the opportunities they gave us, which gave us a really interesting insight into the world (and sent us around the world), but we felt that we would often meet characters within that journey who we didn’t really have the time to get to know properly. We would meet them, interview them and then have to move on. We were left often thinking about the people who we had met during the documentary process, so we, naively probably, thought that we would start writing scripts about some of these characters who had remained in our heads.

Declan: It was a gradual process of coming to realise that we wanted to expand how we told stories. The parameters of Current Affairs documentaries are relatively strict. You are there to hold power to account. It’s an extremely valid and valuable thing in society, but you can’t really explore characters, you can’t really delve into the human psyche and some of those bigger questions. There was one particular night when we were watching some short films in Adam’s apartment in Belfast when we kind of made a commitment to try and write, develop and produce a short film, a fiction, which is the first thing that either of us had ever done in fiction. That was in the summer of 2013 and we finally shot that film, Rough, in 2019.

Adam: Our idea was for a short film. We sent the short film script to a friend of Declan’s in New York, and he said “actually there’s so much going on here, so many characters that this would work better as a pilot”. So that grew into a pilot script which then became our calling-card. A friend in the ±«Óãtv gave us notes and helped to develop that script unofficially and then after about a year and half she said “I don’t think we can improve this any more but we can’t take this into development here at the ±«Óãtv, you need to get an agent, you need to play the game”.

Declan: And we knew hardly anybody. The world of drama is very, very separate from the world of journalism. We didn’t know anybody in the world of television drama to send it to apart from one person, and that was Peter Kosminsky, the writer/director who has done The Undeclared War and The State and all sorts of amazing shows. Several years previously he’d been doing a little bit of research in Northern Ireland, and he was looking for a local journalist to guide him in the right direction and help him out. I got to know Peter a little bit. Once my work for him was done we went our separate ways. Once we finally had our pilot script in our hand it had been about four years since I’d had any contact with Peter and Adam persuaded me that we should send him the script. I was kind of uncomfortable doing that because I didn’t want to impose on him, but we literally didn’t have a single other name or anybody else to send it to. Peter, thank God, read it and sent it to United Agents so we just got very, very lucky.

Every time we’re speaking to upcoming screenwriters, of all ages, we just say to them that you have to leverage and exploit any possible in that you have to the industry, whether it’s an uncle’s cousin’s friend, or whatever distant connection.

Adam: There are two sides to this. Obviously, you have to have a certain amount of talent and you have to have a certain ability to be able to land on a prescient issue that might work well within the creative world of drama, but the other, equally important side is that you need to have a hunger and determination. I think the benefit of the two of us is that if one of us is lacking in one thing then the other one steps up and you kind of drive each other forward and do things that you probably wouldn’t do if it was just you. It’s a hard, and it can be a long and very lonely road. You can wait for weeks and months before you get feedback on anything and in that time, you can get drawn back into the wider world and fall away from the world of drama. So, I think in those times (and those times were plenty) in those early years, Declan and I made each other keep going. It is a business, and you have to approach it as such, but that isn’t always easy for someone with a creative mindset.

What would be your Desert Island box sets?

Declan: It changes and is updated for me constantly. Recently things like , the show about the restaurant in Chicago, and I just finished which I absolutely loved. I think that ’s writing is so unexpected, I love it. The thing that Adam and I always come back to, our gold standard for television writing is . We talk to each other about it all the time because it’s so clever and insightful. I went to see speak in Belfast ten or twelve years ago, long before I was a writer and he said “this place reminds me of Baltimore, it’s a post-industrial city that’s seen better days. It’s had its problems and issues with politics and it’s an incredibly divided city. You could probably write The Wire here and it would work just as well”.

Adam: I’ve just binged both seasons of . In terms of character writing, I was just glued to every single character. I was living with every moment. That can only come from amazing characterisation, which is something we always aim for. Also, to circle back to The Wire, David Simon’s training ground was also in journalism, and I think that radiates through that show. I can see those characters walking around in that city of Baltimore that I’ve never even been to, but I think I know. I think if you can do that with a TV Drama, I think that’s pretty impactful. That’s something that we always aspire to – impactful, character driven drama.

Any top tips?

Adam: Don’t give up. Persistence, persistence, persistence. Write it down three times and recite it to yourself. It’s so easy to give up because the world is tough. Money is a massive driver for all of us. Certainly, in my early years I watched as friends bought houses and cars and I never did. But the idea of creating something was more intoxicating for me so I was able to focus on that.

Declan: A little bit of practical advice is to read the book by John Yorke which was the book that unlocked a great deal for us in the early days about structure and storytelling. I think that book probably changed our lives. We give out copies – John Yorke should probably give me a commission!

If you can find your own unique writing voice, then that’s the golden ticket. I think we’re probably starting to get there now with Blue Lights. A vernacular that we’re so happy with. Just try and find the thing that you can do that is different from what everyone else is doing.

What’s coming up next?

Adam: We’ve got something in development with NBC and we’d love to do more Blue Lights. We’ve also started a production company and have a couple of projects in development there.

Declan: We’re also keeping an eye out for other people’s work to develop and have been speaking to some really exciting writer/directors that we’re hoping to work with.

Blue Lights begins on ±«Óãtv One on Monday 27th March 2023 at 9pm. All episodes will be available on ±«Óãtv iPlayer that evening.

How we made The Salisbury Poisonings - read a blog post from Declan Lawn

The Salisbury Poisonings - read the scripts in the ±«Óãtv Writersroom Script Library

‘From writing beloved detectives to hateful bigots – it’s about adding different strings to your bow.’

Becoming a writer is hard. And growing up in Nottingham, with no contacts in the industry – I had no idea how I’d be able to break down that door. After managing to find a PA job in London, fresh out of Uni - I moved down the day after my 21st birthday, with no idea where I’d go from there.

A few years later, I’d managed to bag a role on the script team of Holby City – not writing, but formatting scripts; still dreaming of the day when I might write my own. And then things changed. After meeting with the ±«Óãtv Writersroom team, I was invited to apply for the Doctors Shadow Scheme; which involved writing a ‘shadow’ episode for Doctors on ±«Óãtv One. It was a fantastic experience – we went to set, met the production teams and worked with a script editor… and I was delighted when my ‘shadow’ episode earned me a commission for a real one.

After five episodes on Doctors, I was still working a full-time day job, now at a drama production company – but had managed to get an agent. I asked her to kindly harass the team at EastEnders, and miraculously, it worked. I like to think my obsession with the show terrified them into giving me a shot, and I’m now a regular contributor for Albert Square.

As a huge fan of Death In Paradise, I was stunned when an offer came through to write on the spin-off show; Beyond Paradise. I’d crossed paths with  (the showrunner) before – and as everybody will tell you, he’s the nicest man in television! After a couple of days storylining, mostly discussing the series arcs for the main characters with a series bible - it was time to come up with a ‘crime’ idea for my episode (Episode 3, broadcast 10th March). This was definitely the hardest part. We wanted mysteries with puzzles at their heart; with engaging characters and satisfying solves. In comparison, the actual writing part was a breeze! And having seen the first episode, it’s looking like a brilliant watch. It manages to keep the DNA of the show alive for fans of Death In Paradise - but can also stand up as something totally new, too.

As a writer, you have to keep doing stuff. In 2020, I’d just gotten my first EastEnders commission when Covid hit - and everything stopped. I decided to write a new spec' script about a young boy with a superpower (The Jude Problem) – and by the end of the year, it had topped (a list of emerging screenwriters, voted for by production companies). My life changed overnight. I gave up the day job, and over the past couple of years, have slowly built a list of projects that I’m developing with different producers.

If TV work is ever quiet, theatre always keeps me going. Scratch nights, fringe festivals – hearing my words aloud has improved my craft 1000%. It’s a place to take risks, to make bold choices; which (for newer writers) is much harder in TV. But it’s not always easy. The two mediums are incredibly different, which is important to know if you’re diving between them. And often I have to prioritise my TV deadlines, because (unless you’re cosy with the big theatres) there’s just not enough money to focus exclusively on theatre. Even worse - the - the lifeblood of London’s fringe theatre scene - has just lost its home, now raising money to find a new venue for next year. And I’m praying that they find a way.

Writing is hard. But from writing beloved detectives to hateful bigots – it’s about adding different strings to your bow. My newest play, POISON, HATE & VITRIOL is about a couple who create a fake, provocative persona to rile up hatred. The play is darkly fun, controversial – and about as far as you can get from Beyond Paradise. And Beyond Paradise is also pretty far away from EastEnders. And all of those things are different to my other work in development. But that’s the joy of this job; working across a range of wildly different stories. And you never know which one could be the one that helps break down the door…

BEYOND PARADISE begins on Friday 24th February on ±«Óãtv One and ±«Óãtv iPlayer from 8pm

POISON, HATE & VITRIOL is on at Vault Festival from 28th Feb – 5th March 

Are you interested in writing for the ±«Óãtv's Continuing Drama Series? Writer development opportunities for these are now looked after by the ±«Óãtv Studios ScriptWorks team.

Sam and Jonathan, why did you want to tell this story?

Sam: Jon and I are fascinated by bad people and where they fit into society, how they are made and in the case of this story how they are potentially unmade, which I guess is what this story is about.

This is just one of those stories which has been under our skin and niggling away at the back of our brains for many years. It has changed a lot along the way, but we are just endlessly fascinated by these themes of morality. It’s not an uncommon theme to examine redemption in a screenplay, a TV series or film but we hope we have found a fresh take on it with Better.

What if redemption isn’t about a lightning-strike moment where a person turns from bad to good in a single moment but instead it’s a painful, slow battle to become good?

How does your story playout with regard to your lead characters Lou Slack and Col McHugh?

Sam: We conceived of this character (Lou Slack played by Leila Farzad) who had got herself into a situation whereby once she had decided to try and course-correct, she found that everything she did to climb out of the hole that she had dug for herself actually just led to her slipping down a few more rungs. Once we had conceived of that world that’s when the story started to bloom naturally.

From there we decided to create this counterpart character to her (Col McHugh played by Andrew Buchan) and tell a different take on the situation, showing how their two paths intersect.

Essentially Better is about ‘can a bad person become good, is that possible and if so then how do they do that?’

Do you begin your writing process with those big themes?

Jonathan: We’re interested in all sorts of things, but when you come to actually writing something it’s really hard to start with a ‘big idea’, a big picture or theme, because it’s hard to draw out relatability from that.

We always start with a character. We start from that ground level and spend an awful lot of time talking about that character, what sort of things they are going to do and what’s their general journey and then we build out from there.

The main protagonist of Better, Lou Slack, actually originated many years ago, with a slightly different character who wasn’t a police officer, but she evolved to really increase the moral quandary that she finds herself in.

Sam: The story goes back so many years that the first conception of it involved a man dying of cancer. The story and plot were very very different. That shows how the story naturally evolved, because it was an idea that we kicked around for years and years before we finally actually got to make it.

Why did you settle on these characters as being the ones to tell the story? What is it about them?

Sam: I think that in Lou’s case it was when we figured out how somebody could slip into corruption without even noticing. It was really key to get this back-story element of 'bit by bit by bit'. The first time she took the first step across that line, just a toe, an infinitesimal inching towards doing something bad, and then that becomes iterative. Each time she went just a little bit further so she could always justify it to herself. She’s a very articulate, persuasive, charismatic person and she can turn those powers on herself.

It felt completely plausible to us that she could slip into a place of extreme corruption over the years but still never quite realise what had happened to her and be able to justify her actions to herself. That was when we felt we had a really compelling character who could do something really, really bad but we could present the audience with someone who was also a mother, a funny friend, really good at her job.

How do you think you make characters who do bad things sympathetic to the audience?

Jonathan: We always talk about this in terms of hearing that you need to like the characters that you’re watching. We’ve never really subscribed to that point of view. We always say you have to be interested in them and interested in their plight. At some level you have to understand why they are doing what they are doing. You don’t have to agree with it, you don’t have to like it or approve of it but you have to understand the reasons why they are doing something and think ‘OK I can understand that character and go on this journey with that character’.

Sam: It’s that thing of loving to watch , , the people in the but would you want to spend real time with any of these people? It’s a more complex situation to like and be sympathetic with fictional characters than it is in our real lives. As Jon says it’s about whether you can understand them. If you can’t understand them then you’re in big trouble.

Without giving anything away, how do you escalate the drama through the series? What have the audience got to look forward to?

Sam: Well I think the drama has a self-escalating mechanic built into it because it starts with this incident where a terrible thing happens in Lou’s family life that triggers this process of her examining her conscience. She denies it and suppresses it at first. The true antagonist of Better is Lou’s conscience and her struggles against it.

As she begins to acquiesce to its demands, she starts to say to herself “I’ll fix this bad thing that I’ve done” and then that makes something else bad happen which brings her into greater and greater conflict with Col. By the process of trying to act in the way that her conscience compels her she escalates the drama until you get to a place of very high drama by the last couple of episodes of the series, hopefully in a way which is truthful to these characters.

How did you first meet and start writing together?

Jonathan: We’ve known each other since we were eleven. We went to school together. We didn’t start writing together then but made videos and parodies, that kind of thing. Later on we made some short films.

Sam: We also made an hour-long snooker-themed action comedy called Maximum Break where he played the hero and I played the bad guy!

Jonathan: We went to university to study film but it wasn’t a practical course, it was an academic course, so we watched a lot of films that we would otherwise never have watched. After that we went our separate ways. I worked in TV Production, light entertainment, post-production, that kind of thing.

Were you writing at this point?

Jonathan: I went into TV Production to try and get into writing through that route.

Sam: I just tried to white-knuckle it and went for it writing spec scripts including a spec Romantic Comedy when I was working in a bookshop which then won a prize. In a fit of huge over-confidence I immediately jacked in my job and then obviously it took years and years to actually earn any money from writing!

When we were both writing separately we ended up with the same agent. We were still friends and thought we should try writing something together – a comedy script. That led to a little bit of a comedy career. Then we wrote a drama together and that really opened doors. Ultimately I think it’s all based on the fact that we had been good friends at school so there is zero ego between us and we can just say to each other “That’s no good” or “This bit is rubbish”.

How do you actually work together? Do you sit together? Does one write a draft and then the other gives notes?

Jonathan: At the beginning it’s just lots and lots of talking to make sure we’re on the same page. We talk about the characters, about the story, about the structure. And then we’ll outline everything properly with both of us in the room. We’ll create quite a detailed outline so we’re able to split up bits of the script when we’re ready to write a first draft. One of us will start writing the first chunk and the other one will start writing something else and then we’ll swap those, edit them and then write the next bit, so it’s sort of rolling editing.

So you script-edit each other as you go?

Jonathan: Yes exactly. We have tried writing the same thing in the same room before and it just takes forever. It takes about five hours just to write one sentence! Even though it’s collaborative, we work together and it feels like everything is both of ours, when it actually comes to literally putting the words down on the page then you need a flow and I think you can only get that from one brain. You need to go off into mental flights of fancy to actually get a product down.

That’s slightly different with comedy because then you're bouncing ideas off each other and improving gags, so being in the same room is better for that.

Sam: But even then you’d probably be working from a draft written by one person.

Any top tips for other aspiring writers?

Jonathan: Always finish what you’re writing. I think the temptation, especially for people having a go at writing for the first time, is to start something, get halfway and then think "this isn’t working, I’m going to do something else" and then you don’t ever really finish anything. You need to finish something to find out if it’s any good. And then you need to re-write it. The old chestnut that ‘writing is re-writing’. If you’re still not happy with it then by all means go and write something else but finish it first, re-write it and then decide.

Sam: When people tell us that they want to write or that they are writers our first question is always “Have you finished anything?” The answer sometimes is “No”. If they have finished something the next question is “Would you show it to someone” and then often the answer is “Oh no I could never show it to anyone”. If you can answer “Yes” to both of those questions then you’re on your way.

The internet is absolutely awash with screenplays that you can read for free so search for them. There’s a free education sitting there. And in terms of screenwriting books and courses you can absolutely learn stuff from those too but go in with a sceptical eye. You need to hold onto who you are and why you’ve chosen to try and bring stories to people. You can’t teach people how to have a good idea, you can’t teach people how to see other human beings from a unique perspective and be able to share that with others. But you can learn huge amounts of useful stuff from all of those resources, so hoover them all up while remaining true to who you are.

Can you share some of your Desert Island TV shows or Films?

Both: , , , , currently on TV then we'd say .

Watch Better on ±«Óãtv One and ±«Óãtv iPlayer from 9pm on Monday 13th February

One of my highlights of 2022 was being selected for the Waterloo Road Shadow Scheme as part of ±«Óãtv Drama Room 2021/22. As a teen, I used to avoid maths homework and instead get engrossed in the lives of Chlo, Janeece and the inimitable Steph Haydock. Sorry to my old maths teachers, but let’s be honest, now it’s all been worth it.

Before we applied, all of us were given a chance to read the show Bible (a document that gives details on characters, episodes, themes, series arc etc) and spent a day on Zoom learning from Executive Producer Cameron Roach and his team. We were then given a couple of weeks to develop a written pitch for an episode and a few pages of script. When I got through, I was ecstatic, relieved (you get paid!) and now faced with the challenge of explaining what a Shadow Scheme was to my family.

Shadow Schemes can vary, but they aim to give you the experience of writing on a TV show without the responsibility of an episode that will be broadcast. Waterloo Road is a ‘producer-led’ show which means that the producers make the key decisions over the series arc. We were given an outline of all the plots that needed to be in our episode and then our job was to weave them together and turn them into an entertaining script. They try to make it as close to the real thing as possible, you get a script-editor, access to the research team and quick turn-around deadlines.

First, we created a ‘scene-by-scene’ which is where you bullet point what order the scenes will come in. It felt like a sort of puzzle, you are trying to make about 4-5 story-lines work together, get the rhythm of the episode right and make it fit into an hour. I would define my relationship with scene-by-scenes as ‘It’s complicated’ but the high points are when you figure out how to tie multiple plots together and you feel like a TV genius.

Next, it’s time to write the actual script. The scene-by-scene is really handy here (this is a message to future me, do the planning, the planning works!) For this first draft of the script, I focussed on making sure all the story beats fit into the episode, I did a lot of staring at the map of the school and googling whether teenagers still say "peng".

My feedback for the first draft was also tied in with one of the most fun parts of the project – the set visit! I’d never been on a tv set before, and giddily showed up like a kid on a school trip. I was given a tour of the set and loved seeing the small details like the photos on Kim’s desk. Being on set reminds you how many people it takes to make a tv show – extras, make up, lighting crew and loads more. Getting to watch actors film a scene was amazing. I don’t know how they manage to be so convincing with a camera right in their face, then they stop acting and are a totally different person - magic!

After my tour, it was time to sit down with my script-editor Amy Coombs and get some feedback on my first draft. Amy was really encouraging, and we talked through what was working and what had been a challenge. I’m a bit of a box ticker, so Amy encouraged me to be looser with the plot points. I was surprised by how much we were encouraged to make the episode our own.

I went into my second draft determined to make my mark, changing plots, locations and focussing more on characters I wanted to highlight. In some ways this was tougher than the first draft because you were inventing more plot while still needing to keep the main elements the same. You’re also given about the same amount of time you would have in a real-life scenario so you’re trying to work quickly without losing quality – great training for the real thing.

In my final feedback session Amy and I were able to talk about the whole process and what I’d learned from it. Amy advised me to trust my instincts, and I’ve been holding onto that in all my writing as I go forward. Recently, I’ve loved watching the new series and see all the characters come to life. Shadow Schemes have huge value to emerging writers and hopefully, it won’t be too long until I’m writing on a show for real.

Watch the new series of Waterloo Road on ±«Óãtv iPlayer 

You can watch every episode of Waterloo Road (2006-2015) on ±«Óãtv iPlayer

On the Blog: Georgia Affonso shares her roundup of the Drama Room 2021/2022 group's sessions