The top 10 women in the television industry
As the new season's drama starts, it’s obvious that women are making the running in British TV — here are the best
Usually on Oscar night, the interest in outstanding female achievement is focused largely on who has the fanciest frock. Tonight, for once, it will be on the talent, with the scrumdown between Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker and Avatar, directed by James Cameron, her former husband, being seen as some kind of winner-takes-all in the gender wars (and with their two films neatly cast as a low-budget, almost demure David versus a fat, farting, blue CGI Goliath).
It’s not just the battle of Little Big Cam. Three of the best-picture nominees have female leads; An Education, directed by Lone Scherfig, is up for best picture; and Jane Campion’s Bright Star should have been nominated this year. For some reason known only to the subfusc ways of the academy, Scherfig and Campion have both been ignored in the best-director stakes, but still there are genuine grounds for optimism about women in cinema.
The normal pattern is that as the big screen leadeth, so shall the small screen follow. It’s not as if television is sexist as a whole: the majority of people who work in the industry, from script editors to executives, are women. Yet, to date, women have never commanded the trophy seats in writing and direction.
In writing at least, however, 2010 looks as if it might be the beginning of a girl rush. To the six writers we spotlight below, you can add Harriet Braun, whose Lip Service, about the sex lives and love affairs of twentysomething lesbians in contemporary Glasgow, will screen on BBC3 in the coming months; Kay Mellor (Band of Gold, Playing the Field), who has adapted her own play,
A Passionate Woman, for BBC1, starring Billie Piper as a wife and mother who falls deeply in love with a Polish neighbour, with disastrous consequences; Lucy Prebble, the writer of the stage hit Enron, who also wrote Secret Diary of a Call Girl; and Jane English, the writer of Channel 4’s Sugar Rush, who has come up with The Secret Diaries of Miss Anne Lister, starring Maxine Peake as a 19th-century Yorkshire industrialist — and secret lesbian.
As for the directors — traditionally a more macho role — one head of development at a television production company we spoke to said that it still remains the case that for every 10 directors they see, only one will be female. So the women listed below represent not just the cream of the crop — with the honourable exception of names such as Aisling Walsh, Samantha Morton and Lisa Gornick, they are the crop. Still, it’s a truism that a good director needs good material. It is to be hoped that where the writers will lead, the directors will follow — call it the Bigelow effect.
The writers:
Ruth Jones
From acting roles in Fat Friends, Saxondale and Nighty Night, Ruth Jones has taken to writing with increasing confidence. Gavin & Stacey, written with her co-star James Corden, was a significant breakthrough. Now Jones has left Corden to rule the chat-show circuit and has quietly got on with building up her own body of work. She shares a company called Tidy Productions with her producer husband, David Peet, their aim being to develop Welsh talent in Wales. Her first writing project for Tidy will be the bilingual Ar y Tracs (On the Tracks), for S4C, about a train crew on the Swansea to London line, and she is in the process of writing her first solo project for television, in which she will also star.
Amanda Coe
Since graduating from the National Film and Television School in 1992, Amanda Coe has created a shamefully overlooked teen drama series (Channel 4’s As If, which was remade in America) and was then transferred to work on the middle series of C4’s Shameless. She has proved endlessly adaptable, with highlights including Filth: The Mary Whitehouse
Story, which had Julie Walters in the lead; Margot, a 90-minute BBC4 drama about Fonteyn’s relationship with Nureyev, starring Anne-Marie Duff; and, late last year, a two-part Michelle Ryan romcom, Mister Eleven, for ITV1. For 2010, Coe has written Room at the Top for BBC4, a two-part adaptation of John Braine’s 1957 novel, which is a triangular love story set in 1940s Yorkshire. She has also written an episode of the forthcoming series of Doctor Who, and is working on a pilot for HBO.
Fiona Seres
A big name in screenwriting in her native country, Australia, where her acclaimed series Love My Way, Dangerous and Tangle were huge hits, Fiona Seres has now relocated to Britain. Sensibly, the BBC has snapped her up for an important drama. The Silence is a four-hour four-parter telling the story of a deaf girl who witnesses a murder and becomes inexorably caught up in the investigation that follows. As well as a second series of Tangle for Showtime in Australia, Seres is working on a new adaptation of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes as a single film for the BBC.
Helen Raynor
As the television event of the past five years, it’s not surprising that the revamped Doctor Who is turning out to be something of a talent crèche. Equally unsurprising is the fact that most of the Doctor scribes are men. The Welsh writer Helen Raynor is the exception: she cut her teeth script-editing the show right from its 2005 rebirth, then graduated to writing episodes of both Torchwood and Doctor Who on her own, including the excellent The Sontaran Stratagem. She is currently co-writing a new original series, The Fabulous Baker Boys, for BBC Wales, which will be a chunk of social realism firmly rooted in a small valleys town.
Lucy Kirkwood
Kirkwood wrote her first play at Edinburgh University and had her next one broadcast on BBC radio in 2007, the year she graduated. She has since been nominated for an Evening Standard best newcomer award and moved seamlessly into television: she is writing for Channel 4’s Skins and developing a TV series with Kudos Film and Television, the creators of Spooks. She is also working on a screenplay for Film4/Ruby Films.
Abi Morgan
Abi Morgan is the go-to girl for hard-hitting, issue-led proto-journalistic drama, including 2004’s Sex Traffic (which won eight Baftas) and 2008’s White Girl, which examined feelings among a disenfranchised white working class and won best single drama at the Baftas. Her next work for television is Royal Wedding, starring Jodie Whittaker and Darren Boyd, and set in a small Welsh village in the 1980s, when the marriage of Charles and Diana gives the community a chance to forget their problems and unite. Naturally, it doesn’t work out like that. Morgan has said that she would like to write an episode of Doctor Who, partly as a gift to her son — the invitation is doubtless in the post. She is also adapting two classy novels, Zadie Smith’s On Beauty and Sebastian Faulks’s Birdsong, for the cinema.
The Directors:
Susanna White
Susanna White began her career in documentaries, winning an Emmy nomination in 2000 for Tell Me the Truth About Love, a portrait of WH Auden. She moved into drama with Channel 4’s Teachers, which led to Love Again, a film about the poet Philip Larkin, and an RTS nomination for best single drama. ITV’s Mr Harvey Lights a Candle, starring Timothy Spall, was followed by six episodes, shown in half-hour bites twice a week, of the BBC’s ground-breaking adaptation of Bleak House in 2005, then, a year later, Jane Eyre, which brought her the first of several Emmy nominations for best director. Most recently, she has morphed into television’s own Kathryn Bigelow, directing half of HBO’s Iraq war series Generation Kill, complete with a gruelling six-month shoot in the Namibian desert, surrounded by men with guns in camo gear. Her reward for putting up with all that testosterone? A job at the helm of the second Nanny McPhee film, out later this month.
Coky Giedroyc
Sister of the comic Mel Giedroyc, of Mel and Sue, Coky Giedroyc began making films at Bristol University and soon won a big-screen debut with a post-Trainspotting Kelly Macdonald in the lead of 1996’s Stella Does Tricks. Since then, strong female characters have often featured in her work. She has concentrated on television drama, directing three episodes of Peter Bowker’s musical mystery Blackpool; the BBC’s 2006 The Virgin Queen, written by Paula Milne; the excellent Fear of Fanny, about the much-maligned 1960s television chef Fanny Cradock; 2007’s Oliver Twist, written by Sarah Phelps; last year’s ITV Wuthering Heights, starring Tom Hardy; and Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss’s forthcoming modern-day Sherlock.
Dearbhla Walsh
Another graduate of documentaries, Dearbhla Walsh, the pride of Tubbercurry, Ireland, has gone from Sligo to EastEnders via Dublin City University, and on to last year’s Emmy for outstanding directing in a miniseries for the first part of the BBC’s Little Dorrit. In between, she has worked on seven episodes of the first two (and probably the best) series of Shameless; BBC3’s Funland; Sally Wainwright’s 2007 single film Dead Clever, starring Helen Baxendale; Danny Brocklehurst’s ill-fated Talk to Me; and the American schlock-history drama The Tudors, proving she can cut it in big-budget American production, too. This year, she will direct Fiona Seres’s serial The Silence.
Hettie Macdonald
Hettie Macdonald started out as a theatre director before moving up to serial dramas such as Poirot and Casualty in the late 1990s. Doctor Who, yet again, has been the making of her — she directed what many consider the greatest episode, Steven Moffat’s 2007 chiller Blink, which won a Bafta and featured Carey Mulligan. That was the springboard that took Macdonald on to Abi Morgan’s White Girl, with Anna Maxwell Martin in the lead. Most recently, Kenneth Branagh’s hit Scandinavian sleuth, Wallander, has provided a shop window for her talents, with Macdonald given the first episode of the recent series and responding with a sumptuous exercise in mood and tone.
Benji Wilson, The Sunday Times 07-03-2010