Meet the midlife mums writing TV’s hottest shows
How? By making hit shows about — and for —women just like you
What did you watch on TV last night? Call the Midwife, the BBC’s Sunday-evening hit? the sumptuous historical drama Victoria, on ITV’s channel Encore; or perhaps Girlfriends, on ITV hub? all three of these dramas aired at prime time. all three were written by women. It may have happened by stealth, but the fact is female writers in their 50s and 60s have slowly been hijacking television for some time.
In Girlfriends, ITV’s show about three childhood friends in their 60s; BBC One’s comedy- drama Last tango In halifax, where a couple fall in love in their 70s; and the BBC’s forthcoming age Before Beauty, about a woman who takes over a beauty salon after her children leave home, we are seeing female writers explore topics that matter deeply to midlife women. From late love to dealing with elderly parents, the empty nest, redundancy and fears about ageing, the day-to-day dramas of grownup women are finally being played out on the small screen.
and not before time, says Gwyneth
Hughes. She wrote the award-winning BBC drama Miss Austen Regrets, about Jane Austen at 40, and has now adapted Vanity Fair, William Thackeray’s novel about social climber Becky Sharp, on ITV this autumn.
‘The bulk of the TV audience has always been 50-plus women, but in the past no one made anything they wanted to watch, so they’d find themselves sitting in front of The Sweeney with their husbands,’ she says.
Not any more. TV bosses are finally waking up to the fact that mature women want to see stories that reflect their own lives. After all, the average age of a BBC1 viewer is 61.
Initially some male TV critics dismissed women-led shows such as Heidi Thomas’s Call The Midwife as fluffy ‘Horlicks TV’. But the ratings have proved them wrong. BBC1’s head of drama Piers Wenger says women have written more than 40 per cent of the drama he has ordered for the channel, since taking up the role a year ago.
And, thanks to a new wave of talented female writers, we now have shows where midlife women are centre stage, instead of just playing the harried wife or the bit-part best friend.
Crucially, these are written by women who can draw on decades of life experience, such as Sally Wainwright, 53, the Bafta-winner behind cop drama Happy Valley and Last Tango In Halifax; Kay Mellor, the 66-year-old powerhouse behind hits including slimming-club series Fat Friends and current drama Girlfriends; Poldark and Age Before Beauty creator Debbie Horsfield, 62, and Amanda Coe, 53, who wrote last year’s BBC thriller Apple Tree Yard.
‘So many myths exist about women because for so many decades TV was written by men,’ says Sally Wainwright. ‘Women were either the Madonna or whore, put on a pedestal or treated like they were nothing. Now there are more women writers, we’re seeing women represented for what they really are.’ THERE’S more work to do, of course. Last week in an open letter to TV drama commissioners, 76 women writers, whose work ranges from eastenders to Midsomer Murders claimed there is an ‘ untapped resource’ of female writers who have cut their teeth on soap operas, yet are locked out of writing high-end prime-time drama.
‘Women are writing big dramas, but there still aren’t enough of them,’ admits Daisy Goodwin, 56, the writer- creator of ITV’s Victoria, which is back for a third series this year. ‘ When women do well, they do really, really well. What we need is more women coming up the ranks.’
Clearly, barriers are still being broken. Kay Mellor has long pioneered dramas with strong female characters, but writing this year’s hit ITV series, Girlfriends, about three friends in their 60s, was a passion project, designed to counter midlife women’s fears of becoming invisible. She wrote it on spec, rather than waiting for the green light from a TV channel, ‘because I thought, uh-uh, it’s not sexy, they won’t like it. But I’m just going to do it because I think I have something to say about women of a certain age.’
The running joke in Girlfriends is that actress Miranda Richardson’s character is approaching a big birthday, but we don’t know which one. As Mellor explains: ‘Miranda said to me: “How can I play my age, Kay?” And I said: “You’re a gorgeous woman, who cares what age you are?” But I could see that for her, as an actress, there’s a fear that if she admits to being that age, roles might start becoming less frequent. So I said: “OK, well I’ll not mention it. You’re the youngest of the group.”
‘Then on Twitter someone wrote: “They look good for 50” and I thought: “They’re not 50!”’ says Mellor, with a twinkle. ‘But they’re lovely-looking. So what if they’ve got lines on their faces? It just makes them more interesting.’
Girlfriends has been dubbed Mellor’s ‘menopause drama’. But ‘the menopause is just part of life’, she insists. ‘I’ve worked through it. I had a hot flush just now! But I think the wisdom that comes with age is fantastic. You’re not just a sexual person, you’re a person in your own right, whose thoughts are as important as the man sat next to you.’ That said, the new crop of dramas is not shying away from showing midlife women as passionate beings. When
it comes to brave new roles for grown- up women, last year’s Apple Tree Yard blew the doors off. Starring Emily Watson as a married scientist, it showed her having wild sex in a Westminster broom cupboard with a man she barely knows.
‘It was great to see Emily doing that,’ says Amanda Coe, who adapted the thriller from Louise Doughty’s novel of the same name. ‘ Emily does a lot of film work where she tends to crop up as somebody’s mum, or wife, usually in a rather unflattering wig. She’s a fantastic actress with a big range, so for her to be really sexy, and have a role with light and shade was great to see.’
So does getting older make you a better writer? Wainwright thinks so. She recalls a meeting with her first agent in her 20s where she worried she only had one story. Her agent replied briskly: ‘By the time you’re 50, you’ll have 20 stories.’
‘It’s proved to be true,’ says Wainwright. ‘Life gets richer and you get richer as a human being — the older you get, the more things you have to deal with.’
Women writers are overturning the assumption that their age makes them less tuned in, less relevant somehow. ‘I remember being asked to talk to some screenwriting students,’ recalls Debbie Horsfield, whose last series of Poldark attracted over 6 million viewers for its finale. ‘I was 45 and one twentysomething man said to me: “Don’t you worry that as you get older, you’ll just become less relevant?”
‘And I said: “What I’ve found is the older I get, the wider my breadth of experience is to write about, and the more stories there are.” Because the truth is you never forget being 17, that’s the wonderful thing, but you cannot imagine as a 30year- old what it’s like to be 70.’
Sally believes male scriptwriters are still trusted more, while women have to prove themselves. And class is another issue, she adds. ‘In TV, I work with a lot of people who have clearly been privately educated.
‘Now I’ve started to direct my shows myself, I’ve realised a lot of directors are only where they are through confidence. I can be quite selective about who I work with now, but I’ve met people over the years who are sharp- elbowed, freeloading entitled people who can talk the talk and often can’t walk the walk, but are so good at appearing to be able to do things. And other more talented people get overlooked.’
And the writers’ room can be blokey and competitive, says Amanda Coe, which can make it harder for women. ‘Who has the confidence to speak up? Who can stay late for the drinks and networking that might land that commission, especially if they have small children at home?’
Kay Mellor admits that getting Band Of Gold on the screen back in 1995 took her eight years. ‘It was the biggest battle ever because not only was it about women, but it was about women who worked in the sex industry. It was written by me — and I was unknown and a woman. You can’t get much tougher than that.’
Today, many of our top women TV dramatists, including Goodwin and Wainwright, make sure they have an executive producer credit on their dramas, so they have more control. It’s no coincidence that in Victoria, we often see the tiny indomitable woman surrounded by a forest of pompous men dressed in black, laughs Goodwin. ‘I worked at the BBC in the 1980s as a trainee arts producer and it was pretty patronising,’ she says. ‘Even later, there was a sense I wasn’t serious because my shows were about doing up your house, which was, as it were, women’s work. Significantly, Goodwin is one of the first women trusted to write a drama about a British queen. It never occurred to her that she was writing a feminist drama, ‘ but the fact Victoria is a young woman in power, some people find surprising. There aren’t many shows where a woman, who’s not the love interest or hasn’t been kidnapped or raped is the central character.
‘Even the best male directors don’t always get the nuance of a woman’s life,’ says Gwyneth Hughes, who’ll often fight to keep a small scene in that reveals more about character.
‘It’s partly the perspective of being female, and also an older female, all the things we go through about beginning to realise you’re invisible. If you put it in a drama, women will completely get it.’
You only have to look at the diverse slate of female- driven shows going out this year to see how far women have come. Sally Wainwright’s next BBC drama is based on the diaries of 19th-century lesbian Anne Lister. ‘Hopefully it will go out at 9pm on BBC One and I don’t think that would have happened ten years ago.’
Amanda Coe is working on an original drama about the Profumo affair, The Trials Of Christine Keeler, written through the eyes of the late Keeler. She’s relishing the chance to write ‘what’s become a national fable, with the young women who are seen as the triggers for this national scandal at the centre of the story. They’re not just adjuncts to the men.’
And there are more stories to come. ‘I think British telly really is leading the way for women,’ says Sally Wainwright.
‘We can have characters who are middle-aged and the story isn’t necessarily about them being out to get a man. It’s about them as complex, human beings doing all sorts of things. There are exceptions, but I’m often disappointed when I see so much American telly is about men, for men, written by men.’ CLEARLY there’s still work to be done by British TV bosses so new female talents get a chance to shine alongside these established stars, who are quick to point out they had been plugging away for 20 or 30 years before their ‘overnight’ success. But what they have proved is that shows that appeal to midlife women are money-spinners.
‘It’s normal for a show with a strong female lead — Dr Foster, Marcella — to be written by a man,’ says Amanda Coe, who sympathises with the women who signed the open letter lamenting the status quo.
‘But I can’t think of a male-led show written by a woman. It would occur to nobody to commission a show about, say, a man having a mid-life crisis written by a woman. Or a female-penned biopic about a male historical figure. Women get to write women, and men get to write both. It’s a microcosm of the moment we’re suddenly waking up in: why have women historically been treated as a minority, rather than half the population?’
The irony is, if anything, scripts written for and by women may prove the saviour of prime time when this year’s flashier ‘macho’ shows such as the BBC’s epic Troy and Sky Atlantic’s historical fantasy Britannia have proved a turn off for many viewers.
Forget over-the-top Americanstyle ‘formats’, with expensive special effects, what we want are authentic British shows, about how we live now; shows that combine wit and humour, tension and emotional truth — with terrific female characters.
And the best news? It’s us midlifers armed with our remote control, who have the power to make more of those happen.
20 the number of BBC dramas for 2018 written by women