HOTSEAT I think that I’ve proved I do write things that people want to watch

Sally scored major hits with Happy Valley and Last Tango in Halifax starring the likes of Sarah Lancashire, Anne Reid and Derek Jacobi less so now because I think I’ve proved that I do write things that people want to watch, so now they [critics] do tend to look at just the work.

After the first transmission of the first series of At Home With The Braithwaites, some **** in some newspaper wrote, ‘Sally Wainwright has been given six hours of television and she doesn’t know what to do with it’.

How can you judge that after one hour? People don’t say things like that anymore which is nice. NO. I feel very lucky at the moment because I work with some great people who give you so much confidence in yourself. I have a nice group of people around me, wonderful crew, wonderful teams of people, so you feel that you are, as a team, creating something good. I REALLY love it. I love working with actors. I love being the person who is there seeing it all happen for the first time and being a part of shaping what it looks like and how it comes across and how it feels. IT’S not about control. It’s about empowering other people. It’s about empowering the actors to give the best performance they can and give them as much information you can. Particularly with this, they were on a crash course in the Brontes ‘cos I’ve been a big fan of the Brontes all my life, so I had to imbue them as quickly as I could with my own sense of who the Brontes were. The actors playing the four Bronte siblings called it Bronte boot camp!