‘It was just so great to write for a woman who isn’t a perfect wife and mother but a terrible mother and a rotten wife’
Screenwriter’s joy at breaking TV mould
From a potty-mouthed Downing Street spin doctor to a potty-mouthed media tycoon, from Malcolm Tucker to Logan Roy, Georgia Pritchett has helped put words into the mouths of some of TV’S most memorably incendiary and hilarious characters.
However, the award-laden writer, hailed for her work on TV comedy-dramas from The Thick of It and Veep, to Miranda and Succession, says writing for potty-mouthed vice-president Selina Meyer, played by Julia Louis-dreyfus in US hit Veep, was a special kind of joy.
“For a long time, women on TV were depicted as perfect wives or sensible wives or perfect or sensible mothers but women are flawed, funny and intelligent,” said Pritchett, ahead of an appearance at Aye Write book festival in Glasgow next month. “So, when I was asked to write for Julia’s character on Veep, it was amazing to write for such a flawed person who was this terrible mother.
“We all benefit from hearing from more diverse voices and people’s authentic stories. It has changed a little but when I was starting out, no, there weren’t many women at all. There were a few other female writers, but I never got to work with them because why would any show need two women writers. That would be preposterous!
“So I just sort of accepted my fate in a way and then when I went to do Veep in America there were two women in the room and it sounds so silly, but it was incredible. It was mind-blowing, because suddenly I was looking at two writers who kind of looked a bit like me and dressed like me and had a similar sense of humour and similar life experiences.
“It was so extraordinarily validating and so good for my self-esteem and in a way that made me realise what I had been missing and made me realise as well how hard it must be for people who still don’t see themselves reflected, whether it’s on a TV screen or a corporation or when they walk into a room.”
A report commissioned by the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain revealed just
14% of prime-time programming was
predominantly female-written. However, in the US, a similar report found the percentage of women employed as screenwriters increased from 17.2% in 2010 to 29.6% in 2020.
Pritchett also has noticed a difference in the depiction and inclusion of women, both as writers and as characters, in US TV shows in comparison to the UK.
“They’re still ahead of us,” she said. “They’ve always had that tradition of – particularly in comedy – women like Lucille Ball and Mary Tyler Moore, and right from the beginning of sitcom they’ve had women in the lead. They’ve also had women writers and that hasn’t been an issue. But, for some reason, in Britain it’s been more male dominated and the shows tend to be written by men and have men in the lead or men in the comedy roles.
“And even now, one of our most popular, long-running sitcoms, Mrs Brown’s Boys, is a show where a man is dressed up as a woman. And you know, that’s fine, but it feels like a missed opportunity and kind of a sad irony.”
She may have won five Emmys, five Writers’ Guild awards, a Golden Globe and a Bafta for her comedic and dramatic scripts but now Pritchett has decided to write about a very different character, one she says she found very scary and strange to put out into the world. Herself.
She is bringing her memoir, My Mess Is A Bit Of A Life to Aye Write next month, and the book is a joyful reflection on just how to live – and sometimes even thrive – with anxiety. The writer felt these uncertain times were as good a moment as any to share her coping strategies with the world.
“I found it quite a difficult thing writing about myself because, after 30 years of literally putting words into other people’s mouths, it was very strange and scary to write something so personal and direct,” said Pritchett, who lives in London with her partner and two children.
“I love the anonymity of being a writer and just sort of peeping out between the lines I write and letting other people say my words, so it felt very different.
“I don’t know if it was uncharacteristically brave or a terrible lapse in judgment. I haven’t quite decided! But, yes, I decided it was time to do it during all the lockdown madness. It was time to be honest and write something more personal.
“And I think for the first time in history really the entire world was experiencing the same thing. And we’ve all been struggling.
“We’ve all been in a situation where we’ve felt isolated and scared and lonely and we’ve been kept away from our jobs and our loved ones. So it feels like a real opportunity for everyone to just be a bit more open and honest about the fact that things can be difficult and that we all struggle sometimes.”
Inner angst features in many of the characters Pritchett has written for, most recently and notably Succession’s ball of confusion Kendall Roy but, even at their most tortured, most retain the ability to be hilariously funny.
She said: “There’s a big link between anxiety and comedy. It’s something stand-ups talk about a lot. I think of this in a sort of Venn diagram way, that there’s a crossover between self-awareness and self-loathing perhaps and that comedy and anxiety all sort of link up in some way.
“In the last 10 years, I’ve sort of carved out a little niche for myself, writing for pretty irredeemably awful yet sometimes funny characters.
“One of my favourites was definitely Malcolm Tucker. On day one of my time on the show, I was instructed to write a diatribe and I just thought, ‘oh I don’t think I know enough swear words for this’ but it was really fun.
“I think that has been good for me, finding compassion for characters. And writing the book has definitely helped me find a bit of compassion for myself.”
As a writer and co-executive producer, Pritchett is currently working on the fourth season of Succession, HBO’S critically acclaimed, award-winning comedy-drama. The show, starring Jeremy Strong, Sarah Snook, Kieran Culkin, Matthew Macfadyen and Nicholas Braun, follows the lives of the billionaire Roy siblings, who squabble over the media empire run by terrifying patriarch Logan, played by Dundee-born Brian Cox.
It’s a group of people Pritchett says can be difficult to write for, for a number of reasons. “When I was first asked to write for the show, I did have some reservations,” she said. “Do I really want to write a show about rich, white, heterosexual men who are destroying democracy in the world?
“As a writer, it’s been really exciting and challenging to dig deeper and find the sort of humanity and try to understand those characters a bit more.
“It’s a very tricky line to tread because, while you want to always treat your characters with compassion and understand them and explore the kind of whys and wherefores of what they do, we also need to remind ourselves not to accidentally make them too human or do some wish fulfilment and imagine that they’re going to change or become lovely people because I don’t think that’s the truth.
“Left to my own devices I might be tempted to make them into lovely people who have a lovely relationship, but of course they’re so damaged they’re not capable of that and they’re not going to suddenly become incredible humanitarians or philanthropists or something. It’s just walking that line so you don’t lose sight of the message and of what you’re trying to say with the show.”
Succession is written by a number of male and female writers but this is something Pritchett has not found so frequent in writing rooms over the past decades of her career.
She was one of the writers on Smack The Pony, which, airing in 1999, was a rarity as an all-woman sketch show. The comedy helped lead the way for more subversive, comedic, female characters in what was still a male-dominated sphere, aside from the likes of French And Saunders and Victoria Wood’s As Seen on TV.
As much as she laments the discrimination in the industry of a lack of female writers and characters, one of Pritchett’s next projects involves far more female roles.
“I have a few things in the pipeline I’m really excited for, including adapting a podcast called Tunnel 29, which is about engineering students who dug a tunnel from West Berlin to East Berlin, and Johan Renck who directed Chernobyl is going to direct it so that’ll be great.
“And, I’m also writing something for Julia Dreyfus again that’s going to have 19 women in it – 19! – so, that’s definitely going to be exciting.”