From Bad Girls to blowing up tower blocks
SHE made her name with trashy television shows such as Footballers’ Wives and Bad Girls.
Now Glasgow 2014 independent director Eileen Gallagher is again courting public disapproval as the face of the Red Road flats demolition.
But it is just the latest risk for a television writer and producer whose first famous show was one about women in prison, complete with graphic lesbian sex scenes.
Bad Girls was shock television, as was Footballers’ Wives, a drama about WAGS and their sex lives condemned in the Easter sermon of the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams.
But the programme and others such as Supernanny netted her an estimated £7.5million when she sold her independent production company in 2010.
Things could have been very different for the Ayr-born politics graduate. As a member of a musical trio at Glasgow University, she spent a summer busking in the Paris underground and the group’s covers of Abba songs were so successful they were offered the chance to make a demo by record company EMI.
The girls were ‘ too shy’ to go through with it, though, and instead she took a job as a reporter at the West End News in Glasgow.
Describing that job, Miss Gallagher has said: ‘On a Friday we’d huddle round the Calor gas heater and wait to see how much money the advertising team had pulled in. That determined our wages.’
But she moved on to Scottish Television, where an early success was the resuscitation of ailing Scots soap Take The High Road. She went on to become managing director of London Weekend Television and deputy managing director of Granada Broadcasting.
In 1998 she walked out with old school friend Ann McManus, Coronation Street producer Brian Park and writer Maureen Chadwick.
Shed Media, their new company, was so named ‘because we were either going to make shedloads of money – or end up living in one’.
The group borrowed £5million to make Bad Girls but managed to sell it to ITV, brought it in under-budget and made £700,000 in the first year Shed productions went on to make household shows including the genealogy series Who Do You Think You Are? and the BBC school drama Waterloo Road.
In 2005 it was listed on the stock exchange, reportedly bagging Miss Gallagher £6million.
In 2010 the company was sold to US giant Time Warner, the company behind hits such as Sex And The City and Batman, in a deal reputed to have won her £7.5million. That same year she was awarded an OBE for services to broadcasting.
One of the few knockbacks in a shining career has been the decision of the BBC to axe Waterloo Road after its tenth series this year.
Now the furore caused by the Red Road flats decision brings a whole new level of bad publicity.