How I See It

Reese’s pieces of gold! How did the actress find the energy to make a billion-dollar company on the side?

Entrepreneurs are so annoying. With their vim, their energy, their get-upand-go. We all have ideas! That’s easy! But you and I, we just sit on our ideas, don’t we? Like hens. We brood on them, keep them warm, but nothing ever comes of them. There’s an element we’re lacking. And then, when we watch somebody else hatch out a success, we can only cluck resentfully, concluding that a cock must have been involved.

I mean, I like Reese Witherspoon. I enjoy her as a performer, I admire her as a producer, I warm to her as a person. I gobbled up Big Little

Lies (the series she optioned, developed, executive-produced and starred in) with gratitude that she had done it. I’m delighted by the principle of Hello Sunshine, the company she founded to create films and TV series with interesting female characters.

She’s all good news, but I still had mixed feelings when I read last week that Hello Sunshine has been sold for nearly $1 billion. (To be precise, $900 million. That’s $100 million short of a billion. It was described as “nearly $1 billion” in the international press, even though you wouldn’t describe a $1 sausage roll as costing “nearly $100 million”, but that’s numbers for you.) Anyway, I had mixed feelings because it reminded me what a total loser I am. A lazy slug-a-bed with no companies to her name at all.

If you do anything on TV these days, they tell you that you should start your own production company. So many people have given me that advice; so many people have painstakingly described the benefits of money and power while I secretly imagine what it would be like to have to file company accounts or fire a secretary and secretly resolve to surrender money and power to The Man for as long as I have a TV career, which is presumably not much longer and that’s why they give the advice, but there it is, I could always be a speciality sex worker.

People have told me that I should launch my own poker website, with strategy videos and an Instagram feed, then flog advertising on it at a vast rate and market a range of special branded cards and dice, eventually selling the whole Goop-style endeavour to a gambling giant for millions I tell you, millions! But you know how it is. I’ve been busy. That television won’t watch itself. That cup of tea needed finishing.

Last year I had a brilliant wheeze for an app. But what was I supposed to do with the wheeze? How do apps get made? It’s a mystery! Currently, I’ve got an even better idea for a game – a proper, real-world, non-computer game. But how would one physically make the item, the box, the tokens? How does one sell it in bulk? I don’t know that kind of thing! I’m not a manufacturer!

How do other presenters find this stuff out? Holly Willoughby has a successful clothing range. Davina McCall has just trademarked the word “menopausing”. Where did she learn how to do that?!

Is a trademark the same as a patent? Do you go to a room with a clerk at a desk and… and… and sign things?

I have always felt a kindred spirit with James Middleton,

Prince William’s brother-in-law, who once explained: “I come up with fantastic original ideas but have had difficulties with the minutiae of running a business… I view myself as a fire-starter. I have sparks of inspiration but I need my ideas to be stoked by people who are better at the day-to-day running of a business.”

Quite! James and I are brilliant in our minds, sitting in our chairs! We can’t be expected to do the actual things as well!

The difference between me and James Middleton is that at least he’s bothered to surround himself with people who are better at the day-to-day running of a business. His company has just made its first million. Et tu, Brute?!

So anyway, Reese Witherspoon sold this company. Her idea was to make more films and TV shows with complex women in them, which is a very good idea that I also had and then I went for a bath and a sandwich.

Hello Sunshine changed the TV landscape. You may have noticed that everybody’s talking about Nine Perfect Strangers, which just launched on Amazon Prime. It isn’t made by Witherspoon’s company but, with its thrillerish vibe, range of female characters and starring role for Nicole Kidman, has Reese’s fingerprints all over it anyway. I’ll

watch that soon, but news of the nearly-billion-dollar sale reminded me that I hadn’t yet seen Little Fires Everywhere, a Hello Sunshine production that’s been on Amazon for months.

Two episodes in, I love it already. Witherspoon stars as a prissy, disapproving and overly organised woman; all her best characters have fitted that description, with the exception of Cher in Clueless and that wasn’t her, it was Alicia Silverstone.

Here she has a troubled adolescent daughter and a mysterious housekeeper-tenant with false references. But who set the house on fire…?

This is all great. Jealous as

I am, I love Hello Sunshine’s work. Women are much more interesting to watch than nonwomen, especially in thrillers – a genre where gripping plots have historically been rendered oddly boring because the protagonists are all male, blending together in an indistinguishable mass of grey suits and guns. Like Mrs Thatcher’s cabinet, only without Mrs Thatcher and with guns.

Reese Witherspoon knew that the road to better entertainment lay in restoring Mrs Thatcher to the heart of the action. I expect that’s how she put it herself when she founded the company.

You and I, we just sit on our ideas, like hens. Brood on them, keep them warm

Cleaning up: Reese Witherspoon in Little Fires Everywhere, a drama produced by her company, Hello Sunshine