S10, Ep11: Sally Wainwright, TV writer

0:00This is The Guardian.

0:07I'm Grace Dent and this is Comfort Eating from The Guardian a podcast where we pay homage to the lesser celebrated foods in life because even as a restaurant critic I believe the food that matters most is often that snack you cobble together when you're curled upon the sofa Each week, I ask my guest to lift the lid on what comfort foods have seen them through their lives. Because you can tell a lot about a person from what they eat behind closed doors. Hello, friends. Now, another guest is about to arrive at my house. And you'll find me doing something very joyous. I'm putting a jumper on. There's a nip in the air, I'm glad to say.

0:57I breathe a sigh of relief at this time of the year because the swing ball in the garden is firmly packed away. The summer barbecue season is very much over. I don't even have to pretend to love having my upper arms out anymore. Those babies are packed away under some lovely wool here. It's so good to go back to being what I feel is my authentic self. Now, my guest today is known for being herself. She's famously straight talking, pulls no punches and just so happens to be one of our greatest living storytellers for screen It's TV writer, producer and director Sally Wainwright OBE You'll know Sally's work, it's usually set in her native West Yorkshire Think Happy Valley, Gentleman Jack, Last Tango in Halifax and Scott and Bailey She's won the BAFTA for Best Drama not once, not twice but three times and a bunch of other awards too She decided she wanted to write when she was but a slip of a girl at nine and started out with a job on Radio 4's The Archers, followed by Emmerdale and Coronation Street.

2:02But it was finally going alone and creating At Home With The Braithwaite's for ITV that Sally really began to forge the path to TV domination. Sally, like me, is a good working class Northern girl. So I wonder how years at the forefront of the media industry has changed her life, her outlook. and crucially, have you on snacks? Don't tell me she's swapped HP for ketchup.

2:29Sally Wainwright, welcome to Comfort Eating. Thank you for asking me. I'm really excited. I kept hoping you'd ask me. I'm thrilled that you're here. I'm going to start with an actual question. In your new show, Riot Women, we dive headfirst into the world of five women who form a makeshift punk band in order to enter a local talent contest. But my question to you is, if you're in a band, what would you play? Well, drums, because that's what I've learned to play over the last two years while I've been writing Riot Women. You've learned to play the drums over the last two years. Your neighbours must love you.

3:10Oh, no, I've had a room soundproofed, so I don't annoy them. That's the most rock and roll thing I've heard for a long time. And I've spoken to my neighbour. She said, no, it's marvelous. You carry on.

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4:26I think she's being kind there. Small tear in her eye as she said it. Drunk gritted teeth.

4:39Now you've brought with you a snack that brings you comfort. I'm excited to know what you think about this. I don't think anybody else has invented this. But it is genuinely my snack food. And they should have invented it by now. And they probably have. You're probably going to say, everybody knows about this, Sally. You're just sad. I like the fact that I've seen the greatest and good come into this house and begin apologising. Right. Please unveil your snack. So this is three perched egg yolks with absolutely no white. On sourdough bread? It can be any bread, is the truth. This is quite a posh version of it.

5:17Well, this is it. You are very, very BBC royalty now, so surely it's always sourdough now. Obviously. But you can put it on anything. You can put it on white bread, brown bread, sourdough. You can put it on broccoli. But it's just a poached egg yolk and it's got to be runny. You need the jus of that egg. What did egg whites ever do to you? They're just disgusting, aren't they? Poached egg yolks. I think they might call it confit. Oh, there you go. Comfy egg yolk. Yeah, but I think that if it was comfy egg yolk, they'd make a right song and dance about it and it'd probably take a man in a white hat about six hours.

5:53I didn't invent the poached yolk. You didn't invent the egg.

5:59So tell me when you eat this. Every day. That's a lot of eggs. It is a lot of eggs, isn't it? Yeah, you just let you laugh in the face of cholesterol, don't you? It's okay, I'm not going to start trying to do a cholesterol check. I'm not going to make you do like squats and burpees outside to choke your heart. Right. Happy Valley, Last Tango in Halifax. Gentleman Jack, it's safe to say you are one of the UK's greatest chroniclers of the human story. You grew up in Sorby Bridge, West Yorkshire with your parents, Harry and Dorothy and your sister Diane. Was this a house full of storytellers? My mum was great at telling me anecdotes from just family history.

6:44We spent many, many, many hours just her telling me stories about the past and me asking her to repeat them. And she really appreciated stories. We used to watch Coronation Street from when I was old enough to stay up later than half past seven, I watched Coronation Street. And in those days, it was every Monday and Wednesday, and half past seven, you just never missed it. Literally never missed it. It wasn't passive watching, though. it was like quite engaged watching you know my mum would always be like really discussing the storylines afterwards and wondering what was going to happen next and yeah where this was going and she was very articulate about which were the best characters and which were the most interesting characters and why they were the most interesting characters if we were filming the story of your life let's call it happy sally six part 9 p.m sundays it's about sally wainwright ogre and you had to explain your father or your mother your father was a headmaster and your mum a school secretary how would you sit down with those actors and explain what these two people were like how would you get that across I grew up in quite a weird household as most people probably did in some shape or form everybody's childhood's odd if you look at it my mum and dad I think they fell out before me and Diane were born but decided not to get divorced because people just didn't get divorced in those days so me and my sister grew up in quite a tense environment yeah looking back now I think my mum and dad were both good people but they just got married to the wrong person and I kind of think sometimes I think that's partly what made me a dramatist yeah was growing up in a environment that I didn't really understand were they silent or were they shouty when I was little I used to lie in bed worried that they were talking about me because there was silence and I just worried that they were having to speak in hushed voices because they were talking about me so but I do think it's at the end of the day that's partly why I became quite introspective and thoughtful and well the Braithwares was kind of a portrait of my mum and dad.

8:44At Home with the Braithwares that is your 2000 ITV comedy drama it's about a suburban family in Leeds. Yeah. So in your house it's if I was to go to the early 70s and it's dinner time What can I see here? What can I hear? What can I taste? What's going on in the kitchen? So we always used to sit around the table in the same places. We used to get home from school at probably about quarter past four and we'd have tea, what most people call dinner, pretty much as soon as we got home. So it'd be like half past four-ish, which now seems weirdly early. Is your mum cooking? Yeah, my mum always cooked.

9:22Were you having? It was kind of, oh, it was that comedian who said in the 70s there were two food groups, packets and tins. I've never heard that before, but that's exactly it. So it was that kind of, I mean, my mum wasn't a bad cook. She didn't resort to convenience food any more than anyone else did. So it'd be things like sausages and fish fingers. And I remember she made this thing called spaghetti pie, which was actually quite good. There was like a layer of tinned mince on the bottom layer. And then there was a layer of tinned spaghetti. I think there was a layer of something else, like onions, and then a layer of mash, and then cheese on the top.

9:59Do you know? It was all right. I was giggling, but now I'm thinking, hang on a minute. Tinned mince. We seem to have lost that somewhere along the years. Yeah. There was a lot of tinned mince in the 17th. You can still get it. I've seen it. I've never bought any, but maybe I should. Was there like a local Chinese takeaway or anything like that to go to? Yeah, there was, which I discovered through a friend. And I introduced my parents to this and it was a big hit. So we used to get Chinese from then on every Thursday. But we always ordered exactly the same thing. My parents never experiment much at all.

10:35What's the order? It was chicken and mushroom. That's all it was called. It was chicken and mushroom. That was it. And we actually used that in Happy Valley. It was the same takeaway. so my childhood takeaway ended up with Tommy Lee Royce and Catherine on separate occasions going in there. Oh! That's the influence food had on my little life.

11:07It seems to me that you're not somebody that just has this blind respect for authority. I hope not. back then did you do your own thing did you say what you meant then like what were you like as a little girl I was quiet and shy I mean I now think I'm a bit autistic which makes sense of a lot of things like being shy um but I think despite being shy I did always sort of plow my own furrow with stuff but again I think that might be a bit of an autistic trait that I just didn't conform because I couldn't. Would it make you feel any clearer if you knew that you were right now? I think at the time it wouldn't.

11:49I think at the time if I'd been diagnosed autistic it would have because it was different then it was whereas now it does help to know to be able to just make sense of a lot of things in my life. Like not being able to speak. I mean I'm not a great speaker. I'm not I'm not If there's no one there, I know it's just a night. I just wouldn't go. You know, I can't just walk into a room and chat shit. I don't understand it. I don't understand what the point is. Well, the point, I suppose, is to oil the wheels of society by going. So how far did you drive? It feels like there is this kind of, you don't really love conversation in real life.

12:37but what you do is dialogue it's incredible dialogue that's interesting because i think the characters are like invisible friends and i think i create my own worlds because i do it really function very well in the real world so i create worlds that i can have a a function in a part of a sort of god-like function of creating everybody and decide what they say as well yeah maybe that's why maybe that's why i'm a writer it's to it's a control dialogue that i out control in real life because nobody does nobody writes small talk like you nobody can put together these ideas of you know someone's having a huge conversation about a murder but very wainwright thing is for them to just pivot to what they're having for tea and like a blockage on the bypass on the a427 and then to go back to the murder yeah so clearly you do yeah but that's that's got a function hasn't it i remember the line in happy valley where catherine was having a very tense conversation with Ryan.

13:37And then she said, what are you having for your tea? And he goes, Stu. And she says, well, it'll be all right. And it was, but it was doing something. It was showing that she still had this motherly instinct towards him, even in the middle of an argument that she cared about whether he got fed or not. So it's not exactly small talk, I hope. Were you happy at school? I loved school because I did like learning. I loved information. Yeah. And I did have a reasonably good friendship group and I didn't get bullied much. I got bullied a bit, but... And I really enjoyed being in the sixth form because I did history, English and art.

14:07And that was just my idea of heaven. You've said in the past that you weren't lonely, but you were solitary. Yeah. Yeah. I've always sort of enjoyed my own company. Do you start writing then? Sixth form? Oh, I started writing when I was... I've never not written. This is the thing. This is what I've realised. I started writing when I was tiny, like most kids. Me and my sister used to draw strip cartoons together. and at some point I realised that dialogue was the most important thing in writing and all the rest was superfluous. Yeah, yeah. All the descriptions in novels, you don't need all that, you just need to know what other people are saying.

14:46So I got really excited. It developed from strip cartoons to writing plays. We wrote them together and then we read them out together in bed at night time and it evolved from that and I think at some point Diane just realised this was childish and gave up like most kids most people just grow out of it and I just literally think I never grew out of it and it became more serious and I did start to write more serious stuff when I was probably about 16 17 well then you went to you did English Lit at York and then later this year there is actually a university set text about your work being published there will be students up and down the country rejoicing as they watch your tv shows and call it part of their coursework That's going to be incredible for them.

15:31But if I go back to the 80s, being a student in the 80s, what does that look like? Are you like a left-wing punk 80s student or are you solitary then? No, I discovered alcohol and cigarettes when I got to university, which helped to be less solitary. Yeah. What was your drink of choice? Beer. We used to drink a lot of beer. Old Peculiar. We lived in the second year. Feakston's Old Peculiar. In my second year, we lived in a street that was not far from a pub that sold up Peculiar. We just used to go out and drink pints of Old Peculiar. I mean, Old Peculiar. Which I don't think I could get through one pint of Old Peculiar now.

16:09Old Peculiar is like quite a dark, a dark ale, I was going to say. It's like Guinness with knobs on. If I think about it from when I was a kid, when I used to see like the old men drinking it, it felt like it had like bits of bark and things just floating in it. It had a dark head, didn't it? It wasn't a nice, fluffy, whitehead-like Guinness. It was a dark, treacly... How many pints could you drink of it? Probably about three or four. That's when you felt noisier and more outgoing. Yeah, I think it unleashed things socially for me. And I started smoking then as well. What did you smoke? Silk coat.

16:47Yeah, classic 80s. So were you like 20 ciggies a day? Were you a proper smoker? I never did more than about 20. What did you wear at uni? Oh, God, just jeans. And it was the same pair of jeans. I've just seen who I'm on. This is what I've come in today. What? I remember just going around with jeans that had massive holes in. Just because I couldn't afford or I didn't know where you bought jeans. They were just jeans my mum had bought for me that I was still wearing. I've never been very fashionable. I don't understand clothes. I hate clothes. I threw all my clothes away last year. I decided I just need to keep what I wear and I only ever wear, you only ever wear one thing at once, don't you?

17:31And I only wear the same thing all the time. So I just, I hate clothes. I think it's an autistic thing maybe that I just, I never thought about my appearance ever. I've only just started to think now, I probably look a right mess. You don't look, you absolutely don't look a mess. You look wonderful. It must put you under a hell of a lot of pressure though, every time they go, and we'll do red carpet. Oh, yeah. It used to. It doesn't now. We'll just go in jeans now. So they say to you, and what are you wearing tonight? And then you go, ah. They always ask these questions. If I tried to wear the kind of clothes that all the lovely slender actresses wear, I'd just look like a complete dick, wouldn't I?

18:13At least I don't feel like a complete dick if I wear the same pair of jeans that I had when I was at York. I completely admire the fact that you refuse to bend and decide. It's about feeling. I feel. Last time I wore a skirt was my graduation when I was 21 or whatever. I feel the word melancholy comes to me. I just can't wear female attire. It just makes me feel wrong. Next time I'm hoisting my boobs into a small backless frontless dress with what we call tit tape, to go to some event, I'm going to think, what would Sally White might do?

19:00Okay, after uni, you take a play to the Edinburgh Festival. No, it was at uni, actually. Okay, you get an agent and they suggest that you move to London. Now, please tell me about arriving in London. How do you make ends meet? I had about 200 quid served up and that quickly went in a deposit on rent. Okay. It was going up to Christmas. I got a job at WH Smiths. I've worked at WH Smiths for Christmas. Where did they put you? I was in the stationery department. I was in the stationery department. Yeah. So it wasn't all bad. Big pens. Did you do filofaxes and things like that? They'd just come out.

19:32It was just a big thing, filofaxes. Yeah. Right, scrap all the rest of the questions. It's just all. And magazines and newspapers, though, obviously you were putting those through there. I didn't have to deal with them. You didn't have to deal with the old men buying health and efficiency magazine. It's just like women with their tops off doing volleyball. I was thinking, you're not interested in volleyball. Did you drive a bus? I did. That blows my mind because this is the 80s. Yeah. Not a lot of women bus drivers, surely. No, there were three of us in a garage of 250. That says a lot about you.

20:09I kind of, I love driving. I do like driving. I really, really like driving. And the bigger vehicle, the better. I used to drive the 111s up to Heathrow and fantasise about flying the aeroplanes because they're that bigger. But yeah, I used to drive the 237s, the 37s. Did you ever do the 73? Yes, I did do the 73. The 73 is, I think, one of my first tastes of freedom was the 73 because my brother lived in Stokey. And if I got on when I was 13, they knew I was safe to get to Oxford Street. I wonder if you were driving that bus. I could have been. I could have been. Alan Armstrong once got on one of my buses in Wandsworth.

20:45I'd seen him on stage when I was 16. He was in a production of Bastard Angel. Yeah. At the way out at Donwell. And I was, like, really starstruck when he got on my bus. I've worked with him since then. I told him. He didn't remember. I was the one in the seat with the bus. Right. Tell me something about the actual day-to-day of being a bus driver. Right. Where do you eat? There was a canteen. It was a massive canteen. You know, school dinners. Lasagna and chips. Stodge. Stodge. What happens if you want a wee when you're up by Marble Arch on the 73 bus? Well, you do get stuck sometimes because there aren't always conveniences anywhere.

21:29I used to just wee in a teacup, a paper cup upstairs. I used to go upstairs where I thought nobody could see me. What do you do with a teacup when you come downstairs? How can you drive the bus with a teacup? out the window not the whole thing just the wee that's still not good well it's good for me if I needed a wee so were you writing when you were driving this bus did you used to pull over and work on your script no I didn't but I read I read a lot I read the whole of complete works of Chekhov and the complete works of Ibsen while I was driving buses and then I'd write in the evenings I did have an agent when I was a bus driver and she approached the Archers and they offered me a trial script for the Archers and I resigned from being a bus driver on the strength of being offered a trial script because I was just young and daft and I just thought it would work and kind of weirdly it did.

22:26And not long later you're poached by Emmerdale. Yeah. Now this is a regular primetime telly gig. is this everything that you've dreamed of? Really not, no the things I really liked writing The Archers it was really good fun it was a really nice group of people but I really wanted to write telly so it was an opportunity to have a go at writing telly as well but no, Emmerdale in those days was not where you really wanted to be the script editors tended to rewrite all the scripts so there was no sense of individuality whereas there was in The Archers they didn't twiddle with these scripts they'd give you notes and you'd rewrite it but it was still what you'd written whereas Emmerdale it was like oh we've rewritten this scene it's like well it's not interesting anymore then is it because you've written it it was very homogenous, every episode was homogenous it was all very samey it was all very bland, it was all very vanilla I remember my agent at the time saying well you better get used to it because this is what it's like which she was wrong I've never known it that bad ever since then it was a very unpleasant atmosphere it was run on fear I now know that fear is the enemy of creativity but it's like they didn't want creativity I don't know what they wanted but they didn't but I just accepted it because at that age you do kind of just accept So how did this all come to a head?

23:49I got sacked Oh There was this article in the Observer at the time called Experts, Experts and they did one on soap writers and I raved about John Stevenson who wrote Coronation Street and Brass which I thought was amazing I think I must have explained in this article about why Coronation Street was so good because it was all about the individual voices and why Emmerdale was so bad and I was just stupid enough not to realise that that probably wasn't a good idea so yeah I got sacked which was great because I'd only written six episodes so hopefully nobody noticed and I got to go back to the Archers because you can't write two agricultural soaps at the same time it's in the Archers contract that you're not allowed to write any other agricultural soaps When you gave that interview, did at any point you think, I shouldn't have said this?

24:36I don't remember, to be honest, but I think at that point in my life I was quite arsy and provocative. Probably still am, but probably a bit wiser now. And I suspect I thought I didn't have anything to lose. Yeah. I was young enough to kind of think it doesn't matter, I can just always end up driving buses again, you know. I don't know, it's one of those things you look back on now and it's just funny now. it's just part of life's vast rich stuff you've said i watched corrie from the moment i was able to stay up beyond half past seven and in 1994 you land a job on the writing team take us back to your first day there hello um it was really scary it was really scary because nobody left coronation street the writers they'd been there since like 1066 yeah so they were and they were famous names they were me and my mum used to watch the show and guess who'd written it you could tell who'd written it because it was so individual and the first day did you have to go into a writing room and and yeah and bring up your ideas yeah except i didn't i just didn't speak i didn't speak for the first three years it was very male you know it was a very male environment you know there were 12 men and three women when i was there it wasn't an aggressive environment but it was quite intimidating environment and it was it was ruled by you know the loudest voices so it was quite frightening and I just lived every meeting thinking I was going to get sacked because I didn't contribute anything at all.

26:02But they kept you, why did they keep you? Well of course my scripts were so good, I assume. Did everyone have lunch together? Did people drink at lunchtime? Oh god yeah, it was the 90s, everybody was pissed and that's what lunchtime was for. How did we get anything done in the afternoons? I can't remember. It was a very different meeting to the morning and the afternoon the morning was you know reasonably civilized and the afternoon was much more um aggressive but you'd never get away with that oh no no thank you no it's like it's not like you're not really allowed to drink a bottle of cinzano and shout at everyone a happy valley it's not no it's frowned upon isn't it it's quite surprising when you think back to what the way people did behave then in in ways that you just you wouldn't dream of now

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28:35After five years, you go it alone and you write at home with the Braithwaite for ITV. You know, this is a drama centered around a suburban family in Leeds, their life turned upside down when the mother wins the lottery. It's an immediate hit. what does this feel like like you are completely flying solo now is this how does this feel it was great I mean it was really exciting it was kind of a double-edged thing though because I got quite frustrated with the production because I was kept away from production a lot of the time which I didn't really understand I accepted it because on Coronation Street you just never got involved in production because there was never time but you were you wanted to kind of be on set like looking at how people were being dressed and getting that i wanted to be across everything and i only realized that when it was too late when they shot the first series so there were a number of things i wasn't happy about but i think that's because i was a frustrated director i directed at university i direct in the village where i live the amdram group who i love you know i love amdram um hang on you direct your local amdram yeah do you yeah i love that oh my god those poor people coming on stage and you're directing and you directed the cast of happy valley and then people are doing oh what a lovely war the pie crust players oh i love it sorry i'm completely that's totally taken me anyway i have always directed and so i i realized it was frustrating and then you go on to write crime romance history but what is interesting is it often comes back to west yorkshire yeah what is that about why i don't know because it was never a plan it's not like i wanted to make a thing of writing for west yorkshire in fact riot women which is a thing i've written most recently i did wonder about setting that in the village where i live in oxfordshire but i did come back to setting it in hebdenbridge for a number of reasons first of all there's the vernacular I just think you get more detail out of your own accent and your own voice.