PHOTO KATE LAWSON/BBC PICTURES, BEN BLACKALL / BBC PICTURES
It’s been 12 months now since Gentleman Jack first aired on British and American TV, catapulting the extraordinary life of Regency diarist and lesbian Anne Lister into the global mainstream. When I cast my mind back to the eve of transmission, I remember thinking how nervous I felt, and how I hoped that the audience would love and respect Lister just as much as I had done over the years. The same thought crossed my mind when I saw Suranne Jones dressed for the first time in Lister’s signature black pelisse. She looked magnificent. She was everything that I had imagined Anne Lister to be – charismatic, bewitching, almost otherworldly. The image took my breath away. But would viewers feel the same, I wondered?
While everyone involved in the production felt quietly confident that we had created something very special in Lister’s memory, in reality none of us could have predicted the massive success that Gentleman Jack was set to become, or just how passionately its eccentric heroine would capture the hearts and minds of the international lesbian community. Nobody could have ever imagined that just a year on from when the first episode was shown, Lister’s home town would be playing host to hundreds of women from across the globe, gathering to celebrate her 229th birthday anniversary. This April, Halifax’s most famous daughter will be revered and “stanned” in a way that she never has been before. Almost 200 years after her death, “Listermania”, to everyone’s surprise, is finally here.