Star interview: Sally Wainwright
Stellar screenwriter Sally Wainwright discusses her career and inspirations with Andy Plaice
From BUS DRIVER to Bafta
The sun never shines in winter, they say, in this small Yorkshire valley town associated with textile history, quirky locals and more lately with a BBC drama that established its creator, Sally Wainwright, as the most influential female voice in British television.
Hebden Bridge is something else: postcard-perfect with quaint shops and millstone houses that cling for dear life to the steep hills all around. Tourists like it, as do painters, poets and wealthy professionals who work in Leeds or Manchester.
And yet there’s a dark side too, a side rich for excavation as the backdrop to Sally’s Happy Valley, which is now getting a second outing after series one in 2014 drew critical acclaim and had viewers hooked in their millions. Not only is Hebden Bridge the setting for Happy Valley, it’s virtually a character in its own right and it’s easy to see why Sally was so inspired.
Sally’s here to film the second series, which will see Sarah Lancashire return as no-nonsense police sergeant Catherine Cawood, and to talk about her forthcoming film about the Brontë siblings for the BBC, To Walk Invisible.
The preferred meeting place is ‘posh Yorkshire’, a pub where the coffee comes at nearly four quid a go but you do at least get a cube-sized chocolate muffin on the side. Three ladies at the next table – ideal casting for Sally’s Last Tango in Halifax perhaps – are chatting about the pros and cons of online banking when Sally walks in.
Our starting point is something she feels passionate about in her writing, and that’s having something to say. A common weakness in fledgling writers, she feels, is that they are copying things they’ve already seen – not necessarily a conscious borrowing but doing it nonetheless rather than telling the story that is special to them.
With Happy Valley she wanted to tell a big story about a small place. ‘You can write big things about very small people,’ she says. ‘The thing about Happy Valley was that it was an epic drama but about ordinary people. What matters is what you put people through and the depth and psychology of the characters. I don’t mean big in the way that a James Cameron film is big.’