Authors Electric

When I started my MA, many years ago, I was asked who I would like to be able to write like. I didn’t want to be able to write like anyone else, I wanted to write like me. There wasn’t anyone else who sounded the way I wanted to sound (I was writing for radio at the time). Until now. Sally Wainwright, the author of Happy Valley, hits the spot. She combines heavy drama with social commentary, fantastic characterisation, superb plotting and the touches of humour which make her work so memorable. Make ‘em cry, then make ‘em laugh. If you can elicit a physical reaction your viewer or reader will remember it, as it’s a memory substantiated by more than looking and listening.  Contrast is everything. The main character, the supremely tough and capable Sergeant Catherine Cawood, is brilliantly played by Sarah Lancashire. She tries to stop someone setting fire to himself by introducing herself to both him and us as follows: “I'm Catherine, by the way. I'm forty-seven. I'm divorce...

 I love Happy Valley. I really, really love it. Sally Wainwright is the most amazing screenwriter. She knows her characters inside out. She knows exactly what Sgt. Catherine Cawood would say or do in a situation and Sarah Lancashire knows exactly how to deliver it. After only the first episode, everyone's calling for another Bafta for Sarah Lancashire, and rightly so. Then, I watched the first episode of Silent Witness (I haven't seen the second one yet). I couldn't believe the contrast between the two. The plot's a bit convoluted and 'out there' but that wasn't the main problem for me. It was the dialogue. It just didn't work. It was stilted and didn't flow. (And they still don't cover their heads in crime scenes grr. ) It's series twenty-six for Silent Witness  now and unsurprisingly, there are no consistent writers. So no one knows Nikki Alexander inside out. Watching as an audience member, I wanted to shout when Nikki (as a visiting lectu...

Let's hear it this morning  for Radio 4 and too much wine the night before. I don't normally listen to Desert Island discs in bed of a Friday morning, because like all good conscientious writers I'm up and at my computer. Naturally. But the islandee, the castaway, was Sally Wainwright, and I heard her name luckily just before I hopped out of me pit to frighten off my hangover with a sunshine walk. I don't imagine that I'm alone in this, but I think Sally Wainwright is the best TV writer of series that we've got, and possibly ever had. No, that's nonsense. Come back Dennis Potter and Pennies from Heaven, all is remembered. And Tutti Frutti, come to think of it. She turns out to be a woman with a wonderful West Yorkshire accent in the Elland/Halifax mode. When she went to university to study French, the other students used to laugh at  the way she spoke the language. (How would a Parisien say Ecky Thump. I wonder? Not that that's Yorkshire, I suppos...