Sally Wainwright: ‘Happy Valley is over – but my new BBC series is in that world’

Sally Wainwright is behind some of the most iconic British TV – and she has no plans of slowing down.

Last Tango in Halifax, Happy Valley, Gentleman Jack and now, Riot Women.

The 62-year-old showrunner’s latest project joins a long line of shows highlighting the complexity of women’s lives within a story that appeals to the masses.

‘Obviously, you write for the people who are going to watch it, and it’s just wonderful to get that sort of affirmation [not just from who] we thought of as our target audience, but from other people as well,’ the Bafta-winning showrunner tells Metro about the instant success of her newest series.

Riot Women follows five middle-aged women – Kitty (Rosalie Craig), Beth (Joanna Scanlan), Holly (Tamsin Greig), Yvonne (Amelia Bullmore) and Jess (laooraine Ashbourne) – who came together to channel their menopausal rage into rock music.

‘The older people get, the more interesting they become,’ simply says about why she wanted to highlight an often overlooked group in society.

After winning the Rolling Stone Gamechanger Award, Sally knew her work was not only more urgent than ever, but it was on the ‘cutting edge of what’s new’.

The series, which has already been renewed for a second season, easily found a home because ‘people instantly seem to respond to the idea of a middle-aged woman’s punk rock band’ and having five leading ladies in the ensemble cast certainly didn’t hurt the cause.

The show doesn’t shy away from tough life experiences

We meet Kitty, whose life has gone off the rails when she joins the band, and soon discover her history of sexual assault as a minor as she unexpectedly reunites with her estranged son.

Beth is grappling with suicidal thoughts that have driven her to the noose more than once; Holly is a recently retired police officer whose mentee in the force, Nisha (Taj Atwal), is violently assaulted by a co-worker.

And that’s just scraping the surface.

‘One of my objectives when I write is that I’m always aware of the audience thinking: “Oh, I don’t believe that. Oh, that’s too extreme.” You’ve got to tell a dramatic, dynamic story, but marry it up with believability and authenticity,’ she explains.

When it came to Nisha’s gutwrenching storyline, the reality is all too grim.

She admits: ‘There was a concern when we were constructing the show that it would seem over the top. Then, unfortunately, the stories that were coming out in the news just made us think [it’s] not. This isn’t over the top.’

Perhaps best known for her three-season crime drama Happy Valley, starring Sarah Lancashire (for whom she created the show), Sally sees Riot Women as making up a part of that universe.

‘Sarah and I were really clear that we wanted to sign off after three series because we wanted to end on a high. We didn’t want it to drift off into a poorer version of itself. So, it did end in a very good place,’ she says about any potential new Happy Valley.

Before adding: ‘The idea of doing a spin-off, I’m not sure what it would be. In a way, for me, Riot Women feels still very much in that world, in Hebden Bridge. It’s got similar values, and I think it’s got a similar feeling.

‘[There is] this thriller-ish element in it with the Kitty story and where that’s going to go.’

As for where Kitty’s story might head in season two, the award-winning writer calls it an ’embarrassment of riches’.

‘[It] was lending itself to the continuing themes of how women deal with that kind of abuse and exploitation, hopefully without being too preachy about it, which I hope I would never be,’ she notes.

Most of all, her ‘big, big excitement’ is to see where the band goes next, posing that a tour around North Yorkshire could be on the cards (or even Majorca, she jokes).

For someone like Sally with such a mammoth TV presence, not everything always goes off without a hitch

Her popular LGBTQ+ series, Gentleman Jack, was cancelled by HBO, and although its avid fanbase still held out hope that it might return, it seems that won’t be the case.

‘HBO got taken over by Warner Bros, and they changed the goal posts of what they wanted from their dramas.

‘I think that’s why Gentleman Jack didn’t get a third series, because it did have a huge fan base in America, and it still does, but perhaps just not huge enough,’ she reflects, confirming ‘too much time has now passed’.

That hasn’t stopped her from launching headfirst into several rich new projects as she teases she has ‘three other shows that I’m working on at the moment, and two of them are about powerful, interesting, complex women.’

After earning her first writing credits in the 1990s in soaps like Coronation Street and Emmerdale, Sally has witnessed the industry undergo a complete transformation over the past three decades.

Especially when it comes to telling empowering female-centred stories.

‘It’s changed out of all recognition to me,’ she says, noting the turning tide with streamers and then needing an ‘American appeal’ to get ‘anything like reasonable financing’.

It means you ‘have to constantly raise your game’, but also that shows like Riot Women might get picked up by the BBC but not many others because the themes don’t suit American sensibilities.

‘We’re not just interested in women as appendages to men,’ she quips.

But hard-fought progress can be easily lost, as she warns

‘We went through a phase a few years ago of it feeling like we were really moving forward in the way we represented women on TV.

‘You didn’t have to be under the age of 30 [and] stick thin to appear on screen, but I am slightly concerned that that’s going backwards again now.’

Sharing her disdain for the influx of the TV equivalent of ‘airport thriller novels’, Sally ends our chat on a call to action.

‘It’s up to individual writers to continue to pitch things that they believe in, things that are more authentic and more complex and subtle and nuanced,’ she declares.

Riot Women is now available to stream on BBC iPlayer.

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