Starting a Riot
Happy Valley creator Sally Wainwright previews her upcoming BBC and BritBox music drama Riot Women, discusses how it was influenced by her personal experiences and explains why she now recommends singing as a way to build bonds between cast members.
Like many people, Sally Wainwright has fantasised about being a member of a rock band. Now with her latest series, Riot Women, she has made that dream come true.
The BAFTA-winning writer and director – best known for Happy Valley, Last Tango in Halifax and Gentleman Jack – is the creative force behind this six-part drama, which introduces a group of women juggling jobs, grown-up children, complicated parents, husbands who have “buggered off” and disastrous dates and relationships. So when they come together to start a makeshift punk rock band, the group becomes a catalyst for change in their lives.
Joanna Scanlan (Beth), Rosalie Craig (Kitty), Tamsin Grieg (Holly), Lorraine Ashbourne (Jess) and Amelia Bullmore (Yvonne) make up the band, with Taj Atwal (Nisha), Chandeep Uppal (Kam) and Macy-Jacob Seelochan (Miranda) as their backing singers.
Written by Wainwright, who is also the lead director, Riot Women is produced by Drama Republic (One Day, Doctor Foster) for the BBC and BritBox. Mediawan Distribution is handling sales of the show, which is due to launch later this year.
Wainwright was at French television festival Series Mania in Lille last week, where she took to the stage with Drama Republic co-CEO Roanna Benn to preview the drama.
Riot Women has been a decade in the making, with Wainwright only starting to write the scripts in the last two years after completing work on recent seasons of crime drama Happy Valley and period drama Gentleman Jack.
Wainwright: I got the idea about 10 years ago and I started just mentioning it to people at work, the idea of 50-something women forming a punk rock band. Every time I mentioned it, people were like, ‘Yeah, let’s do that now,’ and I couldn’t because I was busy with Happy Valley and Gentleman Jack and other stuff.
Behind the guitar riffs and drumbeats, the show is actually a very personal story for the writer, who drew on her life experiences and relationships to develop the central quintet of characters.
Wainwright: It’s about my life. It’s about the menopause. It’s about my mother who developed dementia. You get to this age where you have to deal with things like elderly parents who now need your help, difficult children, my husband decided to leave, so there was that, and also you’re at the height of your career so you’re in demand. You’re being pulled in all sorts of different directions and you’re dealing with the menopause, which suddenly makes you feel very different. It makes you feel invisible. So I wanted to write about that.
People don’t talk about the menopause, or it can be an energy drain. It’s one of those subjects that make people go, ‘Oh my God, we’re gonna talk about that?’ So I wanted to try to find a way to talk about it that wouldn’t have that energy to it, that would have a new kind of energy to it. Most people have fantasised about being in a rock band. I know I have. It’s kind of a fantasy, but the idea of conflating the experience of the menopause… It’s kind of fantastical, but it’s also about grasping the nettle. It’s about getting to an age where you think, ‘Well, if I don’t do it now, I’m never gonna do it.’ The show has got an extraordinary energy, so hopefully it’s talking about the menopause and women of a certain age, but it’s also got something very propulsive and exciting about it.
Riot Women isn’t a comedy, despite its humour. Instead, it’s got a very dark story running through it that wouldn’t be out of place in Happy Valley.
Wainwright: It’s much more akin to Happy Valley in many ways than, say, Last Tango [in Halifax], which is another one of my shows. It’s got a really serious, historic crime story. One of the characters had something very distressing happen to them as a child and it’s been triggered at the start of this series. And it is her evolution through the six parts about how she starts to talk about what happened to her. It finds some kind of resolution, but it’s also the start of another story where it ends.
Benn: You think it’s just about the band, but there’s something that connects them that we discover first, and then they gradually discover that is huge and has a story with a crime element to it. But [it’s always seen] through the perspective of these characters. The show has a lot of stories in it – very juicy, hooky stories, which is Sally’s raison d’être. What Sally does so well is just let you think, ‘How did you cram all that in?’ And yet it feels very organic.
The programme makers secured their “dream cast,” each of whom spent six months learning how to play their character’s instruments.
Benn: None of them can play [instruments], apart from Rosie, who’s the younger one, the singer, who comes from a musical theatre background and both Sally and I have seen her in several things on stage, so she was very much in our minds. But the others – none of them. So it was a very interesting process where they all had to learn, and they did. They properly learned how to play. They embodied the show. They lived the fantasy of becoming a band.
There’s not a huge amount of music, by the way. It’s not musical. They just play the tracks they write themselves, but when they do play the concert, you see the frisson between them. They are completely bowled over by what they’re creating together and they properly play.
Wainwright likes rehearsals and she insisted on a week before filming dedicated to band practice.
Wainwright: I think it had a real effect on them. By the end of it, I remember Amelia, who plays Yvonne, saying, ‘We really are a band. We really, actually played that and we got through it.’ You could tell they were really bonded. It had a fabulous effect. If any of your cast isn’t bonding, just get them to sing a song together.
The music in the series was actually created by Brighton-based punk duo ARXX, who wrote the songs based on ideas from Wainwright and others.
Wainwright: Just Like Your Mother was the first song, which came from me, because one of my husband’s favourite insults when we had an argument was, ‘Oh, you’re just like your mother.’ So in the song, we turned it on its head; it’s not an insult, it’s like, ‘Yes, fuck you, I am just like my mother.’ So we gave them ideas for songs, but then they put it into their ‘machine,’ as they call it, and they turned out fabulous stuff.
They wrote another song called Seeing Red, which they perform in episode four, which is about the menopause. I came up with the drumbeat, because I learned to play the drums in preparation for this show. Then we gave them some ideas about what the song should be. The first line was actually written by our police advisor: ‘I’m so depressed, I can’t get dressed.’ So everyone was throwing ideas in. Then they turned it into their own. We’re really pleased with the songs.
There are four songs in the show – Just Like Your Mother, Seeing Red, Shitting Pineapples, which is about giving birth, and Riot Women, the title.
As the creator, screenwriter, director and executive producer, Wainwright was involved across the development and production of Riot Women.
Wainwright: You write and it’s quite a solipsistic process. I meet with Roanna and the story producer and script editor, then I go away and work on my own. Then we regroup and I go on my own again. When you’re directing, it’s completely different, it’s very sociable. It is the complete opposite. I don’t really think about being an exec because I’m just there anyway. It’s an ongoing process.
Benn: But Sally does do outlines, storylining, lots of research, different people helping on particular areas, and we have got crime. There are some really tangible things. We’ve got domestic violence, we’ve got abuse within the police force. There’s a lot of stuff going on, and there’s another big one, which I won’t talk about. So we’ll do lots of storylining and talking about it, and then Sally will write outlines before she goes to write [the scripts]. We feed into that and it will go backwards and forwards. It’s very thorough.
Had Wainwright’s name not been attached to the project, Riot Women might never have been made.
Benn: Everyone in the UK is desperate to have a show with Sally, so that was easy peasy [getting the BBC commission]. There are no dead bodies in the show, so that makes it harder these days. It’s quite a hard show to describe and there are a few things that would maybe make people think, ‘Oh, is that a musical?’ It’s not. Is it just about being middle-aged, being in your 50s and 60s? No, it’s not, it’s multi-generational. It was hard to describe, but when people read the scripts, they got it, and how much is in there.
If it wasn’t Sally, it would’ve been a difficult sell, definitely. Hopefully people would read the scripts and go for it. But in this climate, it’s not what people [commissioners] are saying they’re looking for, which is really sad. It just means we don’t always have the breadth [of variety on TV], but I’m so pleased this show is coming out and that we are going to have a show with these characters at this time.
Riot Women was filmed in Hebden Bridge, the same Yorkshire town that has become synonymous with Wainwright’s crime drama Happy Valley.
Wainwright: In fact, there’s more set in Hebden Bridge than there was in Happy Valley. We really wanted to lean into the quality of the landscape and the town because it’s quite an unusual little town. It’s in West Yorkshire, near Halifax, and it’s quite an alternative little place. It’s got quite an alternative culture and community, and we really wanted that in the show. I live in a little village in Oxfordshire and I did wonder about setting it somewhere other than where I normally set things, like in a little village in the Cotswolds. But it just didn’t seem as vibrant to me as where we’ve chosen to set it.
One of the challenges on set was filming scenes with every member of Riot Women involved, which led Wainwright to ask for more rehearsal time.
Wainwright: There are always challenges. Things always go wrong, but it’s like childbirth. By the end of it, you tend to forget.
Wainwright just wants to entertain people – and hopefully make them think a little bit about the subject matter.
Wainwright: There are no shows about women in their 50s, as a rule, and it’s mad because women in their 50s are actually really fun and entertaining and interesting. It’s entertaining from start to finish, I think, but who am I to say? I don’t get sick of watching it.
Benn: It’s properly, properly funny. I know I obviously made it, so I’m going to say good things about it, but it’s properly funny and it’s properly gripping moment-by-moment until the end. We’ve worked incredibly hard with Emma and Jess to make it so. So I just want people to really get addicted to it and power their way through it and love it, and love the characters.
Wainwright: I hope it’s a good mixture as well. It is a properly dark story in places, but it never stops being funny either, which is quite unusual.
The show wasn’t always called Riot Women…
Wainwright: It was called Hot Flush for a while, but I just thought that was like, ‘Oh God, menopause. Who wants to know about that?’ So I was quite reluctant to use that; I thought it sounded old-fashioned, it sounded like a sitcom from the 80s, so I wanted to find something a bit more vibrant. Then I started to read about Courtney Love and the Riot Girl movement, so it seemed very appropriate to call it Riot Women.
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