Sally Wainwright: the titan of genuine reality television

This Tuesday sees the return of one of three finely wrought dramas set in the north of England that have emerged over the last five years from the busy keyboard of the writer Sally Wainwright. The second series of Happy Valley arrives after three series of the Bafta-winning septuagenarian love story Last Tango in Halifax and four series of the female cop show Scott & Bailey.

Together, they form a peak period body of work, at once funny, poignant, realistic and quietly profound. None of them is flashy star fodder and all of them have become word-of-mouth hits. Indeed, both Last Tango and Scott & Bailey were initially turned down by the BBC and ITV.

Finally, the word has got out about Wainwright. More than 25 years into a career founded on uncompromisingly earthy values, she finds herself surprisingly in fashion.

The first series of Happy Valley, starring Sarah Lancashire as a tough-minded police sergeant in West Yorkshire, won a Bafta for best drama series and Wainwright picked up another Bafta for best writer. It told the tale of Sergeant Cawood, a woman struggling to come to terms with her daughter’s suicide and the release from prison of the suspected rapist she blamed for the death.

It was gritty, powerful stuff, full of tense domestic scenes, pulsating drama and Wainwright’s particular speciality: pitch-perfect, punchy dialogue. Few writers can make their characters speak with the kind of bristling naturalism that litters a Wainwright script. People talk as they do in real life, only with the boring bits cut out.

Wainwright acknowledges that her greatest strength is her acute ear for speech. “I think I’ve always had a compulsion to write dialogue rather than prose or poetry,” she said recently. “When I was seven, I started writing down the things people said – it was something I just had to do. I think I was born with it. It’s like being able to draw or paint.”

Although she started out writing for The Archers, she really cut her teeth on Coronation Street, that writers’ training ground that also produced Paul Abbott and Jimmy McGovern. Coronation Street taught her the discipline of storytelling, an aspect of writing that, unlike character and dialogue, she really had to work at. Intimidated by the high quality of writers in the room, she didn’t speak in script conferences for three years, but her scripts were better than anyone else’s.

She worked on the soap for five years and was particularly influenced during her time at Granada by her mentor figure, the actor and writer Kay Mellor, for whose women’s football drama Playing the Field she wrote several scripts. As Wainwright said: “Kay taught me loads about technique and structure. But most importantly, she taught me to stand up for myself as a writer and not take shit from people.”

One senses that Wainwright didn’t require much teaching when it came to sticking up for herself. She walked out of The Archers because she thought the characters were too nice and middle class and she was sacked from Emmerdale after six episodes when she told this newspaper that the show’s writers weren’t given any creative freedom. As she told an interviewer in 2000: “If I get into a situation I don’t want to be in, I just leave. I don’t sit and suffer if it’s something I’m not excited about.”

But it would be wrong to see Wainwright as some kind of high-maintenance artiste. At their best, soaps find drama in the everyday and the mark of Wainwright’s work is that, however dramatic, there is a respect for the drudgery and humdrum nature of much of life. In Scott & Bailey, for example, a good deal of the police work is mundane and the characters are bedevilled by the kinds of real-life domestic troubles that normally receive little more than lip service in police procedure.

Wainwright grew up between Huddersfield and Brontë country in Yorkshire. She says that her home was not a particularly happy household. “I don’t think my parents ever got on. I suppose I grew up in a house with quite a tense atmosphere. It makes you quite screwed-up and quiet and shy, with not much to say. But it’s also, I suppose, why I am a writer, so I can’t be too critical of it. If I’d grown up in a more normal household, maybe I wouldn’t have wanted to be one.”

Although she moved to London after studying English at York University (she now lives in the Cotswolds), Yorkshire is an area she frequently returns to in her television writing. “I did a talk in Halifax last year,” she told an interviewer recently, “and this woman stood up and said how I made a lot of money writing about Yorkshire but I don’t actually live there. She reminded me of why I moved away.”

It’s a characteristically bittersweet comment that, like Happy Valley’s title, betrays Wainwright’s appreciation of irony. She doesn’t romanticise Yorkshire, showing its rough beauty alongside its even rougher underbelly. But what she’s most interested in is affording the north of England an authentic vision that owes nothing to transplanted images of America.

“A lot of British television now is trying to be cool,” she has complained, “and what a lot of people feel is cool is American.” She says that one director at the beginning of shooting Happy Valley wanted it to look like Nevada. Happily, it ended up looking very much like Yorkshire – majestic countryside surrounding towns in the long shadow of industrial decline.

Her first original drama was also set in Yorkshire – suburban Leeds. At Home With the Braithwaites, which ran for 26 episodes between 2000 and 2003, followed the plight of a family that won £38m on the lottery. The lead character, played by Amanda Redman, initially keeps her newfound wealth secret from the rest of the family.

It exemplified two themes that would recur in Wainwright’s work: the extraordinary in the ordinary and the foregrounding of strong female characters. The second tendency has led her to being branded a feminist writer, and certainly there’s an argument that a show such as Scott & Bailey is a sparky feminist rejoinder to so much of the macho posturing that passes for police drama. One of its finest pleasures was the way it shed a revealing light on the camaraderie of female friendship, so often depicted as a passive-aggressive exchange of bitchiness.

But really, all she has done is give women the kind of parts – complex, conflicted, funny and flawed – that are usually reserved for men.

She is, she says, not anti-men, rejecting the notion that her male characters are weak. “I don’t think so. I just don’t focus on them. I resent it because there’s this perception that I consciously write men as twats. I don’t.”

If she’s been involved in a form of dramatic rebalancing, then perhaps her most striking success has been Last Tango in Halifax, which focused on one of television’s most neglected sectors of society: the retired.

A critical and ratings success that took everyone, not least its commissioners, by surprise, it was inspired by Wainwright’s widowed mother who fell in love, at the age of 75, with a man she originally met in junior school. In a lesser writer’s hands, it could have been a fanfare of mawkishness but, instead, Derek Jacobi and Anne Reid were rewarded with a script that was by turns enormously touching and mischievously tart.

Most of all, it plugged in, like all of Wainwright’s best work, to the irrepressible nature of the human spirit. For while she’s never afraid to venture to the darker corners of everyday life, she doesn’t do grimness for the sake of being grim.

Nonetheless, Happy Valley was accused of exactly that sin, as a lot of white noise was manufactured about unnecessary violence, particularly the episode when Wainwright made her debut as a director. It featured a scene in which Lancashire’s character was severely beaten by the suspected rapist, played by James Norton. “Did the BBC’s brutal Happy Valley go too far?” asked the ever-concerned Daily Mail.

But there was nothing gratuitous about the episode. Wainwright showed violence for what it is: violent. In real fights, people get injured, often badly injured. And just as she seeks to show people how they are at their best – when they’re being funny with friends or brave when they’re scared – she doesn’t shy away from what happens when they’re at their worst.

In Wainwright’s world, there are happy valleys and sad peaks, but the pinnacle her writing occupies at the present is one of British television’s most uplifting sights.

THE WAINWRIGHT FILE

Born Sally Wainwright in 1963 in Huddersfield and brought up in Sowerby Bridge, Yorkshire. She is married with two children and lives in the Cotswolds.

Best of times Winning two Baftas for Last Tango in Halifax in 2013, although it made her wonder why it had taken so long. “You do think, ‘Why haven’t I been noticed before?’”

Worst of times Working on Emmerdale, though perhaps her most challenging time was working as bus driver in London while writing at night.

What she says Of her frustration at having been overlooked for much of her career: “It’s the opposite of confidence. It’s having a chip on your shoulder. I think it’s very northern. And it is a class thing.”

“I think human beings essentially are funny… however dark things get we tend to respond with humour.”

What others say “Sally Wainwright is the greatest writer at the moment. She manages to balance character and plot beautifully – usually one is sacrificed for the other, but Sally somehow manages to maintain both.” Actor James Norton