![]() “In my mind,” she says, “it was always a trilogy, so that will be the last.” Sarah often says to directors: ‘It won’t be funny if you do it like that.’” Wainwright wrote the third season during lockdown. It’s a slightly dry delivery of humour you don’t have to be laughing your head off to deliver funny lines. The way I write just has such a northern sensibility. “I don’t know if it’s to do with being a northerner. ![]() The popularity of Happy Valley – the story of one police officer battling crime in Calder Valley while still dealing with the suicide of her daughter years earlier – was partly down to the serendipitous casting of Sarah Lancashire, who “just gets it”, says Wainwright. “I’d just done The Braithwaites, which was very popular, but I’d yet to ascend to the point where I could do whatever I wanted. When Wainwright pitched a drama about Lister in 2002, even then the world wasn’t ready, but Wainwright puts that partly down to her own box-office heft at the time. When the diaries were first transcribed in the 1960s, the council vetoed their publication. “I knew she was gay and that she was eccentric, but it was impossible to find out anything else. She didn’t manage to deepen her knowledge, though, despite Lister having left one of the most comprehensive diaries of her day – more than five million words across 26 volumes. As a child, she visited many times, fascinated by Lister’s portrait. She grew up in Sowerby Bridge, a few miles from Shibden Hall. Wainwright had long wanted to turn Lister’s life story into TV. “It always makes me laugh when my dramas get described as ‘gritty’ just because they’re northern.” “I felt that if you were different in any way, you just couldn’t survive.” But so many of her dramas now circle back to it. “All I wanted to do was leave,” she says. She wasn’t the biggest fan of the area when she was growing up there in the 1970s and 80s. ![]() This sideswipe may stem back to Wainwright’s own formative years in West Yorkshire. She was intelligent, single-minded and “uncompromisingly gay – it was a huge part of who she was, a huge part of how courageous she was, living that life not just at that time, but in Halifax, where you still can’t really be gay. Part of Lister’s appeal, says Wainwright, is that she is “an atypical historical character”. “I got slated for that – apparently, all lesbians die in telly, which I just didn’t know.” I mean, she will die eventually.” Wainwright still feels bad about killing off Kate in Last Tango in Halifax. She didn’t die at the end – she got her big romantic reconciliation. Overturning two centuries of erasure is no small achievement, but the other thing viewers liked, Wainwright thinks, “is that her story was so life-affirming, uplifting and clever. The University of York has named a college after her, while Halifax has put up a statue. It started as a weekend and has now ballooned into a fortnight-long event. One American woman has launched an Anne Lister festival in Halifax. “My mum was agoraphobic, so I know what it’s like.” “That really touched me,” says Wainwright. One woman had been housebound with agoraphobia – but after watching it, gathered the courage to walk to the shop for the first time in years. Wainwright has had letters from women all over the world who’d never heard of Lister and now “she’s become the most important thing in their lives”. So marked was the drama’s impact that the BBC isn’t just bringing it back, it’s also making a documentary about the “Gentleman Jack effect”. Photograph: Sarah Lee/The GuardianĬlearly, she succeeded.
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