Inside the Shed

Richard Bevan speaks to Shed co-founder Eileen Gallagher and writer Maureen Chadwick.

Footballers Wives may have now come to an end after five years of rollicking storylines but the company behind the raucous drama and the eternally popular Bad Girls show no signs of slowing down.

Waterloo Road, the latest offering from the Shed stable, has already been recommissioned by the BBC for a second series, while a musical show of Bad Girls, in partnership with the West Yorkshire Playhouse, opened in June.

How did Shed come about?

Eileen: I met Chad (Maureen Chadwick), Anne (McManus) and Brian Park on Coronation Street. I think we just knew we had the same sensibilities about the kind of dramas we liked and that we’d want to do. We thought it would be good fun to form a company and so we pitched three ideas, all of them contemporary drama ideas to ITV commissioning editors and they loved Bad Girls. Chad had been working as a scriptwriter on Coronation St but had previously written a screenplay so that’s where she came in.

Maureen: Yes besides Corrie I’d also done screenplay for the BBC that was about the whole issue of pornography. One of the characters was imprisoned. She was a campaigning anti-porn feminist who gets locked up. So through that I had good contacts with ex-prisoners and was already interested in that world. But Irene was the one who had the idea of doing a drama set in a women’s prison. We had extraordinary access then of experiences of women criminals and managed to get into various prisons to do more research.

Did you realise that you all had similar sensibilities before you formed Shed?

Eileen: Brian Park and Anne were the executive producer and script executive on Coronation St and Chad was a writer on the show. I suggested that we form our own company. That was the core of it and then when we thought we’d got Bad Girls we decided to ask Chad to join us because she had been a scriptwriter employed by Brian and Anne and really knew her stuff about women’s prisons. So at first it was just the four of us on that one drama.

Anne and Chad worked so well together as the writing story team. That was the genesis of it. It’s like most things - coming together in a haphazard and accidental way. But the mix was really quite perfect with Chad a script expert, Anne a story expert, Brian a production expert and me doing the business side. We still get on very well.

Maureen: It really was rock and roll to begin with. Our offices were in Anne and mine’s basement with second-hand furniture. We spent all our money and time on the show rather than setting up swanky offices.

What advice would you give to writers? Is perseverance the key?

Eileen: I think picking the right production company is key – a company that’s got a good reputation. But writers should also go to companies that will give them good advice. For instance, I wouldn’t allow a writer to work too long on one script before interesting a broadcaster. How we get our dramas on air generally speaking is we’ll go and discuss with the broadcaster about things they are looking for. We’ll then decide on an area or a few areas and then we’ll give them a treatment and unless they’re really interested in that treatment at that point we won’t commit to writing a script.

You’ve got to bring the broadcaster into it early, they’ve got to feel a part of it and be part of that process. There’s no point in sitting in a darkened room writing the best script in the world if there just isn’t the market there. It could be the best script in the world but if it’s not the fashion at the moment broadcasters won’t be interested. You’ve got to pick your production companies and partners very carefully.

But broadcasters themselves don’t know what’s going to be a hit, do they?

Eileen: No-one knows what’s going to be a hit!

Maureen: You’ve got to write the things you want to see. I think it’s part of a writer’s training to write a lot of scripts that aren’t going to be produced, because that’s learning your craft. You have to watch a lot of stuff, you have to read a lot of stuff, read film scripts and television scripts and write stuff on spec in order to learn how to do it.

If you’re starting out you have to write stuff on spec because you’re not going to get an agent unless you’ve got something to show. You’ve also got to test yourself to find out whether it’s really what you want to do. You’ve got to have self-belief and you have to believe that what you’re doing is good yourself, even if other people don’t. Listen to the advice of people you respect but part of the process is testing yourself to see whether you’re in the right field and you can stick it out.

Richard Bevan is a screenwriter (MA) who also writes reviews for magazines and websites.