When Rob Delaney was asked to suggest a list of people he might like to speak to for this issue, it was short. It said simply: Sally Wainwright. Delaney, who grew up in Boston and moved to the UK five years ago, came to fame as a Twitter wit, after years as a standup comedian. Along with Sharon Horgan, he then created, wrote and starred in Catastrophe for Channel 4, lauded as one of the best original comedies of the last decade. This year it ended, after four seasons.
A former London bus driver, Wainwright has written and created some of the best dramas of the last two decades, from Happy Valley and Last Tango In Halifax, to this year’s Gentleman Jack. She has just been honoured with the freedom of the borough of Calderdale, the area in which she grew up, which means she is allowed to walk her sheep through Halifax (she does not keep sheep).
Delaney and Wainwright meet on a dark, late‑November afternoon. Wainwright lives in Oxfordshire, but has been in London for meetings. Delaney has been swimming with his wife in a local lido. “I do that to impress her, because she’s a killer cold-water swimmer,” he says. Listening to them talk is like sitting in on a screenwriting masterclass, but they want to talk about each other’s lives, too. Three days earlier, Delaney had shared a video on Twitter in praise of the NHS, relating his family’s experience of the care they received when his son Henry was diagnosed with the brain tumour that eventually killed him. Already, the clip has been viewed many millions of times. “It’s made me think I probably am going to vote Labour,” Wainwright tells him. “I am undecided, but that’s the biggest thing that’s made me think that’s the way I’m going to go.” Delaney thanks her. “I’m a loudmouth who’s on TV blathering on about all kinds of nonsense, but since I did have a mouthpiece, I wanted to say: we can afford to take care of people,” he says.
Rob Delaney My wife and I have watched a lot of your programmes. Not all of them – you’re married and you have children, and you know you can’t watch all the television there is to watch. But we make Sally Wainwright television a priority. So thank you for agreeing to speak with me.
Sally Wainwright Thanks for asking me.
RD I thought this might make you laugh. We’d watched Gentleman Jack, Happy Valley and To Walk Invisible, and then we were moving on to Last Tango In Halifax and, by mistake, we watched one of the Christmas specials first.
SW [Laughs] That would be a mistake, on many levels.
RD I was thinking, this is so bold of her, to assume in the pilot episode that we can follow all these threads, but by God, it is possible. It was thrilling, like being on a rollercoaster. We finished that and thought, what’s next? Then we thought, wait a minute, everybody looks maybe a tiny bit younger, the phones are a little clunkier – oh my God, we watched it out of order.
SW It’s an interesting lesson, though. One of the things I learned early on was, never write the first episode of anything. Just jump in at episode three.
RD You can tell that you really respect the viewer, and you assume they’re intelligent, which is how you make good TV. You clearly know that.
SW It’s weird that people don’t think that. I’m like you, I don’t watch much telly, partly because family things mean that time is precious. Then when you do, it’s things that are very rare, like Catastrophe, that are just amazing. You have to concentrate, otherwise you don’t get half of it. People who have telly on in the background – I’m not writing for them.
RD I heard that phrase recently, “background television”. Netflix was considering something where you could speed up TV shows a bit. I think they might have just put this in the news to make people angry – but you could snort them up quicker.
SW Oh, but you can! If you put it on fast forward, you can still get the sound. My son does that, so he can get through it all.
RD I’d like to talk to your son. How old are your children?
SW George is 22, Felix is 20.
RD Mine are eight, six, Henry would be four, and my youngest is 15 months old. They’re all boys. We wished we had girls as well. What’s silly about me is that I thought it would take a girl to awaken my paternal urge. I thought you can just give boys some bananas and a hammer, and they’ll be fine. But in fact boys are very tender, and they need love just as much as girls, so I quickly learned that having boys is wonderful.
SW I was really pleased when we had boys, but I think my husband, Austin, really wanted a little girl, for the same reason.
RD We might adopt one, one day. I clearly can’t make them. It’s the men, apparently, who determine the gender, so it’s my fault we have all boys. I’m sorry. But I’m doing my best to unleash kind men on the world.
SW I wanted sons because I couldn’t stand the idea of going to Toys R Us and buying those horrific little dolls with not-proper feet, whose limbs don’t move. I needed people who would want Action Men. But maybe I’d have had a girl like me, who’d have wanted Action Men anyway.
I lost a baby.
RD At what age?
SW It was a late miscarriage. I had to give birth. I know it’s not the same, but I have some understanding.
RD My wife and I go to a bereaved parents’ group, which is massively helpful to us, and I know one story in particular is rather similar, and the pain that family is in is awesome. So, it’s all different. It’s funny. Life hurts, you know. My wife and I, when we can, we try to take a little grief nap together. It hasn’t been two years since Henry died, and it’s really nice to lie on the floor, or a bed. And recently, our six-year-old son came down and he had cut up pieces of paper in the shape of a star, but it was like a head, arms and legs, and he coloured it in and said it was a tumour killer ninja. He could have had a tantrum, which is a fine thing to do in grief. It touched us deeply that he took some feelings he was having and turned them into something with some artistic skill and care, and shared it with us. That made our week.
SW When you write, do you find that bad things end up in your writing? I’ve written a couple of things in my life that I realised, after the event, came out of shit happening. And in a very different form to the original shit. It was only retrospectively that I realised I’d turned them into something. If you’ve got a creative mind, I suppose you do.
RD With the fourth series of Catastrophe, which I wrote with Sharon Horgan after Henry had died, I couldn’t even imagine going into work, but I knew that I had to. Mainly because I wanted to model normal behaviour for my kids: Daddy goes to work, so hopefully they can go, “OK, then I’ll go to school.” But rather quickly, I found I began to enjoy the process. I would still take time to cry, or leave early if I just had to go sob, but I did find work and grief to be compatible. Certainly, the fourth series of Catastrophe, I think it is readily believable that one of the people involved in its creation was going through a tremendous amount of pain. But what was also fun was weaving some laughs out of that and putting some funny stuff in there.
SW How do you and Sharon work together? Do you sit together and work it all out, or do you go away and do it separately? Do you improvise?
RD We will talk, then transcribe, then read out loud, because our fear is that we might sound like a television show, where you watch and you’re like, well, that’s clever. That’s a creative sin. You have to sound like human speech. So we vastly prefer to be in the same room, so we can sound off each other.
SW Do you ever argue, or disagree about how a line will work, or what the funny bit actually is, as opposed to the bit that makes it not funny?
RD Yes. And that’s fine. Because we both knew the other one had the show’s best interests at heart, so there was no wrong decision. If someone felt really passionate about it, then the other person would yield or, since the disagreements were not too frequent, shoot both and let somebody else decide.
SW And because you call yourselves Rob and Sharon as characters…
RD [Laughs] That was a mistake.
SW Was it? The reason it feels so real is because you think, oh, that’s what they’re really like, and that’s why they’ve used their names.
RD We just did that as placeholders when we were writing because we couldn’t think of any names. Then the network said, we’d prefer you kept it as Rob and Sharon. We were happy to let them have little decisions like that. Sometimes you hear writers complain about notes, and the fact is that some notes are good. We were going to leap right to them being married by the end of the first episode. And I remember Channel 4 saying, what if you showed us getting to know them? That wound up being the whole first series.
SW It’s such a simple idea, I think that’s why it works so well. I’m shit with notes, I hate them. My first draft is always my last draft, as far as I’m concerned. [Laughs] No, occasionally you get a good note. It’s good to know when to listen and it’s good to know when to fight back.
RD Of course. I imagine you’re pretty good at that by this point.
SW I am. [Laughs]
RD Would you be able to drive a Routemaster bus right now? Is that the one you drove?
SW It’s been a while. I might need to practise a bit. They’re quite tough to drive, the old Routemasters – not like they are now. There’s power assist and stuff. The old Routemasters, you used to have to stand up in your seat to pull them around a corner. I often see a bus and think, could I still do that?
RD I used to drive a water taxi in Boston, where I grew up. We were closer to a big harbour than either Boston or Gloucester, Massachusetts, where the two coastguard outposts were, so we could often respond to emergencies faster than they could. We would go out in storms and help save people, and stabilise them until the coastguard got there. Honestly, with all the horrible jobs I’ve had, in between that one that I loved, and this one that I love, it’s the only one I still daydream about.
SW I have recurring nightmares about being a bus driver. It’s more about being off route and not knowing how to get back on route. If I’ve got stress going on in my life, my brain goes off route.
RD Could you tell me about your writing day?
SW It evolves all the time. I get up at 4am most days. I think that’s because I concentrate best then. By 9 o’clock, in an ideal world, I’ve done five hours’ work, but that doesn’t always happen. I’m going through a patch at the moment where I really can’t concentrate, which is bad. So I’m trying to write one episode a month [of the second series of Gentleman Jack]. It’s just the nature of it, there’s so much research involved. It’s not like Happy Valley, where I’m just making it all up, or Last Tango. There’s a ridiculous amount of reading involved. You know we get paid silly money in this industry, and it’s the first job I’ve done where I actually feel like I’m earning it. It’s tough, but I love it. I feel so lucky that I’m the person who got hold of this story.
RD Well, you are, and so are we. I did a Makaton bedtime story. It’s not quite a language, but it’s a communication technology for kids and adults with certain disabilities, and we used it with my son Henry. He had a tracheotomy, and when you’re that young, if you have a tracheotomy, you can’t speak, so he had to learn Makaton from a young age.
SW I’ve not heard of that before.
RD I was asked to do a CBeebies bedtime story and I said I’d like to do it in Makaton. It was so great to do Makaton with Henry, and now we’re doing it with our new baby, who’s 15 months and a wild animal. Our wildest yet. Oh God, such a tornado.
SW Can you tell jokes in Makaton?
RD Have I tried to be funny in Makaton? No, I haven’t. Will I tonight with my son? Yes.
So you started directing with Happy Valley. You seem to have taken to it. There’s no looking back?
SW I don’t know if I’m going to be able to. It just takes so much time. It’s balancing that desire to direct with reducing the amount of output, which is difficult. I really want to get back to Happy Valley. I’ve got to take a back seat with directing, I think, but I’m not quite reconciled to that yet. It’s tricky. Are you directed when you do standup, or do you work it all out yourself?
RD That’s the great thing about standup – you’re the writer, director, producer, stage manager, the whole thing, so that’s quite liberating.
SW I always admire standup comedians. I’d love to write about one. It’s such an unusual thing to do; it’s so exposing. I don’t think writing drama is exposing, because nobody knows who I am. Nobody knows what I look like.
RD Some of the sex murders in the second season of Happy Valley are clearly some of the things you’ve either witnessed or done.
SW [Laughs] It’s interesting how many people have said to me, “Oh my God, you’ve got a sick mind.” I don’t think I have. I can hide behind the fact that it’s just fantasy. With the standup, there’s nothing to hide behind. That’s what I find awesome. You’re performing this stuff that is presumably actually about you. Even if it isn’t, if it works, it should feel like it. It’s like you’re telling somebody your dirtiest, rottenest, most perverse secrets. Then if they don’t respond, which clearly they do to you…
RD It’s crushing. It’s a weird thing. There’s got to be some sort of kink in your head that makes you want to do it. So many things are daring. A lot of people look at what we do and think that it’s very risky. Which it is. The success rate is low. We don’t usually think that way, because it’s what we want to do. Yet I do flip out whenever I see a new restaurant open on a high street. I’m like, do they have any idea how hard it is? I get really nervous for them. So I’m still human about other people’s risks, but for me I’m like, yeah, screw it, take that risk.
SW How old were you when you started doing standup?
RD When I started doing it all the time, I was 27. So a little later than some folks. At 27, it was now or never. Coming into the public eye, I’m glad for myself that that happened after I was married. I mean, no one knew who I was until I was married, two kids, sober for many years. I wouldn’t want to be bouncing around the entertainment world with any drink or drug problem. It’s nice to know who you are before other people, who aren’t your intimates, begin to think they know who you are.
Here’s a question I have: is there any stuff out there that you’d like to write in the style of?
SW I think I do it all the time, consciously and subconsciously, if I see a good show on telly. Nurse Jackie had a massive effect on me. I think I wrote Happy Valley because I wanted to write my own Nurse Jackie.
RD I think young writers should pay attention to that. To admire, or allow yourself to be influenced, is so absolutely artistically valid. OK, thus ends the lesson.
SW Have you got other TV shows that you’re developing?
RD I’m writing a pilot right now, and I won’t say anything about it. Sorry. [Laughs] But I’m having fun. I’m just about to dive into the first draft.
SW Is it a comedy? Or are you not allowed to say?
RD It’s funny, but is it a comedy? I don’t know if it is. But is there funny in it? Yeah.
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