Sally Wainwright Reveals How Her Band Of ‘Riot Women’ Learned To Play A Tune — Series Mania
- Sally Wainwright's new BBC series Riot Women features a cast of middle-aged women forming a punk rock band, with only one lead having a musical background prior to filming.
Sally Wainwright has assembled a band for her latest BBC series Riot Women but it turns out her cast could barely play a tune when they first came together.
The Happy Valley creator revealed today that just one of the five Riot Women leads had a musical background prior to cameras rolling – the lead singer, played by Rosalie Craig. Made for the BBC and BritBox and previously titled Hot Flush , Riot Women follows a group of middle aged women who form a punk rock quintet. It stars BAFTA-winner Joanna Scanlan, Tamsin Greig, Lorraine Ashbourne and Amelia Bullmore. Mediawan is selling Riot Women.
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After learning their respective instruments from scratch for six months, Wainwright said the cast clicked musically almost immediately.
"They rehearsed together as a band and they bonded," she said during a Series Mania masterclass. "They were literally playing together and had to get to the end without stopping while playing at full speed. Amelia at the end said, 'We really are a band'."
Wainwright joked: "If ever your cast isn't bonding just get them to sing a song together."
Wainwright talked the Series Mania audience through the process of creating and writing the songs for Riot Women, songs that she revealed have names including 'S***ting Pineapples', 'Just Like Your Mother' and, unsurprisingly, 'Riot Women'.
The team enlisted Arxx, a real band, and gave them creative briefs and lyrics, which the band then took and "put in a machine and turned out fabulous stuff," according to Wainwright.
While the show has comic elements, Wainwright stressed it is not a comedy and "has a very dark story running through it."
She therefore said Riot Women is "much more akin to Happy Valley than Last Tango in Halifax," both of which she created for the BBC. "It has a really serious historic crime story," she said of Riot Women. "A character had something distressing happen to them as a child and it has been triggered."
Wainwright also discussed how personal the show is to her.
"You get to an age where you have to deal with things like elderly parents who need your help, and my husband left me, so there was that," she added. "And you're at the height of your career being pulled in all sorts of directions, and then there's the menopause, which makes you feel invisible. So I wanted to write about that feeling. The menopause can be seen as an energy drain but I wanted to find a time to give it a new kind of energy."
Roanna Benn, who is producing Riot Women for Mediawan-owned Drama Republic, said a show about middle-aged women "would be a difficult sell" in today's risk-averse funding climate.
"It is not what people are sitting here looking for, which is really sad and means we don't always have the breadth," she added. "But I'm so pleased this is coming out and we are going to have these characters in this time."
Wainwright was speaking at Series Mania, which runs till Thursday in Lille. Later today, James Norton will lead a similar masterclass.
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