Q&A: Screenwriter Sarah Phelps on Why She Writes (the Really Long Answer)
In a sweeping interview, the acclaimed British writer discusses her Agatha Christie adaptations, 'unlikeable' female characters, and working through a brain injury to finish her latest series
“Well, she’s fucking brilliant, isn’t she?”
This was just one of the many responses I received from British screenwriters when I shared the news with them that I was currently engaged in one of my artist-on-artist conversations with Sarah Phelps. Her name elicits this kind of (often curse-laden) enthusiasm because she is one of the most respected and celebrated screenwriters working in U.K. TV and, by the estimation of myself and many others, the world.
Amongst Sarah’s many accomplishments are “Great Expectations” (2011), a now iconic quintet of Agatha Christie adaptations (2015 to 2020), “Dublin Murders” (2019), "A Very British Scandal" (2021), and, most recently, the horrifying, heartbreaking, achingly beautiful "The Sixth Commandment" (2023). There is a darkness to much of her work, in that it scratches and claws its way under the belly of British society, exposes its grotesquerie, and lays it bare for all to see with, variously, delight, gothic thrills, and divine wrath - or maybe we should call it a screenwriter’s wrath. This said, I find it equally intrigued by such mercilessness as it is mercy.
This is easily the most comprehensive artist-on-artist conversation I’ve ever had for this series, digging into and dissecting her work on her Christie quintet, "A Very British Scandal", and "The Sixth Commandment", in particular. Because of that and the fact that many of the series we discuss are not necessarily widely known outside of the U.K. and U.K.-adjacent territories, I’ve taken the unusual step, for this Substack at least, of breaking our chat down into sections. Most come with introductions to set up what’s about to be discussed for the Sarah Phelps neophytes who want to learn from her work, craft, and experiences. And trust me, there is so very much to learn here. Enjoy!
BEGINNINGS
COLE HADDON: Sarah, I’m going to skip trying to express just how excited I am to get to talk to you about your work and just say I am. I want to start off by trying to wrap my head around how you work because you’re easily one of the most prolific writers I can think of. I don’t mean you’ve written many successful projects or anything like that, rather how many episodes of television you’ve actually written over the past two decades. I did the math here, and there was a stretch from 2002 to 2016 that you were writing an average of just over ten episodes of TV a year. These were produced episodes, which I only point out because I’m confident there was other development in there that never saw the light of day. That is an almost super-human pace, made all the more impressive by how you constantly shifted between genres. Can you talk about this first part of your career and what it taught you about your craft and yourself?
SARAH PHELPS: Thanks for inviting me to this. So, okay…yeah, I wrote many, many episodes of TV early on in my career. My first actual writing gig was working for the BBC World Service soap, the small but truly mighty “Westway” and from that I got invited to do the shadow scheme on the BBC soap "Eastenders", a show I adore, have watched religiously and passionately. I just…hit the ground running and, by the time I’d written my second episode for them, I was asked to come and storyline and then, it was just all guns blazing. At the same time, I was writing “No Angeles” for Channel 4 in the U.K., a comedy-drama about four nurses in Leeds, created by Toby Whithouse - who subsequently created “Being Human”, another fantastic show I wrote on. And at the same time, I was also working on development projects and writing guest episodes of other shows with varying degrees of success. Some I got sacked from, which was annoying but gave me great anecdotes. Some I walked away from because we weren’t the right fit and I should have trusted my gut from the start.
CH: I’ve never had a problem with writing at a racehorse’s clip, but what you’re describing really is staggering.
SP: If I’m honest, I don’t think I ever thought about how much I was doing, just that I was always doing it because I loved it so much and was so deeply invested in all the stories and the characters. Plus, there was some familial chaos going on and it was a bit, “Fuck, if the hardest thing I’ve got to do today is write an episode of “Eastenders”, then I’m laughing. Sometimes, I’d look up from my desk and think how much my life had changed. I never imagined for a second this would be my life, you know, and now it was - and I hadn’t had time to notice it. Then there would be a production issue or a new deadline and I just cracked on with what needed to happen next.
CH: Is there a part of you that regrets not being able to appreciate it more because of how much you were working? I can’t help but hear a screenwriter’s version of “Cat’s in the Cradle” playing in the background.
SP: But what would appreciating it look like? I stretch out on a sumptuous chaise longue and call for my opium pipe? I just wanted more more more. Greedy, you see. And I was so stunned to be doing this that I just wanted to do everything. Also, there’s a fair dollop of the dread imposter syndrome, that if you take your foot off the pedal for even a moment, someone will sidle up to you, put a heavy hand on your shoulder, and mutter, “Yeah, good try, now fuck off.”
“There’s a fair dollop of the dread imposter syndrome, that if you take your foot off the pedal for even a moment, someone will sidle up to you, put a heavy hand on your shoulder, and mutter, ‘Yeah, good try, now fuck off.’”
CH: I’ve had about thirty conversations with screenwriters in the past year now, all part of this series, and you’re the first to acknowledge how so many of us spend the first part of our career trying to outrace the imminent discovery that we are frauds despite how common I know it is amongst writers of any ilk. I think it’s vital to emerging writers to understand that even award-winning writers such as yourself — people they might admire, want to emulate, and so on — experience that terror.
SP: It never goes away. Never. It’s always prowling, licking its chops. Every new script. Every new project. Sometimes, when the terror is particularly ravenous, every single damn word.
CH: I had asked what this stretch of your career taught you about writing or even yourself.
SP: What did it teach me? Oh god, I don’t know. That I’m obsessive, for sure. I think, that I have to have a feeling for the story, an immediate visceral feeling for where the heart of the story is, and then you fight for it. And when I say fight, you have to fight for it in your first draft. Or I do. Go to war with myself to make sure the first draft is as complete as possible. If the first draft is half-baked, then too many conflicting voices come in with how it could be fixed and I just can’t work like that. I know screenwriting is collaborative, yadda yadda, and of course it is, but I have to own the world of the first draft and understand it, why the characters are doing what they’re doing, what the world smells like, how low the ceilings are, has the milk gone off, who owns the house the character lives in, can they make the rent this week, what is the terrible thing that wakes them up at 4 am covered in sweat? All of that, I have to know it and own it, all the deep, deep stuff. The who and the why and the when. The tiny abrasions, the grit, the racing heart, and the banging blood. The collaborative stuff comes later for me. I have to make sure that the people I’m working with and for can see it and believe it through my eyes, then we’re all heading in the same direction together. Christ, I sound like a little dictator. Obsessive and dictatorial. Fantastic personality traits.
CH: When my son left reception — this was in Camberwell — his teacher similarly and observed, “Well, someone has to run big corporations.” I think she meant to suggest he might be a sociopath, but all I thought was, “Orrrrr he’ll make a great screenwriter.”
SP: I have questions for that Camberwell teacher. It’s reception class for fuck’s sake - chill your tits!
CH: [Laughter]. Christ, you’re delightful.
“If the first draft is half-baked, then too many conflicting voices come in with how it could be fixed and I just can’t work like that.”
CH (cont’d): Can you tell me about your childhood? Did the arts play much of a part in it?
SP: Yeah, the arts were really vital. I’m the eldest of four, I’ve got three brothers, but we’re all born very close together. My youngest brother is exactly five years, five weeks, and five days younger than me. In all the family photos when we’re kids, my mum and dad have this 1,000-yard stare from the sheer chaos of all these feral children. And, god, we were feral. But we were so lucky, my brothers and me, because we grew up in a house full of books and art and history and music. My dad was a scenic artist for film and TV. Sometimes his work was painting huge areas of sky or parquet flooring and sometimes it was painting Beatrix Potter characters or Tudor-style portraits. I remember once, he had to paint a pastiche in the style of an Italian master for a drama about an art theft. We watched the drama, and there was my dad’s painting and a deranged villain slashed it with a butcher’s knife. My dad sighed and said, “Six weeks of my life - six bloody weeks!”
CH: I’m sure you’ve also had that same reaction once or twice while watching what’s been done to your work onscreen.
SP: Genuinely, I’ve only had that experience twice so far. The absolute gut punch of looking at what’s on-screen and thinking, “What in fuck has happened?” In one of these experiences, which was like having my skin flayed off, the first block director emailed me an apology for not treating the original material better and allowing it to be taken in another direction - but he was under a lot of pressure from execs blah blah blah. Well, fuck him, he’s a grown-up, should’ve stood his ground and fought. Anyway. I’m totally over it, it doesn’t claw my soul with shame and I’m not curdled with bitterness over it. At all.
CH: [Laughter] At all, of course. I created a ten-episode TV series that Sky aired. I still haven’t been able to bring myself to watch more than a few episodes of it – so I am incredibly envious of how much better your work has fared overall.
SP: I’m really sorry, it’s the shittiest of feelings. I was so overwhelmed with shame when I saw the work. Shame and fury. I still feel belches of the shame of being powerless to influence decisions made by people I’d been dumb enough to trust. Also, I bet they’re not feeling any shame.Ugh. But it is hideous. That’s nearly ten years ago now, but my brilliant friend Tony Jordan – creator of “Hustle” and “Dickensian” and many others – said “You’ve got to bounce off the ropes and come back swinging.” Dukes up, Cole. Dukes up.
“I still feel belches of the shame of being powerless to influence decisions made by people I’d been dumb enough to trust.”
CH: I’m still fighting the good fight. Sorry, I’ve distracted you. We were discussing your childhood.
SP: We were encouraged to draw and paint. My dad taught us the basics of perspective and things like, but let us get on with it. We painted on the walls and radiators, too, which didn’t go down quite so well but there we are. And reading. I was obsessed with books, had my own library card. I was allowed to spend time on my own just reading without being told to do something else. Just having my face in a book was a completely valid way of spending the day. And I’d read anything and everything. Someone I knew when I was living in Florence, working my way through the entire works of Mazo de la Roche while being covered in infected mosquito bites, told me I lived too much in my head. Yeah, probably but it’s the books that saved me really. The books and the horses.
CH: Is there a novel — or, really, book of any kind — that defines these memories of your childhood when you think about it?
SP: Oh god, loads. Penelope Lively, Rumer Godden, Patricia Leitch, Monica Dickens, Barry Hines, Laura Ingalls Wilder — and those books are wild! — and two books my mum had had in her childhood as a pony mad girl, as I was and still am, Silver Snaffles and The Wednesday Pony by Primrose Cummings. Everyone’s shitty about pony books, but I learned the word “execrable” from Silver Snaffles so. The Endless Steppe by Esther Hautzig, Summer of My German Soldier - my god, what a brilliant book by Bette Green. If I had to pin down one novel from childhood, it would be Fireweed by Jill Paton Walsh and The Greenage Summer by Rumer Godden, both outstanding - romantic and strange and lost and heartbreaking. Just brilliant. That’s two novels, sorry.
CH: Tell me about your mother.
SP: My mum was a teacher — history and politics — so there was always conversation about what we saw in the news, about how to read, how to interrogate language. I did very badly at secondary school, couldn’t stand it and ended up being turfed out, but at home, I was always able to retreat into reading or art. They loved comedy too, Mum and Dad, wordplay and bad puns and silliness as well punchier dramas and films. They were both, my mum and dad, in flight from the expectations of their class and family and the arts and education, for them, represented freedom and defiance, I suppose. Yes, defiance, definitely. So, yes, the entire spectrum of the arts. How important it is to be curious about the world and people and look closely, read and think closely - and how important it is to laugh. Me and my brothers are so very lucky to have had that upbringing.
“I didn’t have any idea I could get so worked up about what should be on Miss Havisham’s dressing table or how an ‘Eastenders’ character would talk about Jesus.”
CH: Earlier, you described this immediate, visceral feeling you have to have for where the heart of your stories are, especially with regard to first drafts. “I have to know it and own it,” you said, “all the deep, deep stuff.” You mentioned wanting to even know where the tiny abrasions and grit are. Your father’s career would’ve been focused on conveying such profound detail, to create something believable, something that felt true for audiences at home. Your mother taught you how to read, interrogate language, look and think closely. Am I imagining how straight this line seems from your parents to how you write and tell stories today?
SP: Yeah, must be. Though to be honest, I didn’t know I could be quite so furious about tiny details until I started writing. I mean, I was always furious about something, but I didn’t have any idea I could get so worked up about what should be on Miss Havisham’s dressing table or how an “Eastenders” character would talk about Jesus.
CH: So now, every time a producer struggles with you acting like a dictator — your joke — we know who to blame.
SP: Nah, my flaws are my own. I’m not making my poor parents shoulder the responsibilities of my character. And I think there’s only been two times I’ve butted heads with producers and execs. Mostly I want to work well and happily with people because they’ve got skills and talents that I will never possess and I want them to be happy in their work, but I have to be certain of the work I’ve given them, if you see what I mean. I’ve been called “difficult” in the past, but that’s said about women a lot.
CH: Especially in the film and TV business.
SP: It’s interesting when other women in this industry call you difficult, though. Like, really? Really? Nice gatekeeping you got there.
“Most of the time, even if I’m kicking against “notes” and “ideas”, there’s a big part of my brain that’s already working to find solutions to the questions.”
CH: You mentioned the “collaborative stuff” comes later for you, after your first draft…but that doesn’t exactly imply it comes naturally for you.
SP: I don’t know. I like talking about the work with people, but I get frustrated quickly, which is much more to do with me being hyper-aware of my own failings. I also find it really hard to spend a long time in rooms having meetings. That’s just a thing that’s always been there. Why I was not much good at school and jumped out of windows and whatever. And most of the time, even if I’m kicking against “notes” and “ideas”, there’s a big part of my brain that’s already working to find solutions to the questions, if you see what I mean. So, my angry mouth can be raging about some note being bullshit, but my mind is already chatting away, saying, “Yeah, but what if it happened like this? What if you put that there and moved this over here? What if?”
CH: Yes, I relate. I often wish producers just accepted many writers’ need to be allowed to honestly react — to have an authentic reaction I mean — before getting on with it.
SP: I think this also comes from working on a soap for so long when the turnaround has to be so fast, you’re aware that no one really has the answer, they just have the question and it’s up to you, the writer, to find the answer in the script, the story, the character, the dialogue or even the POV. It’s up to you to say, “What if?”
THE CHRISTIE QUINTET
Between 2015 and 2020, the BBC released five limited series adapted from Agatha Christie novels and short stories by Sarah Phelps. These proved controversial to some Christie devotees because of perceived liberties they took with aspects of the author’s work, but I found them each to be revelations. My gateway drug in this regard was “The ABC Murders” (2018), which was the first series of any kind my wife and I were able to focus on following the birth of our second son. The Hercule Poirot mystery, which delved into the iconic detective’s secret origins, kept me on the edge of my seat the whole time - as much because of the narrative as how I, a screenwriter, delighted at the decisions Sarah had made with the story. I quickly worked my way through the other adaptations already released, including “And Then There Were None”, “The Witness for the Prosecution”, and “Ordeal by Innocence.” A final adaptation, “The Pale Horse”, brought Sarah’s exploration of Christie to an end in 2020…or did it?
CH: I know you’ve talked about this a lot over the years, so I’m sorry to flog a dead horse here, but I have to ask about your Agatha Christie adaptations - which are so infuriatingly good. You wrote five of them over half a decade or so, which were huge successes at home and abroad. Hell, earlier this year Deadline even referred to a new Christie adaptation as the first in the “post-Sarah Phelps era”. Is it true you had never read one of her murder mysteries before you were approached to adapt And Then There Were None?
SP: Yeah, that’s completely true. They’d just never appealed to me. They weren’t on the bookshelves at home and when I went to stay with grandparents, they didn’t have any Christie either. They had every single James Bond novel, which is how I read the entire [Ian] Fleming oeuvre by the age of, what, ten? But there was no Christie and what I had seen of her and heard of her, or rather, the “world” of Christie didn’t appeal. Cosy Sunday night fare. I thought I knew who she was and what her books were. I was an idiot.
CH: What about Christie ultimately spoke to you as a storyteller?
SP: I was so surprised by And Then There Were None. Surprised and shocked by how remorselessly cruel it was, the occasional gallows humor, the mercilessness of it. It made me think of The Oresteia - you know, action begets action, you can squirm and wriggle and beg for forgiveness, but there’s no mitigation, just the unblinking eye of fate or God. No one can see you or hear you, no one is going to come to your rescue. No one. What you did, who you are, brought you here and this is the very end of your life. And it is going to be terrible. And they know what’s going to happen to them. Monstrous! It also struck me as being so subversive.
CH: How so?
SP: And Then There Were None was published in the summer of 1939, just before we went to war again after the war in which Christie served had reduced Europe to a charnel house. And here on this bleached rock are all the figures from Establishment Britain. The judge, the butler, the secretary, the playboy, the devout spinster, the doctor, the policeman, etcetera. They could all be the figures in some ludic bit of drawing room fun if you want to read the book just as a locked room mystery, but they are also the people who are supposed to be our compatriots, our neighbors, the people we can rely on in time of national conflict and war. They are also products of World War I. But underneath their respectable carapace, they’re all murderers, soused in blood and violence and yet, there’s no red mark of Cain on their brow, they haven’t been materially or existentially changed by their crime, they’ve just carried on living their solid Establishment life. And then you start to unpeel them, all the duplicity and the malice, the sexual jealousy, the indifference, the self-interest…and you see them. To me, it was Christie saying, “This is who your neighbors are, this is what authority is, this is what your countrymen do when they think they can get away with it. This is what the judge does in the dark.” I thought that was a stunning, astonishing thing to write about in 1939. Agatha, I thought, you sly bitch.
“I had this thought that you could write a quintet about England, from the end of World War I to the 1960s - and write about who we are and why we are, how we come to be here, right now, in the 21st century through the medium of murder mystery.”
CH: Okay, you’ve closed the book. She did her job and hooked you to such a degree you felt compelled to turn her work into a TV series. This was a defining adaptation for you, in that it led to a series of them. How did you decide to approach Christie from the perspective of the 21st century?
SP: While I was working on “And Then There Were None”, Britain was going into the EU referendum, one of the most catastrophic acts of self-harm ever and the language around the referendum was hideous. Nationalism, patriotism, borders, foreigners, otherness, who’s loyal, who is a traitor, what should happen to the traitors. It was vile, ugly, racist, and, as I was writing, I had this thought that you could write a quintet about England, from the end of World War I to the 1960s - and write about who we are and why we are, how we come to be here, right now, in the 21st century through the medium of murder mystery. Write the language of national identity, about history, about war, class, sex, poverty, wealth, about motherhood and servitude, about damage, about who gets killed, who kills and why. What killed the victim? Not just the weapon, but what condition, what atmosphere, what dynamic, both domestic and national, created the volatile dangerous environment where a person has their life ripped from them? So, anyway, I pitched it and…it happened.
SP: To this day I still haven’t read everything she’s written. I wanted to carry on being shocked by her and with that lunatically prolific output, there’s going to be repetitions and tropes and I didn’t want to be bored by the tropes, I wanted to be shocked by her. Her hiddenness, how cloaked she is, as a writer. There’s a real conflict with Christie, I think, between the book she wants to write and the book she knows her readers want to read. Especially post-And Then There Were None and later in her career. She gives little clues, little things that don’t fit, tonally or thematically, little throw-away details. And those are the clues I followed in my adaptations. The “what’s that doing there?” clues. I don’t know if any of this makes sense.
CH: It is, I think. But why don’t you give me an example?
SP: Okay, for an example…when we were talking about me adapting The Witness for the Prosecution, the Christie Trust were interested in the theatre adaptation, but I didn’t want that. I wanted the short story that she wrote early on in her career, in the twenties. It was the first thought, right? More raw, more unfiltered than she became later on in her career and one of the things — well, actually two of the things — which informed my thoughts about the adaptation was Mayhew’s cough. He has this little irritating cough, which his wife — the one mention she gets in the short story — says is a habit. It’s this habit which suddenly gets him to realize that Romaine and the mystery woman have the same habit, that of wringing their hands. But I thought, “What if the little cough was something else…?”
I mean, it’s the twenties, it’s post-war, life is very hard. Sure, there’s Bright Young Things hoovering up cocaine and cocktails, but the majority of people are scarred and haunted and traumatized by the War. What if…Mayhew’s cough is gas damage from the War? What if the reason he so completely believes Leonard Vole and goes to such extreme lengths to exonerate him and ruin Romaine is also because of damage from the War - grief and guilt? What if everything he does is to atone for a terrible sin committed in the heady early days of the war? What if?
Anyway, that’s what I mean by clues.
CH: This creative forensics work has me on the edge of my seat. I love this kind of thing. Can you tell me more?
SP: Well, I always make sure that are significant dates in the adaptations.
CH: How so?
SP: In “Witness for the Prosecution”, the murder is committed on the day of the Munich Putsch, the first time really that Adolf Hitler’s name is heard beyond Germany. And the year it’s set is when Howard Carter discovered Tutankhamun’s tomb. Just little nods to the world outside. There’s also a painting I put into all the adaptations.
CH: I suspect I know which one you’re referring to here.
SP: Agnes Dei by [Francisco de] Zurburán.
CH: Yes, I recall it from your series. It’s a haunting painting. I still remember seeing it in person while on my honeymoon in Spain. What was its significance to you?
SP: God, I’d love to see it in person. It haunts me. The lamb with its curly coat and its horns, trussed and bound. It’s Christ’s sacrifice, his surrender, but the lamb’s feet are tied. So, surrender and sacrifice isn’t a choice. We don’t know if it’s alive or dead. If the rope was untied, would it be able to bound away, or is it already carrion? It lives rent-free in my head, that painting, and it just seemed to me to convey something of the hell Christie puts her characters through.
“What would it feel like as everything that was known and familiar and certain crumbled under your feet and you fell helpless into the abyss?”
Oh, and the polar bears, they top and tail the adaptations. In “And Then There Were None” and “The Pale Horse”. The apex predator and the frozen howling wastes where it’s dark for half the year. The white nothing into which the characters fall. In the short story Witness for the Prosecution, there’s something that struck me about the way it ends as a story. You’ll have to look it up, but the placing of the text on the page, it’s as if you fall off a cliff into white space. This startling, cold, shocking revelation - and then white space, howling white space. What would that be like? If you had lived your entire life believing in the due processes of the law, twelve good men and true, and then you found out it was meaningless? What would it feel like as everything that was known and familiar and certain crumbled under your feet and you fell helpless into the abyss?
CH: It’s not often I’ve seen art used as symbolism that transcends a singular work, such as one specific series. It really does make them something of a conceptual whole, a quintet as you described, which brings me back to that observation I made that we’ve entered a “post-Sarah Phelps” Agatha Christie world. More adaptations were inevitable, but I wonder how that makes you feel now that the inevitable is here.
SP: It feels weird for there to be more Christies and I’m not writing them. I don’t know, though. I wanted to do a quintet. I did a quintet. I never wanted it to be so it was just another Christie, they had to be there for a reason, to tell a bigger story about us. Anyway. I did have an idea for doing three novels and a way of doing it. Two novels, one mid-career, one her final, and one of her earliest short stories. I wanted to call it “England Is a Haunted House”. Who knows? One day, maybe.
CH: One can only hope, or at least I will.
SCANDALS, CHARACTERS, AND QUESTIONS
“Sex, secrets and suspicion - the true story of a duchess publicly shamed in a high society divorce that gripped the nation. Starring Claire Foy and Paul Bettany.”
Which is how the BBC describes "A Very British Scandal", Sarah Phelps’ three-part exploration of the lives and marriage of Margaret Campbell, Duchess of Argyll and Ian Campbell, 11th Duke of Argyll. You could describe Margaret as a woman out of time, with an attitude toward sex that got her labeled '“the blo…” - actually I’ll let Sarah explain.
CH: This past week, I rewatched "A Very British Scandal" and tore through "The Sixth Commandment" – the latter of which I’m not ready to use declarations about, I like to stew with my art for a while, but I feel fairly confident in saying it’s my favorite thing of yours I’ve ever watched.
Before I ask about either of them, I want to observe that your Christie quintet and these two series are very much having a conversation with where the UK is today. I’m going to be longwinded here, so apologies now, but you’ve just gone into quite a bit of detail about that with the quintet, in particular. What I mean is, they have questions and ideas to explore, they have strong points of view – obviously, yours. But all are also incredibly character-driven, even when those characters are spectacularly enigmatic figures such as Paul Bettany’s Duke of Argyll in “British Scandal” and Éanna Hardwicke’s Ben Field in “Sixth Commandment”. What I’d like to ask is, what first grabs you about a potential TV project: the question — the ideas you want to explore for whatever reason — or the characters? I know it’s expected to say “characters first”, especially in the U.K., but I often find I react more to a mystery about our existence, or maybe our experiences of that existence that I want to explore or pick apart or whatever, and then only press forward if there are characters that excite me to do just that.
“He suddenly said, ‘Oh, she’s dead … Dirty Margaret, the blowjob Duchess.’ And I said, ‘I’m sorry, what?’ And that was the beginning.”
SP: Okay, so let me talk about "A Very British Scandal" first because I’ve been thinking about Margaret, Duchess of Argyll for such a long time - since July 1993 to be exact. I was working in telesales, cold calling businesses and trying to get them to waste their advertising budget on adverts in magazines that no one would ever see - what a shameless grift. Anyway, it was commission only and I was deeply shit at it. However, there was a guy who worked on another magazine, and he was very funny and kept my spirits up, and we would meet up early in the morning and rake through the papers and other magazines to find leads or things that could help our pitches, and he suddenly said, “Oh, she’s dead.” And I said, “Who?” And he said, “Dirty Margaret, the blowjob Duchess.” And I said, “I’m sorry, what?”
And that was the beginning.
SP (cont’d): I was reading her obituary and looking at these photos, her as a young women — the most photographed woman of her era and then her as an elderly women — this monumental black wig on her thin fragile neck, these pearls. She’d been the richest, most stylish, most adored, most engaged young woman. She was a celebrity in an era that worshipped the rich and titled, she had this terrible, brutal divorce from the Duke, and died penniless in a Pimlico nursing home. And even when she died, people were still referring to her as the “blowjob Duchess” and speculating over the identity of the man in the Polaroids who she was fellating. I looked at these photos of her and I thought, I don’t care about who the man was, who are you?
But this was all way before I was a writer or even knew I was going to be a writer. I was just desperately trying to make rent, so I just thought about her a lot and let the story sit behind my ear as it were. Anyway. Fast forward many years and the broadcast of Russell T. Davies’ “A Very England Scandal” with Hugh Grant and Ben Whishaw, which was brilliant—
CH: So brilliant.
SP: —and I was asked if I’d like to write another scandal, and before I even knew what I was saying, I said, “Yes and I want to write about Margaret, Duchess of Argyll and her divorce and the Polaroids.”
SP (cont’d): It’s interesting to me that you land on the Duke as the enigmatic figure for that drama and not Margaret herself. Her life was strange and complex and brutal. I find her completely infuriating and entirely courageous. She did some terrible things, but she was married to a very terrible man. Very terrible. The Duke himself, well, he had an appalling time in a prisoner of war camp where they were all starved and tortured and forced on death marches and some of his terribleness was a result of that trauma, but he was an absolute weapons-grade danger before the war, too. Put his previous wives through a very specific and sadistic hell and he put Margaret through the same. But she fought back. She fought. She had meager weapons compared to his, but, my god, she fought. I love her for that.
I remember being very shocked, though, through the writing process when I’d get notes like, “Will we like her if she’s that promiscuous?” I’m sorry, what? We only “like” women if they’re sexually well-behaved? And even during the launch screening, there was a Q&A where the cast and director were asked if they “liked” her. I found that astounding and insulting. Such a gendered question. Nobody was asked if they “liked” the Duke. I got really angry about that, really upset. I’ve just written a show which is about how the world, the media judges women for being sexual — how women are loathed for “unwomanly” behavior — and this is the question you come out with? Just absolutely fuck off with this shit.
“I remember being very shocked, though, through the writing process when I’d get notes like, ‘Will we like her if she’s that promiscuous?’ I’m sorry … we only ‘like’ women if they’re sexually well-behaved?”
CH: One of the most disheartening discoveries I made early in my career was that most producers — at least in Hollywood — are reluctant to permit a “likeable” woman an identity that includes being a sexual being. A woman enjoying a meaningless one-night stand without a hint of guilt was verboten, for example, but we could all agree how desirable and captivating a character Don Draper was for bedding everyone from young women to married women to his own employees. Female producers were just as guilty of this as male ones, by the way. It’s improved, but I wouldn’t say by much. Anyway, sorry, I digress. You were answering my question about what grabs you first about a story: a question or characters,
SP: I think, personally, for me, that I never imagine I’m going to pick apart the mystery of existence. A voice in my head goes, “The fuck do you think you are?” I want to know why someone has done or is doing or will do this thing. What made them do this? What conditions allowed this to flourish? It’s the absolute specificity of character that attracts me. I don’t want to try and write a universal truth, that, for me, is going to be a shit show. But I do want to write something absolutely specific about characters and their world because that will speak louder. I think.
Central to Margaret, for example, is how she was groomed from babyhood to be attractive to men, to be entirely subservient to the male gaze and male approval, how she was educated to be that and nothing more and how important it was to her parents’ ambitions that she made that kind of marriage that advanced them in society. When she was nine years old, Margaret’s mother took her to have a perm and to have her eyebrows plucked to “improve her looks.” Imagine that. Imagine the tweezing on her child’s face, the perm lotion burning her child’s scalp. Imagine. She was an isolated, lonely little girl caught between her mother’s criticisms and her father’s approval, and her parents used her as contested territory in their marital battles. Imagine that life. Imagine that childhood. Now grow her up and marry her to this cruel, brutal, unhappy, addicted man who seduces her with all the love, attention, approval, and adventure that she absolutely craved all her life when what he really wanted from her was her money. How when he’d spent her money, he tried to utterly ruin and destroy her.
“Do you ‘like’ her?” Christ, what an insult.
But that’s how I approached her, how I approached the Duke, how I approached all the characters - deep, deep dives into how their perceptions of self, the value of things, what makes you safe, what makes you frightened, how their entire world view is formed. But it’s always there, for me. That’s the real mystery. I can’t imagine being able to start at the other end, like, here’s a mystery - what character will serve it? My brain can’t work like that. I like the granular detail and that opens up to something universal, if you see what I mean.
CH: What’s fascinating about your response is I heard you explain my general approach, but you described it as from a character perspective – which makes me feel like my question is a bit of a Rorschach test for storytellers and we’re all discussing the same thing at the end of the day. Because I asked what first grabs you about a potential TV project. You then described these details and resulting questions that captivated you. For example, the story about first hearing about the “blowjob Duchess”. “I don’t care about who the man was,” you said of the Polaroid scandal, “who are you?” You had a very real emotional reaction to that, which resulted in you interrogating Margaret’s story, trying to understand how she became this person society turned into a symbol of, I don’t know, upper-class feminine depravity. Implicit in the story was a need to understand the people involved and how British society both created her and so thoroughly destroyed her, no?
SP: Oh yes, completely. And I wanted to understand that world, too. The hypocrisies of that class. How it consolidates its power. Margaret pulled the pants of her class down, for sure. She revealed the bare forked animal of her class.
“That’s important to me. How the world grates on us and our fears and anxieties and hopes and appetites. Where the power is.”
CH: One final question about "A Very British Scandal". This is a series that seems very much to speak to some of the qualities you described reacting to in Christie’s work. Or perhaps, it’s a continuation of your own fascination with it. Of respectable Establishment life covering up duplicity and malice and sexual jealousy and cruel indifference to the suffering of others. Am I mental in suggesting this series gave you a chance to explore more of what drew you to Christie in the first place but grounded in a real-world setting?
SP: Yeah, maybe. I like thinking about how the world acts on individuals. What is happening in the world when the tiny bomb explodes in a room between two people? That’s important to me. How the world grates on us and our fears and anxieties and hopes and appetites. Where the power is. Where the money is. Who gets to keep that? Who gets to cover their asses and pretend it never happened? Yes, the Church of England, I’m looking right at you.
THOU SHALT NOT KILL
"The Sixth Commandment", released in 2023, is a four-part true crime drama that tells the horrifying story of how the 2015 meeting of an inspirational teacher, Peter Farquhar (Timothy Spall) and a wildly charismatic student, Ben Field (Éanna Hardwicke), resulted in one of the U.K.’s most complicated and confounding criminal cases in in recent memory. It also focuses on how suspicions around Field’s relationship with Ann Moore-Martin (Anne Reid), Peter’s deeply religious neighbor, unlocked a series of chilling revelations for her family and investigators.
The series is easily one of the finest I’ve watched this past year. It’s a deeply unsettling mystery, a stomach-churning horror story with nary a drop of blood, and, somehow — thanks to Sarah’s storytelling grace — also an aching poem of both loneliness and love. Find a way to watch it wherever you live in the world.
CH: Okay, let’s talk "The Sixth Commandment". Because, as I emailed you, I couldn’t stop watching once I started except to go to bed – and even then, it followed me to my pillow. Before I offer any more of a reaction that that, I’d love to hear what it was that drew you to this true story of baroque horror.
SP: Okay, so I read about the case at the time. It was very recent. The trial was in 2019, so only just pre-pandemic. The BBC contacted me to ask if I would take a look at a documentary that had been made about Thames Valley Police’s investigation – Catching a Killer: Diary From Their Grave from True Vision Productions and Channel 4 – and to read some of the preliminary research material and talk about how I’d approach it as a story. So, I did, and the first thing that struck me was how like a fairy tale it was, one of those terrifying dark Ur-texts from Middle Europe, beasts loping out of the forest, all yellow eye and rank hides, their teeth shining with saliva and hunger, don’t stray from the path or Baba Yaga will get you with her house on its chickens feet – though I always kind of understood Baba Yaga and her need for everyone to leave her the fuck alone – Rumpelstiltskin, bad fairies at the newborn’s crib, Ashputtle sliding her foot into a shoe slick with blood. The Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Anderson, macabre little stories.
“The first thing that struck me was how like a fairy tale it was, one of those terrifying dark Ur-texts from Middle Europe, beasts loping out of the forest, all yellow eye and rank hides, their teeth shining with saliva and hunger, don’t stray from the path”
SP (cont’d): Here was this tidy English village where everyone puts their bins out, everyone behaves. They have book clubs and go to Church, they tend their gardens and listen to Radio 4, they pay their taxes. They’re good neighbors. It’s so absolutely English. And into this world slides this preacher man with his tender smile and his malevolent heart. Actually, it’s also like Flannery O’Connor, isn’t it? Southern Gothic. A Good Man Is hard to Find.
CH: Of course, yes!
SP: And the other image that sprang to mind was one of absolutely overwhelming loneliness. I kept thinking of Romances and the Romantic, of those tales of the lost beauty walled up by a curse or trapped in a forest of impenetrable thorns, and the bold knight or the prince fighting his way through to awaken the beauty with a kiss and restore them to life and love. That’s how I imagined Peter Farquhar and Ann Moore-Martin. Both loved and respected as teachers, both surrounded by their adoring families and friends, and yet…and yet, there was this loneliness. So, when Ben Field stepped into their life with his poetry and his avowed faith and love of the Church and Christ, he was the answer to their prayers. And Peter had prayed, he had prayed and prayed that if God felt he should be delivered from his anguish, the conflict of his faith and his sexuality, then God would make it happen. And here was Ben. The answer. Sent by God. And if Peter had prayed for him and he had appeared, then Ben was God’s love made manifest. To doubt Ben would be to doubt God.
CH: It’s a beautiful — and horrifying — description. Okay, so you’ve settled on writing a contemporary fairy tale, a gothic nightmare steeped in loneliness and religion. What does that mean in practice, given how dark it is?
“I did not want to glamorize Ben at all. Some true crime does that. A lot of fictional crime does that. The killer as enigma. I’m naming no names, but it always leaves a sour taste.”
SP: It is a very, very dark tale. And you need someone to pull you through, as it were. I had a phone meeting with Ann Marie Blake, Ann Moore-Martin’s niece who had discovered what Ben was doing and who triggered the police investigation into her aunt’s illness and subsequent death and into Peter and the others. Because there were others. Ann Marie hadn’t wanted to be part of the documentary, and she had to really trust that I was going to do right by her aunt. We had a big conversation, for hours. She absolutely blazes with courage and love. Where Ben offered this cold, calculating version of love, Ann Marie was the real thing. Real love. So are Peter’s family, they are real love - a light shining compared to Ben’s malice. The families are the motor that pulls us through the darkness.
So, that’s how I pitched it. As a fairy tale. Four episodes. Peter. Ann. The Police. The trial. That I wanted it to be about Peter and Ann and their families. That I did not want to glamorize Ben at all. Some true crime does that. A lot of fictional crime does that. The killer as enigma. I’m naming no names, but it always leaves a sour taste. I didn’t want that. I wanted to understand how Ben sidled and leeched and trespassed his way into their gardens, their houses, their lives, their hearts, their minds, their wills, and their deaths. And you can only understand that if you understand the ache in Peter and Ann’s hearts. And I wanted it to be about real love.
CH: I’m curious what it was like for you to actually research and write "The Sixth Commandment". I’m less inclined to be impacted by fictional violence I explore in my work, but for a few projects I’ve had to sink into real-world evil that left me with the feeling even the light in my own life was being snuffed out. This must have destroyed you.
SP: We were in lockdown at the time and all the research materials started arriving. Peter’s diaries. The police investigations - transcripts of interviews, coroners’ reports, toxicology reports. Trial transcripts, psychological evaluations, meetings and interviews with Peter and Ann’s families. I mean, it was intense. And some of the details in the research material were truly fucking horrific. The calculated cruelty. The delight in the cruelty made my blood run backward. I had recurrent nightmares that weirdly, resurfaced as we got closer to transmission, so that was lots of fun. I had to learn and commit that investigation and that trial pretty much to memory, so I could write the scripts and keep on top of the demands of legal compliance, spreadsheets for each scene with citations for sources to protect everyone involved from the potential for legal challenges from Ben Field and his family. Plus, halfway through the process I had a serious accident and spent a week in neurotrauma with a brain injury.
“Halfway through the process I had a serious accident and spent a week in neurotrauma with a brain injury. Try keeping on top of all that research with left-sided spasticity, no peripheral vision, hearing gone, balance gone and headaches that I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy.”
CH: Christ, I’m sorry.
SP: Try keeping on top of all that research with left-sided spasticity, no peripheral vision, hearing gone, balance gone and headaches that I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. We had to push back the shoot because I couldn’t even sit at my desk. But I had astonishing fellow execs — our producer and director and the BBC for support — so I managed it, but lord above. What a time! When I’d visit the set, I’d have to have someone with me to guide me over cables and uneven ground.
CH: Are you fully recovered?
SP: I’m pretty much okay now. Looking back on it, it seems an insane thing to do, really. Insane. But there we are. What kept me going though were these incredible people whose stories I’d been trusted with and the pull of the writing. Even with everything else and the sheer amount of work that had to be done with legal compliance, the story, the people, pulled me. It was all there, in my head, the rhythm and music of it, how much it mattered to give Peter and Ann their lives back.
CH: Can you talk about the structure you settled on? I’m particularly interested in the one-two punch of the first two episodes. In the first, Ben Field enters Peter Farquhar’s life, but you withhold his intent for most of the episode. Even when his malice begins to manifest, you don’t show his process. You don’t reveal what’s really happening or why, I mean, leaving it all for the viewer to work out in their imaginations even after Farquhar is found dead. Because of the nature of Field’s crime, Episode 2 follows the same general trajectory as Episode 1 – with the exception that this time, you show us how the magician does his trick. You let us see Field’s cruelty in practice. It’s a stroke of storytelling genius, as far as I’m concerned.
SP: Well, that’s very lovely of you, thank you. I was very aware that the case was recent and I wanted to try and allow the audience to forget what they knew, if you see what I mean. And I really wanted Peter and Ann to be more than Ben’s victims, more than the sum of the violations they endured and their deaths and that meant seeing Ben through their eyes. Ben had to be credible, so we had to be with Peter, falling in love with him. We had to be with Ann, being seduced. We have to be in their world so we can see the moment, Ben slithers in. It brims with malice, but the malice needs to sidle, just like Ben did. We need to understand how he went unnoticed, how he was trusted for so long.
CH: You referenced the demands of legal compliance to avoid any risk of legal challenges from Ben Field or his family, but I imagine also Field’s friend Martyn Smith who was accused of assisting him in his crimes. This is something I don’t hear screenwriters discuss enough, so I’d be interested to hear more from you on the subject. For example, did having to thread this legal needle result in anything unexpectedly exciting in the way you approached the story? Limitations can often result in innovation, I mean.
SP: Well, where Martyn Smith was concerned, it was obviously tricky because the Crown Prosecution Service bar for approving charges of murder and conspiracy are extremely high, as you can imagine. But the jury found Martyn not guilty, so the legal needle that needs to be threaded is that I have to go with the jury verdict and work backward, if you like. Have to go from that point of the jury declaring a majority verdict of not guilty and build a character based on his defense case, the defense case that Martyn was suggestible, vulnerable, suffered anxiety and depression because that convinced the jury despite the police evidence of complicity. I mean, you can be suggestible, vulnerable and suffer depression, and still be complicit, right? But I can’t say that in the drama. So, I just had to find those spaces to play that ambiguity, play that doubt, play the way Martyn wants to impress Ben, be a man of the world, as it were, play the expression on his face when the police read his own text messages back to him and Conor McNeil, who played Martyn, absolutely nailed it in his performance. That sense of a man standing on the edge of a cliff and the feeling it’s crumbling under his feet. Things he might have said to impress, to look hard. And now they were being read back to him, in interview, under caution. My god.
Both Ben and Martyn are such difficult roles, real balancing acts, and Eanna Hardwicke and Conor gave such extraordinary performances.
CH: Extraordinary, to say the least.
SP: I did find Martyn fascinating, though. He was obsessed with magic, the Victorian golden age of magic and illusion, wanted so badly to be a magician, failed quite spectacularly, and then finds himself at the center of this murder case. He’s like a Coen Brothers’ character, rather colorless and forgettable, who suddenly blinks awake and finds himself knee-deep in blood. Having to work like that with Martyn, though, within those legal limitations meant I could tell another story of seduction - that of Martyn being “glamored” by Ben.
CH: I appreciate the use of “glamored” there. It evokes your description of "The Sixth Commandment" as a fairy tale, which I imagine was your point.
From everything you’ve said now, this series emotionally challenged you in terrible ways. While you felt compelled to tell Peter Farquhar and Ann Moore Martin’s story, to give them their lives back as you described it, you had to live in that darkness for a very long time. I’m not going to ask something silly like, “Would you do it again?” Of course you would, it’s what we do. But there is a toll, and I wonder if you could talk about those scars, living with them even after the project is in the rearview window, and what they mean to you as a storyteller.
“I’ve locked them into a trunk. There’s a key and everything. I’ve got it all locked up, all Ben’s sins and crimes and it does pulse with its own malignity. But I turn the key and put my back to it. Stay in your box, you fucker.”
SP: Oooof. Well. Yes. There are the nightmares. I’ll be very happy to not have them anymore. Or ever. I think it would have been very easy to be entirely overwhelmed by the cruelty, the savagery of that case. But then Ben would have done what he wanted to do, he would have glamored me. And for as appalling as it was to live with him inside of his head, I wanted to tell other people's stories, so I had to be very tough on myself to not be subsumed. You know, I’ve got unique and privileged access to this police investigation, with everything that entails and access to those officers and the barristers and legal teams who built and prosecuted the case. So, yes, the killer’s mind is a bad place to be, its workings are sulfurous, but I’m also able to see the workings of other minds: the dogged, attritional, tireless dedication of Thames Valley Police Major Crime detectives and family liason officers, the astonishing, forensic detailed prosecution of the KC Oliver Saxby and his team and again, the families of Peter and Ann who faced this, who had to hear terrible, terrible things in court and learn the most awful, desolating, haunting details about what was done to their loved ones - and I’m going to bleat about scars? Bitch, please. I had insight into some incredible people besides Ben Field. So, I focus on them. Not his boundless viciousness but the people who stopped him. Righteousness, professionalism, dedication, commitment, justice, dignity, grace, love.
But I won’t lie, I have to keep all the documents and my color-coded notebooks just in case any questions come up, and I’ve locked them into a trunk. There’s a key and everything. I’ve got it all locked up, all Ben’s sins and crimes and it does pulse with its own malignity. But I turn the key and put my back to it. Stay in your box, you fucker.
THE REASON
CH: This has been one of the most expansive, forensic conversations I’ve had about an artist’s work and craft I’ve had either as part of this interview series or in my former life as an arts journalist. Thank you so much for being so detailed, blunt, and sometimes hilarious in your responses. I know others will inevitably learn so much from reading it, but I can also say I feel I’ve gained immeasurably from the experience. I hope one day we get to talk shop over a proper pint.
SP: I’d love that. The first round’s on me.
CH: One final question before I bid you adieu. The reasons why we write, why we tell stories, can evolve over time. Many writers I know don’t even remember who they were as artists twenty years ago. Why do you do it today? I mean, Jesus Christ, Sarah, you felt compelled to work through a brain injury and when you said that, I thought, “I get it, I do.” Is it a physical need for you? An intellectual or spiritual one? Some kind of combination of all three as it is with me? I just want to hear it in your words.
SP: Why do I do it? Rocky Balboa voice: Because I can’t sing and dance. Okay, so there’s no way I’m going to pretend that I race to my desk every morning in a hot sweat to start work - because I don’t. I’ll spend a day washing every bra I own by hand rather than start work. I stamp and whine and moan and fret but when I’m in it, it is a physical thing. And I don’t find it easy, I wish I did. I find it so fucking hard. Sometimes I look at a word and wonder why I’ve chosen that word, out of all the words I could have chosen, why that one? What does that word do to the balance of the story? Does it send it in the wrong direction? What the hell is that character doing and why? What are those characters doing when I can’t see them? That drives me round the twist. And sometimes, thinking about all the eyes that will read what I’m writing and give notes makes me feel sick with anxiety and dread. There are times when I look at what I’ve written and want to set fire to everything. But. But. Sometimes, just fleetingly, something happens. I’m trying to think of a way to explain this that doesn’t make sound like I need an intervention and I don’t think there is one so, here goes.
CH: I’m ready.
“There are times when I look at what I’ve written and want to set fire to everything. But. Sometimes, just fleetingly, something happens.”
SP: I’ve mentioned horses before. I’ve been obsessed with horses since I was tiny, still am. Horses were my job for a long time and when I was sixteen, I left home to go and work at a stables in Wales, near the Preseli mountains. They did eventing, had loads of horses and ponies for trekking and riding lessons, all of that. And a huge sheep farm where I learned to lamb but that’s another story. Anyhow, my first winter there was like nothing else I’d known. Totally cut off by snow. It was brilliant. One night ,we had to move all the horses and ponies from one field to another more sheltered area. So, me and the girl I worked with were riding a pony each, rope halter and bareback, no crash helmets because we were young and foolish, leading and driving about twenty-odd beasts through the snow. The moon was high and from nowhere, we just started galloping through the snow. All the horses around us and hand to god, if I’d looked down at myself and seen I’d grown hooves and hide and was no longer a human girl, I wouldn’t have been the slightest bit surprised. It was as if everything fell away. Everything. All the puny woes and irritations, no fear, no doubt, just movement and muscle and speed and cold. No ego. It was entirely euphoric, almost like a fugue state, thinking and reacting with an entirely separate part of your brain. Absolutely heady and addictive.
And I suppose that’s the feeling I’m always chasing when I’m writing, the fleeting moment when everything falls away and the thing itself flexes its own muscles inside its own skin, when the thing itself, the beast, gets its own shining, dirty life with filth under its nails and a glint in its eye. There’s the intellectual pleasure of arguing with yourself, pulling things apart and putting them back together, writing a line that makes you laugh or cry - but you’re in the room for that. I love that, don’t get me wrong, I love it. But that moment which you don’t always get, which happens only sometimes and so fleetingly, when you look at what you’re writing and go “Oh, there you are, you tricky bastard.” When you forget what the time is or whether you’ve eaten or changed your clothes for the last couple of days or slept. When the thing is its own self. That’s the compulsion. That’s what’s physically addictive, when everything falls away, that strange euphoric fugue state when everything shuts up, when I’m not in the room. That wild racing moment where your blood just bangs. That.
And then you send it in and it comes back with the note, ‘We have thoughts, here are the headlines,” and you smash something, drink heavily, weep hot bitter tears into the carpet, gird your loins and start again.
Told you it sounded like I need an intervention.
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SUCH a super interview (and I'm not just saying that because I too loved pony books growing up). What a force of nature and inspiration Sarah is. Thank you both for this!
I loved this interview...she is brilliant!!!!