Already well-known as the setting for soaps - Coronation Street, Emmerdale, Hollyoaks, previously Brookside - the north of England has been having something of a moment in shorter-run TV dramas. BBC1’s police thriller Happy Valley, starring Sarah Lancashire set in the Calder Valley and written by Sally Wainwright, will return for a third series after its second pulled 7 million viewers. Romantic drama Last Tango in Halifax, also by Wainwright, has a fourth series lined up. This spring saw the fifth (and final) run of ITV’s Scott and Bailey, about two Mancunian female detectives. The Five, a new crime thriller filmed in Liverpool, debuted on Sky1 earlier this summer.
Behind them all is Manchester-based Red productions, an independent production company headed by Nicola Shindler. It is one of the few big production companies not to be based in London and has been responsible for some of the most memorable televisual depictions of northern England, ranging from Russell T Davies’s 1999 series Queer as Folk, about three men living in Manchester’s gay village, to Clocking Off, a 2000-03 series following a group of workers in a textile factory.
Sitting in the bar at the Lowry theatre in Salford’s Media City, Shindler is talking about the word “gritty”. “I get very cross about that [word],” she says. “That’s why when we set out to do things like Queer as Folk or Clocking Off, which was set in a factory, we said … it has to look beautiful, it has to have colour in it, it has to have warmth, it has to show that people love their homes.”
Although the north of England frequently appears in TV drama, she says it is how it is represented that is the problem. “It’s just that idea that everyone in the north is impoverished and disenfranchised,” says Shindler. “I think the thing that’s brilliant about what Sally [Wainwright] does in Last Tango in Halifax is that she shows the northern middle class and they rarely get on telly.
“Manchester is really lucky. There’s always been a history of making drama here, but it’s about who you make [the shows] about and without it being ‘it’s grim up north’, you can make things that have humour and have warmth.”
Shindler began her career as a script editor on Jimmy McGovern’s Granada crime drama Cracker before working as an assistant producer on BBC2’s Our Friends in the North and a producer on ITV’s Hillsborough, a dramatised account (also written by McGovern) of the Sheffield stadium disaster starring Christopher Eccleston.
She founded Red Productions in 1998, naming it after her favourite football team, Manchester United. Its first production was the multi-award-winning Queer as Folk, which Guardian critics named the 13th best drama series of all time. In 2013, Red sold a majority stake to French film and TV company StudioCanal, in a deal thought to value the UK firm at about £30m.
Earlier in the evening, she had told an audience at Creative England’s Northern Lights event how she had ended up making the leap away from the TV industry’s centre of gravity in London. “I did work in London for 10 years, and that really helped [my career], but from the third year ... because I was working at Granada, I was sent up to Manchester a lot.
“I’d made a couple of things as producer, literally just a couple of things, both of which were filmed in Manchester. I realised I worked best when I was working on something I really believed in and I thought the best way to do that would be to set up my own company. I was ridiculously young and had no responsibilities other than keeping a roof over my head,” said Shindler. “Really I did it because my mum would be too cross if I stayed in London,” she added.
The BBC has made a similar move, transferring thousands of staff to Salford at the start of the decade. Shindler told the audience the exodus was a good idea, but one which will take a while to pay off properly. “We’ve seen people come and set up offices and go because there’s no genuine commitment to the area. I think Media City is a brilliant idea and all of those young people who are working around where we are now, hopefully they’ll be setting up their own companies one day. It’ll take some time, but I think having built Media City and having moved half of the BBC here is absolutely the right thing. I think it will work in the long run.”
Back in the bar, she describes the development of the area’s media industry since she founded Red 18 years ago. “At first it was still quite buzzing, and then we went through a period where we were pretty much alone and there was very little drama being made here, and then, slowly, more investment has been made and more [television] is being made up here, definitely.”
Despite Red’s successes, Shindler doesn’t claim that being based in the north necessarily makes for better TV. “Sometimes it’s easier to make drama here and I think some of the voices I’ve worked with have been very northern voices, but I don’t think it makes it better necessarily. If it is better it’s because of the scripts that we get, the actors, the directors who work on the shows and how much work goes into them, not because of where we’re based.”
She says there are pros and cons to making television outside the capital. Filming away from it is easier because you don’t have London traffic to contend with and being closer to the countryside means there’s a wide range of shoot locations on your doorstep. But she usually has to travel to London once a week for meetings and says there is a shortage of experienced people who can take senior production roles in the north. “People will say ‘I’ll meet you at half eight in the morning’ and don’t realise that I’ve got a life and got children who I need to get to school, because they expect everyone to be in London,” she says.
Shindler adds that many of the companies she needs to work with are London based “so I don’t have as close a relationship with them as other production companies do, but it’s important to me to be up here because it’s where I want to live. I came in at the tail end of Granada and there were a group of really talented people who were based in the north and who I wanted to use and thought were great. And all the writers I seem to work with had brilliant strong voices.”
Is it being based in Manchester that helps make Red’s dramas distinctive? “It’s hard for me to judge from the inside, but I do think that what we do is influenced by the people and the places we’re in, therefore I guess it must feel different. To not have that metropolitan feel, to have different actors in it – I think that probably does make [what we do] different.”
Curriculum vitae
Age 48
Education Bury Grammar School, University of Cambridge
Career 1993 script editor, Cracker, ITV 1996 assistant producer, Our Friends in the North, BBC 1998 founder, Red Productions 2000 Red produces Clocking Off 2013 sells majority stake in Red to StudioCanal
