Riot Women would have been ‘difficult sell’ without Sally Wainwright

Forthcoming BBC1 drama Riot Women would have struggled to sell in today’s drama landscape if it didn’t have Sally Wainwright on board, according to the show’s exec producer. 

Drama Republic co-chief exec Roanna Benn acknowledged that the series premise – which sees five women form a makeshift punk-rock band in order to enter a local talent contest but soon discover they have a lot to say – does not necessarily fit commissioners’ current wish-lists. 

“If it wasn’t Sally it would’ve been a difficult sell, definitely,” said Benn, who is exec producer on the six-part series.

Addressing delegates at a keynote conversation at Series Mania in Lille today, she went on: “We hoped that people would read the scripts and go for it. But, in this climate, it is not what people are saying they’re looking for, which is really sad. 

“There are no dead bodies in the show, and that makes it harder these days.”  

Riot Women was announced at Edinburgh TV Festival 2023 and is set to launch at a time where producers and talent are lamenting a crisis in UK drama, with numerous greenlit UK PSB dramas struggling to find funding to get them into production. 

Benn noted the importance of having two “fantastic partners” in US collaborator BritBox, which boarded after the BBC, and distributor Mediawan Rights, which is Drama Republic’s sibling within the Mediawan family. 

Both Wainwright and Benn said they hoped the series, which covers everyday topics such as jobs, kids, parents and husbands while addressing the experiences of women in their 50s navigating the menopause, would find a broader audience. 

“I hope it’s for everyone,” Wainwright said..” I think it does reflect back at 50-plus women in life, but it’s also about their children and grandchildren.” 

The writer said that though there’s a “lot of humour in it”, Riot Women “is not a comedy” and is more akin to thriller Happy Valley than her other Yorkshire-set BBC work Last Tango in Halifax. 

“It’s got a very dark [tone] running through the whole thing,” she said. “It’s got a really serious historic crime story in it. One of the characters had something very distressing happen to them as a child, and has been triggered to remember something at the beginning of the series.” 

Riot Women features an all-star cast including Joanna Scanlan (The Thick of It), Rosalie Craig (Moonflower Murders), Tamsin Greig (The Completely Made Up Adventures of Dick Turpin), Lorraine Ashbourne (Sherwood) and Amelia Bullmore (The Buccaneers), alongside with Taj Atwal (Line of Duty), Chandeep Uppal (Holby City), and Macy-Jacob Seelochan (Shadow and Bone) as the band’s riotous backing singers. 

Wainwright is lead director and Jessica Taylor (Happy Valley) is producer. Benn (One Day) exec produces alongside Tanya Qureshi for the BBC, Robert Schildhouse and Jess O’Riordan for BritBox.