Flack, W

The process of making Flack started six years ago over coffee with my producer Mark Talbot – then a fresh-faced development exec. He asked me if I had any ideas and I told him I wanted to write a piece that explored the world of tabloid newspapers and celebrity by looking at its underside and the cynicism behind it.

However, what started as an idea set in a glossy tabloid magazine office evolved into a show about PR when I started to realise the full powers of these masters of the ‘dark arts’.

Twisted satire

Tonally, I was aiming for Drop The Dead Donkey meets Entourage via The Thick Of It. Dark, twisted satire, unpicking the public’s obsession with celebrity culture and the work that goes into maintaining the myths.

My other ambition was to create a show with a cracking female anti-hero at its centre. I remember being given a book called Difficult Men about male showrunners and their remarkable male creations, from Don Draper to Tony Soprano. I told Mark I wanted to write a character that could feature on the cover of the book Difficult Women.

There are many pitfalls when trying to create a show embedded in celebrity culture. By necessity, it has to be relevant and current, while also being, frankly, quite rude at times.

One of the joys of watching a show like Flack is letting the audience tie themselves in knots trying to figure out which famous figures the characters and stories in the show could be based upon.

I have had many people come up to me and say: “That character is X, isn’t it?” This often leads them to tell me another story I had no idea about, which just goes in the fuel box for a potential series two.

The truth is, all the ideas for stories come from a seed of truth, a person or rumour (or an outright piece of gossip) I heard during my research wining and dining with the great and good of the PR world, but none of the characters is a direct representation of any one person.

The point of Flack is not to name and shame; it is to examine the mechanisms behind this force of media we are consuming every day – the stories we crave and accept, even though deep down we know they must be untrue.

PR is a dance with the public; great PR is about painting a picture of the world that you know your audience want, which makes them ever willing to accept it, no matter how ludicrous it may be.

We had great fun shooting the show. Our locations ranged from fetish clubs to high-class hotels, and footballers’ mansions to porn sets – the world of scandal is a fun world to go to work in.

On top of this, we worked with a brilliant cast that included Anna Paquin, Sophie Okonedo, Bradley Whitford, Lydia Wilson, Marc Warren, Katherine Kelly, Darren Boyd, Alan Davies, Max Beesley and Amanda Abbington.

We were very lucky to have the coproduction in place between US cable channel Pop and UKTV to bump up our budgets from what might normally be expected for an hour of UK television, and I will be ever grateful to Hat Trick International (Hat Trick Productions’ distribution wing) for investing in the show to get us where we needed to be.

Even so, we had to be creative. Sets were stripped and redressed – as often were the supporting artists – and schedules and budgets were often squeezed and rearranged to make things work.

The most challenging episode in many ways was episode five. It’s a two-hander that plays out in real time and is set entirely on an aeroplane. When I wrote it, I remember thinking: “There is no way I will ever get to make this.” But it’s now my favourite episode of the series.

So, here we are six years later, waiting for Flack to air – a surreal but thoroughly satisfying prospect. Make sure you watch it: it’s a lightning-paced, funny and heart-breaking, female-driven dissection of image culture – at least that’s what my publicist told me to say.