Episode 12 - That's All Right Then

Ellen

Hello. I’m Gillian Richmond. I’ve spent more than thirty years writing for UK stage, TV and radio. People often ask me how I got started. This is the story.

Previously on This Writer’s Journey…

While I continue to work in a challenging school in Hackney, my play Ellen has been picked up by a freelance director, Michele Frankel, who has organised a short run of rehearsed readings at the Riverside Studios in Hammermith.

Photo by Glen Hodson on Unsplash

Fun fact. Both my grandmothers were called Ellen.

February 1985 is a busy time. We’ve returned to our own - now asbestos-free - school, which is great. Well, it will be when we’ve had time to unpack properly. My days are spent trying to keep up with clever, mercurial Caroline (who hated the other place, but is now claiming to be missing it, and saying she wants to go back there), trying not to neglect the other twenty-nine kids in the class, and worrying about little Gaynor.

EastEnders explodes onto UK television screens.

I watch the show, speechless in admiration. Here, on the square box in the corner of my living room, I’m watching a piece of coruscating community theatre dressed up as a murder mystery. I should say here that its creator, Tony Holland, will continue to say right up to his death that in creating the show he had no political agenda. But there are stories exploring racism, sexism, homophobia, domestic violence, cot death - stuff never broadcast before at prime time on a prime channel. The stories are weighty, brave, funny, heart-breaking, compelling. It’s set in East London. I live and work in East London. The show reflects the lives I see around me. It feels real and truthful. It’s difficult, it’s grimy and it’s angry, and I can’t get enough of it. No more can my colleagues at school. It’s the talk of the staffroom.

At this time in the UK there are only four television channels. No catch-up TV, no streaming. The twice-weekly show launches to an audience of thirteen million. An audience that size would be unbelievable now. And the figures grow with every episode that goes out.

Meanwhile, in my world, Caroline continues to be Caroline, and Michele and her cast are preparing to start rehearsing Ellen.

Whenever I think of the readings, I grow a little more anxious.

I’ve been to rehearsed readings before. Lots of them. Good ones, okay ones, boring ones, terrible ones. A great director and an inventive cast can’t always rescue a turkey.

Will Ellen be a turkey? Of course it will. Of course.

The first performance is on a Friday. I consider throwing a sickie at school, but don’t. I probably should have done. Caroline, possibly sensing my head is elsewhere, thows a monster wobbler about a picture she’s drawing that won’t come out right. She tells me it’s my fault. I suspect she could be right.

When the end-of-school bell rings, I dismiss the class and sit alone at my desk, head in hands, putting off the moment when I’ll have to reach for my coat and head to Manor House Station and the Piccadilly Line to Hammersmith.

I grow aware of someone standing in front of my desk. I look up. It’s Caroline.

You okay Miss?

I do my best to smile. Yeah, thanks, I’m fine.

She looks down at me, her expression inscrutable. A beat, and then she nods. That’s all right then.

And she’s gone.

When I reach the Riverside Studios, Michele and the cast have been there all afternoon. John Gordon Sinclair - a Scottish actor, recently famous for his lead role in the film Gregory’s Girl, is goofing around with Sylvestra Le Touzel, an actor I’ve admired for a while. Annie Hayes - whom I’d seen a few years earlier in the National Theatre production of Howard Brenton’s biting play Weapons of Happiness - is another very fine actress. She is sitting alone, munching on a cheese sandwich, gently humming the theme tune from The Archers. Twelve years later she will die too young.

At 7 o’clock, the audience starts dribbling in. David. Friends. Relatives. A few Riverside Studios staff. Some people I don’t recognise. The cast are hoping for casting directors. I’m supposed to be hoping for literary managers.

What I’m actually hoping for is for the ordeal to be over so I can be back at home with my head under the duvet.

I know I’m not the only writer who trembles to share their work. It’s the same now as it was then. You might reasonably expect that writing to deadlines for over thirty years, delivering several hundred episodes of TV and radio series - and then rewriting and rewriting them - would stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood, and help me get over myself. Sadly not.

Here’s another fun fact. When I write these Substack posts I find it so hard to press ‘publish’ that I don’t do it. Nope. I schedule them to publish themselves later, walk away from my desk, have a cup of tea and try to forget that anyone might actually read them.

But let’s take ourselves back to February 1985, to the Riverside Studios. I’m sitting on the edge of the front row, on the far left. I’m vaguely aware of friends coming over and hugging me. My friend Julia brings flowers. David squeezes my hand. By 7.20 every seat is taken, and the Riverside staff are out hunting more chairs. At 7.35, five minutes late, the house lights go down.

Of the next couple of hours I remember not a thing. Nada. Zilch. Zero.

After the performance there is a short audience discussion. It is torture.

After the first show, when the discussion has wound down, a thin man approaches me. Dark hair, dark eyes, a penetrating gaze, chiselled features, he’s in his late thirties or thereabouts. Michele whispers in my ear that this is Tony Craze, the literary manager at the Soho Poly theatre. He tells me that he enjoyed my play. I stammer out some thanks. He says he holds a monthly writers’ group at the Poly. I already know about this group. Every aspiring playwright in London knows about it. I also know that admission to the group is by invitation only.

Tony invites me to join.

After the second show, a woman with swinging, corn-coloured hair and a big smile comes over. She introduces herself as Hilary Salmon, one of the three literary managers at the Royal Court Theatre. She says some lovely things about the play and asks if I might be interested in coming to Sloane Square to meet her and her two colleagues.

Hilary walks away.

Michele is by my side. They’re going to want to know what you’re working on, she tells me.

I’m not working on anything, I say.

So they’ll want to know what you want to work on next.

I don’t know what I want to work on next.

Then you’d better come up with something.

Why?

Michele laughs at my naivity. In case they want to commission you.

The names of the children mentioned in this piece have been changed.

Many thanks to those people who donated so generously to the tip jar at the end of last year. All contributions have now been passed on to the UK charity Crisis.