How a former bus driver became one of the most daring and original voices on TV

Sally Wainwright is major creative force in British television. Although she’s probably best known for the multi-award-winning crime drama Happy Valley, she’s been going her own deliberately varied and consistently impressive way for decades.

Frequently focusing on female characters and often setting her stories in Yorkshire, where she grew up, the writer, producer and director has shifted seamlessly between genres. Whether she’s making a cop show, a swashbuckling period piece or a domestic comedy-drama, her inventive plotting quickly engages and continually surprises. Her characters are full-blooded and finely nuanced, their challenges and triumphs ringing true. They’re easy to care about and all-too-human in their qualities and flaws. Those attributes again shine through in her latest vibrant series, Riot Women, which just arrived on SBS (Thursday, 9.35pm and streaming on SBS On Demand).

She started her career with a considered yet left-field decision, coming to London after university and getting a job as a bus driver, believing the job would give her time and headspace to develop her ideas as a writer. Then, having spent time training in the writers’ room on Coronation Street, in the early 2000s her first successful pitch was the series At Home With the Braithwaites (2000-03). It’s about “a very ordinary family” that wins the lottery, although the matriarch (Amanda Redman) decides not to share the potentially life-changing news with her husband and children, setting-up a delicious tension and an ongoing conundrum.

With some trepidation, Wainwright then decided to chance her arm at a cop show and created Scott and Bailey (BritBox, 2011-16), which focuses on a pair of female police detectives (Suranne Jones and Lesley Sharp).

“I was quite nervous when I started writing it,” she explained when I spoke to her last year during her visit to Australia as a guest of the Future Vision conference. “I didn’t want to get pigeonholed as a police-show writer. I did huge amount of research and wanted to find a new angle on how to do a police drama, so that it felt like something you’d never seen before. I did that by getting the detective inspector [Amelia Bullmore] on board. So it was all about the interviews and the team effort: it’s not eccentric Mr Morse and one brilliant sidekick driving a wacky car.”

When Wainwright took a break from crime series to build one around a romance, her lovers weren’t fresh-faced teens or glowing 20-somethings but septuagenarians. In Last Tango in Halifax (Binge, 2012-20), which was inspired by events in her mother’s life, Alan (Derek Jacobi) and Celia (Anne Reid) reconnect late in life. They’d been keen on each other as teenagers but separated and moved on, marrying other people, having families and dealing with the deaths of their partners. They rekindle their romance, carrying the baggage of decades, including adult children and grandchildren, as they navigate the relationship.

Neatly illustrating just how far Wainwright’s concept was from the conventional approach to screen romance, she recalled encountering an early, unexpected obstacle: “One of the first stories was Alan and Celia buying a car together, and they buy the car of their dreams. So the production was looking for a company that would lend us a prestige car and we all got turned down by all the big prestige car companies because the car was for old people. The only one that would do that was Lexus.”

When Wainwright returned to crime shows, she created something exceptional with Happy Valley (Stan*, BritBox, 2014-23). Set in West Yorkshire, the ironically titled series has a title song noting, “In this troubled town . . . the only thing that’s pretty is the thought of getting out.”

It’s a show regarded by some of her notable contemporaries as one of the best ever made, its diversity of publicly admiring fans including Bob Dylan, Lena Dunham, Guillermo del Toro and Bruna Papandrea. During three gripping seasons spread over almost a decade, the drama expertly entwines the harsh, hard-scrabble social and economic environment with complex family dynamics and suspenseful police investigations. Some of the cases are isolated incidents, some are contained within episodes, others span seasons. One of them, involving chilling rapist and killer Tommy Lee Royce (James Norton), provides the spine for the series.

Anchoring the drama in a tour-de-force performance is Sarah Lancashire, an actress Wainwright initially befriended on Coronation Street, where she played a ditzy barmaid. Here, she’s police sergeant Catherine Cawood, a tough, dogged veteran police-officer who’s also a grieving mother, devoted sister, conflicted grandmother and one of TV’s great heroines.

Following the triumph of that multiple award-winner, Wainwright again changed direction, moving on to Gentleman Jack (HBO Max, Foxtel Now, 2019-22). A rambunctious 19th century period piece, its heroine (Jones) – inspired by a real historical figure – is a maverick female landowner. She’s also an out-and-proud lesbian gamely pursuing profit and pleasure at a time when it would be an understatement to note women didn’t typically enjoy such liberties.

It was followed by a brief and ultimately unhappy experience with Disney on Renegade Nell, a series Wainwright exited before the end of its first season.

Now she’s gifted us a series about the formation of a pub rock band. And because it’s a Sally Wainwright creation, they aren’t energetic, telegenic, talented young up-and-comers itching for their big break in the music biz. They’re an unlikely assortment of menopausal women, each facing different challenges to do with their families, careers, relationships and ageing bodies.

Initially titled Hot Flush, Riot Women is Wainwright’s tribute to the ’70s musical drama Rock Follies, her “favourite show of all time”.

West End star Rosalie Craig is electric as the impulsive, volatile yet vulnerable lead singer, while Tamsin Greig, Joanna Scanlan, Lorraine Ashbourne and Bullmore are as good as ever. The cast members learnt to play their instruments for the production, and they look authentic. Four songs written for the series are catchy earworms and it’s hard to resist cheering for the women when they defiantly perform an anthem demanding their HRT.

Even if, heaven forbid, the 63-year-old Wainwright took an early retirement, she would be leaving an exceptional legacy. Given her history, it’s impossible to predict what might come next, although, on the basis of past performance, it’ll be worth waiting for.

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*Stan is owned by Nine, the publisher of this masthead.