Aisling Bea says a third season of her BAFTA-winning comedy-drama is unlikely to come to fruition after having a “tough time” writing the second season of the series, in which she also stars alongside Sharon Horgan.
“I made the second series during the pandemic after a very tough time and it was really tough to make,” she told an audience at Dublin’s screenwriting festival Storyhouse. “For me, that show is all about feeling light and, I’m not sure if anyone here actually enjoyed the pandemic, but that sort of shadowed over a lot of it. So, we’ll see what happens down the line but for me, it just felt like personally I lost some of the fire for the show, which is in the title. I’m still incredibly proud of the show but I know the intent with which I made it was to feel more uplifting.”
Bea was joined with Courttia Newland (Small Axe) and Laurie Nunn (Sex Education) for a detailed discussion with Element Pictures’ Chelsea Morgan Hoffman during the festival, where the writers explored how they found a path in the world of television.
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Speaking to an audience of aspiring writers at the Irish capital’s Light House Cinema, Bea said it was important to build a small network of trustworthy people to show work to. “The worst thing is a really good note coming in from someone you trust, and you know they’re right,” she said, adding that she often shows her work to her sister, who is a costume designer.
“She’s used to reading scripts but she’s not someone who would write at all and I love it. It gives me a little boost to sort of show off a little bit to her and it can just be a little boost for yourself to show it to two or three people. Never ask them to read a draft more than twice – you’re asking too much of anyone with that. But I would get used to the process and have people early on, no matter what level of project you’re doing, read your work just as a little test.”
Newland, a prolific author whose screenwriting credits include The Woman in the Wall and Steve McQueen’s Small Axe, admitted that the transition from novels to scripts was a daunting one, particularly when he was tasked with writing the real -life character of Leroy Logan in Small Axe, one of the few black police officers working in London’s Metropolitan Police in the 1980s.
“I was really scared of writing a real-life character, because I’ve never done that before,” he said. “I didn’t know that I was going to be doing that story, but I really love that story and when Steve said, ‘Ok that’s your story now,’ just that weight of responsibility was really, really heavy on me and that was the thing that I was scared of the most. But then it became the biggest asset during the writing of it – just being able to ring Leroy up and ask him how things happened.”
He continued: “I ended up seeing this guy more than my wife during the writing and then it became something that I could do. I can now work with real life characters, and I can bring these stories to life and do something that I never had the opportunity to do. So, that became the string to my bow and arrow.”
Nunn admitted that a big learning lesson for her when working on Sex Education, was discovering how writing scenes intersects with production budget.
“I think that was something I was just completely naïve about,” Nunn said, pointing to a scene that she wrote in an episode for the series which took place in an art studio in the school. “I didn’t think anything of it and then I got a phone call from the producer asking if there are other scenes in this art studio because they had built it. I remember thinking, ‘What? Why did you do that?’ and he said it was because it’s in the script. So, the production team had built an entire art studio, and it was incredible but then I was like, ‘Oh god, now I’ve actually got to set stuff there because it exists now.’”
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