 Paula Milne is Britain's most accomplished female screenwriter. That she has
received far less critical attention than her male counterparts may be because
she spent much of her early career writing for popular drama series, soap opera
and children's drama. It was ten years before she began writing original drama
for anthology series such as Play for Today (BBC, 1970-84) and Screen Two (BBC,
1985-97), and 20 years before the serials Die Kinder (BBC, 1990), The
Politician's Wife (Channel 4, 1995) and The Fragile Heart (Channel 4, 1996)
brought critical recognition and awards. The 1990s saw her extending her canvas
to embrace Hollywood movies such as Mad Love (US, d. Antonia Bird, 1995). Since
then there has been no let-up in her work for television and the cinema, with
original dramas for the BBC, ITV and Channel 4, adaptations of Andrea Levy's
Small Island (BBC, 2009) and Sarah Waters' The Night Watch (BBC, 2011), and
several screenplays, including an adaptation of Daphne du Maurier's My Cousin
Rachel for Fox 2000.
Born in Buckinghamshire in 1947, one of four children (her twin sister is the
TV producer Claudia Milne), she left school without qualifications just before
her 15th birthday. She went to secretarial college before going to art college,
where she specialised in painting, followed by a film course at the Royal
College of Art. The short film she made there led to a script-reading attachment
at ATV in 1972, working on Crossroads (ITV, 1964-88). She wrote several episodes
of the Midlands soap in 1972-73. While at ATV she also wrote two episodes for
the schools series Exploration Man (ITV, 1974), the first of several children's
series she contributed to or devised, providing an interesting counterpart to
her adult-oriented drama.
In 1975 she won a contract as a script reader at the BBC, and it was here
that she created Angels (1975-83), the hospital soap that, as its title
suggests, focused on the nurses rather than the doctors. Initially credited as
story editor, then script editor, she wrote nine episodes in 1976-78 before
leaving to pursue other projects. Meanwhile, she also began writing for Coronation Street (ITV, 1960-). Her first
episode for the UK's most popular drama serial was screened in May 1976 (shortly
after her first episode for Angels) and she contributed 12 more over the next
three years.
Having learnt the craft of scriptwriting on soaps, she went on, in the late
1970s, to write 12 episodes for daytime drama Rooms (ITV, 1974-77), an episode
focusing on a policewoman for the final series of Z Cars (BBC, 1962-78), the
final seven episodes for The Foundation (ITV, 1977-78), and two three-part
stories for Crown Court (ITV, 1972-84), with a third in 1983. With episodes for
Juliet Bravo (BBC, 1980-85), Shoestring (BBC, 1979-80) and the children's series
A Bunch of Fives (ITV, 1977-78), Grange Hill (BBC, 1978-2008) and The Squad
(ITV, 1980), by the early 1980s Milne had more than served her apprenticeship on
popular series and children's drama and was ready to start writing her own
original drama.
Before doing so she adapted Kathleen Conlon's novel about a young girl's
coming of age, My Father's House (ITV, 1981). Produced by June Howson (much of
Milne's work has been produced by women), the serial marked the beginning of a
new phase in her writing career. It was followed by 'A Sudden Wrench' (Play for
Today, BBC, tx. 23/3/1982), an original drama about a bored housewife and mother
who decides to get herself out of her depressed state by taking up plumbing. She
learns how to install a new central heating system in her house before getting a
job on a building site, where she is eventually accepted by the men after she
proves her worth.
Over the following few weeks there followed the four-part 'Love is Old, Love
is New' (Love Story, BBC, 1982), about a couple's infertility problems, and 'The
Sidmouth Letters' (Playhouse, BBC, tx. 2/4/1982), based on a book by Jane Gardam
about a novelist's obsession with Jane Austen. Later the same year came 'John
David' (Play for Today, BBC, tx. 23/11/1982), about a woman who, discovering
her baby is a 'mongol', resists the attempts by a nurse and social worker to
persuade her to keep the baby, insisting on putting him into care. The play
dramatised the dilemma Milne faced when she put her own Down's syndrome baby
into care: "it was a battle for survival between the baby and me. My quality of
life or his quality of life", she told a journalist in 1982.
She made a similar transition to original work in her children's dramas,
devising the six-part teenage serial S.W.A.L.K. (Channel 4, 1983), and the
supernatural drama 'The Exorcism of Amy' (Dramarama, ITV, tx. 25/4/83). Further
original drama followed with Driving Ambition (BBC, 1984), an eight-part series
about a woman's determination to be a successful racing driver, the single
dramas CQ (Channel 4, tx. 11/10/1984), Queen of Hearts (BBC, tx. 11/8/1985),
'Frankie and Johnnie' (Screen Two, BBC, tx. 2/2/1986) and The Green Eyed Monster
(ITV, tx. 1/9/1989), contributions to period female detective series Ladies in
Charge (ITV, 1986) and murder anthology Unnatural Causes (Central,
1986), and seven-part futuristic children's drama The Gemini Factor (ITV, 1987).
There was also an adaptation of a Ruth Rendell short story, 'Ginger and the
Kingsmarkham Chalk Circle', retitled 'No Crying He Makes' (The Ruth Rendell
Mysteries, ITV, 1987-2000).
After the apprentice years of the 1970s, the prolific Milne had 22 dramas transmitted in the
1980s, including original single dramas and serials, adaptations, episodes for popular series,
children's dramas, and an English-language teaching film, Family Affair (1984), about a
successful woman architect who is separated from her husband and living with her teenage son.
The 1990s finally saw Milne achieve critical recognition and awards for her
original serials: Die Kinder, which gave a personal dimension to the
politics of terrorism with a story about a mother's search for her children who
have been abducted by their father, a former member of a German terrorist group;
the BAFTA-winning The Politician's Wife, about the wife of a philandering
Conservative politician who proves to be ruthless in her own right when she
takes on his political mantle; and The Fragile Heart, a three-part drama about
medical ethics. Meanwhile she created Chandler and Co. (BBC, 1994-95), a series
about a pair of female private investigators which proved popular enough to win
a second series; Milne wrote seven of the 12 episodes.
She also wrote screenplays for three feature films: Mad Love, about a teenage
couple on the run; Hollow Reed (UK/Germany, d. Angela Pope, 1996), about the
fight for custody of a nine-year-old boy by his father, who is in a gay
relationship; and I Dreamed of Africa (US/Germany, d. Hugh Hudson, 1999), about
a young woman's fascination with the continent and based on the memoirs of Kuki
Gallmann; as well as a US TV movie, Mind Games (ABC, tx. 19/4/1998). As a
sign of her continuing versatility, Milne also wrote a two-part schools drama,
Off Limits: A Life of Ecstasy? (Channel 4, 1997), about a 17-year-old boy who
dies after taking the drug in a nightclub.
Like many writers, Milne was critical of the BBC's increasing bureaucracy
under director general John Birt in the 1990s and of the detrimental effect of
his policies on original drama. Unhappy with the way in which the corporation
treated Chandler and Co., she switched allegiance to Channel 4 in the mid-1990s.
But when head of drama Peter Ansorge left after Michael Jackson became chief
executive in 1997 and her four-part thriller Thursday the 12th was axed, she
also lost faith with Channel 4. Thursday the 12th was eventually picked up by
Carlton TV and twice scheduled for transmission before being pulled. It has
still not been transmitted.
Milne eventually returned to the BBC with Second Sight (2000-01), an
unconventional crime drama starring Clive Owen as a police detective who is
losing his sight. The original two-part story in 2000 was followed by a second
series of three two-part dramas, not all written by Milne. State of Mind (ITV,
2003) was a two-part psychological thriller, while The Virgin Queen (BBC, 2006)
was a highly-praised four-part drama about Elizabeth I, starring Anne-Marie
Duff.
She returned to Channel 4 after more than a decade with Endgame (tx.
4/5/2009), about the secret discussions that led to the end of the apartheid
regime in South Africa. By contrast, Whatever it Takes (ITV, tx. 26/7/2009) was a
not very successful attempt to make a statement about celebrity culture. Better received
were her adaptations of Andrea Levy's Small Island (2009) and Sarah
Waters' The Night Watch (tx. 12/7/2011) for the BBC, though the latter was half
the length of Small Island (co-adapted with Sarah Williams) and suffered a
little from the compression.
Milne's achievement as a screenwriter is evident, 40 years after her first scripts for Crossroads, from the
ambition of White Heat (BBC, 2012). Like Peter Flannery's Our Friends in the North (BBC, 1996), but
with a longer time span, this six-part serial considers how the lives of the central characters have been shaped by the social
and political events of the last five decades. With Red Room (BBC, 2012), a vampire take on Jane Eyre,
and an adaptation of Daphne du Maurier's My Cousin Rachel among other screenplays, there seems to be no let-up in
Milne's creative energies.
From early on she established a reputation as a 'feminist' writer because of her concern for dealing with 'women's issues'
in soaps, popular series and original dramas such as 'A Sudden Wrench', Driving Ambition,
Queen of Hearts, The Politician's Wife and The Virgin Queen, as well as the adaptations of
Small Island and The Night Watch. Now in her fifth decade as a screenwriter, she has outlasted many of the
male writers in whose shadow she spent the first two decades of her career, creating a body of work that is generically diverse but
thematically consistent in placing women at the centre of the narratives and showing their ability to succeed in traditionally male
roles.
Lez Cooke
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FILM & TV CREDITS
