This is a really exciting episode. I've got with me Sally Wainwright, who's a multiple BAFTA award-winning writer.

She's really inspirational and she's just written the series Riot Women on BBC.

It's definitely worth watching, but she's really open about her own personal experience and what drove her to write this series. So enjoy it.

So Sally, I feel quite nervous actually because I just have in all of everything that you do

and it's just such an honour to have met you. It must have been like two years ago was it. It feels

quite a while ago. Yes. Yeah, I guess it is.

Is it, yes, it's two years ago. It was when we started, we were researching riot women.

It's just amazing. So, so your journey has been incredible because you just get under the skin of

people and you really like seem to know so much about how different people from different

backgrounds really live and when I say really it's really important because like I've worked

in lots of areas of deprivation in Manchester I've I've been to some houses that I wouldn't ever

want to visit again the smells the noise, what's been going on.

I've worked a lot with drug abuses.

I've worked with all sorts of people.

And for me, it's a real privilege, but I can do that as a doctor being allowed into people's houses.

But you've got this way of just really bringing it all to life.

But your story of how you learnt so much, I think, is really interesting. So I don't know if you don't mind just sharing a bit about how you got that lived experience when you were working on the bus. I would see when I worked on the buses. Well, I suppose, yeah, when I finished university, I wanted to be a writer. Yeah. And back then, everybody said, if you want to be a writer, you've got to live in London. Yeah. So I moved down to London without any money. I think I was down to my last five pounds, literally at one point. Yeah. And a friend of mine said, oh, you like driving? Why don't you apply to be a bus driver? So I did. I applied to be a bus driver and I became, I quite enjoyed it. Did you? I quite enjoyed driving the bus.

I like vehicles.

Yeah. And the bigger the better. So I used to drive up to Heathrow Airport on the 1.11 and I was fantasizing about driving the airplanes. Oh my gosh. Yeah, but it's interesting talking about the sort of nitty gritty of writing shows because I think for me it's often about getting a really good advisor on board.

Yeah.

Like when I was writing a drama like Scott and Bailey for instance, I had a fantastic

ex-detective who was really intrinsic to the show.

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