Sally Wainwright has assembled a band for her latest BBC series Riot Women but it turns out her cast could barely play a tune when they first came together.
The Happy Valley creator revealed today that just one of the five Riot Women leads had a musical background prior to cameras rolling – the lead singer, Rosalie Craig. Made for the BBC and BritBox, Riot Women follows a group of menopausal women who form a quintet. It also stars BAFTA-winner Joanna Scanlan, Tamsin Greig, Lorraine Ashbourne and Amelia Bullmore.
After learning their respective instruments from scratch for six months, Wainwright said the cast clicked musically almost immediately.
“They rehearsed together as a band and they bonded,” she said during a Series Mania masterclass. “They were literally playing together and had to get to the end without stopping while playing at full speed. Amelia at the end said, ‘We really are a band’.”
Wainwright joked: “If ever your cast isn’t bonding just get them to sing a song together.”
Wainwright talked the Series Mania audience through the process of creating and writing the songs for Riot Women, songs that she revealed have names including ‘S***ting Pineapples’, ‘Just Like Your Mother’ and, unsurprisingly, ‘Riot Women’.
The team enlisted a real band and gave them creative briefs and lyrics, which the band then took and “put in a machine and turned out fabulous stuff,” according to Wainwright.
While the show has comic elements, Wainwright stressed it is not a comedy and “has a very dark story running through it.”
She therefore said Riot Women is “much more akin to Happy Valley than Last Tango in Halifax,” both of which she created for the BBC. “It has a really serious historic crime story [running through it],” she said of Riot Women. “A character had something distressing happen to them as a child and it has been triggered.”
Wainwright was speaking at Series Mania, which runs till Thursday in Lille. Later today, James Norton will lead a similar masterclass.
