Lisa Gifford

How would you describe yourself?
Oh my God, that’s a really fucking tough question to start with!

Let’s see… late bloomer, I think. I spent a lot of time trying to work out what I wanted, and I think I always knew what I wanted but I never had the confidence to go for it. When I was a kid, I was writing and acting; 8,9, 10 until I was about sixteen, I did some little acting jobs and I wrote stuff.

When I was 15, I wrote a play that went to the Royal Court. It didn’t get performed at the Royal Court; they did a regional theatre thing, and they invited kids from local schools to write plays with the possibilities of them being performed. Actors came to the local community centre and mine was one of the ones that was chosen to be performed.

Where was this?
I grew up in the New Forest, so this was in New Milton. I remember that one of the actors that performed in it was in a kids’ tv show at the time, so everyone was thrilled because he was famous. It was a rehearsed reading – scripts in hand – so it wasn’t a proper performance, but it was a big deal for us.

Then the Royal Court wrote to me and said that they really liked my work and they wanted to read more of it. And I didn’t do anything with that at all. I think, lack of confidence, but you didn’t do that where I came from. It was a very working class upbringing, and when you left school, you went to work, and that was what you did. And that’s what we did.

Was that a school thing? I’ve noticed a lot of people are really into it and achieve when they’re at school, but when they’re done school, it’s like, ‘ok, we’re done now.’
I don’t know; I think it was partly because my Dad died at a young age. My Dad was a big supporter and he died when I was 15 and I felt a big responsibility because my mother was left on her own, and I had to contribute towards the house and the upkeep, because she was quite devastated by my father’s death. I felt like I had to take over a bit.

Are you an only child?
Yes, and as soon as I finished my GCSEs, I went to work. But I did carry on acting and writing a bit until I was about 17, and I did actually get offered a tiny role in a film, which would’ve required me to travel – it was somewhere like Madeira. And at the time, I had my first proper job at British Gas, in their call centre as a customer service representative in their customer complaints centre.

If I’d have taken this acting job, I would’ve had to give up my job at British Gas, which was a very steady well paid job, and I remember discussing it, and having people saying that I was insane for giving up a really steady well paid job to go out and do something ridiculous like acting. So I didn’t take the job, and I figured there was no point in me carrying on because I’d given it up and I’d stopped, so that was that.

And then I got made redundant from that job six months later, so hey, whatever.

So I knew what I wanted to do, I just didn’t have the guts to do it. In my 30s, I had a very early mid life crisis, and I woke up on my 30th birthday and I just remember thinking that I had to change so many things because I was so unhappy.

So you just had a ‘normal’ job all through your 20s – no am dram (amateur dramatics) or anything?
No, I didn’t do any writing, nothing. The thing is, when I was at school, I was getting things published – poems in magazines and all sorts of short stories. And that wasn’t an indicator at the time that, actually, I might be good at this. I just thought that I was just lucky.

I’ve done every job there is. I was a brick layer at one point, I’ve driven builders’ vans…

Wait, what!?
Yup, there is a wall in existence in the New Forest that I built. I was around a guy who was a builder for a while. It was a very casual labour type thing, and he taught me how to build a wall, so I built a wall with him.

I’ve been a door to door salesman, I was a hospital manager at the NHS, I have worked in advertising. I was an account manager, I did copy writing, I copy wrote some radio commercials and tv commercials in Southampton.

I’ve worked in a bar, I’ve been a barista, I make really good coffee. I’ve worked in kitchens, I’ve worked in shops, I’ve worked for Heston Blumenthal. I’ve done most jobs, which I think is really good for a writer because there’s not a lot of things I don’t have experience of.

So yeah, I did all of those things and then hit 30 and thought, ‘what the hell am I doing with my life – it’s going, it’s shite and I hate it.’

So I moved to London and worked in a film sales company; basically, you take a film or a tv series that’s already made, and you take it to the Cannes Film Festival or MIPCOM or Toronto Film Festival, or wherever, and you sell it to broadcasters and distributors. So you’re almost like an agent for a film.

And that was my job. Sometimes that involved reading scripts, because you took on a film before it was made, and sometimes looking at concepts and trying to work out if it was something that might sell down the line. And through doing that I’d read some of these things and think they were terrible, and then they would be made into terrible films. And it’s that human thing of, you know what, I can do this much better.

Actually, I have skipped a bit of the story. When I was 25, I was working at the NHS in Brighton. I was approached by my now husband (Elisar Cabrera) to work in his wrestling company as a ring announcer.

Ok, hang on – how? Was he just randomly in hospital in Brighton?
No, I used to like wrestling. I went to see the WWF as they were then, and we went with a group of friends, and one friend was working in wrestling at the time for Elisar’s company, and he told me they were looking for a ring announcer, and I fancied my chances of breaking into wrestling.

As a ring announcer?
Or as a wrestler – I was training at the time. I know, right? So [my friend] introduced me – that’s where me and Elisar met, in the carpark of Earls Court. I remember Elisar walked up, and he had really long hair and a long coat on, and I was like, ‘ooh, he’s really nice.’

So I did that for five years as well. I started out as a ring announcer and then I became a character in the show.

Is the ring announcer the one who walks around the ring with the boards that says Round 2?
No, they don’t have that in wrestling – that’s boxing. In wrestling, there’s that person that does the whole, “Coming to the ring, this is such and such…” My job was to keep the show together and remind the audience of things that were coming up.

But you’d have to go along with the story. So sometimes the bad guy would run out to the mic and you’d have to look scared. The good guy would come out and you’d have to look excited. A really easy way for a bad guy to get booed is to have a go at the girl in the ring, so the bad guy would threaten me, and the good guy would defend me.

There was one show where the bad guy bullied me, then picked me up and dropped me on my head, and stuff like that; they didn’t actually drop me on my head – they dropped to their knees and protected me, but it just looked like they had. Stuff like that.

That’s so random.
Yeah, but it was cool though. I did learn to wrestle for a bit, but not very well.

Did you have a wrestling name?
Jane Childs. I didn’t come up with it – Elisar named me, it was his show. I just turned up and got paid!

So I did that, then quit and went to work in film.

All of this was coming together: I was reading these scripts and hating them, and watching these films and hating those. And this whole desire to perform and everything.

So I guess there is a part of this story that’s a little bit personal. At the time, I had been married to Elisar for about two years. We were intending to have children, and I was pregnant. And we lost the baby. I had medical issues that made conception difficult, so we made a decision that we weren’t going to go down the road any more. We could’ve done; we could’ve gone down a medical route, and gone through with that, and I admire people who do that, but it wasn’t for me and it wasn’t for him.

So all of a sudden, we were both left to reassess our lives and what our lives were, because I think, for many people, you have this very clear vision of getting married and having children and you think that that’s what your life’s going to be. But we’d gotten married – and we were very happily married – but we weren’t going to have children. And all of a sudden, it was like the world opened up: we could do anything because we were never going to have that responsibility.

When I had gotten pregnant, I had had this regret, that I had never done anything with my creative side – the acting or the writing – so I thought, ‘well, I’m never going to do those things that I’d intended to do in a few years’ time,’ or, ‘maybe one day I’ll write something…’

J. K. Rowling style.
Yes, ‘one day’. So after children didn’t happen, what stayed with me was that I’d really had that regret. And as soon as that wasn’t going to be a possibility, I thought, ‘shit, I can do this now.’ And it almost felt like I had to do this now.

So I enrolled on a drama class at a college, Morley College, under the tutelage of Dominic Grant.

I had auditioned and got into this college course, and I remember walking into the college on the first evening – it was two evenings a week – and being so nervous that I almost turned around and left, and I had to make myself walk up those steps.

Why?
Because I hadn’t done anything like that in so long. I didn’t count the wrestling stuff as proper acting, and this was Shakespeare and shit, and I didn’t think I could do this. And I remember thinking when I walked in that this is going to decide what I do next.

Was this a hobby course or was it a qualification course?
It was for an OCNLR, which is something to do with adult learning. I have a certificate somewhere that apparently actually means something, because when I went to do my drama degree, they were quite pleased with it.

So I did that and really enjoyed it, and at the same time, started writing. I wrote a screenplay, which at the time was called Derelict, but now it’s called Sweetheart, and I’m still writing it – it’s probably on its hundredth draft. That was the first thing I ever wrote. I had no screenwriting training whatsoever – all I’d done was read scripts – so I just thought, ‘fuck it, I’m going to write a script.’ The first draft was awful. It was 150 pages , and it droned on but I wrote it. Since then I’ve worked on it and worked on it. It’s the one that I’m still determined to make and I will direct it.

So I did this course for a year and met some really good friends. It was also an opportunity to work with Dominic, who was so positive about the things that you could do, and he was encouraging me to go to university and continue studying. I also remember him saying that if you want to embark on this life, you will have to give up everything you know: your steady job and your steady career, and you will spend twenty years avoiding the knocks at the door from the debt collectors, and all of these awful things, but ultimately you will love it. And that has always stayed with me, because that has been true: doing this has not been financially rewarding, especially not in the early years, and you do spend a lot of that time juggling debt.

However, I am much happier now than I ever have been in the very stable or very well paid jobs I’ve had over the years, where I’ve had lots of foreign holidays and nice clothes and nice cars: all of the material things that I’ve had have never made me happier than me sitting at my computer and writing scripts and getting them made.

It’s hard to earn money at this career. It’s still sporadic; some months you earn a lot and other months you earn nothing. But you have to learn to live with that and embrace it, and as long as you can cover your bills, everything else is a bonus.

And you just end up hoping that each month takes you closer to your goal.

Was everyone in your class at college your age?
It was all adults; 99% were around my age. There were different levels of people, people who wanted to do it as a hobby and people who wanted to do it as a career, and people who were undecided.

And from there, I decided to go to university.

Why? University isn’t short or easy – it’s a commitment, I guess especially as it’s at a time in your life where it’s not the ‘natural’ thing to do.
I was 34 and I was at a point where I really wanted to do something to mark the end of my old life and the beginning of my new life. And I think that university gave me three years to de-programme myself from the corporate world that I’d been in for the last however long.

Was that a conscious choice?
No, but I think there was a definite choice of, ‘this is the opportunity to spend three years being creative.’ And I knew I would never have that opportunity otherwise.

I had never been to university and that had been a source of regret because I wanted to go and I knew I was academic enough to go and do well, but it was never something that had been applicable to me to do at the time or financially able for me to do since. So at the time, we found ourselves in a position that we could financially afford for me to take three years out to go to university; plus I was entitled to a grant so that helped. Had I not been entitled to the grant, I probably wouldn’t have been able to go, which is sad that the Government has done away with the grants because it’s people from backgrounds like mine that don’t get to go to university any more.

It was worth every penny for me. I seized that time and got everything out of that time that I could. I did a bit of everything, I tried things I never thought I would do. I was up ladders and rigging lights and painting scenery. I even learned to sew and make dolls as props for this show. I was a stage manager. I did every role in theatre that you can imagine.

Did you do any screen stuff when you were there?
No, it was just a theatre course. I deliberately fought shy of doing any screen because I’d worked in that industry and I didn’t really want to double up. But in my last year, for one of my modules, I did write a screenplay because one of the lecturers was a screenplay writer, and it was an opportunity to learn from him and have his guidance.

It was great, I loved it. It was testing personally because I was 34 years old and suddenly I was in an environment where I was surrounded by 18 year olds. It was really hard. The first year was very difficult and I nearly quit several times, not because of the work, it was the environment. One or two of the lecturers were very understanding and could see when I needed to go for a coffee and would just be there if I needed adult conversation.

But by year three, I had found a close group of friends who I would say were quite mature beyond their years, and I think that helped.

Where did you go?
I went to Middlesex and I graduated in 2012. I was in the last year of students that went to Trent Park before they moved everything to Hendon. Although Trent Park was falling apart, it was beautiful, and to study drama there was an absolute pleasure.

Was 2012 the year that 3some came out?
3some I wrote in 2011 as a uni module. I started my degree in 2009 and did my first year. In the second year, I took Writing for Performance as a module. You weren’t supposed to take it until your third year, but because I was a mature student, the lecturers were mindful of the fact that I wanted some older company, so they put me into the third year group, which had a couple of other mature students in there as well.

And I met a writer who wrote for the Royal Court called Michael McMillan who is this awesome, awesome writer; he writes a lot about family, about home, brilliant guy. We did different writing exercises every week and he just taught me how to evaluate things. He taught me a lot about subtext – what’s going on and what’s actually going on – and one of the things he made us do was to write a three minute play every week and then perform it the next week.

Wow, talk about honing a discipline.
I loved it, I absolutely loved it. Every week, he would give us what the theme had to be – some weeks, it was a monologue or a two hander, or around the dinner table, or about the subtext – and I loved it, it was probably the best thing I did at uni.

Then after that, I had the opportunity to do an open module so you could choose, and I asked if I could write a play.

I was trying to think about what I was going to write for a really long time. I wanted to have this couple where one of them was gay but the other one didn’t know. I had this character in my head of a Cockney wide boy type character. And that’s literally where 3some came from.

I went to see Mike Lee’s Ecstasy at the Hampstead Theatre. That’s pretty much four people in one room for the whole play. I came away from that and I said to Elisar on the Tube home, ‘I know exactly how I’m going to write this play.’

That was Friday night. Saturday, I stayed in bed all day writing; Sunday, I stayed in bed all day writing with my laptop. I wrote that play in 48 hours and it was done. I did some work on it in re-drafts, but only a little bit, only some small minor details.

So we performed that at uni as a rehearsed reading, script in hand, with Paul Linghorn, playing Paul.

Was he on your course as well?
That’s how I met him – he was in my Writing for Performance class.

So when I left uni, I decided to do a three night run of the play at Camden Fringe. Paul ended up directing it, I was Jenny and we got another couple of actors in to play the boys.

It sold out and we won Pick of the Fringe. The theatre asked us to come back and do three weeks, and then we got a publisher come and ask to publish the play.

Where did the idea of turning that into a series come?
Well, it was so well received and I had so much positive feedback. Although I’d done a short film, this was the first proper thing that people saw, and the feedback was so overwhelmingly positive, and I had no idea at the time how unusual and how fortunate that was. All the reviews were good; people were emailing me and stopping me in the pub and being so lovely about this play. At the time, I had no idea how special that is: I do now – as a working writer.

Elisar was quite determined that this should have a longer life and I remember at the time that people were asking me what happens next, because as you know, it ends on this cliffhanger. So I thought that maybe I should write what happens next.

For a long time, I was trying to turn it into a two act play. I wrote it, and I was really dissatisfied with it. I thought about a film, but I couldn’t make it work as a film, and it felt episodic. Obviously, tv is very, very hard to do, and I had absolutely no experience about doing anything like that, except selling tv series.

Elisar had been working in web series for a couple of years, and he sat me down and showed me Fresh Hell, Brent Spiner’s web series, and I was blown away by how amazing that was and how much I loved it. So I figured that if you could make something this good on not a lot of money, we could try that with 3some.

And I wrote most of it on a flight between London and LA; I hate flying and was looking for something to take my mind off it, so I just sat there and wrote about four episodes, and the other two on the way home.

Was that the first episodic thing that you wrote? Was it weird to get into the rhythm of what episodes should be?
I just found it came very naturally; in fact, I still find that episodic writing comes very naturally to me. I don’t know where that comes from, but I’ve got this feel for cliffhangers, where they should be, where breaks should be, and how to get in late and leave early.

I still obviously look at my work and edit it. But yeah, I feel like I have a natural feel for that; maybe it just comes from watching a lot of television. I watched a lot growing up, and I watched a lot while doing office jobs because it was pure escapism.

I had sold a lot of television by then as well, so I’d seen a lot of tv shows from a lot of countries because I’d sold internationally, so even if you don’t speak the language you get a feel for how the drama is developing and what the natural arc is.

The thing I hate most – in tv, but definitely in a web series – is when there’s no cliff. In tv, in my mind, there should always be something that makes you come back after the break, and if I’m watching a tv show that just peters out before the break, I don’t really want to come back to this.

The amount of web series that I’ve watched where nothing happens in the first episode – it’s so boring! I watched one recently, and it was beautifully shot – they’d obviously spent some money on special effects – but fuck all happened in episode one. You can chuck all the special effects and actors at it as you want, but if the script is shite, it’s shite.

In web series, you don’t have the luxury of just making something that’s pretty; if you want to do that, make an independent arthouse short. That’s what film festivals and for, and you can get noticed for that.

But if you actually want to make series… that’s where I got work from 3some: people understood that I could tell a story and cut it up and make it interesting, and have natural cliff hangers. That was the thing that I took away from that. And also to grab your audience quickly: in the first 30 seconds of 3some you have a guy hammering on the door naked.

That’s what’s really important, and that’s what I think some writers don’t understand. I would say it’s where lack of training comes in, but I wasn’t trained: I trained myself, through reading tons and tons of scripts. When I started writing tv, I googled all the tv shows I liked until I found some official scripts online.

The BBC Writers Room website is fantastic – it has a full library of several hundred tv scripts. You can go on there and find a show you like; usually, the best way to do it, is to think of shows you admire, and then go and read the scripts to see how they’re done – not just how they’re laid out but also how the writer tells the story.

My favourite show ever is Life on Mars. I remember reading the script of the first episode of Ashes to Ashes (the follow up series) and it describes the moment when Gene Hunt first sets his eyes on Alex Drake, and it says, ‘he sees her and in that moment he knows two things: number 1, that he must fuck her; number 2, that he never will’. It was only two lines but it summed up their entire relationship.

And when I read that, that unlocked so much for the character for me, but also voice. And the fact that the writer was using his sense of humour to convey this. I read so many scripts now, and one thing I’ve noticed is that voice is a hard thing for writers to develop. I noticed it with my earlier scripts.

You seem to have obviously oriented yourself towards being a writer but when I first met you, you were an actor, writer, director. So have you consciously made a decision about that?
It was a complete decision not to act any more. I won the ISA for Best Writer in a Drama for 3some, and I thought, you know what, it’s the writing that I love and what gets me up in the morning, and it’s what is getting recognition. And I need to put 100% hell for leather into that. If I’m going to be a good actor, I need to be doing auditions and classes and all of those things and I will have no time to do that if I’m going to be a writer. So I made that choice, and I’m super happy.

I realise now that when I did 3some that I really resented the acting because I wanted to just be behind the camera because that was what I loved.

Directing is something I really want to do as well, but with the directing, I kind of want to do the Sally Wainwright thing where she directs her own work. But what she’s done is to do it over years. So she started out as a writer and she has written over fifteen years or whatever. And then she slowly eventually managed to direct her own work. That’s what I want to do, and I’m not in a tearing hurry; I’m happy to let my career evolve naturally.

It always makes me laugh a little bit when I meet writers who have everything planned out to the letter because you can’t; you don’t know what will happen.

Yeah, but I’m sure you have a game plan.
Yes, you have to have a game plan but you have to be flexible.

So when did you put this down? When did you go, I’m going to do this, this and this?
Well, I flailed for a long time.

On the plane home from ISAs we thought we would try and get publicity off the back of it. We wanted to make 3some season 2, which is so hard to do. But doing that got me exposure, and the exposure opened doors with agents. I still had to write a lot more stuff before they would take me, but at least the doors were open and they were willing to talk to me, which is a big thing.

It really worked out for me when I signed my agent and having conversations with her. She helped me to organise myself a bit more.

How long after your ISA win was that?
About a year after.

As someone who has self-identified as someone from a non-traditional background, how have you found the make up of your peers? Are you optimistic for the initiatives that are looking to increase the diversity of the backgrounds of writers in tv and film?
Not at the moment, no. I’ve walked into writers’ gigs and found them full of middle class people, usually white, often male. I think it sucks, and I think it’s really indicative of what is on tv at the moment. That’s tough and that’s hard and that’s not how it should be, and the whole industry has to do better.

It’s very hard not to name names, but I’ve gone for schemes and approached funding schemes, for things that are meant for women and are supposed to bring diverse voices and not gotten very far in those schemes. And then when I’ve seen what’s been made or who won, it’s usually an Oxbridge educated able bodied white women who has made something about something very middle class. Or it’s the other end of the scale, where someone has made something terribly worthy about the working classes. And I’m working class, and I’m sick of seeing something that’s really worthy. Let’s see something fun about the working class, let’s see something that’s different, something that’s got something else to say.

It just pisses me off the way that the working classes are depicted; either we’re depicted as something to be pitied or pilloried, or it’s something to be scared of. When you watch This Is England, for instance, this is a working class writer / director and he gets it right (Shane Meadows). That’s what I recognise, some of the families when I was growing up, I see in his work.

The Royle Family is another one. I think that there’s a lot in that as a comedy that’s so recognisable to people like me, and the way we grew up: the tv is the centre of the house, and everyone gathers around it and comments, and eats their dinner, and makes jokes about going to the toilet – it’s so accurate and unflinching in its depiction while being warm, and loving and honest. I’ve sat and watched The Royle Family with middle class friends, and they’ve been like, ‘people aren’t like this,’ and I’m like, ‘yes, they are: this is me and my family,’ and they don’t believe me.

We get white middle class writers writing dramas about black families. I’m not saying for one moment that a white writer shouldn’t write about a black family, or that a black writer shouldn’t write about a white family, or a straight man shouldn’t write about a gay man, but it you’re not informed, you need to get informed.

I think it’s authenticity: we can’t have true representation of our culture without authentic voices. How many disabled voices are there? How many shows are out there with a disabled lead character? Why not? Why can’t we have a show where the lead character has cerebral palsy or is missing a leg or an arm?

Whenever you try and say these things, people say you’re trying to be politically correct, and all that bs – I’m the least politically correct person in the world – and what it is is that it’s a wall of sound. It’s the same wall of sound that ‘others’ people and tells them they’re not acceptable. And it’s done to everybody that’s not a straight middle class white man. You’re different, you’re other, even women. We’re 50% of the population but we’re still a minority because we’re ‘other’. It’s a problem, and representation is what we don’t have at the moment.

Until commissioners are commissioning 50% of their content from women writers and women directors – I don’t mean women writer-directors, I mean women directors directing scripts written by men, and women writers writing scripts that are directed by men – until we have that integration, and proper representation of ethnic minorities, LGBT++, and people with disabilities, until we have integration across all levels, we’re not going to have a tv industry that is indicative of our culture.

The problem is that we have a tickbox representation. We get something like Citizen Khan, which I don’t think is any different from something like Mrs Brown’s Boys, just fun, knockabout comedy. But I worry that companies make something like that and go, ‘ok, great, that ticks a box so we don’t have to worry about any more inclusion,’ because we have this one show that we can point everyone to.

One of the things that is often said about the web series community is how generous and supportive everyone is. As we’ve both been in the game a while, relative to the medium, how have you seen the community develop?
When I first started in web series I wasn’t aware of any community at all. Obviously, Elisar was quite active in the community and I wasn’t, so I just pitched up and did my thing.

When I first got into the actual community, there were less of us, so it might have been tighter knit. We were all doing the same festivals and events, so we were all going to the same places, and that gave us an opportunity to bond. I’ve seen the community expand greatly in the last couple of years and I think there’re some really great people in the community, very supportive people.

But I think there’s a lot of people who have come in who think it’s an opportunity to make a quick buck and it’s really not – that’s not what it’s about at all. You can make money from web series but it’s hard: you have to be sponsored, and brands, and all of that. If you’re a YouTuber and / or if you have millions of followers, then yes, you’ll make lots of money, but for the rest of us, that’s not what happens.

I think expectations have changed. When I did my series I didn’t expect any help from anyone; I got it, but I didn’t go into it expecting it. But nowadays, I get a lot of people just coming to me expecting me to give them my entire black book of contacts, or to read their scripts or edit them for nothing, to give them feedback. I’ll do it for friends, or people I’ve worked with and trusted, or people that’ve worked on my productions, but I have that relationship with those people.

I think there’s a lot of disillusionment. I think some creators come in and think they’ll make a series and it will propel them to instant stardom and it doesn’t. I don’t think that’s happened to anyone really. You just have to plug away at it.

From my perspective, I came in and made one web series and it did really well. But there have been years since then of really hard work and constant writing because I want to go into television. Nobody sees all the stuff that goes on behind the scenes that goes into development and falls by the wayside; I could paper a room with rejection slips from things that go into development and then don’t go anywhere. Rejection is the norm in this job.

People only see the surface stuff, so people see that I’m now writing EastEnders and think, ‘I’ll just make a web series and it’ll happen.’ Well, sure, if you make a web series that does well, then spend four years researching, writing scripts, having meetings and getting an agent then it might come to fruition.

It’s the ones that stick at it who are the ones that do really well. Which I guess is the same for a lot of life.