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arts and crafts
When Brian Hill was announced as the winner of the New Director Fiction prize at the TV Craft Awards, Anna Maloney reckoned her chances of collecting another prize for the same drama had vanished.
“I thought, ‘that definitely means I won’t get it, I can relax and have a glass of wine’,” she recalls.
The unexpected happened – Maloney won the New Writer award for her work on the Century/Channel 4 film Falling Apart, which charts the break- down of a marriage through domestic violence.
She and Hill are married in real life, with two children, Conor, 15, and Oscar, eight. Falling Apart marked the first fictional drama for both of them, although Hill is already a BAFTA winner for documentaries.
“We’ve been together don- keys’ years, and worked off and on together. We’ve always found it a fairly harmonious and interest- ing experience. It worked well for us doing Falling Apart together,” says Maloney.
The piece was her first broad- cast drama after working in fac- tual television, both researching and developing projects. “I’ve had a crack at fiction over the
last ten to 15 years, but felt I had to earn a living and couldn’t stop to see if I could hone my writing,” she says.
Falling Apart came about through researching domestic violence for her husband’s com- pany, Century Films. “I was look- ing at ways of doing the subject differently because it’s something that happens, in every sense, behind closed doors. You can’t be there when it happens like in a documentary,” she says.
As they were new to drama, Channel 4 asked them to make a pilot, which Hill directed from Maloney’s script. Cold Feet actress Hermione Norris, who had worked with them before, had already expressed an interest in being part of the project. The 20- minute pilot, a mix of mono- logues and domestic scenes, was filmed in a friends’ living room with two cameramen.
“I researched it like I’d research a documentary. Before writing, I had to be really confi- dent with the material. I wanted to see what I could write myself, and come up with something that was original and different.
“In the end I spoke to four men who’d been to prison, all perpetrators of domestic vio-
lence. They are out and on long- term programmes run by the pro- bation service. Once I had their trust, they were really helpful. The character played by Mark Strong is not one of those men, but has aspects of them about him.
“I was lucky as a writer because I was able to remain part of the process longer than a writer normally would. I went to script readings with actors, had long chats with them and lis- tened to them because they had interesting things to say.”
She’s now working on another Channel 4 drama commission, an examination of how the British legal system handles rape. She has written a 45-minute scenario ending with an alleged rape.
A jury of real people will hear evidence from actors playing characters with back stories pro- vided by Maloney. After the ver- dict has been delivered, her final scene will show what actu- ally happened.
“I don’t intend to always do social issues,” she says. “I’m already working on a TV series, and have written an adaptation of a short story set in Ireland at the beginning of the 20th century.”
Writing Falling Apart made her aware of what she didn’t
know about writing. So she’s tak- ing a part-time Masters on screenwriting, currently in the second year of the course at the London Institute.
“There was always part of me that wanted to write, but I could- n’t quite see how to do it because it would have meant stopping earning a living and I have children. Falling Apart gave me a crack at it; it was a fantas- tic opportunity,” she says.
“One big difference the BAFTA award will make is to help me get an agent. For lots of writers, one of the real problems is getting people to read their treatments and scripts. I suspect I will stand a much better chance to get peo- ple to read them now.
“There was a lot of interest after Falling Apart was broadcast and a number of companies said they’d like to see my stuff. I’m sure the BAFTA will make it easier.”
Photos l-r: Ricky Gervais, Stephen Mercant and Anna Maloney; a scene from Falling Apart; Anna Maloney
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family business
Writer Anna Maloney tells Steve Pratt about her “surprise” award