Russell T Davies - 3

You worked on a show called The Grand for ITV...

It's where I broke out of formula writing. I got this show called The Grand, which was like Upstairs Downstairs, but not as successful. I wasn't supposed to write the whole thing, but every writer fell through each week and I ended up writing ninety-five per cent of the episodes. And this was nine o'clock, and it was on film, and it had Susan Hampshire in it, and Tim Healy, and I was really scared. Well, scared is good, we're all scared of whatever job we're doing, but it was sort of mind blowing to me.

They were good scripts, I think, but they were all tragic. Every week someone would top themselves in the hotel, or a maid would end up crying in the gutter, literally the first series ended in a hanging. I mean, it was a good hanging, I wrote those things well, but in a way I got those things out of my system - the characters in it had been through World War One and were shattered and traumatised, which was a brilliant thing to write. But frankly it wasn't working.

It was going out on a Friday at nine o'clock and I just wasn't writing it well enough. I was writing as well as I could then. My dissatisfaction with what I was writing really was building. And it's funny this, cos this didn't really come from the viewing figures, but I could see they were right. And no-one ever tells you that, they all go don't worry, we'll keep going, we're fine, but I could see it wasn't working.

No script editor told me that, no producer told me that, and there are all sorts of mistakes in it, but I could see my own writing. That was the only thing I was really interested in. If you are a writer, the best critic of your writing is yourself, you've just got to learn to listen to yourself.

Would you say that you weren't doing that before?

I was, I just got wiser. I was always critical of my own stuff, you just get wiser and you get more perspective, and it sort of helps when something isn't working. The soap operas work and they trundle along and you're fine. But when you see something dying live on air at nine o'clock, you know you have to take responsibility. Everyone walks around going oh it's the slot, oh we're up against the nine o'clock news, oh it's the casting, this is wrong, that's wrong – but no, actually. All I can do is look at myself, all the rest is chat. You've just got to look at yourself.

I've come out of soaps with a very sort of baroque style, a very monologuey style, and if you wanted a baroque model I did them brilliantly. But there's other ways to write. And so I was trapped in a studio and everything I'd done had three walls to it. People always say about Queer as Folk, "Oh his writing took off cos it was gay." I say the significant thing about Queer as Folk is that it wasn't based in a studio. No wonder everyone's zooming around in cars and going mental because, hurray, look I can go anywhere. And the freedom of that was enormous. I can see the freedom I had just typing away. So coming back to The Grand, I'd just started working on it myself. I can actually show you scenes from it where I started to change. Everything I wrote was so on the nose, that's what soap opera is, soap opera is if you're angry you walk into a room and say "Oh I'm angry," and someone says "Why?" "Because I've been betrayed, ooh, how could you," and that's doing the job well on a soap. I'm not knocking soaps, because I love soaps, but there are other ways to write, and I started to discover other ways to write that were not so obvious.

There was an episode of The Grand with a gay barman in it, which in 1921 was a really interesting character, because he didn't have a language. And what I did with that - it wasn't the gayness, that was fine at nine o'clock - it was all concentrated on one character, and it was his. And it was flashbacks with his father, and his whole life. There was a fuss at Granada because every other speaking part - there was a regular cast of twelve in that show - they all got two lines each. And the actors didn't complain, but the people paying the actors complained, saying "We've got Susan Hampshire, you've only given her four lines," and I was like, "Tough."

And it was pivotal actually in many ways, it wasn't just me writing better, it was also me realising how tough I was, because everyone told me to rewrite that, everyone, and I just sat there and said "I'm not." And eventually they just ran out of time and had to make it, and it was a great episode, it was, so ha, so there! I'm still counting these victories all those years later.

Is it difficult to stand up for your ideas in that situation?

Yes, because you think well I'll never work again, and you think if there's a third series of this I'll be chucked out. I was so rude to people... I didn't realise I could be that rude. But they were wrong. And there's plenty of times, I've been in meetings where I've tried something and I've been wrong and I've admitted it, but that one I was just absolutely right. I sent it to Paul Abbott, I sent it to my agent - I never send scripts to my agent but I did for that - and said, "Have I gone mad?" And they were going "No just stick to it." So I did.

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