I started my career writing for theatre. My first play, How to Kill Parents and Teachers, about girls growing up in a convent school in the 1970s, was performed by Major Road Theatre Company in 1984.
In 1985, while I was working as a researcher for the Royal Shakespeare Company, I wrote my second play, The Future of Cool, about Oxford students putting on a play in their last term. This was short-listed for the George Devine Award and was put on by the National Theatre Studio in 1985.
I trained as an actress at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama on their postgraduate course in the late 1980s. On leaving drama school, I was awarded a Junior Judith E. Wilson Fellowship in Creative Writing at Cambridge University.
During my fellowship I wrote my third play, a one woman show, All The Better To See You With, about child sexual abuse. I performed this play at the Edinburgh Festival in 1989 and at the King’s Head, London for a three week run in 1990. This led to being signed up by an agent, Sheila Lemon, at Lemon, Unna & Durbridge (now The Agency) and television work.
I was a staff writer on The Bill for seven years during the 1990s and 2000s. I was also a staff writer on the cult Liverpool-set soap opera, Brookside, for two years in the early 2000s.
I also wrote for The Vet, a Sunday night BBC 1 drama, set in a vet’s practice in Devon, and for Peak Practice, a medical drama set in the Peak District. I had two original series commissioned – Seaside, a Twin Peaks style family drama, commissioned by ITV, and Thieves Like Us, commissioned by BBC Wales, about three girls working for a big time drug dealer.
Crime and Investigative Reporting in the UK
Media Representations of Police and Crime: Shaping the Police Television Drama
Book chapters in edited collections
Theatre and Television Work – writing, acting and researching
Dr Marianne Colbran 