An interview with Sarah Phelps

Sarah Phelps began writing for EastEnders in 2002 and stayed with the show for over five years. A star writer on the soap, Sarah quickly rose through the ranks and soon joined the soap’s core writing team. She remained with EastEnders until 2007 when she chose to take a break. Here Ellie puts the woman responsible for classic episodes including Den’s return, ’Marcusgate’, the 20th anniversary, the Armistice special and Jean’s bi-polar under the spotlight...

It’s been a while since you wrote for EastEnders. What have you been up to since?

Hi there, Walford Web. The last episode I wrote must have been about 2 and a half years ago now. It was a Ronnie and Roxy two-hander, and at the end of it we first got the hint that Ronnie had something or someone in her past which was incredibly painful and was never to be mentioned. That someone/something was, of course, her lost daughter.

Since then, I adapted Oliver Twist and spent a long, long time in development with a massive project. [ I ] don’t know if that will ever make it to screen now. At the moment I’m writing an episode of Being Human, which I love, and just starting work on a huge new series made by The Tudors gang. I’m also adapting Great Expectations for the BBC and will (fingers crossed) be working with the marvellous Tony Jordan at Red Planet.

What made you decide to end your association with the show?

To be honest with you, I don’t think my relationship with the show is ended. I call it taking a break. I remember thinking though that I was worried of repeating myself and that’s not fair on the show or the characters. You’ve got to be fresh and energetic for Enders and I felt like I was getting a bit stale. So, I took a break. Have to say though that I think a part of my heart will always be in Walford.

EastEnders writer Tony Jordan was recently tempted back to the show to pen the Dot "one hander" script. Do you think they could ever tempt you back?

There have been several times I was asked if I would like to write specific episodes. Sean Slater’s leaving episode for example, and since I invented Sean, I’d have loved to have written that but the schedule of my other projects made it really difficult... but yes, without a doubt I could always be tempted back. I’ve written 97 episodes, I’d love to get to a hundred.

Your scripts for the show were highly acclaimed by our forum members, and often in the wider domain, at a time when the show was under regular criticism in the press. In fact, you’ve often been described as a stand-out writer on the show at that particular time. How aware were you of the praise your scripts usually received? Did that praise ever increase the pressure on you when writing a new script for the show?

That’s lovely praise and it means a lot, thank you. It was a tough time for the show and I felt really passionately about the fact it was having such a tough time. I suppose it made me really want to pull all the stops out.

No, the praise didn’t add to the pressure, it just made me feel very proud. Inspired me, in fact.

A lot of your work on the show centered around key Watts Family episodes. Do you have a favourite?

I did love writing the episode where Sharon and Dennis first slept together. I got hate mail for that! It was really exciting to have this intense taboo situation between these two characters, and right at the very worst time for them both you hear the words ’Hello, Princess.’ I loved writing a lot of those episodes. I loved killing him and then having Sam Mitchell dig him up during Sharon and Dennis’ wedding.

I think also that a lot of the time there was way too much angst in that family and fair do’s it was a very angsty family environment, but the really attractive thing about the Watts family was they all had the capacity to be very funny, in a throwaway, audacious way. You had to get the one-liners in. There was one I really enjoyed writing which was a Den/Dennis two-hander in The Vic... but no, overall I can’t pinpoint a favourite.

What did you like best about writing for those characters?

I liked writing the sharpness of wit but I also loved what those characters meant to each other, the complexities of what they felt for each other. It was murky and dangerous territory, and [ I ] always thought that it humanised Den. He was never a superhero, he was a wideboy. He fancied himself and a myth had grown up around him. He’d always pretty much been able to deal with most situations, and now here was a situation between his adored adopted daughter--the only person he’d ever really loved--and the son he’d never acknowledged. And he had no idea what to do at all. In [a] sense it was all his chickens coming home to roost, all his past sins coming back to haunt him. You could feel the ground disappearing under his feet; a man getting older and fighting tooth and nail to stay on top of his game, losing control. Something of the Greek Tragedy about it...

I have to mention the Dot and Den "two hander" in the launderette. Was that difficult to write?

Dot and Den? Hard to write? You’ve got to be joking, it was a total gift. It was a real chance to get under the skin of Den and anything with Dot, anything at all, is just a pure joy. She was in a such a state, bless her, ill and not being able to tell Jim, and she saw a man she’d known for years, an arrogant old stag, in an even bigger mess than she was. She locked him in that launderette and took him to pieces, told him the truth about himself in a way he’d never take from anyone else. Den gave as good as he got though and part of the delight of writing that two-hander was the banter; the clash of swords of two characters who didn’t want to give up the pretence they’d created and who were equally verbally dextrous. And they loved each other, in a way that they’d never say, but they loved each other dearly. They irritated each other, wound each other up. Dot thought Den was a heinous reprobate and Den thought Dot was a pious God-bothering gossip but at the heart of it, they really did love each other. It was, like I say, a total gift.

In a recent interview with Walford Web, former Executive Producer Kathleen Hutchison praised your work on the Den’s death storyline. Were you anxious about writing that 20th anniversary hour-long episode?

Lots of things made me anxious about the 20th anniversary episode, mainly how incredibly tight the production schedule was, [but] not so much about the story, I really enjoyed writing that. The three women in The Vic, Chrissie’s howling vengeance, Pauline’s dog-shaped doorstop murder weapon and the incredible out-of-the-blue appearance of Sharon... yeah I loved it. And most importantly, I wrote a bit between Pauline and Den, the old arch enemies, where the masks dropped, all that enmity, that bitter history between them, gone for a moment and what was left was that shared understanding of the absolute grief of losing your children.

The aftermath of Den’s murder with Chrissie covering up what she’d done had some black humour. Would it be fair to say this helped salvage both the character of Chrissie and the storyline as a whole?

I’m a big fan of black humour, the blacker the better. The episodes I wrote where Sam dug up Den, well, yeah, there was a lot of gallows humour in that. I really wanted Sam to be drunkenly wielding the pick axe that broke up the concrete over Den’s body to ’The Ride of the Valkyries’. Don’t ask me why, I just did. So, I invented a sub plot where Ian had got a ’Hooked on Classics’ CD in a box of cereal and kept playing it over the PA in the Square to annoy people.

As for Chrissie, I adored that character and what she did was profoundly appalling, so giving her a kind of razzmatazz of dark humour about it all kept her character bubbling. It was also her armour against what she’d done. If she’d been plunged into this despair about her crime, then the story would have been over very quickly. Peggy pushing her into the grave was a classic moment as well.

Louise Berridge told us that she had some regrets over bringing Den back to the soap. As the woman behind so many of the "Den’s Back!" storyline’s key episodes, how do you perceive the whole storyline looking back now?

Good question. I remember being asked about the preposterousness (is that a word?) of the story by Mark Lawson when I was being interviewed for Oliver Twist... that the story was so deeply flawed. A man comes back from the dead? How d’you explain that? How d’you sustain that? My answer was that, in recent press, a man came back from the dead and that was the Canoe Man. He was dead. His wife colluded, told their sons their father was dead, they grieved and then he walked into a police station and handed himself in. There’s nothing stranger than truth.

That terrible deception, Den had let his daughter think that he was dead, how grubby, how cruel, how sordid. But, it was so human. You tell a lie and then that lie takes on a life of its own. When is the right time to step out of it, to tell the truth? Never, really. And Den told so many lies in his life, to everyone. An arch deciever, always scrabbling to stay on top.

But when he came back, I think that Den was made too much of a hero, like there was nothing he couldn’t handle, no woman he couldn’t have, no fight he couldn’t win. He walked back in and was made boss of The Square, like he was The Man, a gangster... that was never really who Den was in the past. Other savvy characters like Pat had to do uncharacteristic things, like be swindled out of their savings, so Den could ’save’ her. Gorgeous young women had affairs with him when in reality they’d have said ’fat chance Grand-dad!’ That just struck a wrong note, and looking back there should have been much harder thought about how he was going to fit back into this new life. We let the tail of the event (Den’s Back!) wag the dog of story.

Having said that though, I do think we got excellent stories from Den’s return. Ultimately, it meant we could get all the Mitchell’s back because of Sam being duped out of The Vic. I loved writing the episodes where Marcus Christie basically swindled Sam out of The Vic and Den was behind it all, and Paul Trueman met his end. Good stories.

Those episodes when Sam Mitchell lost the Mitchell Empire and Paul Trueman met his maker were received extremely positively by our forum members. Kathleen Hutchison’s already told us how pleased she was with how these turned out - it sounds like they were they a highlight for you too?

MarcusGate! The wily dog Marcus Christie and Den behind it all... yes I loved writing them. I also loved Paul Trueman, a truly haunted and complex character, and wanted to write a really good exit for him and for Gary Beadle who I think is a fab actor. Pulling together all those strings of different stories and tying them all together and with the clock ticking away for each and every one of them, I felt like I was writing a thriller! I also had a lot of fun writing some of the rudest and most cruel lines for Andy, Sam’s husband. When she was broken and weeping and clinging to him, he said so gently to her ‘Don’t you look ugly when you’re crying...’ and then his humdinger of a putdown ‘Of all the women I ever met, you really are the blondest.’ [It was] lots of fun doing that and then, writing Paul’s scenes where he was terrified and cornered, the hairs on my arms would stand up... and writing his final scenes with Patrick, again, I had tears running down my face (everyone’s going to think I spend most of my writing time either in tears or laughing at my own very poor jokes... and they wouldn’t be wrong!)

It’s always good to know that your exec[utive producer] is pleased with episodes you’ve written but to be fair, I wrote the episodes when Louise Berridge was exec and she signed the scripts off. Then Kathleen took over as exec when they were either filming or had already been filmed so, all the script work was done with Louise but yeah, it’s great when a new exec is pleased with episodes that come from the previous exec’s decisions.

In 2005 you wrote some brilliant episodes where Pat was reunited with Frank, Chrissie made her final appearance and Stacey cared for her sick mother, Jean, who attempted suicide. When writing issue-based material such as the Stacey and Jean scenes, is it sometimes difficult to find a balance between portraying the issue truthfully and keeping in mind it’s a family soap opera?

Interesting question. I felt really passionately about those episodes and was enormously proud of them. For me, this comes back to what EastEnders is and how far it can go with ’issue-based’ material. Yes, we do incredibly difficult stories, like the one with Jean and Stacey, like Kat and Zoe, and most recently Tony and Whitney, Stacey’s bi-polar ordeal. I think that the strength of the show is that we can go to dark places and the audience will come with us because the stories and the characters have been balanced and established in such a way that we’re ready to see that story played out in front of us. I think it’s about the bond of trust between the show and the audience. No one wants to be lectured to, or horrified, or gratuitously scared, or feel like they’ve been hit over the head with some pious brickbat of ‘issue’. The skill is in presenting a character like Stacey who looks like she’s a right selfish little madam, all about herself... and then slowly stealthily peeling back that mask so we can see and understand how she is like she is, see her heart and soul.

What was hugely rewarding about the Stacey/Jean episodes (and those actresses are just amazing) was the letters of response, how deeply it touched the people watching. I remember one letter from a girl saying that she’d been watching with her little brother, that he’d turned to her and said ’That’s our Mum, isn’t it?’ and for the first time, they’d been able to talk properly about their situation at home.

We get sidetracked, I think, about the concept of ‘family viewing’. Obviously there is language and content that we shouldn’t be showing at that time, it would be completely inappropriate. But I honestly believe one of the show’s great strengths is it’s ambition to tell those stories which, after all, do affect a lot of people, and to tell them with heart and integrity. You always ask yourself, ’what is the beating heart of a story? How do I unfold it?’ I always think the test is my own reaction to the words that I’m writing. It’s got to feel like it’s taking on it’s own life.

I remember while I was writing Stacey and Jean that I’d often be crying as I wrote. I know that sounds a bit nuts but I was. Likewise, I wrote an episode for Alfie and Nana when they went to Normandy and the episode went back in time to look at the young Nana during World War II. You could say that was ‘issue’ led. We should remember and honour the fallen, respect the sacrifices and yes, so we bloomin’ well should, every day, but we must show and not tell. No one wants to have a finger wagged in their face, least of all me. You stop listening, you turn over, you don’t want to watch and why should you? So you discover the beating heart of that story and that’s what you show. I was in floods of tears while I was writing the Armistice Special because what it was about is just how painful it is to lose a person you love. So, issue based stories like any other, family audiences, like any other audience, you ask yourself: what is the beating heart and how do I unfold it? (Sorry, am I making sense here?)

When writing that episode where Nana Moon and Alfie went to Normandy, how did you find using the rare [for EastEnders] technique of flashback sequences to drive the story forward?

Oh my days, the Normandy episode, I think all the time I was writing that I had tears streaming down my face! In themselves, these flashbacks didn’t drive the story forwards, because they were Nana’s memories, and in order for the story to go forwards, there had to be an internal tension in the episode and that came from Alfie. His ‘journey’ over the episode and what really drove the story forwards was the struggle to come to terms with the fact that Nana was dying and reconcile himself to that fact. But the flashbacks, obviously, in a ‘normal’ episode, they wouldn’t be right at all but this was special. It was really important to marry the past memories to the here and now so it felt urgent and part of the forward moving narrative drive, otherwise the flashbacks and the story itself wouldn’t have worked. But I loved writing them, seeing Nana as a young girl with her adored William Moon, that enduring love story between them. I thought the actors and production team did such a brilliant job; we didn’t have a huge budget but all the flashbacks looked right. I thought, the tube station, the dance hall and the scene where William was in the landing craft going over to Normandy just captured it all... the terror and that incredible courage.

I think the Normandy episode is one of the ones I’m proudest of... it was such an opportunity when much-loved characters’ stories co-incided with such an important event, the 60th Anniversary of Armistice and I felt really strongly that EastEnders, our show, would honour the past, tip a hat in respect as it were. When I met up with veterans and widows to talk about the episode, their memories, what they’d been through just took my breath away. Sometimes it was the tiniest of details that just stopped me in my tracks; one of the ladies that talked to us remembered her own wedding and how they were so excited because she and her husband shared a black market egg for their breakfast. A single egg. A fantastic gentleman, a veteran of the landings, talked to me about the feeling of approaching the beaches and the way he described it felt so raw and immediate. We forget too much and dismiss what’s past, I think, the bravery and the grief, the fear that the person you love might not make it home. It was a real wake up call to see how the French really honour and respect the veterans, [and I] reckon we could learn some valuable lessons there.

The episode was much longer than usual. I’d written a two minute silence into it as well and was worried sick in case we had to cut it down to normal running length but happily, the BBC agreed to give us the extra time so we didn’t have to make the kind of cuts which would have gutted the story. The scene where Alfie argues on the beach with a veteran called Sid (who turns out to be the young boy who William comforted on the boat going over) was filmed on the same beach where my grandfather landed so it felt very special to me personally too.

How did you get into scriptwriting? Was it always an ambition?

I always loved words and stories but the idea of me writing them never occurred to me. I was thrown out of my school when I was 15, so it’s fair to say that I never thought of myself as being good for much. I worked with horses for years and then I wanted to train as a vet nurse, but I would have needed exams for that. So I went to my local night school, just to see if I could sit in a room long enough to study, to see if there was any possibility I could do the necessary exams. [ I ] signed up for A level English because if I learned nothing else at least there’d be books to read, and within 30 seconds of the first class I felt like I’d come home.

[ I ] got into University as a mature student and while I was there, I wrote a monologue about a girl I went to school with who’d killed her violent boyfriend... and then I wrote a play. Frankly, it should have been sunk in concrete and sent to the bottom of the North Sea but that was how it all started. Very haphazard, because then I didn’t write anything else for about 8 years. But then I sat down and wrote another play and that’s when things really got going and I chucked in my job and went for it.

The crazy thing is that now my life has changed in a way that I never ever imagined. If you’d said to my teenage self that one day, this would be my life I’d have cried laughing. I think I’m so lucky to have found this. I can’t describe the feeling of your heart racing when you’re writing and it all starts to come together, or laughing at something, or sitting there with tears rolling down your face. It’s so heady and addictive. Even if my neighbours do think I’m completely bonkers (’She’s laughing at herself again... now she’s crying... now she’s doing a Peggy Mitchell voice... now she’s doing a Dot voice... let’s move.’).

What was your first writing job?

My first proper writing job was the small but mighty World Service soap Westway. It went out twice a week in 15-minute episodes and it was heard all over the world. We’d get letters and e-mails from The Gambia, China, Indonesia.... I loved working on that and to this day am hugely proud of some of the stories we told on there--stories of adultery and betrayal, parents and children, late blossoming love, sexuality. It was brilliant! It was the first time I’d been in a room with other writers and on the writing team were Roy Williams, Gurpreet Bhati and Sebastian Banckiewicz... fantastic people, amazing talents. We had such a great time, yelling with excitement, writing episodes, plotting stories, and then we’d go and have lurid cocktails and do some more shouting and laughing.

Do you have any advice for any budding writers out there who may be reading this?

Writing can be a pretty lonely profession. Mostly it’s you, sitting in a room, talking to yourself. And you have to sit there, pummelling your way through it. You have to put in the hours, so find the part of the story that makes your blood bang and the hairs on your arms stand up. Write that. Don’t write with the idea of pleasing someone else or because you think it’s what that someone else might want. They honestly do not know, no one knows. That’s the alchemy of it all. Always, always write what’s true to you. Be your own voice. In essence: WRITE FROM THE HEART!!!!

Good luck!

Thanks for taking the time to chat with us, Sarah!