The Stage

Dramatic entrance - Laura Mackie

Published Wednesday 2 February 2005 at 16:05 by Maggie Brown

Laura Mackie has taken control of BBC drama serials in the wake of Mal Young’s departure. Maggie Brown hears how the former Radio Times secretary plans to emulate the best American shows with a commitment to be more ambitious and bold with programmes

Laura Mackie has a challenging time ahead, as she steps into Mal Young’s shoes as head of BBC drama series and serials. While Young learned his craft at Brookside, the lower profile Mackie comes from the English literature graduate side of television. She worked her way up after joining as a secretary, a career path rather similar to Jane Tranter’s, her BBC boss.

Mackie’s calling card has tended to be high profile costume dramas and literary adaptations, which will come in handy as chairman Michael Grade calls for less formulaic pieces. For example, she is an executive producer on BBC2’s high profile To The Ends of the Earth, William Golding’s sinewy trilogy of a young man’s rites of passage.

Most recently she’s been buttressed by the quirky success on BBC1 of Blackpool, starring David Morrissey, while North & South was the highest rating and most appreciated costume drama for five years. She insists she shares “that passion for popular television” which Young exemplified, though adds: “Audiences do get bored quickly, I get bored as a viewer. We have to think about when to stop series and when we have to refresh them.

“The brief hasn’t changed - it is, essentially, to develop dramas that feel original and in some cases are risky. You never know when something will hit the popular note, that’s why you must try different things. Audiences like to discover something, they hate being told they will love something before it comes on.

However, she faces the test of a 15% budget cut on BBC drama, alongside the challenge to rise to a purer version of public service broadcasting. She says: “Cuts mean hard choices. We have to be inventive, use new technology, CGI [computer generated imagery] instead of location, use money on shorter runs and develop lower cost series. It will be hardest for one-off dramas or short-running series.”

Her biggest single responsibility currently is overseeing BBC1’s adaptation of Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, to be broadcast in 16 half hours, produced by Nigel Stafford-Clark’s Deep Indigo in a joint venture. It goes into lengthy production this month.

She says: “I am really excited, it will play mid-week, twice a week, after EastEnders. I think Bleak House is Dickens’ most magnificent novel.” Bringing alive its cutting criticism of the British legal system and a fantastic array of comic characters is the task shouldered by Andrew Davies, who adapted it. “He took that challenge to heart - the scenes are shorter and there are more cliffhangers.”

Mackie believes that star casting can open doors. Bleak House brings together a heady mix of Alastair McGowan, Gillian Anderson, Phil Davies, Anna Maxwell Martin and Johnny Vegas. “A real mixture of unexpected faces,” she says. The director of the first tranche of episodes is Justin Chadwick, who has directed EastEnders, Red Cap and Spooks and is expected to tell the story in a dynamic way.

Bleak House is designed to be the annual costume drama treat next autumn - the point of difference between BBC1 drama and the rest - with a production about Elizabeth the First written by Paula Milne planned for 2006.

Mackie is also the driving force behind the BBC’s renewed commitment to Shakespeare, the first proper revivals for 15 years. Four 90-minute films are being made with BBC America in modern dress and language, akin to The Canterbury Tales. “We wanted to do them in a modern way but surrounded by other programming from arts.” This includes the ambitious Shakespeare in Schools project next July.

The plays are Taming of the Shrew, written by Sally Wainwright, Macbeth (Peter Moffatt), set in a Gordon Ramsay-style kitchen, A Midsummer Night’s Dream by Peter Bowker, fresh from Blackpool and Much Ado About Nothing.

Meanwhile, BBC2’s new channel controller Roly Keating is demanding challenging, strong, contemporary pieces in a signal that the channel must increase its drama output and impact. Andrew Davies has been set to work adapting Line of Beauty, Alan Hollingsworth’s award-winning novel. “When I first worked in the drama department we were making Buddha of Suburbia and Oranges Aren’t the Only Fruit,” notes Mackie. But none of this, she insists, is to downplay the big popular pieces, Judge John Deed, Waking the Dead, Down to Earth, Silent Witness and Cutting It, which has its fourth run this April.

Cutting It writer Debbie Horsfield has a new project - she is updating her first commissioned theatre play, True, Dare, Kiss, about four female football fans and going back to them in their forties as they take stock of their lives.

Mackie says: “What I am most excited about in this new bigger department is how we can be more ambitious with our series, talk to a big audience, upgrade.” She points to the way the best American pieces, such as Six Feet Under, “use people who have written for film. Being risky and bold through serious television. That’s what I would like to do, by expanding our series portfolio.” But she is also a big fan of Thomas Hardy and would one day love to adapt a Hardy novel for the BBC.

Mackie, 44, with one son of 11, went to Westfield College, London - her thesis was on Hardy. She joined the BBC as secretary on the Radio Times - “I used to scour my copy of Ariel” - and worked her way up, via radio. She says: “I always wanted to work in drama. Eventually they put me on EastEnders in its early days. I thought I’d died and gone to heaven.”

She moved to become a script editor on Making Out, a Debbie Horsfield comedy drama. “She really championed me. I script edited and worked on Casualty. I learned more on Casualty than any other show - how to structure a story, that there were good and less good writers. [Casualty episodes] are Play for Todays - for one, 18 million people watched as the hospital was burned down. I’d hate to be in a department just making high end serials”. She left for LWT between 1997 and 2001, a point when BBC drama was a seriously unhappy place.

“I am really glad I went, a very commercial company perspective is not a bad thing, nor is learning more about the business side. I loved my time at LWT.” It included making a modern version of Othello for ITV but she was wooed back to the Corporation by Jane Tranter and Alan Yentob.

Her responsibilities include drama at BBC Birmingham. “The new site at the university has brilliant facilities, it’s like a mini Pinewood. I’d love to broaden the portfolio with shorter run series like Cutting It. I want Birmingham and Manchester to feel very plugged in.”

Another gap, she believes, is family drama for 8pm on Sundays. “This department never concentrated on pre-watershed. I have a hunch that’s where we must put energy, it’s the one time of the week a family sits down together. Could we be a bit braver?”