Interview with writer Anne-Marie O’Connor

5 April 2022

How did you get involved in Hullraisers?

I’ve worked with Hannah and Fay from Fable before and they asked if I'd like to come on board. Anything I've ever wanted to try and write in comedy, I was able to do with Hullraisers. It’s working class. It’s women. It’s funny. Toni is hubristic and selfish. She might be a mum but she's also got her own interests at heart, and I just think all that's funny.

 

Do you feel there haven’t been enough working-class comedies in recent years?

Yes. It's fine to be aspirational but representation on TV is really important to me, especially for working-class people coming through the industry. When there’s an authenticity to those stories, it really resonates with audiences. To see somewhere like Hull represented truthfully is like the Holy Grail, especially in comedy. Being on Channel 4 is the Holy Grail anyway: all my favourite comedies, like Vic and Bob and Peep Show, were always on Channel 4, so to be able to bring a female working-class comedy to Channel 4 was just a real honour.

 

Tell me about the tone of the language between the three main characters.

Lucy and I talked about this loads. If you go to Bradford or Hull you could watch two women talking from a distance and you’d think they were having a fight. But then you get nearer and you realise they’re just discussing what they’re having for their tea. There’s this whole history in Hull where the men went out to sea and the fishwives who stayed at home and that world grew out of that matriarchal set up. There’s such a truth to these women having a lot to say. If someone’s passive aggressive to Toni in our show, it flies over her head. Whereas if someone says something quite pointed to her, they just have it out. They don't want things to linger. We didn’t want it to look like everyone scrapping in the streets then going to the pub, though. It’s not that. It’s just that there’s this combative nature in the dialogue and in the bones of the people that I know so well. It really makes me laugh.

 

But there’s also a warmth underpinning it all …

Yes, well I think if you feel safe to say what you think in front of people, that's love, isn't it? They do love each other and if they weren’t on such steady ground they wouldn’t be quite as front-footed with each other.

 

What does Hullraisers say about parenting?

Toni’s paying it a lot of lip service and saying, ‘I’m a good mum’, and she is a good mum, but she shouldn’t have to justify it because parenting is rock hard. She's doing what a lot of people do which is looking around and thinking, ‘Why is it a competition? Why can't I just be me and be fabulous?’ A good comedy character is foolish and causes her own problems, and you can't do that with somebody who's just a good mum. So it was always about trying to get that middle ground of saying that she loves and cares about her daughter but she’s always getting herself in a massive pickle.

 

Is it very specific to the ages of the characters?

Yes because I'm sure lots of people in life have a preordained, ‘This is what I want to do and this is the age I'm going to do it’ but for most people it just kind of rolls. Toni got pregnant accidentally and she thinks she could have been a contender. If the wind had blown another way, she’d have been Kate Winslet. She’s at that age where it feels like someone’s pressed fast forward on your life. You should have it all sorted but you don’t. There are societal expectations that get put on women in their 30s. What's interesting about Rana is that we're allowing her to opt out of that. Nobody’s saying to Rana, ‘Are you going to have a baby?’ And with Paula if you said, ‘Why did you have kids?’ she’d be like, ‘What? Because you do, don’t you?’

 

How are their family lives depicted?

They're all happy and they like their lives and that’s another thing we really wanted to depict in terms of the working classes. It’s not a Ken Loach film, it’s not misery tourism. Life’s a laugh, isn’t it? I've had some of the worst jobs in the world, but I’ve had a laugh while I'm doing it because otherwise, what else are you going to do? Just work 12 hours in a factory and be miserable? You make the fun where you are.

 

What does the setting of Hull itself add to the show?

Hull looks great. There are parts where it looks like Paris because it's a beautiful Victorian park city. There’s real beauty in it so I really hope people from Hull love it and more broadly that people from other similar cities think, ‘Yeah, that’s us, that is’. I feel really proud of that and hopeful that people will take it to their hearts.