The council house girl who always saw the bigger world out there
Helen Blakeman in Colombo. Pic by Ishanka Sunimal
Chatting with Helen Blakeman feels like chatting with one of your closest friends, settled on a comfy couch with a good cup of tea. The award-winning screenwriter and playwright, the British Council invited her to give a Masterclass, aptly titled ‘Female Filmmakers First’ at the Jaffna Film Festival is buzzing from the aftermath of Jaffna and her interaction with women who attended her workshop.
“I enjoyed working with them so much and I said I’m learning just as much from them as they are from me. I love their quiet feminine determination. Well…I don’t want to say quietly but it’s a difference between quiet and bold! Their self-development is at the forefront of everything they do.”
It’s a fitting segue into asking about Blakeman’s own self-development which began early in her childhood.
Born in Liverpool, her consonants are rounded off with a soothing Scouse lilt as she compares her hometown to Sri Lanka – “It’s a happy town – that’s what I like about here, you talk to everyone and you smile at everyone.”
Blakeman grew up in a council house (accommodation provided by the state) and lived in a single parent family with her sister and mother who was a cleaner – ‘My mum loved going to the cinema and I think that she used to get lost in that 1950s Hollywood world. She always believed in education. Considering that we were from a poor background it was quite unusual that she would encourage us to go to the theatre and just take in a wider world. We were never insular and we didn’t think, ‘Oh we’re from this kind of council estate therefore we will stay here’, neither was she saying, ‘be ambitious’. We were just quietly educated with her to see there was a bigger world out there.”
Being proactive seems intrinsic to Blakeman’s nature. After joining her sister’s acting classes, aged 15, she wrote a CV (in red ink, no less!) underlining her achievements and acting experience at school and sent it off to a local soap opera based in Liverpool. They called up the next day inviting her for auditions. She got the part and spent two years working on and off, whilst managing to score the highest marks for her GCSEs in her school. Wanting to experience more theatre, she worked as an usher at Everyman Theatre – “So while I did my A’ Levels I would work there twice or thrice a week and that’s where I learnt theatre. If I jog the story to now, I’m on the board of Everyman so it came full circle.”
Over the past couple of years many high profile actors including Dame Judi Dench have lamented the fact that working class actors have less chance of working in the theatre and film industry owing to financial barriers. It’s something Blakeman has experienced first-hand. At 17 she wrote to countless charities and trust funds to sponsor her fees at the National Youth Theatre of Great Britain. After achieving a First at John Moore’s she secured funding for her Masters in Playwriting at Birmingham University but at the last minute the government changed its rules which meant she had to again write ‘hundreds of letters’ and appeal to charities. But her hard work and hustle paid off.
“I wrote a play (Caravan) while I was on the course. And I wrote to agents and directors to come see it and a director called Terry Johnson who helped teach on the course came along. It was in a small studio space with a bunch of undergraduates who had only rehearsed a tiny bit but and at the end he said “Do you have a copy of your script?” The next day he took it to the artistic director of the Bush Theatre in London whose birthday it was and said ‘Happy Birthday!’ and he loved it. That must have been July and the show was on in November.”
The focal point of ‘Caravan’ is a mother and her two daughters who live in a caravan in Northern Wales whilst her subsequent play ‘Normal’ deals with the aftermath of a mother experiencing the death of her babies. It almost seems like Blakeman is drawn to writing about the intricacies of family life. “When I did the Masterclass in Jaffna I spoke about everything and starting with Caravan, there always seems to be a young female at the centre of it who is either struggling to have her voice heard or on a journey to get her voice heard. I think that’s why I originally wanted to write because I wanted to give a voice to people who don’t usually have a voice. That’s why I was so struck by all the projects that the young women in Jaffna brought as they were all about female identity in all its various guises. They weren’t necessarily political stories but they were personally political.”
The personal is political but it can also be very controversial as she found out when writing ‘Pleasureland’ in 2003. Aired on Channel 4, the programme discussed teenage sex and the pressures of growing up but was hit with criticism due to its subject matter and because Channel 4 attached a debate to it on lowering the sexual age of consent from 16 to 14. “While it was quite controversial, my intention was to write a story around how it was for an average girl to grow up and to hear different stories from their peers and not know what’s true because inherently whether it’s about sexuality or academia, peer groups tell different things to different people.” Despite the knockbacks, it was the highest rated show on Channel 4 and won Blakeman a BAFTA and a Royal Television Society Award. It’s even had an after-life with some of her children’s nursery teachers expressing how much they related to the programme when they were teens.
With great success came a new chapter in Blakeman’s life- motherhood. Her daughter was born two days after the ‘Pleasureland’ shoot wrapped up and she recalls being contacted soon after to write voiceovers for it so a break didn’t seem likely. “As a woman it’s such a huge physical change. You begin with these determinations and then you think ‘Whoa!’ Out of financial necessity as well as want, I went back to work when she was three months old but actually that was kind of good for both of us. It was the new normal.”
She had another child and in between went through quite a long period of ill health but says there was always a determination to work. “So when my second child was younger, I went to work on Hollyoaks (a British soap opera) and that was great because it was regular and I knew what I was doing. I also wrote Dustbin Baby which was a joy to write.’
The BBC television film, which was something of a natural treasure when it came out, was based on Jacqueline Wilson’s children’s novel. Working with an all-female production team, Dustbin Baby was shortlisted for an International Emmy Award and Blakeman won Best Writer at the British Academy Children’s Awards. Wilson herself was so pleased with the adaptation she gave Blakeman free rein to adapt any of her other novels, ‘Hetty Feather’ being the next choice.
“There were three books in the series so at first we worked on all three books and then personnel changed. I did the outline for 13 episodes and they thought to make it more cost effective and because they really liked the last episode which was an original, why not turn it into a long running series. It’s cheaper and it could keep coming back and back rather than be a one off. So we created a whole new world in a way. I see adaptation as looking between the lines and behind the lines to see what other possibilities there are.”
Does she have any advice for those experiencing a creative block or writer”s block? She pauses for a moment, “If something doesn’t feel right it’s usually because it isn’t right so if I’m writing and I can’t figure something out, I’ll always step away from the laptop.”She giggles, “I usually go and do some laundry to be honest! I’ll go back and usually it’ll solve itself. As for block…I think it’s more fear than the block – I think you just have to start small – write your idea in a line, write your idea in a paragraph, write your idea as a page, and just keep on doing bigger building blocks till you’ve got it.”