I wanted to write about men and masculinity: Lucy Kirkwood on her new TV firefighting drama

Award-winning Chimerica playwright Lucy Kirkwood tells Nick Curtis why writing a TV firefighting drama has finally let her give up the bar job
Director: Lucy Kirkwood
14 February 2014

Lucy Kirkwood is listing the more extraordinary insights thrown up by her research into the world of London’s firefighters for her new Sky drama series The Smoke. Instead of an alarm bell, fire stations now have “a disembodied, Moira Stuart-like voice” telling them to mobilise, she says, which the crew in Soho refer to as “The Madam”. No one uses a fireman’s pole any more because the stairs are quicker, but at the Soho station they have retained the pole for the use of visiting hen parties.

“And someone told me about firefighters getting erections on the way to shouts [calls], which I found not surprising but endearing,” says the 30-year-old Londoner. “Yeah, of course! It’s your first day on a really important, exciting job, and you’re saving people’s lives, there’s bells ringing and you’re driving really fast… that seems like an entirely natural response to me. It tickled me.”

The Smoke is a major departure for Kirkwood, in lots of ways. Although she cut her writing teeth on E4’s Skins, she is best known for incisive stage plays: the dark futuristic comedy Tinderbox at the Bush; Hedda Gabler updated to modern Notting Hill at the Gate; the examination of pernicious imagery in lads’ and ladies’ mags, NSFW, at the Royal Court; and Chimerica, her epic look at US-Chinese relations, which transferred from the Almeida to the West End and won the Evening Standard’s Best Play Award last year. Kirkwood describes the award as a “beautiful punctuation mark” on an extraordinary 2013.

The Smoke — which she developed over three years alongside Chimerica — is by contrast a big, brash, primetime drama. An attack by thugs (a common risk for firefighters) during a blaze in which a baby died has left fire chief Kev (Jamie Bamber) mentally and physically scorched, and he’s trying to rediscover what it is to be a man with both his fiancé Trish (Jodie Whittaker) and his rackety colleagues at a Stratford firehouse. It’s a bawdy, beery, brawly milieu over which Kirkwood — who has hitherto expressed a muscular feminism wherever gender enters the equation — casts a benign eye.

“I wanted to write about men and masculinity,” she says. “And increasingly what I became fixated on was the masculine brand of heroism associated with the firefighter, how you break that down and how that fits into the modern world. Working in the arts, it’s very easy to form this idea that every man is a new man, and there’s a danger in that. But it has taken a really long time to write this: if it was a group of people I didn’t have any affection for or didn’t want to understand more, I couldn’t have done it.”

It’s not just Kev who is damaged or has issues. Mal is a shagger suddenly thrown when Trish’s sister asks him, mid-tryst, to slap her (Kirkwood thinks men are nonplussed by the rapid assimilation of 50 Shades-ism into sexual discourse). Little Al is competing in cage fights to earn child support. Asbo has a chip the size of a council estate on his shoulder and a dark secret. Black, female Ziggy is protective of the men she matches pint for pint. They face not only chip-pan fires and stranded abseilers but Tube suicides and a morbidly obese girl who has to be rescued from a burning building.

Kirkwood originally planned to set the show in Soho but Sky felt this might be too metropolitan. “I said, what about Stratford? There’s a new landscape being formed out there that is unfamiliar, and that has been shot very beautifully and cinematically for the show. I come from Manor Park so I am always excited to see those underexposed parts, just out towards Essex, shown on screen. Our hero is a Romford boy in my head.” The script is also stuffed with in-jokes for fans of London lore.

Kirkwood grew up around Wanstead Flats and Epping Forest, her father a City analyst and her mother a sign language teacher: she has a younger sister, Sophie, a fashion stylist. A compulsive reader as a child, Kirkwood got involved in drama at Woodford Grammar School and while at Edinburgh University wrote plays that came to the attention of agent Mel Kenyon. Getting more TV work means she can now afford to write full-time, rather than take bar jobs or care work, but she can’t afford to stay in London.

“I had a really nice flat on Brick Lane but I was always living with three or four other people, it was quite studenty, my workload was increasing and I didn’t have a place to write in,” she says.

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On a trip to Norfolk she found a house near Diss “that I could rent for less than a room in Acton”. She shares it now with her partner, who doesn’t like to be talked about (“but he is male, I can tell you that, and I met him through work”). She hymns the pleasures of solitude and a garden.

Kirkwood is currently prepping an all-female play about the Large Hadron Collider for the Manhattan Theatre Club and reviving the dance piece Rabbits with Lost Dog Theatre for the Brighton Festival. There are film scripts in the offing, and the possibility of a second series of The Smoke if the first is a success. We talk about the way London theatre and international TV seem both to be burgeoning.

“There is a younger generation that has grown up not knowing television as anything else but fucking amazing because they weren’t born until 1995,” Kirkwood enthuses. “But there is a purity and immediacy to theatre that is narcotic and unbeatable, and as a way of exploring ideas it is completely without bounds. I couldn’t ever give it up.”

The Smoke begins on Thursday on Sky 1 at 9pm.

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