BBC & HBO Team with Sally Wainwright for New Drama

LONDON: BBC One and HBO have commissioned Shibden Hall, a new drama created and written by Sally Wainwright (Last Tango in Halifax, Happy Valley).

The series is a Lookout Point production for the BBC and co-produced with HBO. Set in West Yorkshire in 1832, Shibden Hall is the story of landowner Anne Lister, who returns home after years of exotic travel and social climbing determined to transform the fate of her faded ancestral home in Halifax. Every part of Lister’s story is based on historical fact, recorded in the 4 million words of her diaries that contain the most intimate details of her life.

Wainwright said: “Anne Lister is a gift to a dramatist. She is one of the most exuberant, thrilling and brilliant women in British history, and I can’t wait to celebrate her. Landowner, industrialist, traveler, mountaineer, scholar, would-be brain surgeon and prolific diarist, Anne returns from years of travel to her ancestral home, determined to restore it to its former glory, and determined to marry Ann Walker.

“It’s a beautifully rich, complicated, surprising love story. To bring Anne Lister to life on screen is the fulfillment of an ambition I’ve had for 20 years. Shibden Hall is a place I have known and loved since I was a child. I’m also delighted to be working with Faith Penhale again and the wonderful team at Lookout Point after our collaboration on To Walk Invisible, and of course thrilled to be working with the BBC and HBO.”

Piers Wenger, the controller of BBC drama commissioning, said: “The originality and ambition of the writing in Shibden Hall is Sally Wainwright at her boldest and best. In dramatizing the life and loves of Anne Lister, Sally might just have found her most complex and uncompromising female character yet and I’m so proud that they will be making their home BBC One.”

Faith Penhale, Lookout Point’s executive producer, said: “This is an extraordinary story about a remarkable woman. We’re in early 19th Century Yorkshire and here is an independent, land-owning industrialist recording in her diary her own civil partnership with a neighboring heiress. I can’t wait for Sally to bring Anne Lister, with all her wit and warmth and unpredictability, to life for BBC One and HBO. And it’s a joy to be working together with Sally again after our wonderful collaboration on To Walk Invisible last year.”

Casey Bloys, the president of HBO programming, added: “We are thrilled to partner with the extraordinarily talented Sally Wainwright on this epic story and delve into the exceptionally unique life of Anne Lister. We are also pleased to continue our long and successful relationship with the BBC and look forward to our partnership with Faith Penhale and the team at Lookout Point.”