RTS Programme Awards 2022

“[This award] is for someone whose combination of a voracious work ethic and dazzling talent has made him one of the most sought-after writers in television today…and what an incredible body of work he’s built already. It was just fifteen years ago that he made his first foray into television writing with an episode of Shameless for Channel 4, followed by numerous episodes of the teenage drama Skins. Two years later he created Cast Offs, a comedy drama following six disabled people sent to a remote island for a reality television show – exploring themes around disability he’d develop further later on.

Jack began collaborating with Shane Meadows on This Is England in 2010, together writing three series of it over the next five years. This Is England was raw and visceral, showing the bleakness and boredom of provincial life in the second half of Thatcher’s decade – while at the same time celebrating the infectious spirit of belonging to a teenage tribe. From that point on, Jack’s output became prolific – one or two big projects a year, all with something new and interesting to say…and across the dramatic genres: there was a supernatural narrative in The Fades; an action-adventure in Sinbad; a murder mystery in Glue; a crime thriller in The Last Panthers.

The real events of Operation Yewtree inspired him to write National Treasure in 2016, where Robbie Coltrane gave a tour-de-force performance as a once-celebrated TV comedian now accused of sexual assault. In 2018 came Kiri starring Sarah Lancashire, and the following year he collaborated again with Shane Meadows, this time on The Virtues starring Stephen Graham. Incredibly, in the same year he also brought to the screen both The Accident for Channel 4 AND a major Sunday night series for BBC One with Philip Pullman’s opus His Dark Materials.

In 2021, with the pandemic raging, Jack Thorne wrote Help – I’m pleased to say, one of the winners tonight. It was a blistering piece…not only confronting the challenge of living with early-onset Alzheimer’s Disease, but a scorching indictment too of the reality unfolding in Britain’s care homes as COVID ripped through them. Severely underpaid care workers, denied the most basic protection to care for their patients safely, were abandoned by a Government that simply looked the other way. When care worker Sarah, played by Jodie Comer, broke the fourth wall and addressed viewers directly about living in a country where foodbanks had become the norm for people like her – it was a cry from the heart and soul.

Last August Jack gave the MacTaggart Lecture at Edinburgh and addressed how disabled people have been woefully let down by television. He spoke of how as an industry, we’ve abjectly failed to tell disabled stories and employ disabled talent. His words were a real wake up call – and one that’s still to be fully acted upon. It’s a subject Jack expounded on just last week, when BBC Two aired his latest project, Then Barbara Met Alan, a piece co-written with Genevieve Barr. It told the moving story of two founders of the campaigning group the Disabled People’s Direct Action Network, who fall in love while fighting for disability rights through civil disobedience. It was a story in which the personal and political were inextricably entwined – a characteristic of much of Jack’s work.

In his MacTaggart, Jack said that watching Alan Bleasdale’s drama The Boys from the Blackstuff was the most important cultural event of his life – but it’s clearly now true that Jack’s own writing can be seen to be part of the same great tradition: work which reflects the real impact that distant political decisions have on ordinary lives. As Bleasdale did before him, he writes human stories about the issues that stalk the times we live through – stories about class, race, sex, guilt, innocence and justice. And he does so with a passion, an intensity and a searing honesty that makes his work so compelling, relevant and vital.”