However her background in TV did prove useful. “I knew the industry, and I knew there was no point in just writing any old thing.”

Strong characters, she says, are the key to successful drama – a sentiment that one of her writing idols, Sally Wainwright echoes.

“I can get myself excited about most worlds – although once I was looking at the world of finance. That was a bit of a stretch,” she adds laughing.

Her ‘thing’ however – “most writers have a ‘thing’,” she believes – is strong women.

“It’s difficult when you talk about strong women, people automatically assume you mean weak men as the counter point. Absolutely not!” Dickens insists.

However, some writers are more interested in writing the men than the women, or vice versa.

She gives the example of acclaimed film Nocturnal Animals. “It’s a good, divisive film,” she says. “[But] I took something completely different from it than my male friends. It was like we had seen two completely different films. It struck me that people are drawn to different things.”

It is something she has run up against in her own work.

“When I am doing a project,” she explains mournfully, “the character that I like the most, everyone goes ‘Oh, I just didn’t warm to that character. She’s too cold. She’s too hard. She’s too difficult.”

In Thirteen this was DS Lisa Merchant, one of the detectives charged with investigating Ivy’s abduction and return.

“Very deliberately I wanted to have her to be the more questioning, professional, logical, emotionally-distanced cop, and [her partner, DI Elliot Carne] to be the one who is sort of emotionally entangled by Ivy’s story,” she says.

"Anyone who comes through that experience and can string sentences together, is incredible in my book.”

However, Dickens admits, that many of the characters are not in any sense likeable.

“They’ve all, to different extents, elicited quite strong reactions – which I suppose shows they’re all strong characters,” she says. “You don’t react strongly to a character that doesn’t have much definition.”

And naturally the strongest reactions were to the show’s central character, Ivy, played by the RTS award-nominated Jodie Comer.

“Jodie’s performance is the reason the show got the audience it got,” Dickens believes.

“A lot of people didn’t like Ivy, or were suspicious of her,” the writer explains. “[But] you needed people to keep watching either because they did like her and wanted to know what happened, or because they didn’t and wanted to know what lie was going to be uncovered.”

For her part, Dickens is extremely protective of the character.

“I get very defensive of her because, although it obviously wasn’t based on a real story, [I felt] just a real responsibility to anyone watching who might have suffered abuse.

“You read some of the real-life accounts, and anyone who comes through that experience and can string sentences together, is incredible in my book.”

Now she is focused on other projects including Forty Elephants a girl-gang drama based in 1920s London, which is based on a real-life gang of “vicious but real and flawed women doing bad things for good reasons.”

“I certainly wouldn’t do something that was an all-male action piece,” she insists. But an all-female action piece? “Absolutely!” she laughs!