Ask the Write Questions with Dolly Alderton and China Moo-Young
39:34 Share

Hello and welcome to Ask the Right Questions with writer Dolly Alderton and director Chyna Moo Young, a podcast from BBC Writers' Room. If you haven't watched Everything I Know About Love, it's available to view on BBC iPlayer now, or there may be some spoilers. We asked you, the viewer, to send in questions for Dolly and Chyna. We've collated them, thrown them in a bowl and we're going to ask them to choose a question now at random.

They're not sure what's coming next. Let's meet our guests, Dolly and China. Hello, I'm Dolly Alderton. I'm the writer and executive producer of Everything I Know About Love. And with me is... Hi, I'm China Muyang and I'm the director of Everything I Know About Love. Okay, thank you to everyone who sent in questions to the podcast. There's loads to get through, so we'll pick them at random and hopefully yours will make the cut. Right, here we go. First question.

Right, so this is a question we got from Instagram. As there is a lot that is autobiographical almost, how do you write the characters' words that are opposite to yours while making them authentic? How do you get into their psyche? Is it more helpful to base characters on people you know even if you're not literally writing them? I struggle to write the male perspective authentically. How do you do this?

You never want all your characters to sound the same. If you're writing something funny, your humor, your sense of humor will be in the voice of every character. But it's a real failure of the screenwriter if you can't distinguish between all of their different voices. And what I normally do is I think about someone who I know who is most similar to the characters. Sometimes I'll ring them or

I'll go to the pub with them and have a conversation with them about the topic I'm writing about. And then I log the way in which they speak, their cadence, their tone, the observations that they make. So it's a bit of that. And then obviously it's just the thing that writers are meant to use their imagination. It's a combination of both for me. I've always thought that being a writer, the thing that's

Most important is being an observer, is remembering to notice the right things. So if you're really keeping your eyes peeled and your ears open in conversations with lots of different people without even realising you'll be logging away lots of material to use later for how different people

I think you're very good at writing very distinct characters, male or female. For me, certainly it really helps when I start casting, thinking about characters when we're doing script notes, even when we started about thinking about who might play them, even if that person doesn't end up playing them. It was quite good to calibrate who we felt that person might be. So then that voice comes through.

The other thing I'd say is to not be afraid of research. I think a lot of writers feel that they have to just use their imagination and to not just use your imagination is a failure of creativity. But I'm very used to researching with my background as a journalist. And actually lots of writers I know do research. In When Harry Met Sally, my favourite film of all time, one of China's favourite films, Nora Ephron interviewed Rob Rayner and his best friend so she would be able to write Harry.

talking about the male experience. And then all that material was funneled straight into the voice of Harry Burns. So I just don't think that's something that you should shy away from. If you're writing about a man who is, I don't know, a player or promiscuous, or if you're writing about a man who's committed and traditional, or you're writing about a creative man or a very logical man, all these different types of men, apparently there are lots. You just need to meet up with the one that you know, the one that's closest to your character and...

have a chat with him. And also Dolly, you certainly, when we cast Nell and Amara, you know, tweaked those characters, especially Nell, because we didn't know, we knew she was going to be from the north of England and working class, but we didn't have a specific person in mind. So, you know, we knew that they might be Scottish or they might be Mancunian or from Yorkshire. And that definitely fed into then you rewriting for Marley, didn't you? Yeah, definitely. I really liked doing that

with actors, I really like working out how I can integrate

their speaking voice and their heritage and their natural cadence into the dialogue to make it as natural as possible. So yeah, working with actors, I think that's a great tip. So this is from Instagram. So excited to see this. I'm fascinated by the change from nonfiction to partially fictitious. My question, what were the challenges you anticipated, didn't anticipate when developing the script for Everything I Know About Love for TV adaptation? How much did it differ from the novel writing?

I think it was basically the same difficulty throughout. It's like a very broad difficulty that we were navigating at every step, which is how loyal do you have to be to the text? So, you know, initially when we thought it was more of an adaptation than what it ended up being, which is a show inspired by the book, I kind of strapped myself into the limitations of the pages. So the timeline had to be exactly the same. Even when we got to casting, we thought that

And Maggie and Birdie had to look exactly like me and my best friend, Farley, who Birdie's based on. And I don't know why we thought that. But then the further we got away from the book, the freer we felt. And then the minute that we made a decision to do that, we'd go, oh, we should have done that ages ago. We're not making documentary. That was our refrain, wasn't it? That we just kept reminding ourselves that we were free to...

embellish or embroider or alter as much as we wanted to make to make the best tv show well it was helpful for me because I read the scripts first didn't know the book and then read the book very swiftly afterwards and what was clear because you were writing both is that there was that very distinctive same voice in there but for me it was actually much more taking the essence and the tone and vibe of what you capture in the book and then making sure that that's transposed to screen and

you take some truth from it and it's grounded in the truth of what you'd written and then you use that as a springboard. And I think we did that across, you know, everything from casting to costume and location finding was just going, what's the original? Like, do we want to homage that or do we want to,

depart from it because say the marathon bar in chalk farm doesn't even look like a kebab shop disco. If you made it, it's completely incongruous. And so we made one that felt much more in episode one that felt much more real. Yeah. I think that word homage, that's a good word. It was like, we either departed entirely departed mostly did an homage, but we actually ended up never doing replication. We did start out on, well, we know that,

Birdie and Maggie we want that little and large we want that odd couple that immediately it's like a comedy duo if they're opposites it physically so we knew we wanted someone petite and then someone really tall but we were going for kind of blonde six foot actresses and when Emma you know read for it Emma just had Maggie vibes I would say she innately got the role and physically she got it and emotionally she got it so she's the DNA of Maggie or Dolly.

What one thing would you bring to a desert island and why?

I can't say I haven't thought about this because I listen to Desert Island Discs so religiously. What are the best things that are taken on Desert Island Discs? Yves Pollard took tweezers, which I loved. I think I'd take what Helen Fielding said on hers, which was a tree that the fruit of which is Terry's chocolate orange and the sap of which is chilled Sauvignon Blanc. Or Britt Eklund. Britt Eklund took a bath of champagne. Didn't someone take Harrison Ford because he's a master carpenter and really good company? No.

There you go, you can take Harrison Ford, that's love.

because the story is based on your experiences was it difficult to stand on set and witness scenes without interfering or making your own edits what's it like to watch a whole tv production recreate moments of your life has it changed your perspective of those events in any way yes all of it all of it was strange first time i walked into the house you know and there was a bustling crew adding detritus around the kitchen to make it more messy uh

a person from the props department writing little notes from one girl to the other that would be stuck on the fridge and putting the beauty products that would make sense for each character in their room or putting the photos and the books in their room that would make most sense. The level of detail of dressing a world, I still can't quite get over.

My favourite prop in the whole show was something that I just like wrote to give atmosphere to a scene in the stage directions. And I was like, oh my God, they've actually done it. Where in Birdie's childhood home, it was a very specific type of beige suburban middle classness that I wanted to capture that is...

so, so, so specific. These houses that the girls grew up in, I'd never wanted any kind of trace of culture, really. There wasn't art on the walls. There wasn't people's music taste that clearly. It was more about that suburban sense of acquisition of comfort, of plush carpets and

tiles that you need to wipe after you have a shower in the bathroom and lots of photos of family and there was a direction for a canvas print that all the households in my teenage life that I was with all my friends had it like a canvas stretched print of birdies family all wearing white t-shirts and blue jeans and like a photo shoot of them with their arms around each other and I can't believe that I would stand in birdie childhood home and look at that and be like

I can't believe they did a photo shoot for that. Like the three actors went off and did a photo shoot for that and then they printed it as a canvas for like an incidental moment that you probably, the audience probably won't even clock. So all those levels of like deep, deep detail, those are the things...

I found trippiest. Some of the emotional scenes that were based on real conversations in real life, like Maggie and Birdie's breakup or the moment when Maggie says, I love you to street. They were a bit squirmy to watch, but they happened so long ago that I feel like I've kind of processed all of it to the point that pain of it or the familiarity of it is extremely faint now. I mean, for me, when I was watching the monitor with you, you know, I'd often feel like

Well, you always know innately whether you've got a scene, if it does affect you. And I think I would, you know, know that and then look at you and if...

You'd be nodding or looking sheepish or whatever. We had the communication of just knowing that we'd got it. The way it changed my perspective is it made me realise even more the universality of some of those kind of female experiences, young female experiences. So I remember in the bat mitzvah scene when Maggie approaches a boy and he says that she's a lanky minger with no tits. That just rolled off the tongue. That's a deep, deep memory.

Janet, who was our head of hair and makeup, turned to our producer and just sighed and said, we've all been there. And I was like, yeah, every woman found that scene really hard. And then equally my favourite, Chyna, was the scene where Mackie turns up to Street's house wearing underwear under a coat, thinking she's this sort of Jackie Collins protagonist, you know, ripped open her coat to impress him. All the men on the crew were like, who would do that? Like, women don't do that. Everyone commented how mad it was and all...

all the women on the set, every one of them went, "Mm, really? Oh, I've done it." - And then they were like, "Well, if you've all done it, where are these women? Why are they not doing it to us?" Chyna, writers and directors you admire and have influenced you the most? - Oh, that's a huge question. - I always find when I get a question like that, I can't think of anyone, and then I end up saying something like, "Where's Anderson?"

I'm not going to say Wes Anderson, although I think he's great. I'm going to default to Ridley Scott because he's kind of the filmmaker that I fell in love with as a teenager. He's amazing because he works in every single genre and he made two of the greatest feminist films ever made.

Thelma and Louis is an alien, both very different. And he's a man. And so I love him because he's a brilliant filmmaker that just really understands how to make stories that entertain audiences and you're subsumed in that entire world. P.T. Anderson would be my other one. Yeah, I'm united with you on that. P.T. Anderson, Nora Ephron, Billy Wilder, Greta Gerwig. I'm a huge Greta Gerwig fan. Joey Soloway. And in more recent years, Joanna Hogg.

This one's from Instagram. How did you first get started writing and directing and making the distinction between pure autobiography and fiction without it seeming too perfect and unrealistic? Something that I found really interesting about the process of balancing reality and perfection on screen is initially all I wanted was reality. I wanted reality.

a house that looked like shit that was crumbling down, the girls' makeup to be a total mess. I thought that was the most important thing. And the further we got into the process, the more I realized that you're not being paid to replicate life entirely detail by detail as honestly as possible. I think you're meant to be completely honest in its essence, but

When people say that they want more reality of something on screen, what they would be asking for is something that would be completely unappealing to watch. Like I remember when I first went into the girl's house, the set of the girl's house, which is like basically the exact same house that I paid, you know, £650 a month to live in when I first moved to London in Camden. But it had slightly nicer furniture.

a better look of paint on the walls. And it was much, much bigger. The proportions of it were bigger. And I realized when you took me around for the first time that the reason we had to make the house that big is because we had loads of set pieces in the show and we needed to have the space for lots of cameras and the stories and the characters to be able to breathe, to tell the story in the most compelling way. That's what makes it enticing to watch. So you have to take as much reality as possible and

And then you do have to put it into a screen world that's slightly different. I think it's also the medium. You know, if you're making a film versus making a six, seven or eight part show with sets, you can probably stand being in a very, very tight apartment for 90 minutes and that being part of the atmosphere. When you're shooting for six months and you are...

shooting the kind of dramatic arcs and set pieces that we were doing in that house. You need some kind of scale to even cover the dance pieces. We needed an outside space where the girls could smoke or there could be in and outs. We needed two sets of stairs. We needed lots of different angles. So montages would be exciting and fun and vibrant so that you could have a house party and actually be able to shoot that with people.

a crew of 75 people in there, as well as all the people who are going to the house party. And then it's even the reality of shooting like "Lews". We built a "Lew" because the reality of "Lews", and we recce-ed tons in many bars and clubs, is that they are so tiny, you can't get four people and a cameraman in, so you build them.

Favourite animal? This seems like a random question, but actually, Chyna, you did work out with the girls what their sort of physical animal would be, didn't you? We did do that in dance and I can't remember now. I think we did do that work. All I remember is Emma Appleton was a giraffe. We also did...

which Muppet would each character be? You had a really good Muppet mix. What was it? And the dog on the piano. I loved the dog. And was it Janice, the other one you were? I think so. Who were you? Big Bird. Obviously. China's rule for this show is, if in doubt, what would the Muppets do? Because weirdly, there's quite a lot of parallels with my heart-wrenching memoir and the Muppet show. Everything I know about comedy is...

kind of from the Muppets. I'd love to know how Dolly found experiences of writing to the screen versus articles. It's just so different. It's worlds and worlds apart. It engages totally different parts of your brain. The thing that's the same is that it's always about observation, but in articles, you have to deliver some sort of conclusion, which you don't have to do in screenwriting, which I enjoy. I think there's more room for ambiguity and for...

questions. And the main difference is writing an article is a very solitary experience other than a set of notes that you get from an editor. Whereas screenwriting is just, it's a band of, it's a band of brothers writing that script, even when you're the only screenwriter. The first draft that I delivered and I worked on with the executives and script editor four times, and then the BBC sent notes. And then China and I would sit and work on two passes of the script together. And then there would be the worst pass of the script, which is like

the pre-production pass which is when you've written in all this mad shit that's completely unachievable like Maggie bungee jumps off off the London Eye with a cat and then I explained that we'll need a stunt coordinator and a diver and a cat wrangler and we can't do it this

This one's from Instagram. Dolly, did you have any script writing guidance beforehand? I've read all those kind of dorky books when I was a dorky teenager about kind of the science of story and the science of comedy. And I've done screenwriting courses at university.

The main kind of training that I had was I made short films in my 20s and just made lots of mistakes with my writing partner, Lauren Bentstead. And I think that was a kind of quick course for learning about scripts. And then I also worked in script development for six months at Objective Productions.

The best way you can understand how to write scripts is reading as many as possible. Particularly one of my favorite things to do is watch a film and then find the script online and read the script. I do that too. So useful, isn't it? It's really, really helpful. It's really helpful to see how the screenplay departs from it once it's up and moving with actors and location and the vision of a director. And it's really helpful to see what's preserved, you know, word for word precisely. I think it's really, really enlightening.

And how much comes alive from performance as well, as you said, and how much is just from the words. Also, I should pause at this moment and do a bit of BBC plugging and say that there is a script library available to read, so you can read lots of BBC scripts through the BBC Writers Room. MUSIC PLAYS

If you could live in any sitcom, which would it be? I think mine would be Friends because I like New York. I'd be fine with that. The great thing about Friends is as well, in a breaking the fourth wall-y way, is that we get to pretend we're in New York while living in California. That would be great. Or Hacks, actually. That's the only other one because we could be in Las Vegas. Oh my God, Chyna and I are obsessed with Hacks. I'm so desperate for series two.

Any tips on how to structure an episode and series? I mean, this is sort of the bit I struggled with the most, I think. This was when having the executive producer, Sirian Fletcher-Jones, and having my script editor, Sami Al-Hadi, was so, so good. Because I'm always just so preoccupied with funny conversation, atmosphere, set pieces, music, all of that.

All the kind of fun cake toppings of an episode is the stuff that I'm always really focused on. And actually that, to stretch the metaphor, that sort of sponge base of the story rather than the nice little buttercream and the glittery stars that I love, that is actually the thing that

keeps it moving and that's the thing that makes people keep watching not only just across an episode but across an entire series how do you keep people's attention it's all about structure there's also how to promise story visually not necessarily in dialogue or plot you visually give the audience a map through where are those characters at what does it promise where might this go especially at the end of an episode it might not be in dialogue it might just be in visually so you you leave the audience a sense of of wanting more

That transposed into lots of our conversations about how we go in and out of scenes structurally, because I think that's quite different to stage writing or novel writing. I think a good example of this in our series is the end of episode two was probably our most debated ending because it's Maggie and Birdie dancing in a club together to Love at First Sight by Kylie. And that's crazy.

cut into intercut with a flashback of them doing the same dance routine when they're 13 at birdies bat mitzvah and it's in the moment of them dancing it's the moment that maggie realizes that everything in their relationship is about to change this big love story of her life that has been her most constant thing since she was 11 that's all about to change it

That is a huge dramatic moment. Like if that were in a romantic story, that would be the big turning point for drama between two romantic partners. So we really wanted to land that. And initially the way we thought we were landing that was Birdie drifts away from Maggie dancing. We have a closeup on Maggie's face and we had voiceover in which Maggie says

something poetic about Birdie flying free. And it was, I can't remember how I worded it. It was probably very overwrought. And then it was a close up of Maggie's face. And then the more we experimented with it, the more we realized that the thing that actually promised most story was not saying our relationship was about to change. It was saying absolutely nothing at all and just holding on Emma's face. I mean, Emma did everything in that

performance watching Birdie, I knew that we had it because she managed to just summon like a kind of impending heartbreak, but just the feeling of loss and the feeling of love. And then to go back to almost her memory and fold into her memory of her and Birdie at 13, 14, being totally together and in love. I think we echoed it with the dance and everything. You built the audience into that. And then you just trust the audience to make that connection that Emma is so beautifully expressed.

kind of delivering and emanating from her performance. Why was the potentially alienating naked dancing scene so important to you? I was really passionate about any nudity in the show, not feeling gratuitous, but feeling natural and joyful and...

just part of these girls' lives. They're four girls in a house share and you walk around in your underwear. And when you get in drunk late at night, you want to get off the dress and the boots that you've just had on. And she had a dance and I felt like that there shouldn't be any kind of gaze on it and it should just be goofy and fun and celebratory. It was really important to me because you have to...

land characters very quickly in the first episode because you do not want to be wasting precious story time in subsequent episodes, like really still explaining who they are and persuading the audience of who they are. And what that naked dancing is to me is it shows someone who's very, very lost in their own world in their head, which is what she is. She's a dreamer. She's a 24 year old who is like,

so in the mythology of her own stories about herself rather than being grounded and engaged at all in the reality of life. She's just had an awful night where the bloke she really likes has rejected her and embarrassed her. She feels rejected by her friends. She's like desperate to find the fun and she can't find it. And it's her first month in London and she's really putting pressure on herself to be fun. She's standing in a kitchen and

with like laundry racks hanging up and on her CD player, she plays this like very soulful song. And then in her head, we can almost see as she smokes a cigarette that she's going into like her cinematic world. That it's funny for us 'cause it's so dumb.

And it's also set up to a joke, right? A visual gag. So we needed the audience to kind of just enjoy her dancing and that and track before you have the reveal of, you know, that kind of screwball comedy reveal of Birdie and Nathan in bed. You know, Emma is so beautiful. And I think initially we didn't expect that Maggie would look like Emma and she

You know, we did a lot of like with Emma's physicality and the way that she dressed and when we started to make her, to ground her as a kind of every girl. And we didn't want that scene to feel like a sexy scene. When I watched the rushes of it, I was like, China's nailed it. And Emma's nailed it because...

It's kind of rock and roll in a very weird way, a bit. It's also camp and goofy and it's silly and it's someone who's not taking themselves too seriously. I feel really good when I watch that scene. I really like it. The other thing I should say is you put in the screen directions jellyfish dances across the living room. The thing that Emma and I came up with was our interpretation of your brief, jellyfish dancing. Right.

Right, on Instagram, how did the writer's room work when it's Dolly's story? Very interested to know how that dynamic worked. I did a one week development writer's room with a group of writers of all different ages and backgrounds and writing backgrounds and, you know, different writing skill sets and interests. And they were just the most amazing, amazing bunch of women. And they were there really to take away from Dolly's story.

To be totally honest, I wasn't that bothered about Dolly's story throughout a lot of this. I was interested in the story of

me and my friends. And I was interested in the kind of communal story of young womanhood. And I was interested in the story of that time, that generational story, and actually what I wanted in that writer's room to cram in as many stories as possible. So that's what we did. We sat for a week. And the first, as anyone who's been in a writer's room knows, a lot of it is chat. And a lot of the time you're sitting there thinking, is this work?

because we're just sharing stories about this is my house share story. This is my story with my ex. This is my experience as a black woman. This is my experience as a mixed race woman. This is my experience as a queer woman. Working out all the nuances and differences of those stories and then also working out what are the experiences themselves

that united us all. And then in the kind of second half of the week, we worked out how we could funnel that into little conversations in the show or character details or details about the house or details about their jobs. And it was just totally invaluable.

How did you cast for the show? Who did you cast first, Birdie or Maggie? So we cast the show with Aisha Bywater, who's an amazing casting director. It was a really collaborative experience. We sought

and tons of actors for Maggie and Birdie but our Maggie Emma I'd already worked with Birdie well Belle really loved the book and was a huge fan and kind of tenaciously came after the role Marley I'd been tracking she'd been in a film that I loved and I

I put her in the mix for the role. And Ali was a completely new find. The great thing about Aisha is that she brings you so much new, fresh talent. And then there were other actors, sort of known existing people like Craig Parkinson, who as soon as I read James, I was like, please, can we get Craig? And I begged him to do it. And he did it. Nick Farrell and Sophie Thompson for The Parents, they were our first choices, I think. We zeroed it down to a few people for Maggie and Birdie and then did Chemistry Reads.

matching Maggie's and Birdie's and we knew when we had Belle and Emma in the room that that that was our our two. Okay Instagram how did you decide on the scale of the plot the book covers most of Dolly's life and unpicks moments and memories so I'd love to know about how you went about turning them into story beats and then into an arc. The book kind of starts in my teenage life and then it ends it

me at the age of 30, but the main bulk of the stories is the years of house sharing. So the years of, from the age of 24 to 28, that felt like a really good time to find these characters because we wanted to find these women who were making decisions about things like having characters making decisions is a good idea.

we wanted them to be working out who they were. So arriving at a city age 24 with all of them having just started their careers or trying to, you know, jumpstart their careers and living in their first London home together felt like a good time to find them. It also felt like that also in my real life coincided with the year 2012, which was...

was just a great year to be a Londoner. It was an exciting, vibrant time to be a Londoner. So that felt like there were lots of moments for period details, for want of a better word. And then we also kind of encapsulated some of Birdie and Maggie's childhood and their teenage life with moments of flashback. I've always had this thing about

a year. I've always thought a story is very interesting to be told in a year. My novel was a year. In fact, initially, the first draft of the script, in the same way my novel began with Maggie's birthday and then ended with her birthday. In your 20s, there's this sense of what have you done? What stories have you got? What do you have to show for the year? It's a satisfying amount of time to follow a person's life.

This is from Instagram. How did you manage to tread the line ethically when writing something for screen that is based on real life humans? As in, did you consult with your friends or have some lines that you felt it was important not to cross in terms of depicting other people's lives on screen through your lens? Were you worried about offending them? I remember listening to Colin Tobin say that every writer has to basically stop thinking about their arm

that they're writing about or their friend from school who they're writing about. He was quite cutthroat about it, that this is a writer's source material. It's the only way that we can write things is experiencing something in real life and then reordering it for the page. I don't believe that. I mean, I wish I was more like that.

But, you know, my friendships and my romantic relationships and my family relationships are the most important thing in my life. And writing would never be more important than that. So I am always very aware of not offending people and making sure I just think it's about consent, really.

Unless I'm writing about like an ex-boyfriend from 10 years ago, I don't care about his consent. In which case I'm only thinking about the legality of things, about changing details so he can't see himself in the character and not to humiliate anyone. But in terms of my friends and family, I just consult them. If you let someone know and you say this experience that we had or you had, I would love to repurpose into some work in a way that you feel comfortable with if you're happy with that. And also, would you like to be a part of that?

process with me. I think also the thing that you have Dolly in your writing of characters is that you genuinely have an affection for characters. There's not a cruelty or a sending up of anyone even when it's you know Nathan being boring in ill-fitting suits and so it means it's much easier as a director to cast that and then talk to actors about calibrating those characters because it comes from a place of truth and love really.

From Instagram, what are your favourite stories about friendship and love? My favourite story about friendship, and I say this over and over again in interviews, is Frances Ha by Greta Gerwig. It is a romantic comedy about female friendship. It's heartbreaking. It's so funny. It's shot in black and white, but I just want everyone to watch it who hasn't watched it. My

Top few, I can't do one, would be Punch Drunk Love, about love, and it would be Thelma and Louise, about friendship. Oh, we also both loved Me Without You. Yes, Sandra Goldbeck as Me Without You, if you haven't seen it, it's brilliant. That was quite a big reference for our show, wasn't it?

What was the hardest scene or episode to write? The hardest one to write was episode six, which I co-wrote with Cherish Shirley, who's also the story consultant across the series. I always knew that I wanted a very long running scene, like a theatre piece that begins with a,

drunken, giddy drinking game that has a kind of genre witchy aspect to it that's really fun and brilliant and then turns sour and then turns incredibly nasty and then turns into a huge, huge dramatic emotional breakup. Really difficult to get right. Cherish and I had to really, really, really, really draft and draft and draft and draft to get that right.

because we just wanted to hold the attention of the audience and build momentum. So that was a real challenge, but I'm really happy with what we ended up with. Love the book. Was Dolly Maggie really that into street? Yes, she was. I think we all have a street in our lives. I think if you're a smart girl, you'll only ever have one street in your life.

Instagram, love the music intensely. Do you as a writer and director get to influence the exact songs and choices? There was a Beyonce themed episode. So episode one is called Destiny. Originally episode two was called Destiny's Child. And it was all about how these girls had grown up with the music of Beyonce. And it was just like back to back Beyonce songs. And I remember being told it would be impossible to license.

I was like, Beyonce's so important to women of my generation. Like, could we license like one Beyonce song? And I think our music supervisor was like, I don't think we could even license half of one song. It's like the most expensive music to license. I think your instinct is always for expensive songs because you had Sly and the Family Star.

You had Buddy Holly in there There's a lot of heavy duty needle drops On the original draft All the music that I love And that Chyna loves In its original form you can't have You can't have like 60s and 70s rock and roll Can't have Motown And you can't have hip hop

because of all the sampling in it. So we worked with this incredible music supervisor called Ian Cook. I would have the song that I had written into the scene that I was particularly married to. And then Ian would give us a Spotify playlist of the affordable alternatives. And actually, in the end, it's such a creative process, isn't it, Chana? Because you actually end up with much better unexpected choices. I mean, I knew when we heard Kylie that Kylie would be a great love first sight, would be a great track for them.

to dance to and it would do the same job. In fact, it was about falling in love. So it worked perfectly. Originally we had the Rolling Stones cover of

Fade Away, which is a Buddy Holly track, completely unaffordable for the end of the episode. That was in the script. And so when we were in the edit, we were putting all sorts of tracks on there, but knew it needed to be rock and roll. But I also felt it needed to be a cover. And I felt it needed to be a female artist. And we were throwing around a bunch of classic rock and roll tracks, British tracks. And then I thought about Brass in Pocket because I

I felt it had real Maggie energy and vibes. And then it was Dolly's bright idea to get self-esteem to cover it.

This question was from Twitter. Was that drinking scene in episode six a homage to the midnight margarita scene in Practical Magic and the Manhattan homage in episode seven to any others that the audience might have missed? Yes, well spotted. So episode six, the drinking scene uses a Harry Nilsson song called Coconut, which is used in Practical Magic. And we chose that. That was kind of Cherish's idea, actually, that

But when women come together on those nights and they're being raucous and they're drinking and they're sharing truths, that it is a type of sorcery. And we wanted to do a parallel to those witchy films also because as a millennial woman, those witchy films like Practical Magic or The Craft, they were so important to us growing up as teenagers. We wanted to do a little nod to that. And we also weirdly...

both Cherish and I and our commissioner had shared stories that in that year, we'd all had a row with a best female friend on the night of a full moon. So we put a full moon. It's quite a magic thing how you get a big

light on the street kind of attached to their end of a, what's it called, Chyna? Genie boom, if you're talking about the light attachment, yeah. So it gives like a moon glow and then you just in post put the moon over the top. And by total luck as well, that night that we were filming the exterior of the house, the witchy exterior with the full moon, it was also pouring with rain. So it meant that we ended up layering in loads of kind of thunder into their row. So it all layered up in a way that I feel really worked.

Yes, episode seven in New York, there's an homage to Manhattan, but it's also kind of my homage to all those romantic comedies that I love. So Maggie has a meet cute with Patrick when her card doesn't work in the ticket machine. And that also mirrors Street and Maggie's meet cute, which is my nod to You've Got Mail, because there's a scene I love in You've Got Mail where Tom Hanks comes over because Meg Ryan can't use her card in Zabar's and he pays for her groceries and she's mortified.

And then there's the Manhattan bench, a reference to when Harry met Sally, when Patrick and Maggie are carrying a Christmas tree together. And then there's also a little reference to Breakfast at Tiffany's because Maggie befriends a little ginger tomcat in the bodega, who's kind of, she says, is her only friend in New York, which is obviously what Holly Go lightly says. I think episode seven was kind of a pastiche and also a satire a bit, I hope, on what

romantic comedy in film and romantic comedy in real life, like the schism between those two things. Really enjoyed packing it with those little references. And I think you should tell them, Chyna, about our Love Actually reference in episode one. So the shot of Maggie dancing in her G-string across the living room in the wide, shaking her hips, doing the jellyfish dance, I didn't realise that I had, via osmosis, absorbed Hugh Grant in Love Actually dancing from left to right

in a similar fashion. And I only realized that at Christmas when I saw Love Actually again and was like, oh, that's the shot I did of Maggie. That was an accidental homage.

On Twitter, the clothes are amazing. What was the process of the wardrobe costume department? So Matthew Price was our amazing costume designer. And when we met him, his pitch or mood book for the show was all photographs of his friends because he lived...

behind the marathon bar in Chalk Farm in 2012 and that period. So he just understood and got the show. Dolly and I are really passionate about clothes. I started in costume. We were really keen to make sure that the girls looked like girls in their 20s wearing stuff that was in fashion at the time, but what real women were wearing, not necessarily what was in vogue. Also that thing in your 20s where you wear stuff and you're trying out trends.

and they don't necessarily suit you and you borrow things. So Amara wears a coat that actually belongs to Maggie, which I also think is really true to life. Matt and Chyna as a director and me as a writer and all the actors as well, because they're so unvain, all four of those girls. We were very on board with the fact that there would be a touch of the dog's dinner sometimes. It's like they'd still be visually pleasing, but they would wear stuff that like maybe clashed a bit or didn't fit quite right or didn't

was a bit garish. You know, we wanted it, as Chyna said, we wanted it to feel real. And we also wanted it to look like that it was the wardrobe of girls on their salaries. Dolly, will there be a season two? I hope so, Chyna Moo-Young. Yeah, me too. ♪

Thank you for listening to Ask the Right Questions, a podcast from BBC Writers' Room. Everything I know about love is available to view on BBC iPlayer now. Find out more about BBC Writers' Room and keep up to date with news and opportunities on our website at bbc.co.uk forward slash writers' room and follow us on social media.