The BBC has unveiled three new dramas coming to our screens in due course, including Shy & Lola with Hayley Squires and Bel Powley.
Shy & Lola, a new six-part drama for BBC iPlayer and BBC One, is written by award-winning screenwriter and novelist Amanda Coe (Apple Tree Yard, The Trial of Christine Keeler) and produced by multi-BAFTA and Emmy award-winning Clerkenwell Films (Baby Reindeer, The Death of Bunny Munro, The End of the F***ing World), part of BBC Studios.
The darkly comic story follows Shy and Lola, two very different women who are forced to become allies when a murder entangles them in the criminal underworld operating in Shy’s small coastal town in the North of England. Squires (The Night Manager, I, Daniel Blake) stars as Shy, a cleaner scraping by and dreaming of a new life in Portugal, with Powley (A Small Light, The Diary of a Teenage Girl) playing Lola, an ex-model-turned-grifter who arrives in town with trouble at her heels.
Filming on the show, based on the French television drama Cheyenne and Lola, will begin this spring in and around the U.K. cities of Hull and Leeds.
Also announced on Monday is D-Notice from writers and executive producers Adam Patterson and Declan Lawn. The six-part British political thriller is set in the world of investigative journalism. Patterson and Lawn are said to “have some experience of” the D-notice mechanism, which allows the government to advise journalists about national security. Now, they’ve come up with a drama that looks at how truth and power speak to one another. It is their third project for the BBC, following The Salisbury Poisonings and Blue Lights, and their first commission from production company Hot Sauce Pictures, backed by Sony Pictures Television.
The BBC has also commissioned 1536, a new drama series for BBC iPlayer and BBC One, based on Ava Pickett’s play of the same name. The eight-part show written by Pickett from Drama Republic (Riot Women, One Day) is set in the heart of Tudor England against the backdrop of Anne Boleyn’s arrest and weaves royal scandal with rural struggle.
1536 centers around Anna, Mariella, and Jane: three young women gossiping, arguing, and dreaming in an Essex village, desperately waiting for their lives to start. When the news reaches them that King Henry VIII has had his Queen, Anne Boleyn, arrested, the three of them never suspect that this act will change their lives forever.
Pickett said: “1536 is something I am immensely proud of and I feel so lucky and privileged to have the chance to bring Anna, Jane and Mariella to a wider audience and to build out their lives even more. In a world where every decision made in the corridors of power ricochets through all of our lives, this story feels more relevant than ever. I’m so grateful to Lindsay Salt for being such a champion of it from the start.”
Lindsay Salt, Director of BBC Drama, added: “From the moment we saw Ava’s play we knew that we had to have the TV version on the BBC. Visceral, funny, provocative, timely and full of courage, this is a piece of work like no other. Ava is an exceptional voice, so we feel very lucky to be working with her and the brilliant team at Drama Republic to bring three iconic female characters to the screen.”
Executive producers are Jude Liknaitzky, Roanna Benn, Rebecca de Souza, Chloe Beeson and Pickett. The series was commissioned by Salt.
