Prime Suspect creator Lynda La Plante says her age makes broadcast projects ‘impossible’
Lynda La Plante, one of Britain’s most celebrated screenwriters and crime authors, has said it is now “virtually impossible” for her to make new dramas in a broadcasting environment dominated by the young.
The award-winning creator of Prime Suspect and Widows says she struggles to even get a producer to meet her to discuss a new project, describing it as humiliating.
Speaking on Boom Radio, the 81-year-old, whose work is credited with transforming British TV crime drama in the Nineties, has suggested that the dominance of television production by younger people is blocking older talent.
In an exchange on Jo Brand’s Open the Box show, La Plante was asked: “Being you, how easy is it to get a series made today, would you say?” She responded: “It’s virtually impossible.”
La Plante goes on to describe how she is no longer being heard by those she has to rely on to get her work made.
“It’s humiliating. It’s even relegated to them hardly even giving me the time for an interview,” she tells Brand, adding: “I mean, is it [my] age? Or is it somebody so young that they’ve never heard of anything that you’ve done previously?
“But the humiliation, and the only thing that really and truly lifts me up are writing novels and being able to talk to my fans and have the success of the novels.”
La Plante is the latest in a line of women in film and TV to have spoken out over their experience of ageism in the industry.
In 2022 dozens of actors, including Juliet Stevenson, Meera Syal, David Tennant, Keeley Hawes and Lesley Manville, called for better onscreen representation of women older than 45 to fight against the “entrenched” ageism within the entertainment industry.
Helen Mirren, who starred as DCI Jane Tennison in Prime Suspect, has also condemned age discrimination in the entertainment sector, saying last month: “It is a sort of uncomfortable moment, when you realise in my industry, ‘oh, they didn’t want me because I was good, they wanted me because I was young’.”
La Plante also told Brand that considering the success of Prime Suspect, Above Suspicion and her early 1980s drama Widows, she “should be an incredibly rich woman, which I’m not”, and cites issues with her contracts.
She described herself as a true crime addict and has found herself hooked on a Canadian TV period crime drama.
“I’m an addict to all true crime programmes. I have to watch them simply because there’s nothing worse than working on a script and researching and then you turn on the TV and there’s your storyline,” she said. “But there is one show that I watch on a regular basis. I work from very early morning through to lunch and then at two o’clock I turn on Alibi TV and I watch Murdoch Mysteries. And it’s adorable. It’s a wonderful crime show. Period, Victorian, and made in Canada. It’s wonderful.”
But for all her success in pioneering the portrayal of strong independent female characters, La Plante confesses a large section of her audience still remembers her for her early acting role as the hay fever-suffering ghost Tamara Novek in the 1970s BBC children’s series Rentaghost.
“I played some nurse that when she sneezed, she disappeared. This show has haunted me,” she told Brand. “The producer, Jeremy Swan, said, ‘Oh, it’s a little thing. It’s just a little thing. It’s a little series. It’s a little kid’s show. It’s not going to go anywhere.’
“It’s followed me like a torment. I can be giving a lecture at Cambridge or Oxford about crime and somebody will put their hand up in the Q&A part and say: ‘Were you in Rentaghost?’ ‘Yes I was!’”
