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The writers of The Salisbury Poisonings tell the RTS why gaining the confidence of local people was critical to the drama’s success
Salisbury Journal
aking successful factual TV drama is fraught with difficulties. The stakes are even higher when programme-makers tackle real-life events – and no more so when they are as recent and raw as the ones depicted in the summer hit BBC One’s three-parter The Salisbury Poisonings. The series portrays the shocking and incredible events that occurred in the Wiltshire cathedral city when Russian military intelligence officer and double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, who was visiting from Moscow, were hospitalised after being poisoned by the Russian nerve agent Novichok in March 2018. For The Salisbury Poisonings, screenwriters Declan Lawn and Adam Patterson needed to fashion a compelling narrative without being cavalier with the truth. “To what extent can you use dramatic licence? That is the most fundamental question in factual drama,” Lawn told the RTS in July. “All drama, whether it’s theatre or a screenplay, has a set of rules. You can write a three- or five-act structure. There are things that have to happen, but there has to be conflict and it has to be resolved. “As a factual dramatist, you have to integrate real life, which is often messy, with the prescribed rules of television drama. That is hard to do. “It takes a long time but, on this show, we were blessed. What unfolded in Salisbury was inherently dramatic. There was lots of conflict and chaos. It felt a bit like the movie Jaws – you have this invisible threat taking over a small city. It lent itself to drama. We put a lot of work into making sure that we were factually right. I think, factually, we are right on almost everything.” That is a bold claim and one unlikely to be made lightly, given that the background of both Lawn and Patterson is in investigative journalism, rather than TV drama. Having worked together since 2013, the pair turned to drama because they wanted to do something more creative. “Investigative journalism tends to be about how the world works. Drama is about how people work,” said Lawn. “We had a vision of making a kind of factual drama that could encompass both of those things.” Inevitably, winning their first commission proved difficult: prior to what became The Salisbury Poisonings, their
Real-life drama in Salisbury in 2018
Time for the truth scripts were all rejected, though some nearly made it through. “Your first big rejection is such a blow,” said Lawn. “It’s hard to describe the disappointment but, the more it happens, the more you get used to it. You realise that the chances of a script getting made are quite slim. “When The Salisbury Poisonings was
commissioned, we weren’t expecting it. We knew the BBC liked our writing, but we’d been there before.” The idea to tell the story of what happened in Salisbury in the spring and summer of 2018 via TV drama came from Toby Bruce, head of development at independent producer Dancing Ledge. “We had an affinity for
