Leeds scriptwriter Lisa Holdsworth on how Kay Mellor kickstarted her career that has seen work with Emmerdale, All Creatures Great and Small and Call the Midwife

Eighteen months later, Holdsworth landed a job as Mellor’s personal assistant. “It a was a bit of a dogsbody job, I was booking cabs and doing all sorts but whilst I was there she gave me an opportunity to show what I could do in terms of writing.”

It led to Holdsworth’s first screenwriting commission for an episode of Fat Friends. That was 25 years ago now and Holdsworth has been a writer ever since. To her name, she has an impressive list of television credits, from Emmerdale to Robin Hood, Midsomer Murders, Call the Midwife and All Creatures Great and Small. “The Herriot stuff is so close to anybody’s heart if you’re from Yorkshires so that felt like a real privilege,” she says of the latter. “It was such good fun...I’ve had glamorous moments, I’ve been to a couple of awards ceremonies. But actually knuckling down and writing scripts is the best part, I still love writing.”

Holdsworth, who is due to talk at Leeds International Festival of Ideas later this month, is hugely passionate about access to the arts. Without music lessons – “I played, very badly, violin at junior and secondary” - cultural school trips and drama classes in her youth, she would not have had the confidence to step into the career that she has loved for more than two decades.

“I was also lucky enough to have a really good encouraging drama teacher and careers teacher. And I was lucky in that my family never said ‘when are you going to pack this in and get a proper job?’ Mum and dad were really strict in that I had to get my qualifications and work hard but if I wanted to go away and do my film studies degree that was fine – I just had better not waste the time.”

After Holdsworth graduated from university in London, she was warned that returning to Yorkshire would stifle her career. She rejected the idea then as much as she does now. As chair of the Royal Television Society Yorkshire, she is a champion for the region’s thriving industry. Big broadcasters are now here, universities and skills centres are working hard to develop new talent and local authorities are understanding that TV and film production bring jobs and money into the area, she says.

Key too is the influence of Screen Yorkshire, which has supported production in the area for more than 20 years. “What we have going for us is some really passionate people advocating for the amazing places Yorkshire has for filming…but also selling the region for its talent,” Holdsworth says. “Not just the names that go before the title, the actors and writers, but the fantastic crews, the great catering, people who understand how film production works and will welcome you into their homes, into their businesses, onto their streets.”

She’s speaking from experience, having devoted much of her time over the past year to creating Channel 4 commission Dance School (that’s it’s working title, anyway). Filmed largely in Chapeltown, Leeds and set for release next year, it follows a fictional Saturday morning dance troupe whose lives and loves are inspired by true stories from the city. It promises to be a “celebration of resilience, determination, and spirit which never shies away from relevant and hard-hitting themes”, shining a light on the pressures that young people face whilst offering an insight into Leeds and its culture and people.

Holdsworth takes much inspiration from the real-world around her – it’s one of the reasons she was keen to move back to the North. “There’s such a wealth of stories and characters and real funny people [here]. I don’t mean flippant or anything but who have the ability to find humour in lots of situations. I stand on the shoulders of giants like Kay Mellor and Sally Wainwright and there’s never a joke far away even in the most serious situations.”

“When you start seeing your city through the eyes of a cinematographer, you realise just how beautiful it is,” she adds. “To write something set here has been an absolute privilege.”

The production has also presented an opportunity for ten local people to break into the broadcast industry, with training, mentoring and the chance to work on the show offered to those with no previous production experience. “It’s about supporting talent here and making sure we are not importing people from London,” Holdsworth says.

When she started out, she moved back to her hometown and wrote letter after letter to production companies, knowing she wanted to work in writing drama but with little clue how. She landed a job as a production co-ordinator for an independent production company in Leeds, which made factual television. “I was often the stupidest person in the room as they built giant machines to demonstrate scientific principles but it taught me so much about television and I loved it,” Holdsworth recalls. She happened to work there with Mellor’s son-in-law – and the rest is history.

Early on in her career, Holdsworth joined her union, the Writers' Guild of Great Britain. Now chair of the organisation, she works to tackle prejudices in the industry, and champions fair pay and contracts for all. The potential uses of artificial intelligence in the field gives her cause for concern. “The concern is that the creative part – coming up with an idea, working through characters and scenarios – will be handed over to machines and we’ll just become polishers of scripts. There’s a knock on then of who owns the copyright? That will make writing, for television in particular, even more unsustainable as a career and only people who are independently wealthy will be able to be writers.

“The other side is that in order to have AI churn out the perfect rom-com, for example, you’ve got to feed it lots of rom-coms. And they’re the product of human brain, creative people who have worked hard on [that content]. Those writers need to be recognised and paid to have that work used.”

As for her own work, Holdsworth has been a jobbing writer for much of her career, crafting words for someone else’s show. It’s rare she’s on set, though when filming starts, she’s often called upon to make script changes. “I used to find it really annoying, but now I love solving production problems. There’s nothing you can’t write your way out of...Sometimes you get a call to say we shot this and it didn’t work or it was chucking it down raining, can you mention it in the scene?”

Dance School marked a shift for Holdsworth though. She’s been on set for much of the filming, bringing to life her characters and vision. “I now understand why writers like Kay Mellor and Sally Wainwright do direct their own stuff because you’re itching to get on set and go ‘no no no that’s not what I meant when I wrote it, let’s do it this way’. But it’s a team sport is TV so you have to know when to keep your nose out too basically...

"When Dance School goes out it’s going to be nerve-wracking because it’s very much me and something I’ve given a lot of time to. I understand why some writers don’t read their reviews. It will be heartbreaking if anybody says anything bad about it even if it’s fair.”

- Holdsworth will be at Leeds International Festival of Ideas on September 30. Her event with actor Christopher Eccleston is entitled Arts and Culture: For the Many or the Few? and takes place at 7.30pm. Visit leedsinternationalfestival.com