The lead director of A Play for Today’s The Quiet Hour talks about her journey to directing the episode, and why opening pathways into the industry for working class creatives remains important.
Margo Roe is about to make her television directorial debut in the second series of 5's revival of the 70s classic A Play for Today. Originally from Leicester and now London-based, the former dancer's route into directing came first through short films, funded by the BFI and BBC, and mentorship programmes such as Directors UK's Inspire. Fresh from a stint in Berlin, where she was shadowing her Directors UK mentor Tom Shankland, she speaks to Directors UK about taking her first steps into television and what she’s learned along the way.
Why A Play for Today is the ideal first TV credit
The revival of A Play for Today is aimed at working-class creatives getting their first TV credit, and it’s also a canny transition for a director moving from short film into getting their first lead television directing credit because the format is a contained 45 minutes, each episode driven by each director’s unique approach. “You get to put your vision into it,” says Margo.
And 5’s ad-break structure forces episodic TV-native pacing, “so you have to get your hook and then your break and then you go again. You're almost splitting it into 10-minute chunks. That really puts you in that old-school TV format, where you've got to make it interesting enough for the audience to come back after the break.”
Margo’s episode is titled The Quiet Hour, an NHS medical drama set on a night shift. She describes it as an observation of the lead, played by Archie Panjabi. It captures the current dialogue surrounding the NHS as we see staff on wards, what they are doing and the pressures they are under. “It builds towards this end moment at the end, which I won't spoil, but it’s like there’s an acknowledgement you’ve been watching me, now you can see what it’s really like,” she says.
What a dance background gives a director
Margo started as a dancer, training with the Birmingham Royal Ballet in her teens, before picking up the directing bug while studying at Lincoln University and finding herself drawn to creative and organising roles. “A lot of the ideas that were selected were my ideas, and I was very interested and maybe quite pushy at doing the things that I wanted to do. So that sort of started the whole directing idea.”
Then it was her experience in theatre, performing shows in the tough slog of three shows a day at the Edinburgh Fringe, that led her to begin thinking about other routes besides the stage. “I just thought I want my work to be accessible to people, and theatre is not currently financially accessible to a lot of people.”
Her dance background continues to inform her approach. “Fundamentally you're telling stories without language, and I think ‘show it, don't say it’ is one of the things that gets used a lot in film and TV. I think movement is universal, so in film, if you can use that to support the story and simplify the need for dialogue, you're onto a winner. You can lean on the actions and movements of people to tell that story.”
The specific understanding of physicality came particularly in handy with the filming of The Quiet Hour, where she links the blocking to choreography. The 45-page script was shot over 7 days with no rehearsal, and just long continuous takes of medical procedures performed simultaneously with dialogue. “My background in dance enabled me to have a clear vision of exactly where people were going and what they were doing, which I felt quite comfortable with,” explains Margo, calling it “all storytelling”.
The value of mentorship
Margo took part in the Directors UK Inspire programme, where she was paired with House of Guinness director Tom Shankland. She recently shadowed him in Berlin on the set of his new Apple TV project Berlin Noir. “Just seeing how he worked with the cast and crew, and what they were achieving was amazing,” she says. “I love just being immersed in worlds that are ongoing and you can really explore them.”
The experience has helped enormously with Margo’s transition from short film to television, happening alongside her television directorial debut with A Play for Today, which is produced by 5 and Paramount, with their Vertigo team, with the aim of being a foot in the door for working-class creatives. “I haven't seen anything like A Play for Today, specifically for working-class artists,” says Margo. “You've got to sort of push as hard as you can to get your name in the running.”
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