via John Helmes, Broadcast.co.uk
BBC1 has handed a further double order to Waterloo Road to take the drama to its sixth and seventh runs since last year’s revival.
The Rope Ladder Fiction and Wall to Wall-produced youth-skewing series will return to its educational setting in Greater Manchester for further 8 x 60-minute runs, taking the drama through to 2026.
It bring Waterloo Road, which was resurrected by the BBC in 2021 to replace Holby City as the corporation’s long-running scripted series from the nations and regions, to its 16th and 17th series overall.
Filming has begun on the newly-commissioned 16 episodes, with the title now spanning more than 240 episodes.
Known for tackling real-life topics affecting teens, families and school staff, Waterloo Road follows the lives of students and teachers at a high school in Rochdale, Lancashire and stars Angela Griffin, Adam Thomas and Kym Marsh among the staff as well as an array of up-and-coming young talent among the students.
The next series, which will air on BBC1 and iPlayer in September, will feature actor and comedian Jason Manford as the new headteacher of the school. It will also see the arrival of Saira Choudhry (No Offence, Life), and a host of students including Olly Rhodes (The Last Kingdom), Nathan Wood, Sonya Nisa (Damsel), Miya Ocego (Wreck), Danny Murphy (The Parts You Lose) and Matthew Khan (A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder).
Waterloo Road has been an incubator for fresh on- and off-screen talent, with co-producers Rope Ladder and Wall to Wall running numerous programmes to support the development of creatives, particularly from the North of England. This includes supporting 35 trainees across a wide range of craft areas, with all having gone on to further employment with some staying on the production.
Its most recent initiative - launched last month - aims to boost the female directing talent pool in the region, and will give a five-strong cohort the opportunity to develop their skills on the continuing drama.
Lindsay Williams is series producer and the drama is exec produced by Cameron Roach for Rope Ladder, Leanne Klein for Wall To Wall, and Gaynor Holmes and Jo McClellan for the BBC.
Speaking to Broadcast ahead of the recommission, Klein and Roach said the show had nurturing new and diverse talent “baked into the commissioning conversation”, with a minimum of 30% people of colour working on the drama and 50/50 male-female director split. They also noted the drama is “an important entertainment brand” for the BBC.
Klein said: “Waterloo Road has huge characters, it’s funny, but it’s also gritty and deals with the day-to-day. It’s just as relevant or probably even grittier and more relevant than it has been.
“It has to resonate with the audience. Teachers and kids watch it, and it has to ring true to them.”
Roach added: “With Waterloo Road, working with a lot of young people and building a gold standard production model, we’ve had to consider our process.
“We feel there’s an interesting structural conversation to have. We have seen an increasing heralding of high-end TV drama and the budgets ballooning to up to £5m-an-hour. On the one hand this has been incredibly exciting. But with conversations about diversity of voice and where talent is coming from increasing, those shows – through the kind of budgets and partners that they’re working with – are risk-averse.
“I’ve always been passionate about lower-cost, higher-volume drama as a way of incubating talent on- and off-screen. So the opportunity that the BBC has afforded myself and Leanne to reboot the show from our two companies felt of value for us, but also for the BBC.”
Lindsay Salt, director of BBC Drama, said: “It’s incredibly rewarding to see Waterloo Road go from strength to strength – both creatively on screen, where it remains hugely popular with viewers of all ages, as well as behind the scenes developing the next generation of exciting UK television talent.”
