THEY say write what you know, and Emma Lennox has done just that. Her debut series Unfair premieres today, and it’s one that’s been years in the making.
The Glasgow writer, originally from Fife, has been inspired by her own life. She moved into a showman’s yard in the east end of Glasgow with her now-husband Mitch, not knowing a great deal about fairground life.
Now Lennox, described by Channel 4 as one of the UK’s exciting new talents, has been given her TV breakthrough, inspired by her life on the yard in a city with the highest density of showpeople in Europe.
Unfair follows the story of Sorcha (Kat Ronney, pictured below, a clueless student who moves onto a showman’s yard with her boyfriend Bentley (Dylan Wood). Sorcha has fallen out with her own family and is desperate to fit in with Bentley’s but she knows nothing of showpeople culture.
Made by Skye-based company Young Films, Lennox hopes it’ll fill Scots with laughter while accurately representing an under-served community.
“With Unfair,” she said. “I really just wanted to show – because there’s just so many misconceptions – that it’s just families living here just like anywhere else really. I wanted to have a clash-of-cultures comedy situation that happens to be set on a showman’s yard.”
Lennox told The National it was “vital” she worked with an organisation like Fair Scotland, a group dedicated to promoting the heritage of Scottish Showpeople and fairground culture.
She said: “I’m basing the story off my own experiences, but without that support from the community, I wouldn’t be able to make it and I wouldn’t want to make it either.
“I know how damaging some media has been to the community over the years, so I wouldn’t want to do something that added to that.”
The programme was filmed in a real showperson’s yard in Shettleston and will see appearances from The Inbetweeners’ Joe Thomas and Outlander’s Grant O’Rourke.
The show also comes after a victory for the community, which had been fighting to have showman/woman appear as an ethnic group option on the 2022 Scottish Census.
More than anything though, “it’s a comedy first and foremost,” Lennox said. “And I’m not trying to represent the entire showpeople community. This is just my little perspective of it. It’s really a story about family.
“But I do think having at least this one story that is a bit more of a positive thing of actual people in amongst a sea of myths and misconceptions will hopefully make people think twice about what they think showpeople are.”
Lennox added that representation of Scotland generally was lacking in the media. She said: “There are so many sides in Glasgow, not to mention the whole of Scotland, that isn’t seen on screen. We just don’t get enough made up here altogether.
“There’s just not the breadth of voices to tell the stories, so to get this comedy made just this feels amazing. It feels like it’s up against the odds and I would hope that we’re getting to a place where more voices are going to come through more.”
Yana Harris, in her debut acting role as Missouri, said it was an important step for showpeople like her to be used as more than a plot device. She said Unfair was everything a comedy should be.
She said: “I am so happy to see that this is being made. I did an internship over the summer helping with a project collecting information about hate crime towards travelling communities, and my job was to collect media about showpeople or about travellers in general.
“I was just collecting articles on anything that had the buzzword ‘gypsy’ or ‘traveller’ and any depictions I could find. And it was really scary and upsetting.
“I always knew what the world was like, I experienced it as a showperson my whole life, but to see it written down, how much media there is out there against us. I tried to collect rebuttals as well, and unbalanced is not a strong enough word for what I found.
“So for Emma to make a show where the whole story is about showpeople, and they’re not deified or made to be perfect. As a comedy, these people are interesting, intricate, flawed characters … they’re human and loving and well-rounded like a person should be.
“They are three-dimensional characters. I think that’s the only way to combat the media that is out there against us. So this is the first step towards equality, I think, for travelling communities.”
Unfair will premiere on Channel 4’s All4 on Friday May 6.
