As you settle down to revel in BBC's latest frocks-on-the-box period drama, Aristocrats, which starts on June 20, spare a thought for its screenwriter, Harriet O'Carroll. The original best-selling history of the Lennox sisters by Stella Tillyard is a dense 420 pages of historical detail, shopping lists, letters and 101 different characters. Perhaps more significantly, it is placed against the huge political canvas of 18th-century history as it unfurled in Ireland, Britain and France.
From this, Harriet O'Carroll was asked to extrapolate six neat, hour-long chunks that would fit comfortably into BBC's Sunday evening schedule. "I should have been terrified", she laughs, "but I just didn't properly take on board the amount of work it was - I would just think `OK let's get this bit done, then that bit' and so on. Really, I just denied it all and said `I'm not terrified'."
All this might sound haphazard but in fact, she knew exactly which bits of the Lennox sisters' story she wanted brought to the fore. "It was clear in my mind that it was a family drama and that it was women who were at the centre. There are some lovely men in Aristocrats, but they are there in the way women usually are in men's dramas - in the sidelines. "I picked out stories and put them in chronological order. For example, the elopement of the eldest sister, Caroline, is a story in itself and there is a story in Emily's marriage, too. In the beginning I included quite a lot of politics, but as we wrote on, we discovered that really we had to focus on these sisters."
The feat was asked to pull off is all the more remarkable when you consider that until recently she was relatively unknown in either Britain or Ireland. A trained physiotherapist who still practises one day a week, she found success in her professional writing career late in life.
"It began as a hobby. I always felt I'd like to write but I didn't really feel I could. When I started, I'd write a story and that would be the end of it but then it became something I had to do each day. I felt I'd done something with the day if I'd done a bit of writing."
Her first encouragement came when she won the Maxwell House story competition in 1979, which led to writing for radio. When Wesley Burrowes was looking for writers for Glenroe, she made the move to screenwriting for both that soap and for Fair City. She describes it as "terrific training".
"There are so many limitations in soap that if you manage to operate within them and still write credibly, then when those limitations are removed, you charge on. You get confidence in creating and assembling characters and keeping an eye on where a plot might end. Being able to plot properly is invaluable - initially plot didn't appeal to me at all. If I wrote a short story, it would be all about mood and atmosphere and insight. What people did didn't really interest me very much."
O'Carroll left Fair City to write her first screenplay, a piece called Minuet, which fictionalised the romance between Jane Austen and the son of a Limerick army officer, Tom Leffroy. Although that film was never made (the script was broadcast in a radio adaptation by RTE late last year) it was her first big break. When she sent it to the Irish Film Board, the board's then chairwoman Lelia Doolan told her that as there was no producer or director attached, funding could not be given. Doolan, however, liked the script so much that she put O'Carroll in touch with director Thaddeus O'Sullivan. He in turn put her on to his agent - who ironically worked for a house that had already turned her manuscript down.
"Once I had an agent I moved into a different sphere. That script became my calling card for the commission for Aristocrats, which is the biggest thing I've done to date." She now concentrates on writing for the screen, and occasionally the stage - her play, A Bottle of Smoke, was performed by Island Theatre company last year - and is quite clear about what attracts her to the discipline.
"I like characters, I like language and I like the patterns in the way people speak. It's a very economical way of writing - there are things you can't really do on screen, but the things you can do, you can do very economically. Very small touches can tell you a lot."
It was those very "touches" which gave her the most food for thought in the adaptation of Aristocrats. "I realised that I needed a particular historical basis and no more - if you don't know the rest, don't go there. I didn't know whether brides wore white, for example, and there are so many weddings - four of them - so you'd like a nice economical way of signalling that a wedding takes place. I never did find out whether they had wedding cakes or not, so you won't see one."
For other historical details, she went straight to the horse's mouth and called Stella Tillyard, who had written down her phone number when they first met. "She's a super historian because you ask her a question and she gives you a load of answers, each totally precise and qualified. She was really great."
While, for practical and cinematic reasons, the relationships of the four sisters with each other and their respective partners are in the foreground of the series, O'Carroll found the interaction of private lives and public events increasingly intriguing.
`It's very interesting to see how the ideas of Emily, who was interested in Rousseau and the notion of an unspoiled, primitive way of being, were handed on to her son, Edward Fitzgerald, and became the motivation for him to become the way he was - a revolutionary with the French. The ideas that had started in a much more circumscribed world, and the ways in which people behaved, ended up having a political effect. Ireland in 1798 wasn't just Ireland against England, it was a carrying out of those ideas."
She currently has several projects on the go, including a script for Woodbrook (based on David Thompson's autobiography) with Thaddeus O'Sullivan and Little Bird, and My Sister's Hero with Marie-Therese Duggan. She is also full of enthusiasm for another project, an adaptation of Fintan O'Toole's life of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Traitor's Kiss, which she is working on with Ronan Glenane of Stoneridge.
"My son gave me the book for Christmas in 1997 and I thought it was a fascinating story. Because I was familiar with the times, I kept meeting characters I knew from Aristocrats. In one way it mightn't be smart to do another 18th-century drama in case people think that's all I do, but I just couldn't resist the story." Again it is the interweaving of the personal and the political elements of Sheridan's life that appealed to her: "He penetrated into the aristocratic, political circles but always remained a democrat and a liberal in his objectives. I found him an extraordinarily likeable character, genial and generous, and Eliza (his wife) a free-thinking independent woman."
Harriet O'Carroll has more than enough on her plate and she is more than content. Still, there is a streak of realism in her that ensures her feet are firmly on the ground. On being asked what she would like to be doing in 10 years' time, she pulls a rather wry face before answering: "In 10 years time I'd like to be doing what I'm doing but I'd like some of these movies to be made."
Aristocrats begins on June 20 on BBC1
