Jessica Hynes: it's OK to poke fun at suffragettes When I began to write the treatment for the film, I was filled with a revelatory passion and ended up delivering a probably quite dull, tediously worthy drama when what I had promised was "Carry On Up the Suffrage!" The BBC passed on it and I shuffled my suffragette notes into a drawer and did a play. The characters however were hard to let go of and after spending time at the National archives and the Churchill library in Cambridge, I felt a responsibility to those women and children whose arrests and deaths were buried in piles of a 100-year-old parchment written in fading pencil. The BBC didn't want a dull drama but they might want a sitcom. Up the Women was born. At that time, it had only one very ardent fan, my husband, who when I told him about it - "provincial sweet local women who are members of an intricate craft circle decide to become suffragettes, but never quite manage to do anything militant" - beamed with excitement and said that I had to do it because he wanted to see it. His enthusiasm spurred me on and about two years ago I wrote a new treatment, focusing on the characters and their small world, a church hall in Banbury. That treatment was eventually commissioned as a series. It's all filmed in two locations, the church hall and the kitchen, and while it has a deliberately retro-sitcom feel, the lighting is soft and hopefully the comedy is not too arch - I wanted it to look and feel familiar but have a gentle naturalistic comic rhythm and style. Writing and filming a studio show is unlike anything I have ever done, it's a bit like building a boat while you are on the water. The very real fear of dying (in this case in front of an audience) keeps you going until it's done. The series intends to explore the lives of very normal women, literally living in the middle of England, who have discovered militant suffragism and who rather naively imagine that picketing the Post Office for five minutes, just before it closes, might actually change the world. Gwen would most probably prefer to go back to appliqué, Eva (Emma Pierson) is about to drop her 15th child, Myrtle (Judy Parfitt) is lost in memories of a rather salacious past, Emily (Georgia Groome) is ready to kill the king, Helen (Rebecca Front) is determined to undermine and destabilise the "meaningless pursuit of motherless utopia" and the character I play, Margaret, is trying to organise everyone with seemingly no leadership skills nor any intention of actually causing unrest. I hope it is enjoyed in the spirit in which it was written: a gentle comic insight into the lives of ordinary women living at an extraordinary time. I should add that the suffrage movement is very distinct from the modern feminist movement, in that female and male suffragettes stood shoulder to shoulder to take on government and factory owners to obtain their right to vote and address issues of unequal pay. Modern feminism in many cases became in-fighting between the sexes - a frankly pointless war with no winners. In many ways, the people battling for legislative justice for women in 1910 had a more straightforward task than those men and women today, who are engaged in the struggle to disentangle themselves from the almost fetishistic exaggeration of men and women's "differences," which our media and minds are saturated with. I have always felt that men and women are very similar and that it is our characters and interests that should define us, not our gender. Up the Women begins on BBC Four on Thursday 30 May at 8.30pm