Paula Milne on what inspired her to write White Heat The narrative of my new BBC drama serial White Heat concerns seven characters who meet as university students in 1965 when they share a flat in north London. It is Charlotte (played by Little Dorrit's Claire Foy), a middle-class English student from Gerrards Cross, who takes us into the story. Among her flatmates are Lilly, an art student from Bolton, Victor, a law student from Jamaica, and Jack, a radical and rebel, their landlord and nemesis. Their diverse class and racial mix means they embody the social mobility that further education provided in the days before tuition fees and education spending cuts. The serial explores their interwoven lives, loves and betrayals set against the social and political backcloth of Wilson through Thatcher to the present day, via feminism, hedonism, union strife, the Falklands and HIV. It attempts not only to explore the contradictions of the human condition, but to show how our lives are shaped by the choices we make, which are, in turn, governed by the opportunities society affords us. The success of Our Friends in the North, Peter Flannery's 1990s drama set in Newcastle upon Tyne that also followed a set of friends from the Sixties to the present day, proved the audience has a fantastic appetite to watch how the lives of richly drawn characters alter over the span of years. But the focus of Our Friends primarily lay with the social and political events shaping the destinies of its white male heterosexual characters. The contraceptive pill, legalizing abortion, the emergent sexual revolution, racial tension, feminism and gay rights were also part of the second half of the twentieth century, and it was these that I wanted to explore as well with White Heat - to see how they too shaped the lives of those of us who had lived through them. A number of the scenes in the programme are drawn from my own experience. Like the character of Lilly I too went to art college. At that time it was a hot bed of sit-ins and student revolt as we rebelled against the apathy and strictures of figurative art and demanded more control over our education. Like Lilly, I too covered my naked body in paint to do a "body painting" in retaliation for the patronising attitude of a misogynist tutor. I too was on the Grosvenor Square anti-Vietnam War demonstration which is depicted in the second episode. It was one of the first student protests of its kind, and one of the most violent. I can still remember the unexpected brutality of the police, and our fleeing in terror as the horses galloped towards us, their riders shouting abuse, calling us "bitches in mini-skirts" for ruining their Sunday. I also, as touched upon in the programme, went on Women's Rights marches and later went to Greenham Common (though I have to admit the latter visit was initially more out of curiosity than solidarity). It was the sheer diversity of the women there that was inspiring. Yes, the stereotypical tattooed, pierced angry lesbians and radical feminists were there, but so too were ordinary women: grandmothers, wives and magistrates, nurses and teachers who had sacrificed their home comforts to swell the ranks of the protesters at the camp. And the place was no picnic: it was squalid and mud-infested, lacking electricity, running water and toilet facilities. The women were subjected to regular evictions and police raids, but it only seemed to increase their tenacity and their refusal to submit. For my children's sake it's probably best I don't stray into too much detail about the more intimate sexual incidents portrayed in the serial, but I wanted to include a version of some personal events I experienced, not just to give the drama veracity but because several decades later, I can look back and see how those events helped shape he person I have become. For this reason I decided to start the serial in the present day so it resonates with the audience now. During the six episodes we see six of the seven flat mates, now in their sixties, arrive back at the flat to help clear it after the death of one of them. But the identity of who died is not revealed until the final episode. It is while the characters are clearing the flat that we flash back to incidents in their past to reveal what it was that happened between them which has so irrevocably altered their relationships in the present. White Heat starts on Thursday 8 March on BBC Two at 9.00pm