When spotlighting a Film & TV writer this week, my choice was made obviously clear to me. You most probably know Phoebe Waller-Bridge as the star of beloved BBC comedy-drama Fleabag (2016), the unendingly popular chronicle of one woman’s mad life in London. But did you know that Waller-Bridge also wrote the show?

“Bold, flirty and audacious, Waller-Bridge’s words and witticisms infuse her shows with a lightness [...] that is rare”

Based on her one-woman show written for the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2013, the first season of Fleabag was widely praised; the second series, starring Andrew Scott as the infamously fan-named ‘Hot Priest’, went on to win 6 Prime Time Emmy Awards, including ‘Outstanding Writing for a Comedy Series’. Featuring (literally) award winning one-liners, such as: “I sometimes worry that I wouldn’t be such a feminist if I had bigger tits”; “I took half an hour trying to look nice and I ended up looking amazing”; and, my personal favourite, “I look like a pencil”, Fleabag epitomizes Waller-Bridge’s writing style. Bold, flirty and audacious, Waller-Bridge’s words and witticisms infuse her shows with a lightness and child-like glee that is rare in modern Film & TV. Rarer still, is that she doesn’t shy away from the sadder side of drama, often writing truly poignant and often devastating scenes for her characters; her shows really give us the best of both worlds. So, at this point, if I have managed to make you a Waller-Bridge convert, let me use the remainder of this segment to point you towards some of her other works.

Waller-Bridge doesn’t star in, but was crucially head writer on, and executive producer of, the first series of acclaimed spy thriller Killing Eve (2018). Much darker than Fleabag, but not missing its wit, Killing Eve is a must watch for fans. Other works of Waller-Bridge’s that are unmissable are Channel 4’s Crashing (2016) — a comedy set in a disused hospital turned housing complex, which Waller-Bridge created, wrote, and also stars in (she really is a woman of many talents) as the chaotic, ukulele-playing Lulu. The most recent of Waller-Bridges contributions to the big screen, however, is No Time To Die (2021), actor Daniel Craig’s final James Bond film, on which she contributed to the screenplay.