Creating Mandy: The Character Who Broke My Plans

Every writer has a character who refuses to stay in the lane you've carefully created for them.

For me, that character is Mandy.

When audiences first meet her in Escorted, she appears to be exactly the sort of person you'd expect to find running a nail salon on a Yorkshire high street. Loud, funny, flirtatious and seemingly incapable of taking anything seriously. She's the sort of person who can turn a simple conversation into a performance and a routine trip across the road into a public event.

She also happens to be one of the most complicated characters I've ever written.

What interested me from the beginning was the gap between what Mandy shows the world and what she keeps hidden from it.

Humour is her armour. If she can make people laugh, they won't ask too many questions. If she keeps talking, nobody notices the things she avoids talking about.

Like many people, Mandy has become very good at presenting a version of herself that feels easier than the truth.

As the series developed, I realised she wasn't simply there to provide comic relief. In many ways, she became the emotional heart of the story. Beneath the jokes, gossip and bravado is a woman carrying years of regret, loneliness and unanswered questions.

The more I wrote her, the more she surprised me.

She can be outrageous one moment and deeply vulnerable the next. She often says the wrong thing, but occasionally sees situations more clearly than everyone around her. She has an instinctive understanding of people, even when she struggles to understand herself.

Those contradictions are what make her interesting to write.

I've never been particularly interested in perfect characters. Real people are messy. They make mistakes. They carry secrets. They convince themselves they've made the right choices and then spend years wondering if they haven't.

Mandy understands that better than most.

For all the twists and turns in Escorted, she remains one of the characters closest to my heart.

Although if she ever read this, she'd probably accuse me of being soft and tell me to get back to work.