The BBC has commissioned an adaptation of journalist and campaigner Paris Lees’ memoirs.
What It Feels Like For a Girl, which can also be the title of the ebook, can be an eight-part collection for BBC Three and BBC iPlayer that’s billed as a “wild, anarchic spin on a coming-of-age drama” impressed by Lees’ story.
Here’s the synopsis: “It’s a new millennium – Madonna, Moloko and Basement Jaxx top the charts, and there’s a whole world to explore. But teenager Byron is stuck in a small working-class town that hasn’t been the same since the coal mine shut in the ’80s. Sick of mam, sick of dad, sick of being beaten up for “talkin’ like a poof.” Sick of everybody shuffling about just like the dwelling useless, happening about kitchens they’re too skint to do up and marriages they’re too scared to depart. Byron must get away, and doesn’t care how.”
The story will then comply with Byron’s escape to Nottingham’s underworld and discovery of the East Midlands’ “premier podium-dancer-cum-hellraiser” Lady Die, who adopts Byron into her household of hilarious and chaotic troublemakers within the UK’s early 2000s membership scene.
Lees is adapting the story with Chris Sweeney (The Tourist, Back to Life) taking over lead director duties. Hera Pictures (Mary & George, Temple) is producing. Both are govt producers alongside Liza Marshall and Ron O’Berst for Hera Pictures, with Nawfal Faizullah for the BBC.
Filming kicks off subsequent yr.
Journalist and author Lees is likely one of the UK’s LGBTQIA+ group’s most outstanding figures, described by i-D journal as “the voice of a generation.” She referred to as What If Feels Like For a Girl “a deeply personal project.”
“I’m excited, hysterical, thrown and overblown with bliss, but most of all I’m just having so much fun bringing this universe to life in a visual medium,” she added. “It’s a primal scream — from the depths of a council estate — against a world that would prefer people who don’t fit the norm didn’t exist. But we do and we’re not going away, we’re not apologising and we’re not shutting up.”
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