Lilies (BBC TV series)

Lilies
Genre	Drama
Created by	Heidi Thomas
Directed by	David Moore Roger Goldby Ferdinand Fairfax Brian Kelly
Starring	Catherine Tyldesley Kerrie Hayes Leanne Rowe
Composer(s)	Kevin Sargent
Country of origin	United Kingdom
Original language(s)	English
No. of series	1
No. of episodes	8
Production
Executive producer(s)	Heidi Thomas Tony Garnett
Location(s)	Liverpool, England
Camera setup	Single-camera
Running time	approx. 59 min. per episode
Release
Original network	BBC One
Original release	12 January – 2 March 2007

Lilies is a British period-drama television series, written by Heidi Thomas, which ran for one eight-episode series in early 2007 on BBC One. The show's tagline was "Liverpool, 1920. Three girls on the edge of womanhood, a world on the brink of change." Due to lower than expected ratings, the BBC did not commission a second series.

Lilies details the lives of Iris, May and Ruby Moss, three Catholic sisters living with their widowed father and brother in a terraced house in Liverpool in the early 1920s. The story is set in the years immediately after the First World War and, as such, the after effects of that conflict are apparent.

The story depicts a life lived on a knife-edge of poverty, tempered by various kinds of love. All three girls must make their own way in the world. In the course of the series, each sister tastes passion for the first time, and their lives, newly launched, are changed forever.

Heidi Thomas first developed the idea for Lilies from listening to her grandmother's stories about growing up in post-World War I Liverpool. The Moss sisters are loosely based on her grandmother and her three sisters. Some aspects of the series, such as the grave fund that the girls save for, are taken directly from their lives. Thomas wrote the first complete draft of the script in 1996, but it was almost ten years before it was optioned by the BBC. During that time she lost the script, and had to recreate it from an old copy she found in her attic. Thomas elected to insert certain elements into the script to give the series a sense of realism, such as the slaughter of animals in the Moss home. Largely unknown actors were cast in Lilies, including native Liverpudlian Kerrie Hayes in her acting debut.

During location scouting, the production team was unable to find an area of Liverpool with terraced houses that had been sufficiently preserved so they decided to reconstruct a whole neighborhood on a backlot in Aintree. In order to give a sense of space to the production, large painted billboards mimicking distant buildings were erected on the edges of the set. Other scenes were filmed on location at the Woolton Picture House, the Walker Art Gallery and Croxteth Hall.

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