Shaun Duggan
| Shaun Duggan | |
|---|---|
| Born |
25 May 1970 Norris Green |
| Nationality | UK |
| Occupation | playwright; television writer |
| Years active | 1986+ |
| Notable work |
Brookside Accused |
Shaun Duggan (born 1970) is a BAFTA nominated writer based in the UK. He has repeatedly collaborated with Jimmy McGovern. He has written several plays and has worked extensively for television including Brookside (Channel 4) and EastEnders (BBC1).
Like McGovern, Duggan is associated with a realist tradition centring on documenting life in his home town of Liverpool. Born on the Norris Green council estate,Duggan's writing career began at the age of 16, when his play William, inspired by The Smiths song "William, It Was Really Nothing", was produced at London's Royal Court Theatre Upstairs as part of their Young Writers' Festival, 1986. Shaun was befriended by his hero, Morrissey, who also interviewed him about the play on Channel 4's The Tube. Shaun continued to write other stage plays for the Liverpool Everyman and the Playhouse, including It's Nearly June, A Brusque Affair, All Lips and Sex; and Boy, (winner of the Liverpool Echo and Daily Post Best Writing Award), which went on a UK tour before transferring to the Lyric Studio, London. His play Drama Queen was produced in Liverpool for the Homotopia lesbian and gay arts festival as part of the city's Capital of Culture celebrations in 2008.
Duggan spent eight years writing for the Liverpool-set soap opera, Brookside; he wrote the episode that featured the first pre-watershed lesbian kiss on British television when Beth Jordache (Anna Friel) began a relationship with the Farnhams' nanny Margaret Clemence (Nicola Stephenson) in January 1994. The kiss was seen by an estimated global audience of one billion when Danny Boyle included it in the opening ceremony of London 2012. As a result the kiss was shown in countries such as Saudi Arabia, where it is illegal to be gay. No other gay kiss has ever been shown on television in the Middle Eastern country.
Duggan received a BAFTA nomination in 2013 for the opening episode of the second series of Jimmy McGovern's Accused (starring Sean Bean in a BAFTA nominated/RTS Award winning/International Emmy Award winning performance as cross-dressing teacher, 'Tracie' Tremarco).Caitlin Moran said in The Times "It was physically affecting — that brilliant, drug-like transcendence where you're floating inside a story… I can’t remember the last time I was so on the side of someone in a script."
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