Debbie Horsfield


Debbie Horsfield is an English theatre and television writer and producer.

Early life and career

Horsfield was born in Urmston and she attended Eccles Grammar School and Eccles College before studying at Newcastle University, where she gained a BA Honours degree in English Language and Literature.
Horsfield went on to work at the Gulbenkian Studio, Newcastle, and for Trevor Nunn at The Royal Shakespeare Company, 1980-82. Her first plays Out on the Floor and Away from it All were produced at the Theatre Royal Stratford East studio and All You Deserve was performed as part of an RSC Festival at the Barbican.
In 1983 she won the Thames Television Playwrights Award and became Resident Writer at the Liverpool Playhouse. There she was commissioned to write the Red Devils Trilogy.
The last two of these were first performed at the National Theatre's studio, the Cottesloe, in 1985. For these plays she was nominated for the 1985 Evening Standard Awards 'Most Promising Playwright'. True Dare Kiss was later to be adapted for a TV series,.
In 2005 she returned to the theatre to adapt her TV series Sex, Chips & Rock 'n Roll as a musical for the Royal Exchange, Manchester.

Television career

In 1982 Horsfield adapted her stage play Out On The Floor for BBC2 and wrote an episode of Crown Court for Granada Television..
From 1989-91 she wrote all three series of the BBC1 factory-based drama Making Out..
1993-94 Both series of BBC One 6-part series The Riff Raff Element.
1997 6-part BBC One serial Born to Run.
1999 6-part BBC One serial Sex, Chips & Rock n' Roll.
2002-2005 4 series of the BBC One hair salon based Cutting It
2007 6-part BBC One serial True Dare Kiss.
2009 All the Small Things, BBC One, follows the trials and tribulations of a northern church choir.
Horsfield has twice won BAFTA Best Drama Series award nominations, for The Riff Raff Element in 1994 and for Cutting It in 2003.
She has adapted the first six novels of Winston Graham's Poldark cycle for the BBC's Poldark series. Eight episodes were broadcast on BBC One in early 2015, ten more episodes in autumn 2016, and a further series based on books 5 and 6 is being aired from June 2017.
In 2018 the BBC broadcast a six-part series, Age Before Beauty which had been written and co-produced by Horsfield.