The Lesbian Housewives Of Chiswick Go Online

Drama adaptation of the novel Different for Girls is now finished

The complex love lives of the 'Real Lesbian Housewives of West London' is now the theme of a three-part e-drama series ( Vimeo On Demand ) which was filmed in Chiswick.

Television producer, writer, director and commissioning editor, Jacquie Lawrence successfully crowdfunded for Different for Girls, an adaptation of her fiction novel of the same name - first published as an e-book in 2014, and then as a paperback in 2015.

The drama series features a group of lesbian and bisexual women based in Chiswick - the 'real lesbian housewives of West London' - women, she said "whose lives and loves revolve around children, marriage, betrayal and divorce. That's not to say that there isn't room for drink, drugs, sex and dancing; there is. Just not in front of their wives and children".

Jacquie was inspired to write the novel when she attended the Chiswick Book Festival in 2014 and the following year she presented a session on self-publishing. It sold 11,000 copies.

The drama was shot entirely in and around Chiswick, and was supported by friends who loaned houses, clothes, even a wedding dress, to the team so that the budget could be kept low.

The cast includes Denise Welch, (above) Rachel Shelley, Guinevere Turner, Victoria Broom, Jake Graf, Alicya Eyo, Toby Sawyer, Caroline Whitney Smith, Tuyen Do, Sarah Soetaert, Helen Oakleigh, Craig Robert Young, Nimmy March, Topher Campbell, Janet Ellis, Shaun Prendergast and Malcolm Tomlinson.

Denise, ( Loose Women, Coronation Street), said that she enjoyed playing the character of Maeve, who was an LLL- a 'Later Life Lesbian', which was a comedy role and the first time she remembered playing a lesbian, apart from once at drama school. Many women had come up to her and told her that they had only had the confidence to reveal that they were gay, after many years of marriage when their children had grown up.

Jacquie used to work in television as a commissioning editor at C4 & Sky One (she won the channel's first BAFTA for Ross Kemp on Gangs) and has now set up a production company, JACKDAW MEDIA ,with her partner, Acton based, former head of drama & business affairs at the BBC, Fizz Milton.

Jacquie says that television repeatedly portrays lesbians in a bad light.

"We wanted to portray characters that manage to live their dramatic and complicated lives, on screen, without fear of death by car, helicopter crash, house fire or stray bullet. DIFFERENT FOR GIRLS is here to save the fate of lesbians and bisexual from what has become known as the Dead Lesbian Syndrome."

July 28, 2018