The television writer Ann McManus, who has died aged 67 after suffering a cardiac arrest, was the key creator and writer behind the hit TV series Waterloo Road, and a co-founder of the multimillion-pound company Shed Productions.
She landed her first TV job as a scriptwriter on the soap Take the High Road in 1993, before graduating to Coronation Street (1996-98), while still working as a schoolteacher in Glasgow.
Her fast-paced, often funny style impressed Brian Park, the producer. In 1998, he instructed her to get rid of a few Coronation Street characters that he thought were stale, including that of Hayley Cropper, played by Julie Hesmondhalgh. McManus had a brilliant idea: she would make Cropper the first trans character in a British soap, in what became a remarkably popular storyline.
Another storyline she devised was sending Deirdre Rachid, a key character, played by Anne Kirkbride, to prison, unjustly convicted of fraud. A public “Free the Weatherfield One” campaign ensued, leading to the prime minister, Tony Blair, commenting on the case in parliament.
Anne Kirkbride as Deirdre Rachid in Coronation Street, 1998. Ann McManus devised the storyline that Deirdre should go to prison, unjustly convicted of fraud. Photograph: ITV/Shutterstock
In 2005, when asked by John Yorke, BBC controller of drama, to come up with a contemporary series that would be relevant to the lives of ordinary people in modern Britain, McManus pitched a show set around a comprehensive school. “If there is one single issue that dominates the thinking not only of parents but of everyone who wants a decent and fair society, it’s how we give our children the best start in life,” McManus said at the press launch of Waterloo Road in 2007.
In the show, Waterloo comprehensive is a fictional, failing school in the north of England, which slowly gets back on its feet. McManus’s vast knowledge of the world of teaching (she had spent five years teaching English at some of Glasgow’s toughest comprehensive schools) shone through in the scripts, earning it accolades far and wide.
Shed Productions (later Shed Media) was established in 1999 by McManus, Park, Eileen Gallagher and Maureen Chadwick, who had all met while working for Granada Television.
Their first production proposal, Bad Girls, set in a women’s prison, was commissioned by ITV in 1998. Featuring British TV’s first long-term lesbian relationship, it quickly acquired cult status, with fan clubs popping up across the UK.
In 2000, Shed won a major new commission to produce Footballers’ Wives for ITV. Photograph: ITV/Allstar
In 2000, Shed won a major new commission to produce Footballers’ Wives for primetime ITV. In 2005 came a drama series, The Fugitives, about two runaway teenagers. Shed was also behind other hugely successful programmes such as Supernanny for Channel 4 and a number of other high-profile dramas for both ITV and the BBC, within its first decade, selling its formats and content in over 200 territories worldwide.
The buyout by Warner Brothers that was completed in 2013, and which valued the company at £100m, netted McManus and the other executives payouts of £3.8m, as well as shares in the company. On the day of sale, she celebrated by burning all the scripts on a large open fire. But soon she was writing again, this time on a drama about the Irish famine.
McManus was born in Ayr, to James McManus, a railwayman, and Frances (nee News), who started out as a PA, but was sacked when she became pregnant, and went on to raise six children (of whom Ann was the second), later becoming a teacher for children with special needs. Ann’s early education was at St John’s Ayr primary school, then Queen Margaret Academy, a local Catholic comprehensive school at which she did not shine, and “mucked up” her highers.
A clip from an episode of Waterloo Road, 2012
After a period working in a call centre, she resat them and finally made it to Glasgow University in her early 20s. There, she became a very active member of the Communist party (which she left in the early 1990s). It was during this time she met Peter Breeze, whom she married in 1980.
She completed her degree in English language and literature at Glasgow and followed it up with a postgraduate diploma in education, studying for it in her own time while training as a teacher at Jordanhill College. Her passion for education came out of her own experience – as a child born into a teaching family, as a pupil, and as a teacher in schools serving two of Glasgow’s most deprived housing estates, Castlemilk and Easterhouse.
At the start of her teaching career, corporal punishment was still permitted – but she found it far more effective to encourage the class to laugh at the ringleaders than to martyr them via the cane. “Some of the pupils I taught were genuinely tough cases but they all had their crosses to bear. Many were living in chaotic homes where school was first and foremost a refuge,” she once remarked.
In 2008, recognising that the industry really needed new writers, she created, with Gallagher, an MA in television fiction writing at Glasgow Caledonian University.
In later years, she loved overseas travel, and her favourite London pastime was lunch, often raucous affairs with her friends from the Shed days. McManus was a keen singer, having formed a band during her retirement, and lent her enthusiastic support to lesbian and gay campaigns, such as LGB Alliance UK.
Breeze and McManus divorced in 1990. She entered into a civil partnership with Gallagher in 2006.
She is survived by Gallagher and by her five siblings, Veronica, Jim, David, Helen and Frances.
Ann McManus, screenwriter, born 6 October 1957; died 16 August 2025
