He was what I call a lantern person in my life - he lit up a path for me. It was director Bob Spiers - who directed more than half of Press Gang's 43 episodes - who Sawalha credits with helping her find her confidence as a comedic actress. And so I shied away from it and sort of dreaded the farcical side of Press Gang, because I just thought, 'I’m not going to be able to do it.'" "I mean, Paul Reynolds as Colin Matthews was just genius and I just thought, 'I don’t know how he does it'. "I really admired the comedy in it and the actors that could do it," Sawalha says. "These were shows where they said, 'It's just television, we can do whatever the hell we like.'" and Moonlighting which I adored," he recalls. "Hill Street Blues could be quite mad at times, and St Elsewhere.
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Despite a strict production schedule, with episodes being produced in just five days, it was never lacking in ambition, veering from farce to tragedy and dabbling in dream sequences, flashbacks and fantasies – part of Moffat's desire to ape more "adult" series like Moonlighting and Hill Street Blues. Press Gang was unlike any other children's series on air at the time. "He was in his office a lot, on his own, and I used to go and see him and he’d be battering away on the typewriter, and I'd say, 'Oh Steven, this script is just amazing, it’s brilliant, it’s brilliant' – and he’d just say, 'Ah, it’s nothing, get on with it!’."
Looking back on it, I feel a bit bad now because I think we were all a bit in awe of him and he must have felt very separated from us. "He was just so brilliant, and he held great authority. "I thought Steven was really so much older – nothing to do with looks!" laughs series star Sawalha. but y'know, I was 26, and just thought, 'To hell with that.'"
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Basically my parents said, 'You have to make a living, you can't just lie around the house saying you're a writer' so they made me get a job, but I quit my teaching job well before I signed the actual contract for Press Gang, which was daring! Quite a lot of TV writers carry on doing their day job for a bit, till they're secure enough. "But I loved television, so of course I was thrilled. I probably had my sights set on the theatre – I think at that time I was really fascinated by being a playwright.
" I wanted to be a writer, I was absolutely clear on that. Though this was his first television commission, on the day he got "just a sniff of a contract", Moffat quit his teaching job. Using his father's idea as a springboard, Moffat created Press Gang, which followed the student staff of the Junior Gazette, edited by the no-nonsense Lynda Day (Sawalha) and produced by a cast of characters including American delinquent Spike (Dexter Fletcher), assistant editor Kenny (Lee Ross) and the paper's financial brain Colin (Paul Reynolds). I mean, I was pretty much solely responsible for its fictional world, I guess you'd say." "What my Dad had come up with really was a sort of education kit about a newspaper in a school, run by kids," Moffat explains. The idea appealed to producer Sandra Hastie and Bill Ward, co-owners of her company Richmond Films and Television, with Bill suggesting that his son, then an English teacher, should write the script.
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