Lucy Forbes; the long and the short of it

If you were to combine the essence of Big Brother’s Big Mouth with a season or two of no-budget children’s telly, some spoof ads and a stack of Charlie Brooker’s Screenwipes, combine all that with a massive love for film and telly, the drive to succeed and a winning way with funny stories, and what would you get? You’d get Lucy Forbes in the director’s chair, that’s what.

“It was Harvey Weinstein being a complete shitbag that changed everything."

Forbes has directed episodes of the Bafta-winning drama series In My Skin and The End of the F**king World and, more recently, directed Benedict Cumberbatch alongside a seven-foot tall puppet in the hit Netflix series Eric. And while she is an in-demand longform director, she is lauded, too, for her shortform work – most recently a deftly conjured whodunnit spot for Waitrose Christmas, Sweet Suspicion, and a groundbreaking celebration of menstruation and womanhood, Never Just a Period, for Libresse.

Above: Forbes directed Benedict Cumberbatch in the hit Netflix series Eric.

Signed to SMUGGLER for her commercial work, Forbes is talking from Canada, where she is about to shoot a new drama series. “It’s called The Audacity, about tech billionaires in Silicon Valley,” she says, “written by Jonathan Glatzer, one of the main writers on Succession. It’s about the people, not the tech. It won’t be mega-futuristic, it’s more about humanising these people that control and know everything about our lives.”

While it means she’ll not helm another ad campaign until next year, directing both long and short-form are processes she relishes. “A longform is a slow burn and it’s a marathon, you have to sign over your life to get it done,” she says. “You do that with advertising as well, but it’s a month, and then you’re out the other side. It’s a different muscle you use. It’s creatively very, very rewarding. Especially with something like the Libresse campaign. It was literally my imagination run wild. It’s really exciting to do things that you can’t do on a longform. And you get to work with really interesting creatives and collaborators. I love working with SMUGGLER.”

"I still have to be 10 times more prepared than a director of the opposite sex. I have to really know what I’m talking about."

As an acclaimed, in-demand female director, had she obstacles to overcome to secure her first work? And what was it that opened the doors of opportunity? Forbes’ answer is succinct. “It was Harvey Weinstein being a complete shitbag that changed everything. It was the MeToo movement, and the thought that, ‘Oh yeah, maybe we should get some female directors’. And suddenly the doors opened. Then it was knowing you have those opportunities and seizing them. I still have to be 10 times more prepared than a director of the opposite sex. I have to really know what I’m talking about and I definitely prepare. I’m not winging it. I’m very aware of the opportunities I’ve been given, and I throw absolutely everything at those opportunities.”

Above: Micky Flanagan, Mark Dolan and Mark Watson, from The Mad Bad Ad Show, from 2012. 

Forbes started out in television, working up from an entry-level job at the BBC, as a PA to the Head of Light Entertainment. “I was a contestant researcher, then an assistant producer, but the big thing was when I started working in kids’ TV. There was no money; they just threw a camera at me, and went, ‘can you just go and film this?’. And that’s where the love affair started.

"Children’s TV was a really good training ground. No money, no time, I had to shoot it and write it myself, turn it around really quickly. Then I worked in music television for a long time, made really bad documentaries with Big Brother contestants, and eventually got a job on [round-up show] Big Brother’s Big Mouth. I had to make sketches about what was going on in the house. That was my film school, because we could do anything we wanted. We’d come up with ridiculous ideas and film them in new and creative ways.”

“SMUGGLER went, ‘we’ll have you’, and these incredible opportunities came along."

She then started writing sketch material for the likes of Katherine Ryan, Micky Flanagan and John Bishop. Then a dream job – working for Charlie Brooker’s round-up of the year, Screenwipe. Then there was the first and only series of The Mad Bad Ad Show. “We made spoof commercials, some of which still I deeply love” she says. Soon after that she started directing her first longform, the 2018 coming-of-age BBC3 series In My Skin.

By the time she’d finished helming all six episodes of Eric in 2023 – after two years non-stop work – Forbes felt exhausted and ready for a break. Or, at least, an ad break. “SMUGGLER went, ‘we’ll have you’, and these incredible opportunities came along – Libresse and the Waitrose Christmas advert.”

Above: The Waitrose campaign, directed by Forbes, from 2024. 

Waitrose Sweet Suspicion, out of Saatchi & Saatchi London, is a game changer when it comes to modern-day Christmas retail advertising, in that it is neither depressing or maudlin, there’s no frail female vocal stretching out like gossamer over a sloooow version of an old hit, and it lacks the usual twanging of heartstrings. Instead, Sweet Suspicion is a tightly plotted, slyly funny whodunnit centred around a Waitrose dessert you’d actually want to spoon into your gaping maw as soon as possible after viewing.

"We had to approach it as a proper whodunnit. I characterised each of our family members – one’s the femme fatale, one’s the hapless idiot – then wrote their motives."

“It was a clever way to do what you needed to do on a retail Christmas ad,” she recalls. “You need to show the produce, but it was a smart way to do it. We had to approach it as a proper whodunnit. I went through and characterised each of our family members – one’s the femme fatale, one’s the hapless idiot – then wrote their motives, then had a pass at the script. We got in a proper crime writer, who’d done Miss Marple, and we spent a day working it out, all the little nuances. Then I did another pass and injected some comedy into it, so it was definitely a collaboration between me and the creatives and the crime writer.” 

The two-parter drew a cool 150 million views across all platforms, making it the supermarket’s biggest-ever campaign. And as most viewers at the end of part one were pointing their fingers at the wrong suspect (Fig the cat, to be precise, which does seem felinephobic), Matthew Macfadyen’s detective had some explaining to do in the part two reveal.