Emma Hickman and Ella Watts are writer and director/producer respectively of Eliza, a new Crowd Network SF podcast that deals with themes of domestic abuse, coercion and control presented in a rather different way. Starring Sex Education’s Tanya Reynolds as the robot, Eliza, with Arthur Darvill as her creator, known only as Him, and Dominique Tipper as His wife Her, it’s uncompromising and treats its subject unflinchingly. Paul Simpson chatted with Emma and Ella…

 

Where did the idea for Eliza come from?

Emma: My Instagram name is @Emmalovesrobots but that was always about making music – about synthesisers and how if it wasn’t for computers, I wouldn’t be able to make music. I’ve had this thought about consciousness – if there could be a conscious robot and if there would be this point where they were so conscious that they would then be able to convince us that they weren’t – obsessing in the back of my brain for years.

I just started writing about this robot in lockdown and obviously it was a really difficult time. There were lots of awful things in the news about violence against women and unexpectedly I started telling it through my robot… and then forty rewrites later it became shaped into this robot story.

Before you sat down and wrote it, had you worked out the entire progression of the story?

Emma: No, I was very much in the dark, very much how they tell you not to write. I had written a children’s story before, so I had a bit of an idea about where peaks and troughs in the story would be but this kind of episodic tale, especially with podcast, it’s all kind of new. So it was just trying to feel it out really.

Ella: To be fair, I think that Emma is underselling herself. When I was brought onto the project, there were already scripts for the whole series, based on what Eliza had originally been, which was a novel, right?

Emma: I started writing it as a novel just because it was a stream of consciousness and I thought, maybe I can shape this into a novel. I was quite secretive about it because when you make something, you don’t know if anyone else will care. So before I spoke to Crowd Network, I wanted it to be as good as possible because I didn’t want to embarrass myself.

Ella: It was fantastic. When I got it, it was at a time when I had a couple of different projects in review. This one came across my desk: it was a writer who’s never written anything that’s been published or broadcast before, and with a network that’s never done any fiction or drama before – it does all talk, interviews and sports stuff.

I was like ‘OK, I don’t really know how to interpret this request.’ I went in with no expectations: ‘I will just read these scripts and see how they are and just see what it is.’ I remember reading Emma’s scripts on a tram on my phone and just not being able to stop reading them. There are several lines, even in the first drafts, that have made their way all the way through to the released podcast which just hit me so hard. One of them is in episode 1 about Eliza having tears and being able to cry.

By the time that I actually met Emma, I was like ‘I have to work on this series. I have to make this show.’ And then Emma very kindly humoured me, forcing her to rewrite it, several times!

Emma: Yes, it was good for me. Character building!

From the novel/original script version to what we’re hearing now, what has changed more? Is it more in terms of sharpening the characters or is it the plot progression?

Emma: I think I was very focused on Eliza. Some of the characters I didn’t want to write too much about because I didn’t want to spend any time with them.

One thing in particular was that He wasn’t a full character really, He was just reflected in Eliza’s words. So I think Eliza is who she always was but other characters have developed a lot more, and Her as well.

Ella: I think Her became a really interesting character – that’s His wife, Dominique Tipper’s character in the first episode who may or may not come back. We talked a lot about bringing Her in more and bringing Her voice in more because there was this tension that we had to deal with.

Emma felt very strongly – and I think that she’s right – that in the series Eliza is very isolated but I felt very strongly that I wanted there to be another woman’s voice in the series who was doing her own thing and having her own story, so we fleshed out Her.

In order to do that, Emma wrote these draft therapy sessions that Her had with her therapist. They aren’t in the scripts, they were just to get to know Her. And we got to know this really cool character who then ended up having a much bigger place in the series.

The other side of it was with Him because of where you knew He was going as a character. Obviously it was difficult to humanise Him earlier on but something we discussed a lot was the fact that domestic abuse is often dismissed because people operate under the assumption that abusers are one-dimensional monstrous villains and therefore, if this person is my nicest friend, they cannot possibly ever have been abusive. Unfortunately everyone is complicated and everyone is nuanced and something we felt very strongly about in the series was conveying to people that

Arthur’s character is a normal person. He’s cute sometimes and he’s funny and he’s geeky and he’s nerdy and also he can be cruel, and it’s not always intentional but that does have a consequence and it does hurt people. But if we just brought Him in as this one-dimensional villain, I don’t think we would have been able to make our point in the way that we wanted to, which was that abuse can happen to anyone.

One of the things I noticed in the first two episodes is this idea that Eliza has that she’s not real early on. Is that something that’s developed?

Emma: Yes.

Ella: That was interesting to me as a director because by the time I directed Tanya, I had read so many drafts of these scripts and had obsessively lived with these scripts for a while. Emma and I had a lot of discussions about it also with Louise, our Executive producer – we had quite a key creative team, a cooperative team.

What I realised more and more with every day of recording was how much Eliza’s core personal struggle outside of her relationship situation is that she doesn’t know who she is or what she is, and she really feels very uncomfortable about that. She feels very stuck between places. She gets the emotions and she doesn’t know if any other robots have that, so she feels like she’s more like a human on the one hand, but she’s more like a robot on the other. She doesn’t feel quite like she’s either of them and she has this anxiety and self consciousness that I thought was really interesting for me to direct.

Emma: Yes, there are parts of her that are so much like Him because she’s a people pleaser essentially. She’s been built to please Him and even when she becomes emotional, she’s still doing it and that happens, it’s a human thing as well isn’t it? That does make your identity slip away in a way because of the nature of the coercive control.

Ella: I think of Eliza as more like fable-type metaphorical 70s/80s feminist sci-fi than hard sci-fi in an Iain Banks way. When you are a human being who is in a toxic relationship or you’re just not sure of your place in the world, it’s really difficult to separate out the bits that are “me” – the bits of me that are gaslit, the bits of me that are real, the bits of me that aren’t real – from everything else and I think what’s interesting with this is that it [combines that with] the quite common robot sci-fi trope which I really enjoy: ‘Am I myself because of my programming or am I myself because I’m a person?’

I most recently really enjoyed that in C. Robert Cargill’s book Sea of Rust. There’s a character called Brittle who’s a caregiver robot. She can’t decide if she cares because she’s supposed to care or because she actually cares, and she has this endless loop in her head. There’s no way that she can logic her way out of what it is because she does have core programming and she has evolved past that but where does she land?

I think it’s similar with Eliza: she is designed to reflect Him in every aspect and so there’s part of her that is shaped by Him, in the same way that people who are traumatised are shaped by our trauma, no matter how much you might not want that to be true. I can say certainly as an abuse survivor myself, I am shaped by my trauma. That doesn’t define me, but it certainly impacts me and impacts how I encounter the world. I sympathise and relate a lot to Eliza and the way that she’s frustrated with the fact that this trauma has changed how she experiences the world.

Emma: I think there’s the zoomed-in version of that coercive relationship but also a zoomed-out version of society and women more generally. Is that programming actually patriarchal systems?

Ella: That’s how I feel in the world as someone who’s been raised and gendered as a woman. There’s a lot of male behaviours where I’m like ‘Would I act like this if I had been raised differently?’

That’s a much bigger question, you’re getting into nature vs nurture.

Emma and Ella: Yes.

One of the things about drama is that we can actually put ourselves in somebody else’s place for however long the play is and if a skilled writer is creating the person, we’re looking through their eyes. So that trauma, that drama is all centrally linked to everybody; you’re not necessarily having to take people with you because it is part of their experience.

Ella: Something I think about a lot is that when people talk about The Handmaid’s Tale for example – feelings about Margaret Atwood aside – they often talk about these misogynistic dystopias and go, ‘Wow, that’s so alien, I can’t possibly imagine that happening.’ And as a cis woman in the world, I’m like, ‘No, I feel the invasive and pervasive violence of misogyny in society every day, all the time, and the control that it has over my body and my behaviour and my actions and what I say’. And, for me personally as a queer person, as a neurodivergent person, I try to think a lot about intersections of marginalisation, different intersections of inequality and so on, and there are so many problems in the world, it’s easy to get lost in that and forget that actually, baseline misogyny is still a really big problem, and it hasn’t gone away. It still enormously impacts a very large number of the population, in a way that is just relentless.

I really love telling queer stories, they’re very important to me, but what was important to me about this was that it was a story about women and it was a story about women’s experiences and women’s experiences of misogyny. What I really hope is that people who listen to this series – who might not feel they currently understand where people are coming from when we talk about sexism or misogyny – maybe through Eliza, they can put themselves in her shoes. They can hear the way that she details this kind of universal constant feeling of surveillance and self-policing and maybe understand a little bit where we’re coming from when we talk about these issues. Because, it’s more than individual incidents. It is those individual incidents but it’s also the tapestry of control we’re caught in all the time.

Emma: The Women’s Aid partnership has been really important with all of this. They would read the scripts because we want to deal with it all responsibly. Also we see the partnership going forward. They’ve got programs for educating perpetrators which I hadn’t even thought about.

I think, the idea is that we could make some things that are subconscious in people or sub subconscious into something that they can see and identify with through a robot.

I hadn’t even thought about perpetrators listening to it but Women’s Aid have said that the content could be useful for some of the programs that They’ve got working with perpetrators. So that’s blown my mind.

Ella: We worked on things like the content warnings and making sure they are correct, making sure the helplines are there and the helpline messaging is correct in a way that they think will be most effective. We’re also planning to release, after the main series is out, a panel with a collection of domestic abuse charities who specialise in different areas.

So for example, talking to charities that work with male survivors of domestic abuse as well as people of colour, people with disabilities, queer people, to again just emphasise this thing that we keep coming back to, which is that whilst Eliza is very much a series about gendered violence, domestic violence is a thing that can happen to anyone, regardless of your gender or position in society or whoever you might be.

Emma: It’s gendered in this way because I’m a woman and I’ve written it but I don’t want to talk to anyone else’s experiences because that’s not my job.

One of the things that occurred to me was there is an equivalent series to be made about a male robot. While some of the beats would be similar, there are others that wouldn’t be and would be equally valid. One of the things about domestic violence is that it isn’t purely one direction.

Emma and Ella: No.

Emma: That’s really important, that we get that message across, that great message at the end of the show. As Ella said, domestic violence can happen to anyone, it’s not a gendered thing. And also the subtlety of coercion: you don’t need to have bruises to have experienced it.

In terms of writing, what was the most challenging thing for you?

Emma: Trying to make Him likeable, at the beginning. I don’t know how likeable He is. We’re trying to make Him have traits that weren’t just evil from the start.

Ella: When we were talking about it and trying to nail down who He was as a person, we ended up coming along to Jonathan Byers from Stranger Things’

You have to humanise everyone in your drama. No person in your drama is thinking, ‘I am a one-dimensional villain’, because no one is like that in real life. So it’s kind of going, ‘OK, what’s his motivation? Why does he go this way?’ And He goes this way because he’s lonely, because he doesn’t feel loved, because he feels rejected, because he feels insecure, because he is very frightened of the idea that someone will reject him and therefore he tries to eliminate that possibility before it happens. And so archetypically, when we’re talking about pop culture, we’re like ‘OK, he’s the classic nerdy boy of media who has a light side and a dark side. The light side is Jonathan Byers from Stranger Things and the dark side is Him in Eliza.’ If this character in these archetypes gets the right support and defeats that insecurity then they could become a wonderful person. But on the other hand, sometimes if their insecurity defines them in some way or excuses or uses it as an excuse for their own behaviour, then it can become very toxic.

Emma: And add a big pile of stress onto them as well and they’ll react in a way that’s not great.

You have to have that moment being believable, the logic gate, They’ve got to go left for the purposes of the story but you’ve got to have the option to go right, or they become one-dimensional.

Ella: Yes, I think that’s one of the things I really like about these scripts because the fact that coercive control is a really big theme in the series and part of that and part of the nature of abuse is it’s extremely rarely one-sided. Most of the time, both people in the relationship feel affection towards one another. The perpetrator does genuinely believe that they really care about the person that they might be hurting and the person who is being hurt really cares about the person who’s hurting them.

What you see a lot in Eliza is a lot of back and forth with the character of Him. There’s a lot of moments where He’s very kind to Eliza and does things because he cares about her. Even from the start, he’s got this robot, he can do anything to her, legally, and, He’s like, “Make me a fantasy football team. Let’s have fun, I want to joke around, I want us to have fun and have a fun conversation. I don’t want you to be my slave, I want you to just think and talk.”

He starts off as far as we can tell, wanting a friend.

Emma: Yes.

But then He realises that that can be a friend with benefits and then it’s just the benefits. To me the moment in episode 1 by the canal is quite a triggering incident. Not so much for Eliza, not so much for Her because she’s clearly building up to it and getting herself drunk to do it, but for Him realising what Eliza means to Him and what Her means to Him. There’s a balance shift at that moment and it seems quite stark: was it intentionally so?

Emma: Yes. You talked about that choice and He had to make that choice. If Her wasn’t there, there just wouldn’t have been the depth of story there.

I’m honing in more on the violence of that incident: violence is used against Eliza for the first time, at that point and from there we then see a path that He goes down.

Ella: Her dehumanises Eliza quite easily at that point, which is why she can do what she did. That is one of the key themes, when humans dehumanise others when it suits them. Terry Pratchett wrote, “Evil begins when you begin to treat people as things”. It’s exactly that

There’s several things that go on there. First of all, I think that if He wasn’t already married, I think he might have just been friends with Eliza for a lot longer, without realising that he thought of it as a romantic relationship because I think that He doesn’t realise he’s getting a crush on Eliza until he realises that his wife is jealous. And then he’s like ‘Oh, maybe there is a romantic tension here.’ And then that escalates.

But second, it’s interesting because Her is a lawyer who made her career proving that robots aren’t sentient, so you can do whatever you want with them. So, Dominique’s character feels very strongly that robots are things and has had to internalise that whereas Him, Arthur’s character, wants the opposite so badly, so badly wants to make a robot a person. His entire career is dedicated towards making a robot as much like a person as possible. That’s his passion, his guiding star.

So you get these starting positions for them and then interestingly, over the course of the series they kind of swap places and for Him, the more stressed he gets, the more obsessed with Eliza He gets, the more He wants to dehumanise her in order to give himself a pass for what he does to her because he doesn’t feel as guilty if it’s not really a person.

Then vice versa for Dominique’s character Her. I don’t want to give too many spoilers but over the course of the series, she learns more and more to see robots as more and more human. I always read that as being triggered by this first incident with Eliza. I think Her, in retrospect, thinks about Eliza a lot and I think that she thinks of Eliza as a person on reflection.

Emma: Yes, she has a big old think.

Was there any particular reason for setting it in Manchester?

Emma: I live in Manchester. I read somewhere, make as little as possible up and obviously I was making a lot of it up about a robot! I tried to keep Manchester as it was. I didn’t really look anywhere else.

Ella: Crowd Network is a Manchester-based podcast network and they really want to have more focus on Manchester as a location and just in media in general and media production. I moved up to Manchester and it was really nice for me to be able to work with a Manchester-based production team rather than having to go down to London for everything.

Of course, what ended up happening was we had to record in London because Tanya and Arthur are both in high demand and it’s difficult to move anyone anywhere, especially in these times of both Covid and train strikes!

It was important for us to involve as many Manchester-based creatives as possible. We’ve got a person who has one line – ‘I’m in the best relationship I’ve ever had’ – which is Robert Wallace, who’s a guy from the production team who is a radio drama lover from up North.

If we ever made more in this world, I would love to bring more of it into the series. There was quite a lot that we wanted to bring in. Northern voices and talk about the North –  just generally, I think it’s nice to have a dystopia or any kind of future sci-fi setting that isn’t in London.

Emma: The Alan Turing statue comes up again and again. I’m a big fan and that’s where it is, so I wouldn’t like to think they’d move it in the future.

So far it’s all first person narration by Eliza. Do we get scenes she is not in?

Ella: No, because the conceit of the series is that Eliza is delivering you this information as recordings she has made with her own external microphone and with her own internal cameras. So everything that we receive is something Eliza has experienced first-hand. Sometimes she editorialises on that, in the narration. Sometimes she summarises things because she isn’t playing everything to us in real time but the idea is that when we hear voices and things, you’re hearing clips.

One of the things I really liked that our sound designer Alexis Admiora did was play around with distortion of Eliza’s external mic to indicate something is coming from that source. Something Alexis and I have worked on, as the series goes on, is that when Eliza feels close to memory, she sharpens and clarifies the audio so it feels very close and very real but when she wants to keep it away from her, because it’s distressing or because it’s something she didn’t understand, she leaves it distorted and she doesn’t scrub up the audio. That is just a little bit of storytelling that’s happening in the sound design for people who might be interested. Often, when she’s having a romantic scene with Him or there’s something she feels very fondly about, she brings Him very close to her and clarifies His audio. But if there’s something that happens that upsets her, then she pushes Him away.

Can we rely on everything she says? The inference of Asimov’s three laws is that a robot should not be able to lie and you get into the topic of lying by commission or omission. The impression I get from the first two episodes is that Eliza wasn’t editing what we’re hearing but Ella, you just said she’s editorialising. Now the minute you are editorialising something, you are amending it.

Ella: She says ‘my memories are changing and human memory distorts when they go back and I feel like I can’t be objective about this any more’. Eliza isn’t lying…

Emma: She’s trying not to.

Ella: Yes, she’s really trying but essentially because Eliza is a survivor and because the Eliza we’re hearing is someone who has been through abuse and gaslighting, she doesn’t feel able to trust herself and her own recollections. She’s very conscious that people will interpret the things that have happened to her so she feels very defensive and also very anxious about trying to present stuff as objectively as possible, whilst also being aware that because she has been so hurt and so frightened and so bullied it’s going to be very difficult for her to present it objectively.

I think that if you look at the series and what we know “really happened”, Eliza does present a very clear and accurate story of what happens.

She works quite hard to present Him as a multi-dimensional person who was very positive towards her. She doesn’t vilify Him but she also does say that the fact of her having emotions means that she feels she has lost her ability, as a machine, to assess things objectively. So she’s conscious that because she has emotions, she will be editorialising. And so, when I said the thing about the sounds Alexis and I are doing with the microphone, that’s not something Eliza’s doing on purpose. It’s something that because she has emotions, she’s doing without thinking about it. So she pushes Him away but not creating that, as in, Eliza is consciously trying to tell you something.

That’s what often an unreliable narrator is. An unreliable narrator written properly doesn’t realise it.

Emma: I think it’s also the survivor mentality and knowing that they’ve got a story to tell and wanting to be believed. It isn’t just her, it’s the others like her. So it’s about, in order to be believed, she wants to be as truthful as possible but she knows that she can’t always manage that.

Ella: There’s a thing of historians of trying to be objective and struggling to do so. The Venerable Bede is a really good example: when [he’s chronicling events] not within his lifetime, he’s really good at being unbiased but when it gets to his lifetime he starts more and more having opinions. Then he remembers that he’s not supposed to be biased and because he’s writing in a manuscript, he can’t go back and delete what he just wrote. So you get this lovely moment where he starts saying ‘This guy who rules the neighbouring kingdom is the worst monster who’s ever lived and he’s sinful and unchristian’ and all these things and then realises that he’s being biased and the immediate next page of the Ecclesiastical History of England says, ‘But I’ve heard that he’s a very loving husband and father and apparently, he’s quite kind to his soldiers’. It’s very fun. I’m bringing that in to try and bring some levity in but I do think that’s what happens with Eliza.

And often with survivors of abuse, there’s this constant push and pull of ‘This thing happened to me and it was very upsetting and I felt very hurt and very frightened and very angry’ and then on the other hand, being like ‘I have to give it to you objectively because everyone, including my abuser, including just generally social standards which are very unfriendly to victims of abuse, are telling me that I shouldn’t be believed, telling me that I’m making it up, telling me that I’m exaggerating or telling me that I’m remembering wrong’.

Eliza struggles with that the whole way through the series. She so badly wants to be believed and she fights so hard to present so much information. One of the things that comes up towards the end of the series is – again my interpretation of Emma’s scripts –that in episode 7 and 8 how far Eliza feels that she has to go, in order for anyone to believe her, is in itself an injustice.

The extent of abuse that people who survive abuse feel that they have to suffer before they’re allowed to tell anyone because of our social prejudice against survivors is so harmful. We should listen to people when they say they are feeling hurt or feeling trapped, and we should facilitate ways for them to get out of those relationships. But unfortunately we trap people and force them into feeling they have to provide more and more “evidence” before they’re allowed to leave. That is a central theme and struggle of Eliza as a series and of her as a character.

Emma: The power of denial is explored a few times. You don’t want this thing to have happened to you and then it’s your responsibility to tell other people that it’s happened to you – sometimes even to the abuser or the perpetrator, you are the person who has to tell them what They’ve done because they’re not going to say it out loud. It’s quite a responsibility for the survivor.

So all along Eliza wants to believe herself and she wants to be able to revisit these memories herself, if she survives, to be able to know exactly what happened and know she tried and there were moments when she “should have left”. Yes, technically, that incident was a red flag, but she was isolated. So she is trying to record it for herself, actually, as well, in a way.

This is her story relating to herself in the hope that others will hear it.

Emma: One voice raises another.

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