(Photograph: Lindsey Parnaby)
ABI M
ORGAN lives in north London, not far from Alexandra Palace, the early home of the BBC, which sprawls across a hilltop like some Victorian idea of a space station. It's an apt locale, as Morgan, who is not quite 40, has already been responsible for various landmark television programmes, among them 2004's Sex Traffic, which won eight Baftas. Her latest drama is White Girl, part of BBC2's season of programmes examining a feeling among the British white working class that they are disenfranched and their culture is under threat.
White Girl tells the story of Leah, an 11-year-old from Leeds who moves to Bradford with her mother and younger brother to escape her violent, drug-dealing stepfather. The family are the only white people on their council estate, and Leah and her brother the only white kids in their school. Though initially resistant, Leah comes to find a sense of peace and order in Islam that she has never had in her chaotic life. She starts wearing a hijab and attending the local mosque.
Morgan has used the premise as a jumping-off point to explore more universal themes. "Fundamentally I think it's a love story between mother and daughter, and the changing landscape of their relationship is reflected in the changing landscape of Bradford, which effectively has changed over the past 40, 50 years with several generations of migration," says Morgan.
In White Girl, Islamic culture is portrayed more positively than we are used to seeing it on television, and there is no more than a glancing reference to terrorism. The Muslim characters are kind, sober, responsible, community and family-minded. The white adults, meanwhile, are callow, shallow, angry and hedonistic. The scenes around the mosque are filmed beautifully, and as a viewer it's easy to feel, like Leah, seduced by faith. "The piece is a very poetic take on Islam," Morgan says, "but I don't think everyone will suddenly go, 'Oh, I didn't realise it was so peaceful. I must join up straight away.' You only need to look at what's going on in Afghanistan to realise that there are images and notions of Islam that will always sway against the poetry that this piece offers. But White Girl is a child's point of view so to a certain degree it is naive."
Morgan has a reputation for taking a journalistic approach to her work, spending a lot of time on background reading and interviews before starting to write, and for creating dark dramas which reflect real life.
Sex Traffic, which starred John Simm and dealt with young women from eastern Europe sold into prostitution, was based on extensive research. Before writing Tsunami: The Aftermath, Morgan visited Thailand, witnessing the destruction first hand and meeting a man who had lost his child in the flood. For her 2002 drama Murder, starring Julie Walters, Morgan met murderers and the families of victims. Yet she is slightly nettled by the idea that she is an alchemical writer, transmuting base life into golden art.
"I'm a writer of fiction," she insists. "I try to write about my time, but it's dangerous if I'm seen as an investigative writer. I manipulate and change and control. I hope my pieces have an authenticity to them, but my job is to filter the world and tell a story, not to define and recreate exactly what's going on. That won't give me a chance to say what I want to say."
Although Morgan's writing is rooted in the real world and seems to reflect topical issues – sexual exploitation, racial tension, child poverty – it is also deeply personal. She works through themes which have been important in her own life. Morgan went to a school in Stoke-on-Trent with a large Asian community and can see further parallels between herself and Leah.
"I can understand a family that's imploding," she says. "I have experience of that in my own life." When Morgan was 11, her parents went through an acrimonious divorce. She thinks this caused her to become a serious, very analytical child, and that is the reason she has been so preoccupied with loss in her work.
"I think somewhere there is a loss in me," she says. "Good writing is often about trying to investigate something you feel is missing and trying to put it back."
Displacement is another major theme in Morgan's writing, which she believes has its roots in her childhood. Her parents worked in theatre, her father as a director, her mother as an actress, and she thinks this, as well as going to five schools by the time she was 13, made her an outsider among her peers. Though she lived in Stoke and also Newcastle, she has no trace of those accents, and regards this as emblematic of her rootlessness. "I think that's why London suits me. It's full of displaced people who have all come together."
Of her chosen career path, Morgan says writing has given her life a sense of peace and order, of the sort Leah gets from Islam, and, of course, she grew up with literature all around her. "From an early age I would help my mum with things like King Lear. While she was doing Goneril, I would read Regan."
Morgan is a parent now. She has two children, aged four and six. Has that changed the way she writes? She nods. "I wrote Sex Traffic when my son was three months old. I had resisted that project and then they sent me over the research material. It's very odd because you are breastfeeding this small baby and it's all so wonderful and then you are reading about this awful sex trafficking of children. I came away from that piece going, 'I don't think I can go in as intensely as that again,' and then I went and wrote about the tsunami, about the loss of a child.
"So there is a compulsion in me to go back to that stuff. I've found having children is a great motivator, has made me feel more courageous about going into those territories, maybe because I have a nice home life now, something good to come back to."
Morgan is extremely busy at the moment, adapting four books, among them Zadie Smith's On Beauty and Sebastian Faulks' Birdsong, for the cinema. She also has a play she hopes the National Theatre of Scotland will perform, and has been talking to her agent about how much she would like to write an episode of Doctor Who, partly as a gift to her son, who loves the show.
"I always say I will take some time off," she says, "but as George Clooney says, 'It would be shameful, when good things come along, to turn them down.'" v
• White Girl is on BBC2, tomorrow, 9pm
www.bbc.co.uk/white/The full article contains 1188 words and appears in Scotland On Sunday newspaper.
