Danny Brocklehurst (born June 1971) is an English screenwriter, playwright, and former journalist. He has won both BAFTA and Royal Television Society writing awards. He was featured in the writers' section of Broadcast magazine's Hot 100 in 2007. His 2024 Netflix drama Fool Me Once is the sixth most successful Netflix show of all time.
In November 2024, The Hollywood Reporter named him as one of their "'top 50 most powerful producers".[1]
In 2024, Brocklehurst was included in the Radio Times 100 list of the most powerful people in British television.[2]
Early life
Brocklehurst was born in Hyde, Cheshire, in June 1971. He grew up in a working-class home and had several jobs before entering the media.
From 1993, he worked as a journalist for several years, freelancing for The Guardian, City Life, and Manchester Evening News while serving as a senior feature writer for The Big Issue.[3]
Brocklehurst left journalism to become a full-time screenwriter.[4] He cited Tony Marchant, Jimmy McGovern, and Alan Bleasdale as his writing inspirations. In a Creative Times feature in 2010, he wrote that Our Friends in the North was his favourite drama of all time. He wrote several episodes of the BAFTA award-winning series Clocking Off,[5] as well as the two-part BBC film The Stretford Wives.[6] With Shameless, he won a BAFTA for series one, co-wrote series two with Paul Abbott and became lead writer on series three. He left prior to the fourth series.[7]
In 2011 it was announced that Brocklehurst would write a new HBO drama, Dirty, with Andrea Arnold attached to direct.[14] This project was subsequently developed with Sharon Horgan and Amazon.[15] In August 2013, BBC One announced a new drama, Ordinary Lies, written by Brocklehurst.[16]
In February 2014, HBO announced a project called A Teacher, which would be co-written by Brocklehurst and Hannah Fidell, and executive produced by Mark Duplass. The show, a drama about a teacher/student relationship, based on the film of the same name, did not get made by HBO but was picked up by FX.[19] In 2017 Netflix made Safe starring Michael C. Hall, written by Brocklehurst and Harlan Coben.[20][21]
In 2024, his drama Fool Me Once became a smash Netflix hit. The series was number one in 75 countries and is currently the 6th most successful English language Netflix show of all time.
Brocklehurst has written three award-winning plays, My Eight Times Table, Nobody and Loaded (transferred to Radio Four),[29] as well being story adviser and book co-writer of the West End (and national touring) musical Never Forget.[30][31] His play Casual Ties was a Royal Exchange hit in 2014. It is a dissection of modern relationships.[citation needed]
Radio
Brocklehurst has written extensively for radio. His detective series Stone for Radio 4 is in its ninth series.[32] It stars Hugo Speer as Detective Inspector John Stone and every episode features a morally complex crime. It has been described as "gritty" (The Guardian), "hard hitting" (The Times), and "realistic in a way radio drama rarely is" (The Observer).[citation needed]
He wrote a play about Margaret Thatcher's mutually assured destruction policy in the 1980s, The End of The World,[33] a thriller about a man who seems to have ceased to exist, Nobody, an Australian set examination of greed, Loaded and a single drama about an eighty-year-old woman who admits to a series of brutal murders, Mary Shane.[34]
He has appeared as a regular commentator on Radio 4 and 5Live.
