Morwenna Banks writes people who stay funny when things turn frightening, and that is why Down Cemetery Road works even when its plot does not. Thirty years on from sketch comedy, she has become one of British television's most dependable adapters of other people's novels.
Fi1m perspective
The best stretches of Down Cemetery Road (2025) are two women getting on each other's nerves while a conspiracy tightens around them. Emma Thompson and Ruth Wilson bicker, and the bickering is the investigation: exasperation is how these people find things out. That is Banks's doing. She shares the writing credit with Emily Marcuson, Rose Heiney, Andy Riley and Kevin Cecil, but as lead writer and adapter she set the tone, and the tone is what carries the series past its slower patches.
She began as a performer. Cambridge Footlights, then the sketch troupe behind Absolutely (1989–1993), then vehicles of her own, including The Morwenna Banks Show (1998), which was patchy in the way shows built around one performer tend to be, though the characters were strong. From the mid-2000s the writing took over. Miss You Already (2015), a film about friendship and illness, she adapted from her own radio play. Damned (2016–2018), created with Jo Brand, found comedy in a social work department without pretending the work was funny. Funny Woman (2023) adapted Nick Hornby. And Slow Horses (2022), for which she wrote episodes, put her in Mick Herron's world before she was handed a whole book of his.
The pattern is consistent. Banks takes a subject that could be grim, social work, illness, the intelligence services at their shabbiest, and lets the people in it be funny without letting them off. In Down Cemetery Road the jokes do not drain the danger; they are how the characters cope with it, and there is enough moral uncertainty that we never know quite how much to trust anyone. We laughed at Thompson and Wilson needling each other and then noticed we were worried about them, which is harder to manage than it looks. The conspiracy matters because it troubles people whose company we have come to enjoy, and the writing mostly remembers that.
Plot is where she is weaker, or at least where the material is. Down Cemetery Road dawdles between its best scenes, and on Slow Horses the thriller each run hangs on is ordinary; the office is the show. Some of that is Herron and some is the form, but Banks is plainly more interested in the talking than in the machinery. On the evidence, so are we.
If there is another Herron novel to be adapted, she is the writer we would want on it. Bring patience for the middle episodes. The people are worth the wait.
Biography
Morwenna Banks is a British actress, comedian, writer and producer. Born on 20 September 1961 in Flushing, Cornwall, she attended Truro High School for Girls and Robinson College, Cambridge, where she was a member of the Footlights.
She appeared in the Channel 4 sketch show Absolutely (1989–1993) and has acted in series including Saxondale (2006–2007), Skins (2007–2010) and Damned (2016–2018). Her voice work includes Mummy Pig, Madame Gazelle and Dr Hamster in Peppa Pig (2004–). Banks wrote the screenplay for the film Miss You Already (2015) and has written episodes of Slow Horses (2022–) and Down Cemetery Road (2025), on which she is also showrunner and executive producer. She has been married to comedian David Baddiel since 2017.
