Jack Thorne on Adolescence, The Beatles movies and Lord of the Flies: The Radio Times Writers’ Room

Welcome back to The Radio Times Writers' Room!

This time around we're welcoming Jack Thorne, the writer known for his work on films such as Enola Holmes, series including This Is England and His Dark Materials, and stage productions like Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. Oh, and he wrote Adolescence, which only won 8 Primetime Emmys, including Outstanding Writing for a Limited or Anthology Series or Movie.

Having at one time thought he would go into politics, acting or directing, Thorne developed a love for writing plays at university, and started his screenwriting career writing episodes of Channel 4 shows Skins and Shameless.

After co-creating the mockumentary series Cast Offs, he teamed up with Shane Meadows to follow up the latter's acclaimed film This Is England with three miniseries, set in 1986, 1988 and 1990 respectively.

Since then, he has created series including The Fades, National Treasure, Best Interests, Toxic Town and The Hack, while also adapting Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials for the BBC - and that's just scratching the surface of his TV work.

On stage he has been behind a host of productions, including Harry Potter and the Cursed Child and Stranger Things: The First Shadow, while he has written film screenplays for the likes of Wonder, The Swimmers, Joy and all three Enola Holmes movies.

Perhaps his biggest triumph to date has been Adolescence, the four-part Netflix drama that arrived in 2025 and became a global phenomenon that seized the cultural zeitgeist, winning countless awards and even being discussed in parliament.

Now, he brings us a new four-part adaptation of Lord of the Flies for the BBC, one which faithfully sticks to William Golding's tale of a group of boys who find themselves stranded on a tropical island without any adult supervision, following a plane crash.

The series stars young actors Winston Sawyers, David McKenna, Lox Pratt and Ike Talbut, and has been brought to life in bold colours by director Marc Munden.

Thorne teases that what Munden has created is "as if Terrence Malick has directed a TV show", adding: "I hope people realise that this show is more Marc than it is me, that his authorship is all over this like a stick of rock".

Throughout our chat, Thorne spoke about the key lessons he learned working with Skins creator Bryan Elsley, teased what fans can expect from Enola Holmes 3 and deftly avoided spilling the beans on the four upcoming Beatles films he has written for director Sam Mendes.

He also did reveal some of his favourite scenes that he's ever written, and identified the "finest moment" of his career - believe us, it's a doozy.

You can watch the full video at the top of this article right now, read an extract from it below, and look out for more trips to The Radio Times Writers' Room soon.

In the meantime, you can also catch up with our previous chats with Mark Gatiss, Harry and Jack Williams, Noah Hawley, Neil Cross, Steven Knight and Chris Chibnall.

Jack Thorne on the challenging development of Adolescence and how long he's been thinking about Lord of the Flies

James Hibbs: "With Adolescence, obviously it was so innovative in so many ways. Was there ever a point or points in the development process where you just thought, 'This isn't going to work - we can't get there'?"

Jack Thorne: "Never with episode 1. Not really with episode 3 or 4. With episode 2, there were times when I thought maybe we'd chosen the wrong angle on it, and maybe I’d chosen the wrong angle on it. And maybe I'd not given something that people could work with. Particularly because we were working in a fixed space.

"With 1 and 3, we created those spaces. Adam [Tomlinson] built those spaces, our brilliant production designer. With 2, we were working in a school, and the school didn't behave as we wanted it to behave. It didn't have rooms and windows and all these different things that were in the right places for us. And so there was a lot of corridors and that sort of thing.

"And I remember sitting with Phil [Barantini, director] and just going, ‘We've got a story problem’. And three things really saved us. The first is Ashley Walters, who I think is - even though he's got nominated for loads of awards - an unsung hero of Adolescence. I think that episode relies on his face, and he is magnificent in carrying us through it and carrying us through the complication of it all.

"The second is Phil and Matt [Lewis], our brilliant DOP, managed to make the school into this sort of labyrinth that really, really worked powerfully. And the third is that Toby Bentley, who was one of our execs at Netflix, said, ‘I think we need to end the episode on Stephen [Graham]’. And we were Tuesday of shoot week.

"So this is the final week of working on this episode. We had a week or rehearsal, a week of tech, and then week of shooting. And because Stephen was there anyway, as an exec producer, everyone got to work. And Matt not only had to make a camera fly, he had to land the camera, which was a completely different technical operation. He worked out how to do that.

"Stephen was just Stephen and being brilliant, because Stephen is brilliant. And the show was suddenly given its soul again in that final few minutes of the episode. So I think, yeah, that that combination of Ashley's face, Phil's brilliance and Matt's ingenuity, and then just the gut punch of Stephen at the end sort of brought us through.

"Along with a whole ream of magnificent performances, not least the amazing young actors that we had in the show. I mean, Fatima, who played Jade, I wish we'd given her more to do, actually, because I think she could have carried far more than we gave her."

JH: "Now, I know it is very clearly a closed story, you've spoken about, that Jamie's story is done, but I know also that Stephen, when he was accepting his Golden Globe, hinted that you might be speaking about about future collaborations. Is
that the case?"

JT: "I love Stephen Graham, but sometimes… What I can tell you is, we don't know what that is so. So, maybe. When he said it, I think he said ‘the dark recesses of our brains’. Yeah, but they are still in the dark recesses of our brains. There is no story where they're like, ‘Oh yeah’.

"My step-sister-in-law phoned last night, and was like, ‘so you're doing one about prisons?’ And I was like, ‘No, we're not doing one about prisons. We're not doing one about prisons at all’. No, we don't have a story. So yes, maybe, but, you know."

JH: "Now, if we turn to Lord of the Flies, your new project - how long have you been thinking about adapting this?"

JT: "I'm 47. I read the book when I was 14. So, 33 years."

JH: "And have you always had a sense of what you would want to do with the story?"

JT: "No. The project sort of started when I was at lunch at Joel's house - Joel Wilson, a brilliant exec producer. And Joel said, 'Go on. What is it? What book would you be desperate to do?' I love it, producers never stop working. And I said to Joel, 'Lord of the Flies'.

"And I think I said to him there, 'I'd do it like a relay race'. So that's always sort of been in my head as a way of doing it. I thought the book could and would and should break down in those four parts.

"There's a Hitchcock quote that I may be misattributing, it may not be a Hitchcock quote, but I love it as a quote, which is, 'Dialogue is just the words actors say while their faces tell the story'. And I think so much of what we do as screenwriters is give windows. We give windows into souls, and the opportunity to spend time in those windows is the most important thing we can do.

"And having an episode - particularly episode 2, which is the one we focus on Jack - having an episode in which you step into Jack's shoes... I'm not saying you understand his perspective or you feel empathy for him, though I do think you feel both those things, but you do reach an understanding of his logic.

"I think that the way Golding writes the book is with such care and love for all his boys - possibly excluding Roger - and as a screenwriter, being able to show that love, not by necessarily giving Jack some gooey scene in which he cries and talks about his feelings, but just you understand the logic of his brain.

"So, I felt like that's what TV could do with this story and and I'm really pleased that we've been able to tell it that way. And I'm so proud of the young actors. It is a show that's told in silence more than words, and that's because of the enormity of their performances."

Lord of the Flies will air on BBC One and BBC iPlayer from Sunday 8th February 2026.

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