While sister Mel graduated from stand-up to sofa-sitting in C4’s Light Lunch, Coky was slogging for years on the other side of the camera. Working the festival circuit, applying to arts organisations, and shooting commercial quickies, she became, she says, “queen of shorts” before getting her first shot at a feature.
The result is Stella Does Tricks (right), the tale of a homeless girl trying to quit her London life of prostitution, while dealing with raw memories of a Glasgow childhood. The idea for the film came, Giedroyc explains, from a documentary series she made for Channel 4 some years ago. “In the course of researching the series, I spent a lot of time with a bunch of young girls in the North. I loved their company, but was heart-broken and amazed by their stories. When the series finished, I knew I wanted to turn that experience into something more.”Having met and become friends with the girls, Giedroyc was determined not to present her prostitute as a two-dimensional victim.

“Sure, Stella’s a victim of circumstance, but there’s so much more to her. I wanted her to be a female scally with a wicked sense of humour and a rich emotional life.”Such a concept seemed alien to the screenwriters she commissioned to draft scripts “Writers seemed to think `ah .. young prostitute Drugs! Issue drama’ Or, make her into an epic, literary figure The whore with a heart of gold. What no one seemed to understand that what was really important were her aspirations. She had to be someone worth more than life had given her.”Luckily, while ploughing her way through a pile of picaresque preconceptions, Giedroyc began reading a collection of stories by AL Kennedy, and decided this “dark, humorous, strange” writing was exactly what the film needed. The pair met and “clicked”, and Giedroyc’s hunch seemed vindicated when Kennedy turned in a “blinding” first draft.But their creative partnership was not without problems.

“Alison’s a novelist, so she found working with others difficult, and I’m a complete collaborator, so we ducked and dived around each other a bit Looking back, the things we clashed on were quite technical. The first was whether Stella’s childhood should be set in Manchester or Glasgow. I felt very close to the girls that I’d met in Manchester, and always dreamed it would be there, but Alison put her foot down and said it had to be Glasgow. There were some white lips about that one, I can tell you, but in the end I realised that I had to let go of my experience, and hand it to Alison to make it into fiction.”With a screenwriter in place, Giedroyc’s next challenge was to find Stella. Surfing the hype from Trainspotting, Kelly Macdonald read for the part, then turned up again And again. “She kept phoning back,” remembers Giedroyc, “and saying she wanted to do it better.” Still, she’d only been in three scenes in Trainspotting (“all I did was bonk Ewan,” confessed Macdonald), and had no formal training, so Giedroyc continued to audition.