Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic What could have appealed to Abi Morgan about returning to the glossy world of The Split, for a two-part special set in a sprawling villa in the countryside around Barcelona, at the height of summer? \u201cWell, it\u2019s tricky, isn\u2019t it?\u201d says Morgan, who created the drama in 2018 and officially put it to bed after three series in 2022. \u201cWhat would make me want to go back with some of my favourite actors, to a very nice, hot country that does amazing food and amazing wine, and film the kind of joyous make-ups and break-ups of a chaotic destination wedding?\u201dThe Split, a moreish tale of high-end divorce lawyers with tangled personal lives, was a big hit for the BBC. With a starry ensemble cast led by Nicola Walker, it put stressful but ultimately loving family life under a microscope, against a backdrop of demanding careers, big money divorces and aspirational kitchens. \u201cI\u2019ve always said it is a Trojan horse for so much more. It looks like a family legal drama, and it\u2019s a nine o\u2019clock [primetime] show, but television has always, for me, been quietly political,\u201d says Morgan. \u201cI\u2019m always trying to make people feel less alone, by showing understanding of people.\u201d She tries to do this across all of her work, she explains, whether that\u2019s writing about sex addiction in Shame or Margaret Thatcher\u2019s weaknesses in The Iron Lady, or what it\u2019s like to grow up in a creative family in the Netflix series Eric. She is drawn to what she calls \u201cthe messy stuff\u201d.There are few life events messier than divorce, and in The Split Morgan wanted to challenge the notion that divorce should be seen as a failure. \u201cI just see some marriages as finite. We live in this new age where marriage isn\u2019t meant to go on forever, necessarily, and yet we still buy into the trope that it can and it will.\u201d In the special, Hannah (Walker) and Nathan (Stephen Mangan) are divorced and navigating a new kind of friendship. \u201cI\u2019m really admiring of people who are brave with divorce,\u201d Morgan says. \u201cI think it\u2019s interesting that myself and my two siblings have all been in relationships for over 20 years. It\u2019s been really important to all of us to try and find a way to make something work.\u201d She was 13 when her parents, actor Pat England and theatre director Gareth Morgan, got divorced. \u201cI\u2019m now 56, and I still talk to my siblings about it.\u201dThe world of marriage and divorce has changed, even in the six years since the series started. No-fault divorce, meaning that couples no longer have to assign blame for the end of a marriage, came into effect in UK law in the same week that the third series aired. \u201cAnd one of the big progressions is the notion of mediation, and divorce surgeries. Pre-nups have become much more important. They are much more de rigueur now. Even if they don\u2019t always legally stand, they are a kind of template and a blueprint to have those difficult conversations.\u201dHas her work on The Split made Morgan something of an expert in divorce law? \u201cThe first thing I ever wrote on was a medical drama, and you do think, for the first two weeks, that you can do open heart surgery,\u201d she says. \u201cThere are moments that I will launch into some boring diatribe on divorce law, and then I realise that I only know the surface of it. I think I\u2019m an expert for the period that I\u2019m writing it, and then it drains away, in my goldfish brain.\u201dBut do her friends ever come to her for relationship advice? \u201cI don\u2019t think they dare, actually. But I have been able to put friends in touch with some good divorce lawyers.\u201dMorgan has always said that the BBC would have liked The Split to continue, but she called time on it after three series (though a Manchester-set spin-off, The Split Up, written by Ursula Rani Sarma, is due to go into production next year). Three series felt like the right \u201cshape\u201d for the original, she says. The first series was about Hannah and Nathan\u2019s marriage, the second about Hannah\u2019s affair, and the third about the couple\u2019s divorce. It was also designed to explore women at different stages of their lives, with the three Defoe sisters representing women in their twenties, thirties and forties. Now that Hannah is in her fifties, Morgan couldn\u2019t resist another peek at her life. \u201cWhat does it mean when your body and your whole ecosystem changes in your fifties? What does it mean to be something else?\u201dIn 2018, Morgan\u2019s own ecosystem underwent a dramatic change. She wrote about what she calls \u201cthe grenade that went off in my life\u201d in This Is Not A Pity Memoir, which was published in 2022 and became a bestseller. Her husband, the actor Jacob Krichefski \u2014 they married in 2021 after living together for 22 years \u2014 suffered seizures and an inflammation of the brain, and was put into an induced coma for seven months.When he awoke, he thought Morgan was an imposter. \u201cI was at a point where my husband didn\u2019t recognise me any more. I was really questioning my actual existence,\u201d she says. \u201cAnd then I got a stage three, grade three cancer diagnosis. So then it was like, my god, my existence is really in question.\u201dShe wrote the memoir at her kitchen table, at night, over the course of three weeks. \u201cI was so obliterated. I was so devastated. The words and the process of making chapters out of that chaos, it really helped rebuild me. And I also had to make money, really simply. So writing my own story was another part of that process.\u201dThe return of The Split stands out in the Christmas TV schedules. It has none of the tinsel and trimmings that you might expect at this time of year. But the way that Morgan describes it makes it seem perfectly festive after all. \u201cChristmas is the best and the worst of times, don\u2019t you think? It exposes all the fractures and weaknesses and splits and strengths in a family, and that\u2019s always been at the heart of The Split.\u201dAt least the Defoe women will get to work out their romantic issues in style, as they always do. \u201cIf we\u2019re going to burst the bubble of family,\u201d says Morgan, \u201cthen hopefully we\u2019re going to give people the relief of a gorgeous location and sunshine, in the middle of the cold.\u201dOn BBC1 and iPlayer on December 29 and 30 at 9pm; series 1-3 are on iPlayer nowFind out about our latest stories first \u2014 follow FTWeekend on Instagram and X, and subscribe to our podcast Life and Art wherever you listen<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic What could have appealed to Abi Morgan about returning to the glossy world of The Split, for a two-part special set in a sprawling villa in the countryside around Barcelona, at the height of summer? \u201cWell, it\u2019s tricky, isn\u2019t it?\u201d says Morgan, who created<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":149728,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-149727","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-culture"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/149727","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=149727"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/149727\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":149729,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/149727\/revisions\/149729"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/149728"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=149727"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=149727"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=149727"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}