EXCLUSIVE: Sally Lindsay on the secrets of The Madame Blanc Mysteries

"Gosh, I don't know! I created it because I love this kind of show, the sort that's a murder mystery but very light. I think it's brilliant escapism — I'll sit and watch Murder, She Wrote or Columbo back-to-back. Everyone thinks it's dead easy to write this kind of stuff, but it isn't — there's not many that make it, so we're extremely proud. We've got an amazing cast and crew as well, who love the show, and I think that comes across. And because my husband [musician Steve White] does the music, it's a very special bespoke cottage industry!"

"It's really funny, because Scott & Bailey [the ITV1 crime drama which was developed from an original idea by Sally and Suranne Jones] took six years to get commissioned, and Mount Pleasant [the Sky comedy drama starring Sally and Daniel Ryan] was five years, but this one got commissioned the minute I gave it to Mike Benson, who's the head of [production company] Clapperboard! 

He was going for a meal with Seb Cardwell that night, who's one of the commissioners for Channel 5, now Paramount, and I'd said 'oh, I think this is BBC daytime, I don't think it's for Channel 5' — and two days later, they said they really wanted it for primetime! They wanted to see a script, and it was a race to get that out. Sue and I had only written comedy before, but I said to her, 'we're going to have to write a murder-mystery' — and I discovered I could! I found my inner Agatha Christie, not that I could ever be anything like her, but it must have come from years and years of watching this stuff!"

"I like to use people that I know — essentially I wanted familiar faces, like Steve [Edge, who plays Dom], like Robin [Askwith, who plays Jeremy], like Sue [Holderness, who plays Judith]. We found Djinda [Kane], who plays Simone, she's one of our regulars and she's fantastic. And Sanchia [McCormack], who plays Charlie, she's been acting for years, and those two just looked like the characters I had in my head! I was like, 'wow, these two are amazing, they're just unbelievable'."

"I'll see, say, a story or an antique on television, or I'll even be walking through the shops, and I'll see something and take a picture of it. Everything's recorded on the Madame Blanc file on my phone! Or sometimes it's a headline, so I've got it written down — I've got random things written everywhere! Then Sue and I will do a bit of research — there's a lot of great things about Sue Vincent, and one of them is that some of our plots are really quite complicated, and sometimes Acorn [the show's international broadcaster] and Channel 5 say 'we've never heard of this before', and Sue's got a stack of research behind it! 

"Before we start writing the series, I'll read reams of information and then I'll work out what's the first episode, what's the second episode, and so on. Then I write an eight-page document, which is very detailed, of every single scene — that's the complicated bit, the one that keeps me up at night! Once that's done, I know it's going to be fine. Then I give it to Sue, and she literally goes under for about three days writing dialogue, we don't hear from her, and she writes about 20 pages too much, then we get together and hone it. It's an unusual way of writing because we both have very different skills, but for either of us to write the series by ourselves would take twice as long!"

"I think it offers an alternative — a lot of crime shows are very dark. Even though you've got to think throughout Madame Blanc, it's got the essence of escapism. We call it 'France around the corner' — it doesn't exist, but it's this beautiful, sunny, amazing place where people want to go. They want to chat with Jeremy and Judith, they want to have tea at the chateau, they want to sit outside La Couronne in the sunshine and have a drink with Dom and Jean. I think if you can create characters in that kind of setting that people want to spend an hour with, that's the secret of it really — they feel like we're their friends!"

"Absolutely! As far as I'm concerned, I will do it as long as people want it, because it's just such a joy to do — I spend all this wonderful time with dear friends and we laugh a lot. I'll do it for as long as Channel 5 and Acorn, and the audience, want it. I'm not one of those people who says 'right, let's quit while we're ahead' — I've got years of this left if they want it! I've not even started yet!"