--- name: "Diane Taylor" canonical: "https://film.one/person/diane-taylor" fi1m_id: "diane-taylor" imdb_id: "nm4461520" tmdb_id: 1254778 roles: ["Producer"] reviewed_on_fi1m: 1 average_as: "producer" average_over: 0 updated: "2026-10-07T15:48:25.841139+00:00" licence: "© Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL." --- # Diane Taylor ## Identity Diane Taylor - **Canonical:** https://film.one/person/diane-taylor - **Type:** Person - **Fi1m ID:** diane-taylor - **IMDb ID:** nm4461520 - **TMDB ID:** 1254778 - **Same entity:** https://www.imdb.com/name/nm4461520/, https://www.themoviedb.org/person/1254778 Producer. ## Details - **Work:** Producer - **Elsewhere:** https://www.imdb.com/name/nm4461520/, https://www.themoviedb.org/person/1254778 ## Streaming the US now - **Apple TV:** [*Scott & Bailey*](https://film.one/tv/scott-and-bailey.md) (75) For United States; add `?region=XX` for another country. ## Fi1m on Diane Taylor > Diane Taylor spent thirty years in Greater Manchester Police and then helped make one programme, five series of *Scott & Bailey*, and it is what a procedural looks like when someone who has run a real interview room is in the building. Nobody shouts across the interview table in *Scott & Bailey*. Lesley Sharp sits, asks the next question, and lets the silence do the rest; Amelia Bullmore runs a briefing the way a competent manager runs a meeting, which is to say quickly and without a speech. The bodies are mostly somewhere else. That is Diane Taylor's contribution, and it is easy to miss because it looks like the absence of things rather than the presence of them. Taylor joined Greater Manchester Police at eighteen and rose to Detective Inspector on the Major Incident Team, with a secondment to the National Crime Faculty at Bramshill along the way. After she retired she worked with Sally Wainwright on developing *Scott & Bailey* (2011), and is credited as co-creator, writer on episodes, and consultant producer across five episodes in 2012. The programme ran for five series. The job, as she described it, was to stop it doing what every other police drama did. "That's what really irritates me in other dramas – detectives crying over dead bodies and getting drunk senseless. You'd last about two weeks." So the detectives in *Scott & Bailey* go home, make tea, argue with their mothers and come back in the morning. The investigations are done by a team rather than a brilliant loner, and the case material has the shape of real cases, which is to say it is often tawdry and rarely ingenious. Wainwright wrote the people and Nicola Shindler's Red Production Company produced it, but the thing that separates it from a dozen other Manchester procedurals is that the police work is never the implausible part. We gave it 75, and the scenes that got to us were not the murders but the door-knocks: two women on a step telling someone their relative is dead, with nobody raising their voice and nobody permitted to leave until it is done. The flaw, as our review said, is the opening, and it is a telling one. The series starts with a boyfriend plot in which a detective fails to notice her long-term partner is married, and our review was not alone in finding it hard to believe. It is the one stretch where the show forgets what Taylor knew about how detectives read people, and the show is better the moment it drops it. The authenticity she brought was never about the gore, which she thought unnecessary; it was about behaviour, and the first episodes briefly let the behaviour slip. Taylor worked on one programme, across its five series from 2011, and died in 2016, so there is no next phase to speculate about. What there is instead is a small, useful proof that a police drama can be gripping without a single pathologist's slab in close-up. Anyone setting out to write one now should watch a middle episode of *Scott & Bailey* first, and then ask whether their detective really needs to cry. ## Biography Diane Taylor was a British television writer and producer. A former Detective Inspector with Greater Manchester Police, she co-created the crime drama series *Scott & Bailey* (2011–2016) with Sally Wainwright, drawing on her police experience to ensure authenticity in the scripts and production. She also served as consultant producer on the series. Taylor joined Greater Manchester Police at the age of 18 and rose to the rank of Detective Inspector before retiring. Her contributions to *Scott & Bailey* included shaping realistic police procedures and storylines. The series received BAFTA nominations for Best Drama Series in 2012 and 2013. She died in September 2016 in Greater Manchester, aged 55. *Sources: imdb.com, en.wikipedia.org, manchestereveningnews.co.uk.* ## On Fi1m (1) - *Scott & Bailey* (2011), Fi1m 75, Producer, Writer, Creator — [page](https://film.one/tv/scott-and-bailey.md) ## Complete filmography (2) Every credit, newest first. Titles without a page can be requested for review on the HTML page. - *The Detail* (2018), series, Original Series Creator - *Scott & Bailey* (2011), series, Producer, Writer, Creator — Fi1m 75, [page](https://film.one/tv/scott-and-bailey.md) --- © Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL. Canonical: https://film.one/person/diane-taylor