When Alex Woolley and Hendrika Seguro-Bigg first met, they did what people working in the creative industries do all the time: swapped numbers, promised to stay in touch – and then didn’t.
They’d both been judges for the RTS Student Film Awards and vaguely knew of each other, but it took a chance encounter at Live Theatre a while later, where Hendrika was enduring what Alex remembers as “the most terrible shift of her life” behind the bar, to give things another nudge.
This time they actually went for that drink and quickly discovered a shared love of Victoria Wood and French and Saunders.
They also made each other laugh a lot and realised they were both at a point where they didn’t just want to talk about being creative. They wanted to make things.
A lot of things, as it turns out.
In little more than a year, a working relationship has become a friendship and an increasingly productive creative partnership – one which neatly illustrates something else happening across the North East at the moment.
There’s a growing network of writers, directors, performers and filmmakers who aren’t waiting for the traditional industry machinery to find them. They’re writing things, filming things, putting on shows, swapping skills and calling on each other when they need a hand, or four.
Alex and Hendrika are very much part of that.
“We didn’t really have a friendship before a working relationship,” says Alex. “We had a working relationship, and then sort of now live in each other’s pockets.”
The project which properly brought them together was Peeping Toms, a comedy sketch Hendrika had already performed several times on stage as part of The Girlie Show - more of that later.
“I could really just see it visually,” Hendrika says. “I knew that it had potential to be something, and then Alex was like, ‘Yeah, let’s do it.’”
What they initially envisaged as a relatively small film began to grow when the people on their dream list started saying yes.
Funding Alex received from the Emerging Voices Film Foundation helped them scale up the production, while a predominantly female and non-binary cast and crew came together to make it.
The experience also gave the pair an accelerated education in producing.
Hendrika had already worked her way through unscripted television, from runner and researcher to producer and development producer, while Alex had spent years working on film and TV sets alongside writing and directing her own short films.
They admit making Peeping Toms exposed plenty of gaps in their knowledge when it came to producing a scripted project of this scale. Rather than putting them off, though, figuring things out as they go has become part of the process.
“Every single time we’ve made something, we’ve been like, ‘Oh, so now we know how to do this’,” says Hendrika. “Each project has massively developed us as producers.”
Peeping Toms went on to premiere at Sunderland Shorts Film Festival earlier this year, where it was nominated for Best Short Comedy and Best North East Comedy.
The original sketch, meanwhile, had already set something else in motion.
Hendrika’s original stage version won the previous year’s Sketch for Sammy competition – or to give it its more prestigious title, the Clement and La Frenais Comedy Award – leading to an invitation to create something for the main Sunday for Sammy fundraising concerts, which took place at Newcastle’s Utilita Arena in February.
This time Alex and Hendrika wrote together for the first time, coming up with Why Aye, a sketch about a Geordie AI provider which made use of Sting’s music and included specially recorded contributions from Ant and Dec.
It was also the point at which they had to become comfortable questioning each other’s material.
“Is it funny though?” became a regular refrain as they wrote – a useful test when the finished sketch was heading for an audience of thousands.
Hendrika performed in it too, although she admits much of that experience was something of a blur. Her one regret came afterwards, when some audience members assumed Ant and Dec’s pre-recorded contribution had itself been generated by AI.
“No, you don’t understand,” she laughs. “They actually recorded this!”
By the time Alex and Hendrika wrote this first sketch together, they’d both spent years finding their respective paths in the industry.
Alex’s screen ambitions started early.
“I was digitising all my mum and dad’s old VHS tapes recently and found one from when I was about 12 and I had made all my friends play people in an episode of Jeremy Kyle, which I directed,” she laughs.
“Then there was my 13th or 14th birthday when I got all my friends round to watch Victoria Wood’s At It Again show. Every time they didn’t laugh or talked, I paused it and explained the joke. It was like, ‘if you don’t get it, you’re not welcome here!’”
She went on to study drama and scriptwriting at Northumbria University - on the same course as Alphabetti Theatre founder, Ali Pritchard - before deciding that, if she wanted to understand film and television, she needed to get herself onto sets.
That took her to London, internships at Ealing Studios and Imaginarium Studios and, eventually, years of work on productions of all shapes and sizes.
Among them was Bond film Spectre, where a stint as a locations marshal involved freezing night shoots and helping to keep members of the public off London bridges while filming took place.
On one occasion, she was mistakenly sent across a bridge and nearly wandered into a take.
“I hid behind the man with the smoke machine, and I was like, ‘Oh my God… Sam Mendes is going to see me nearly walk into a take. I’m going to pass out, fall into the Thames, die, and production will have to stop because of me.’”
She survived, and the experience confirmed something rather more useful.
“I remember being on that set and thinking ‘this is it. I know that this is meant for me’. I knew in whatever capacity I was supposed to be on a film set or a TV set.”
Covid eventually forced Alex back to the North East after around a decade in London. By then, the landscape she returned to looked rather different from the one she had felt compelled to leave.
Newcastle became the BBC’s inaugural City of Comedy in 2021 and Alex began finding the people and opportunities she hadn’t seen here before.
“Ironically, I’ve made more progress in the North East,” she says. “I think it’s such a community, and that’s what I didn’t have in London.”
Hendrika’s arrival in the region was rather less planned.
Brought up in Maidenhead, she had left university expecting to do a law conversion course before getting a job as a runner at the BBC and deciding television was considerably more appealing.
She worked on programmes including The One Show before moving into research, production and development. Comedy, meanwhile, had been there all along.
As a child, Hendrika persuaded friends to dress as old ladies so she could film them on the family video camera. One surviving performance features her in a wig discussing her piles and late husband Stanley.
“RIP Stanley,” offers Alex.
Lockdown revived that urge to perform when Hendrika began making comedy characters to entertain her friends online. After restrictions eased, a schoolfriend from the North East suggested she come and stay for a while.
“I moved up here, and then I was like, ‘Oh wow!’ I blinked, and then like five years have gone,” she says. “I love it.”
She also found an outlet for her comedy, first performing character material and then creating the aforementioned Girlie Show in 2023 to provide a space for women and non-binary comedy performers.
That project has grown too. This summer, The Girlie Show joined forces with Rosie Bowden’s Lasses for a sell-out show at Live Theatre’s Unearthed Festival, with Hendrika writing and performing sketches directed by Alex.
Their partnership has expanded in other directions, too, including a recent collaboration with stand-up and musical comedian Kelly Rickard on a One Direction/Ronan Keating parody.
Kelly says the song had started life in a stand-up set as part of a routine about “the ludicrous nature of boyband songs”.
She already knew Hendrika from performing at The Girlie Show and met Alex when she appeared in Peeping Toms.
“When it came to the boyband song, I wanted to work with talented people who understood the premise of the parody and found it funny too,” says Kelly. “And Hendrika and Alex were absolutely the right people for the job!”
They filmed the whole thing in a day – squeezed between two thunderstorms - with a cast which included members of North East sketch group Metroland Comedy.
They’ve also moved into music videos, producing Grocery Store for funk and soul artist The Alex Opal Outfit, featuring Grammy-nominated singer Acantha Lang and directed by Alex.
Each job, they say, adds something to the next.
“What we’re saying is, give us a Marvel film now,” jokes Hendrika.
“We’re ready,” agrees Alex.
A blockbuster may have to wait though, as there’s plenty keeping them occupied.
Alex recently directed Beth Mullen’s Ulcers at Live Theatre, also as part of Unearthed, and worked alongside Bank of Dave and Fisherman’s Friends director Chris Foggin, supporting the BBC/New Writing North Comedy Camp at Alphabetti Theatre.
Hendrika, meanwhile, was selected for Film Hub North’s 2026 Producer Lab, part of BFI NETWORK, and reached the final 10 in the Female Pilot Club Script competition with her comedy Nations and Regions.
Both talk enthusiastically about a North East creative community in which people are swapping skills, working on one another’s projects and pooling what they know.
Alex describes “a real sense of community and sharing skills”, while Hendrika says the people around them genuinely “want to see each other win”.
North East Screen has helped build some of those connections. Alex points particularly to its networking events and the North East Comedy Hot House, which brought her into contact with people who have subsequently led to other relationships and opportunities.
She also credits the Hot House with helping make an industry which can seem frustratingly distant feel more accessible, including through encounters with the BBC’s current interim director of comedy - and North East lass - Emma Lawson.
“She kind of gave a sense of, ‘No, this is for you. It’s achievable’,” says Alex.
Hendrika has found similar support through New Writing North, whose Emerging Creative Associates programme gave her mentoring and development time and helped her work on Nations and Regions.
And the ideas keep coming.
They’ve written another short film together, Neil’s Ark, a comedy with heart about a North Shields fishing family navigating the decline of the industry and what the future might hold.
It’s another project they hope to get made – and another sign of how much their creative lives have become intertwined over the past year.
Alex describes Hendrika as one of her chief sounding boards.
“My phone is literally Hendrika, Hendrika, Hendrika, Hendrika, mum, Hendrika, Hendrika, Hendrika.”
The feeling is mutual. Asked about Alex directing her sketches for The Girlie Show, Hendrika’s answer seems to sum up their wider creative relationship pretty neatly: “I know we work really well together, and I think she just gets it and makes it better.”