Writer and actor Chris Buckley chats with Imogen about his inspiration for the film Satisfaction.
Satisfaction began with a 1792 cartoon called The Petticoat Duel — two women, swords at their sides, pistols drawn. Chris Buckley, its writer, went looking for what else was there and found a Ribera painting of two women fighting with sword and shield before a crowd, and a topless rapier duel in Vienna in 1892 refereed by a baroness who made the male servants face the wall. He talks to Yoreflix founder Imogen Cooper about honour as a patriarchal instrument, the Georgian slang dictionary he wrote the dialogue from, and why 1792 is the year everything was in the air.
"If you could go back to any period in history…"
Imogen Cooper: If you could go back to any historical period, what would it be?
Chris Buckley: I'm quite a big Western fan. Channel 4, when I was younger, used to run Westerns back to back, and when I was ill I could go downstairs and watch one for a couple of hours.
So it would be a Western — but a specific period, about 1890 to 1910, which surprises people, because that's Edwardian. You don't think of the Western still going on, but it's the tail end of it. You have modern influences, modern medicine, cinema cropping up, and you still have cowboys in Texas and Nevada working the ranches and getting into saloon fistfights. Danger-filled. A bit of jeopardy, just to keep you on your toes. And I'd love to be riding a horse through untouched country.
IC: That's the Yellowstone prequel period — 1883 and 1923. I'm a history student turned executive producer, so the first thing I did watching those was think, that's not entirely accurate. They don't go full out into how much grittier and grimier it was. There's a lot of cleanliness.
CB: In 1883 they base it around the Oregon Trail, but they start in totally the wrong state. They segue onto a different one, the Bozeman Trail, which did end in Montana — but they're supposedly on the Oregon Trail, which never went through Kentucky and Indiana.
IC: And there's the whole thing online about the beautifully pearly white capped teeth and black eyeliner. Do you know what dentists were like then? They'd pull a tooth out if anything was slightly wrong.
CB: That's us wanting to relate to characters on screen. We have a modern audience that can be very discerning, because we have a level of information that was much harder to access even twenty or thirty years ago. So we can be quite definitive about what we want to see in our period drama.
Research, and a dropped handkerchief
IC: When you're writing something like Satisfaction, what are your standards for historical research?
CB: It's massive. I like to know lots of different features of a period — what art was being consumed, what day-to-day life looked like. Because then, when you're struggling as you write, you can reach into that wealth of information and pull something up.
In Satisfaction, the handkerchief moment — where she drops the handkerchief — was a real part of duelling. I hadn't considered it when writing, but in the edit we realised we needed a signal for it to begin. We couldn't just have someone dropping an arm, though that was used at times. We wanted something more evocative, something that showed fragility alongside violence. The handkerchief came back up, and we thought: that's it.
IC: The contrast of fragility with violence — you can tell you're a writer. Are there other moments like that?
CB: There's a whole thing about hats. Verity, who is gorgeously all in pink with the massive hat, says it's "a Lock & Co of the highest quality". I wanted to find something, because Verity is very concerned with her self-image — how would she describe what she's wearing?
I went down a long rabbit hole through the haberdashers, and Lock & Co is still a hatter in London to this day, and has been since the seventeenth century. It was a well-known establishment among the gentry, so saying you'd got it from Lock & Co was the equivalent of naming one of the big fashion houses now. Everyone would go: you got it from Lock & Co?
IC: Nothing's changed. The brands have changed, but it was all about status symbols and how people were viewed.
CB: There was an article in The Spectator in 2023 arguing that we are much closer now to Georgian values, sentimentality, art, distractions and fancies than to any other period in British history. You might have said the early 2000s were a bit 1960s — exuberance, new tech coming in. Whereas now that's established and we can play with it, much like later Georgian history with the Industrial Revolution coming.
Setting the scene: 1792
IC: For anyone new to the period — who was on the throne? What was happening?
CB: Satisfaction is set in 1792. George III, the Mad King George, is on the throne, and hasn't yet begun to exhibit the symptoms of his madness, so he's very much in power. Prince George, who becomes Prince Regent later, is still kicking around, womanising and flirting with everybody.
But while things are stable in some societal respects, a lot of the rest is completely up in the air. About fourteen years earlier the American Revolution had happened — the most extraordinary thing, where a very loose union of American colonies somehow completely routed the British army. At the time they said the world had turned upside down. And Georgian society goes: what? We're the British Empire. We should be able to go into countries and have utter stability and rake in our wealth. So there's an unsettling feeling of — are we not as strong and important as we thought? Have we inflated our own egos through problematic colonisation?
That gets compounded in the 1790s by France. 1792 into 1793 is the beginning of the French Revolution. Louis [XVI] and the court have completely removed themselves from working society, and because of that the citizenry rises up. In the initial period Louis and Marie Antoinette try to navigate it, fleeing to different palaces and being brought back to Paris, and it culminates in both of them being executed.
And England looks at that and goes: oh my God. All the upper gentry are thinking, that can happen? The masses can just do that? So they become very afraid of the working class here. That leads to economic problems, and there are bad summers with droughts and famines — so you have a working class looking at France and thinking, huh, I didn't know you could do that. Has anyone thought about doing this?
It exacerbates tensions already there philosophically and religiously. There's a religious near-civil-war still going on between Protestantism and Catholicism, which people don't realise. They think of the Reformation and Henry VIII, the 1500s, and assume it was over. But those large landmark moments hide how both sides kept attacking each other and vying to install the right people in power so they could practise and preach what they believed.
Gossip, ranks closing, and a place at the table
IC: Communication is becoming more established in this period, and I think that comes through in Satisfaction — the gossip, and what it means for a reputation.
CB: Newspapers were incredibly popular and printing had become enormous, but it was mostly a national focus. International material crept in here and there, wars particularly.
Because of all the turmoil, you have a genteel class that really closes ranks. They decide they need to look out for each other, so vast social networks appear, with people aware of others in other counties and cities. It's like how we say the industry is small — everybody knows each other's business.
And particularly for women, because of industrialisation, there was much more free time, so socialising became far more important. So scandal and gossip was: this is beautiful. I've got a titbit I can tell my friend Mary, who tells Susan, and it gets back to Diana who started it anyway. And my day just got much more exciting.
IC: There's a base-level rumbling of real female agency there — the little bits of power women could wield among their friends. Not just, the men go to war and that determines whether we're a duke or an earl. But: how can I write this letter that might bring that family's standing down?
CB: Don't underrate the written word at that time, because it's going through something huge. The 1790s were enormous philosophically. Thomas Paine writes Rights of Man, which says man has certain inalienable rights that should be adhered to across the entire world. And in response you have the amazing Mary Wollstonecraft, who writes A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and says: fine, you have these rights of men, absolutely — but you need to think about women in the same way. These things are given to men completely off-hand, as a natural given. We deserve that too.
So suddenly you have a feminine empowerment, a proto-feminism, where women sit up and think, I'm deserving of a place at the table. Why haven't I been given one, in a social circle or a political circle, that men seem to have had all the way through?
That's what I tried to imbue Satisfaction with — as a way of honouring the women in my life, and because this was a fulcrum, a moment when women got to say: we have a self-identity too. Why have we not had one all this time?
The Petticoat Duel
IC: I didn't know about petticoat duels. What did you find?
CB: I was writing for a competition and looking for something. There's an Ealing film I love with a duel in it between two men, silly and farcical, and I thought — a duel is nice, it has a beginning, a middle and an end.
Then I looked into the history of duelling and thought, this is ridiculous. What we see is a very patriarchal tool: men using a violent instrument and saying, this is how we solve our honour. And honour has a myriad of meanings. It could be that your love has been insulted and you're defending their honour and your own — or your mate spilled a drink on you in the pub because he was trying to flirt with someone, and you challenge him to a duel over it. To the death. What life-or-death stakes?
Then I found the thing that really sparked Satisfaction: a cartoon called The Petticoat Duel, published in 1792. Two women, swords at their sides, pistols drawn, pointing at one another.
I saw it and thought, what? Because we're taught that femininity should reject physical violence as a means of expression. It was a bit life-changing, because I'd never considered that duelling history has taken so much from the men's story. What is the women's side of this?
So I went into art. There's a painting called Combat de Mujeres by José de Ribera — two women fighting with swords and shields in a huge expanse of land in Spain, with hundreds of onlookers, because they were fighting over a man. We don't know how the duel ended. It's the most evocative piece, with almost St George poses: one woman on the ground with her sword and shield up, another above her about to lay into her, the crowd behind.
So there were instances of women using violence as expression. Were there more?
Vienna, 1892
CB: I found one of the more famous ones. 1892, in Vienna. Princess Pauline von Metternich and Countess Anastasia Kielmansegg, in the upper court of the Austro-Hungarian world. They're at a reception, they've both created flower arrangements, and something about the arrangements causes such a spat that they decide they have to physically fight.
So they go to a baroness who is a doctor — take the train to her house — and say, we want to fight with rapiers. And the baroness says: if you're going to fight with swords, you don't want to ruin your dresses. I recommend you remove your upper garments and have the fight on the lawn, so we can mitigate any chance of infection, because cotton wasn't very clean then.
So they're topless, having this sword fight, and the male servants are in the yard, and the baroness says: all of you, turn around, go over there, you're not allowed to look. Only the women can watch.
They have the fight, and I believe Anastasia stabbed Pauline. She falls, the doctor is called, all the men in the corner start trying to turn round, and the baroness is going — no, stop! Still facing away, please.
And there are countless others.
IC: Did the term "petticoat duel" come from that 1792 cartoon?
CB: I believe so. That seems to be the beginning of the terminology, because it was the cartoon's official title. People looked at it and thought, a petticoat duel, how amusing. But then — because of the magnificent way history has — the subversives looked at it and thought, that's a good term to own. So let's take it for ourselves, for when we have to make our own stand.
Writing the way they spoke
IC: Some of my favourite moments are the language. How much is research and how much is tongue-in-cheek?
CB: There was a Georgian gentleman by the name of Grose who wrote A Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue — he took terms and phraseology from the period, put them in a manuscript and published it. It was very popular, got reprinted several times, then fell out of use, because when we get to Victorianism they repressed all of it. They decided they didn't want to be like the Georgians, they had to be morally better.
I found a version of it by a writer called Louise Allen, who laid it out chronologically, gave it proper dictionary terms and divided it into subsections. I wanted to give the characters a flavour of actually speaking how they spoke, so when I found that book I thought, this is amazing.
IC: "Cantankerous hedgehog" is amazing.
CB: Casting women in an overly natural and dirty term. My favourite is hellcat — a woman who is very outspoken, fiery, passionate. I'm always saying I'm lucky to be surrounded by ten thousand hellcats, advocates and icons I can look at and think, yes. Go, hellcats.
There's also a writer — Georgette Heyer — who wrote a great many Regency and Georgian romances from the 1930s onwards, and was vigorous in wanting historical accuracy. She dived deep into the correct terms, the correct pronunciation, the correct manners.
From an English-speaker's standpoint we don't often look at the past of our own language and see how much it has changed. We look at Shakespeare and think, wow, that's vastly different. But this felt like a missing link — a middle point where you see it growing.
IC: One of my favourite facts, and I said this to Kevin McNally on another episode of this podcast, because we established early on that we're both serious pedants about language: only 5% of the words in Shakespeare's plays are not still in common usage today. It's the structure, and the way words are framed in sentences, that makes it seem so different. It's from a great book called Shakespeare on Toast.
Next: the poisoning of Socrates
IC: What's your dream period to write?
CB: I was thinking about this the other day, which is spooky. I'd love to write something set around 400 to 500 BC in Greece, because I was reading about the poisoning of Socrates — and about how gay Greek society was.
I'd love to do a Greek political thriller around his poisoning, where you see all the machinations of why he's being poisoned. He talked for hours before he died, sitting there drinking with his students around him. The imagery of that, and again a linguistic piece where you're talking about moral philosophy, could be quite fun.
Chris Buckley wrote Satisfaction, available to watch on Yoreflix. Its director, Bailey Tom Bailey, appears in another episode of Yoreflix Stories. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.