Daniel Rigby
- 41 years old
- English
- Actor and stand-up comedian
Press clippings Page 5
Flowers returned for a second one-off, glorious, maddening week (all six episodes shown on consecutive evenings). First shown over a similar week in 2016, it is, if you remember - and if you watched it back then, you will - an exceedingly quirky week in the company of the Flowers clan, with a dank underbelly of quietly desperate depression. It is almost indefinable, certainly impossible to shoehorn into any known genre - but it's constantly and crazily inspired, inventive, gloomily funny. It will drive some people to dark places. It will drive some people to reach for the off button.
This outing was even odder, and even better. Julian Barratt and Olivia Colman excel as a depressed children's writer and his increasingly estranged wife, who is struggling to remember what she's for, apart from caustic disillusionment, which allows her to come out with some winningly cruel lines. After Barratt has mused again on his "major depressive disorder", she snaps: "Oh, just call it depression, Maurice. It's not a Nobel prize."
But they are relatively in the shadows as regards their children, the unimaginative failure Donald and his sis Amy, who was struck by lightning last time round. Daniel Rigby and Sophia Di Martino are sublime in their characters, with Amy hard to watch as she descends - via some crackling lines ("At least I don't have to watch you piss your scent all over the moral high ground like some demented incontinent barn animal") - to febrile madness.
As to what it's about, apart from Amy's visions of cursed German ancestors... I think it was, in the end, about something rather serious happening to Shun, the Japanese houseboy/illustrator played by Will Sharpe, the writer/creator, and himself bipolar. But I can't be sure. And I only think this because, after Shun was left contemplating, with quickening melancholy, a tall tree in the penultimate episode, the entire last one was a series of his flashbacks to his first few days in the Flowers household - a joyous, flowery, celebration of a loopy, tangled, untidy English family in the English countryside, all dusk and drink and beauty and looming shadow. As I say, indefinable, but sometimes indefinably lovely. And a brave recommission from C4, with brave issues tackled.
Euan Ferguson, The Guardian, 17th June 2018Flowers, series 2 review
Fiercely imaginative and emotionally truthful
Ben Lawrence, The Telegraph, 15th June 2018C4's Flowers is much more than just a 'dark comedy'
Flowers, which ran all week on Channel 4, was thrillingly good to watch -- but is, I now realise, extremely tricky to summarise.
James Walton, The Spectator, 14th June 2018Flowers series 2 preview
It is certainly a one-of-a-kind programme that will stay with you.
Steve Bennett, Chortle, 11th June 2018Flowers, episode 1 and 2, review
Rejoice as this melancholy curio blooms once again.
Patrick Smith, The Telegraph, 11th June 2018Flowers: 'comedy with mental illness' redefining sitcom
Starring Julian Barratt and adored by Paul Thomas Anderson, Flowers is grotesque, surreal - and part of a new wave of TV exploring mental health.
Rebecca Nicholson, The Guardian, 8th June 2018Comedians front E4 video encouraging people to vote
Roisin Conaty, Natasia Demetriou, Tom Rosenthal, Joel Dommett and Richard Ayoade star in a video from E4 that aims to encourage young people to vote.
British Comedy Guide, 30th May 2017Review: Twelfth Night - NT Live
Michael Cox reviews 'a very enjoyable staging of one of Shakespeare's best comedies'.
Michael Cox, Across The Arts, 20th April 2017BBC to broadcast Victoria Wood tribute series
BBC One is to air Our Friend Victoria, a six-part series paying tribute to the work of Victoria Wood.
British Comedy Guide, 17th March 2017Review: Twelfth Night, National Theatre
The National Theatre's promotional campaign for Simon Godwin's new Twelfth Night has been all Tamsin Greig, all the time.
Dan Rubins, A Younger Theatre, 27th February 2017