Sharon Horgan

Catastrophe hits Facebook before coming to Amazon Prime

Catastrophe, a British comedy series written by and starring Rob Delaney and Sharon Horgan, is coming to America. It will arrive for Amazon Prime subscribers on Friday, June 19th, but before it gets there, it is taking a quick detour to Facebook. The premiere episode of Catastrophe will be available on Facebook for 48 hours before it heads to Amazon.

Back to 2006 for the first episode of Sharon Horgan and Dennis Kelly's sitcom about three filthy wastrels from Penge. Donna (Horgan), drifting towards marriage with rancid manchild Karl (Cavan Clerkin), realises on her hen night that she's got a lot of aimless partying still to do with her pals (Tanya Franks and Rebekah Staton). The extent to which female characters get all the funny lines by revealing their rotten souls would still feel groundbreaking today. And this opener is flab-free: one killer scene after another.

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This enduring Radio 4 show is one of those excellent ideas that seems glaringly obvious once someone else has thought of it. The basic concept is a hostless chat show; an initial guest chooses a sparring partner who, the following week, chooses another, and so it goes on in a cheerful human centipede of chat. This series began with Adam Buxton talking to Reece Shearsmith and has passed through a range of comedy luminaries, including Vic Reeves and Sharon Horgan.

The idea behind Chain Reaction, if you haven't listened (why?), is that last week's interviewee becomes next week's interviewer, so we get a long list of famous people (usually comedians or actors) interviewed by a similar person who they admire or have worked with. Each person's interview technique is very different, so the show is hit and miss. The last two week's programmes, which featured Bob Mortimer interviewing Vic Reeves, and then Vic Reeves talking to Olivia Colman, have been tricky listens. I love Reeves and Mortimer but they don't do interviews, really. When they were together it was funny but utterly random; when Reeves talked to Colman, I had to switch off. He had no questions; he didn't really listen to the answers. Argh! It was frustrating.

This week, Colman talked to Sharon Horgan, and I enjoyed the whole show. Colman managed to take the mickey out of the interviewing process ("Do you have a favourite sibling? Do you have a favourite child?") and also get revealing answers. Revealing of both Horgan and herself, which made up a bit for the week before. So we learned that Colman can't cope with too much to do (and then her husband points out that what she's worrying about could be done in a hour), that Horgan prefers writing to acting, and that despite being born in England she considers herself Irish - "it's very important to me that I'm Irish". The chat brought out the contrast between Horgan's career-minded pragmatism and Colman's family-comes-first attitude. As well as both women's wit. Colman was a great host. Give her a show. Nurture the "talent". Manage it.

Sharon Horgan and Rob Delaney wrote and starred in this hilarious comedy about a transatlantic couple who go from one-week-stand to prospective parents. The dialogue is sharp, the characters believable, and the humour impressively balances the sweet with the downright coarse.

Radio Times review

"Do you have a legal list?" Olivia Colman asks her interviewee Sharon Horgan. "Sorry, what's that?" responds Horgan, in answer to which Colman informs her it is a list of people you are allowed to sleep with without your husband getting cross. The audience roars with laughter, which soon increases in volume when an innocent Sharon asks, "Can they be dead?" -- not quite making the necrophilic link implied by her wish to have Steve McQueen on her "legal list".

This gives a flavour of the conversation between these two very funny women. Colman's questions cover topics ranging from work--life balance to the joys of nit-combing a child's hair, and Horgan's wickedly witty responses exemplify why she is at the top of her game at the moment.

Catastrophe review: a delightfully blundering finale

The last of six very funny episodes signed off, not with style, but with some wonderfully deranged carnage from Sharon Horgan and Rob Delaney.

Catastrophe: great actors, but they're too darn nice

Sharon Horgan and Rob Delaney can do funny standing on their heads but Series 2 could really sing if they ditch the sweetness and keep their claws out.

Loved Catastrophe? You'll love Pulling too

Fans of Sharon Horgan's Channel 4 comedy should seek out her wince-inducingly brilliant BBC Three sitcom.