Simon Nye

Simon Nye interview: Men Behaving Badly & 30 years of TV

Written by: Jake Godfrey
Published: Friday 18th February 2022

Simon Nye is one of the most prolific sitcom creators in Britain. From Men Behaving Badly, which defined an entire 90s culture, and much of the decade with it, to the bucolic bleakness of How Do You Want Me?, more recently he has moved into drama, scripting the smash hit ITV series The Durrells and co-writing a much darker tale in Finding Alice. As Men Behaving Badly celebrates its thirtieth birthday, we chat to Simon about the politics of profanity, what it feels like to be a British writer in America and whether his panto writing days are behind him.

Men Behaving Badly was based on a novel. What was it like jumping from such a solitary pursuit to the pressures of a live audience sitcom with three gags per page?

It was great really. I had a really nice publisher who I was co-writing with briefly, they took me out for some really nice long boozy lunches which was a thrill in itself. I was just glad to be calling myself a writer. It became a whole new level of excitement, particularly auditioning. Now - not even Covid-related - you don't see the actors themselves, it's all on video; but back then it was all in person. These great people would come in and they'd want to be in your show.

Rehearsals were more of a mixed pleasure because you're on show, and I'm not really very good at coming up with ideas straight off the bat. So I would say, like some awful junior accountant, "I'll have to go away and think about that, give me some time". I never got any better than that. It seems wrong to rush in.

There were the occasional flashpoints in a production with "Can you come up with something better? Is that a joke?". Things that don't seem to be hurtful to the people that say them, but you think "Oh, I didn't think he didn't realise it was a joke!". But I do like it, meeting the actors and going on set. I go on set less now, everybody knows it's a bit dull, but I was just glad to be in that world.

You learnt your craft on the job: what was it like working with the late, great Beryl Vertue, a respected and experienced producer?

Well I didn't know what the average producer was like then so I suppose a bit of me was going "You're working with somebody who's gone to America, reinvented the idea of selling shows abroad, has had a history of being agent then producer". Fearless. A woman in a man's world, particularly back then, but not going on about it. Modest. She was just amazing.

Now you work with an army of executive producers, a producer is someone who gets up early, policing everything. Beryl was the producer, there were no executive producers, doing everything. Creatively and professionally, she had grown up with the likes of Spike Milligan and Johnny Speight, so I was in the right hands. I did make mistakes, the first series of Men Behaving Badly I haven't watched since actually, but I don't want to really. So thank you British TV for letting me learn on the job.

It stands up. It's a good show, you should watch it.

I'll reach a stage where I get angry about the state of TV and comedy because I'm not getting work anymore and I'll think it's brilliant.

ITV dropped the series when it was getting seven million viewers, which now seems crazy.

Yeah, below ten was the threshold I think. But you have to work within the numbers then, though even then it seemed OK but not quite good enough. But it was the real era of the sitcom, particularly in America, and so I think they probably felt there would be another one along to replace it. That was the beginning of ITV giving up on sitcoms, which they well and truly have now. Beryl stepped in and did things that hadn't been done before, getting it transferred to the BBC.

Did you feel you were able to find your voice when you went post-watershed at the BBC?

Yeah, we were never that rude I don't think. I remember a conversation about whether we should say 'cock' or 'prick' or something, so grown up, bearing in mind I was in my thirties then so I was late to the party really. It was fairly, not tame, but certainly compared with modern shows about these things it was pretty conservative.

So the BBC allowed you to write freely. Was anything ever considered too risqué?

It was language and weird things, well less weird now. Different things. I'm slightly anxious, the sexual politics I think we were on the right side of, but we're all being re-examined. My big offence, really, was not writing proper jokes for Caroline Quentin and Leslie Ash, but I did learn to do that. But the BBC were very laissez-faire apart from language. I suppose they would have stepped in, although I don't know what would have made them.

The one time I did realise how weird the line is, was when the American adaptation of Men Behaving Badly happened. Generally Beryl and I let them get on with it, but there were a few things. Seeing an appendix (from the episode In Bed With Dorothy). Outrage, and these are guys in the writers room who have seen a lot of stuff and done a lot of untoward jokes and they were [makes disgusted face]. But then they did weird things like a joke which I don't think I would do - used underwear as a coffee filter, which I can just about imagine, but they did stress that they were really unclean underpants and I did think [makes disgusted face again] - different international boundaries.

Higher standards over here, wanking jokes on Christmas Day (from Performance, transmitted Christmas Day 1998)?

That was when I started to realise that maybe we were drifting, we were told off. Maybe it was ruder than I imagined it. The characters were quite sweet so it didn't feel dangerous. But yes, the masturbation, not that you saw anything, but the whole idea of it, questions were asked in the House of Commons.

Is there a moment or set piece from the series you are particularly proud of coming up with?

The bits I can remember are so childish, but the bit the audience laughed most at was the Wedding episode. Tony was supposed to be saying something romantic and Deborah asks "What are you thinking about?" and he says "I was just wondering what colour your bush is". I'm embarrassed to say that, because this is not Ibsen, you know? But on audience reaction, it's a guide at least. On the other hand, if you just say 'sausage', the audience will laugh more than if you don't. You've got to be careful of playing to the crowd.

As a writer generally, I learned to plot, I really did over the first series. I think there's only six scenes in the pilot. By the end we were moving around a bit more, not quite as much as American sitcoms. It was much more like a proper mechanical device. By the time the 90s ended I did feel at last that I knew what I was doing, having got great comedy actors and the odd good joke I did feel the craft was better by the end.

Men Behaving Badly is sometimes labelled as laddish or chauvinistic, but that unfairly undermines the roles of Caroline Quentin and Leslie Ash. Dorothy and Deborah, as you wrote them, were not passive characters and they gave as good as they got.

They did and I must stress that the Men Behaving Badly novel is not a good book, but it was written through the men's eyes. You have a POV. That was the genesis, I thought I knew about being a man in his twenties because I was one and so that spilled over into the sitcom. Even then, if I knew it was going to be about two couples I would have given them a better shout early on. Caroline Quentin never held back and would say "Where are my jokes this week?". Those rehearsals are where you think "Oh God I should be a novelist really". But generally it was a very happy show and the week of rehearsal is to polish it up.

Was it difficult to transition into acting for your cameo role as Catatonic Student (in the episode Gary And Tony)?

So easy, I don't know why they go on about it! I did actually have a couple of lines in How Do You Want Me?, a proper part which underlined for me, if I didn't know it already, how hard it is to act naturalistically as was required of me. We should all do some job share. Some actors are more into improvisation than I am. It's a phenomenal skill, acting. You realise they don't just wait for the camera to roll. Anyway, it's good to know what I can't do.

Was it difficult to convince Kylie to do the Comic Relief sketch?

I don't know actually, I mean she did it! My prized possession is a signed letter from Kylie saying she'll do it. I was delighted. We rescued Kylie's career in the 90s really you know, by having the guys obsess over her... Not true, but certainly we banged on about how great she is. I wasn't even in the country, I was in Australia, so I never met her! But she was a good sport.

One of life's great regrets!

Yes! Although I have been lucky enough to meet some legends, not so much in Men Behaving Badly.

You must be asked in every interview whether you will ever bring Men Behaving Badly back. I wish I could say this interview would be different!

Yes, Neil Morrissey in particular has to field that question a lot, and he says more or less what I say, which is that generally I like to say yes to things. I think everybody knows it's a risky business.

Is the more interesting question then whether you could bring it back in today's climate?

Oh I think you definitely could, though I think the focus being on two middle aged white men might raise a few eyebrows at the BBC particularly, which is rightly trying hard to broaden things out. There are ways of doing it. I would say this but I think there are interesting things to be seen about how men do change and mature or don't. But the show was always designed to be an exuberant half hour of stupidity really, so to have to think too hard about the sexual politics of it might take away some of the joy. But in principle I never like to say goodbye to characters.

Never say never.

Exactly.

Your next sitcom was Is It Legal?. Was it more difficult coming to a completely blank page, not having a novel to base it on?

No, I'd worked in offices in my twenties, translating in the city. Banks, insurance, really dull things. So I liked office life and the idea of writing about it and frankly making it funnier than my own experiences. Lovely people but the banter wasn't always watchable.

You didn't kill someone on your first day then?

[laughs] No! You see? That was how real life failed me! I worked, as I say, as a translator, a proper city job, but we had our slippers on in the nerdy, low paid end. Anyway, we were allowed to do a pilot in those days, we did make some cast changes. I sound like a hopeless luvvie here, but it was a joy to make, lovely people. Imelda Staunton I've worked with a few times.

You are a prolific creator of sitcoms. Do you write a detailed bible with character backstories and plots, or do you prefer to discover as you write?

I don't really. I'm not saying I'm one of those writers who blunders in, because they are out there, but I do like to do an outline. But not much detail. You can get yourself into an awful hole if you create this whole backstory, this whole world, and then find that comedically it's best to go off that way. The process is actually that you do just slap an adjective on a character. If you have five or six, 'lazy', 'tense'. I'm not a big theorist, but there is one called the victim half, and the other half who exploit people, Is It Legal?, for example, half of them are worried the whole time and trying to make things work while the other half are either being cruel or just not noticing that others are suffering. I think that's the dynamic I realised works.

Not a very good title. It should have been called The Office really. We thought there was a great title out there, as one always does, that's going to make people watch but Is It Legal? wasn't it. It changed channel as well, it went to Channel 4 for the last series which was a slightly bizarre place to be perhaps.

One of my favourite shows of yours is How Do You Want Me?, which you wrote immediately after Men Behaving Badly. Was it a conscious decision to write something in such stark contrast to your previous studio sitcoms?

I never really make decisions consciously, I think subconsciously. It's a funny thing, you think the work will be the work but I knew this was for BBC Two and you kind of think "Oh, that's a BBC Two show so I can do different things, be more adventurous, dare I say it, grown up".

Without the audience being there it felt another reason to be more naturalistic, but with an edge of comedy. Throwing life away when it looked like it was funnier to go out on a limb. But, thank you, I think it is probably my favourite show. We had a lot of freedom from the channel controller who we had lunch with, which is rare these days, and he more or less said "Yeah, do what you like". Also there was the excitement of working with people I hadn't worked with before like Dylan Moran, who was a bit of an unknown quantity. We did audition more 'actorly' people for the part but he was just so great.

It had a much darker tone than your previous shows, almost folk horror.

Yeah, it could have gone that way couldn't it? It was supposed to be - not exactly a love song to my roots in Sussex - but I wanted to celebrate rural life and so the fact that it came out with a bit of a horror edge to it maybe suggests I was hiding something from myself.

How did you become involved with the ITV pantos? Were you pitched it or did you always want to write one?

I increasingly use the phrase 'I can't remember'. I did the first one, Jack & The Beanstalk, with John Henderson who directed How Do You Want Me?. But I've always loved pantos, my first experience of comedy, a lot of people's first experience of comedy. I used to go to amateur shows actually, in Sussex. I sort of tucked it away as something I'd like to do.

The history of TV started with live shows so it felt like it could work. Jack & The Beanstalk was where I learnt how to do this, the poor audience were there for seven hours or something in the Old Vic. A half hour sitcom can take three hours to film, by the end they didn't care what was behind you, you know? But that was a case of meeting your heroes.

Did you get a list of available stars to write to their comedic stylings?

Yeah, a bit. We had Julie Walters in Jack & The Beanstalk as the Fairy Godmother, real class. I suspect some of them said yes, obviously because they want to have fun and meet people, but they have kids who they want to show some of their work to without having to do a two-month run in Lowestoft, just have one very long line at the Old Vic. But I loved it. It's a bit like translation, you get a broad structure for the pantomime and then you can go off a bit. The plot's there, nobody really judges you on whether the plot's working.

You had comedic royalty with the likes of Ronnie Corbett and Julian Clary.

Yes, a few of them, particularly Julian Clary actually, took the lines and said "I'm going to do my own thing", and I don't blame them because they know their audience. Not that it writes itself but there was a lot of "Now I do my thing". But yes, lots of great people.

Can you see yourself returning to panto?

I would do it like a shot. I wrote a movie, a pantomime which didn't get made, which was a shame. No one else has done another one for television yet, but it was really about theatre I suppose. There is something about the fact it's at Christmas and there's so many shows, three pantos a day some of them do in some freezing, windswept seaside town, I do think it was quite filmic to do a one-off so if there are any film producers out there who want me to revive it, I will!

Especially given the last couple of years, pantos are the most joyous thing.

Well that's it, and that's why I hope live audience sitcoms don't die a death, although it is heading that way. There have been a few flying the flag, Count Arthur Strong, The IT Crowd. But it's not a century that has embraced audience sitcom.

There was a time in the mid-nineties where you had four shows on in the same year.

I was just boasting about this to my kids actually, I had shows on all four main channels.

Do you ever look back and wonder how you found time for it all?

Yes. They were half hours, with commercials it zips by, but it was lovely. Obviously I thought it would go on forever but there were a few bumps in the road and all of a sudden it stopped. Famously in America, people at NBC, all of them in fact, would have four sitcoms between eight o'clock and ten o'clock all watched hugely, and so I did think I would probably go to America. I did for a little bit but you pay a price going over there. It's a very friendly world for writers here once you're commissioned, I don't think that's true in America. The half hour is king.

You sold Men Behaving Badly to the US, but breaking America was never a big goal for you?

I should be so lucky. It was nice to go over there in the winter on the beach. At least my wife enjoyed it! It just felt kind of showbiz, Venice Beach! I love Episodes, I'm not saying it's completely accurate but so many things, even me dipping a small toe into that world, resonated. The insincere executives. They have them over here too but they are spectacularly insincere over there. All very well nailed by Episodes.

Did you get the American writer's room experience?

I did. The American Men Behaving Badly went badly wrong after ten episodes. There was arguing between the actors and the very nice showrunner, who left the show. They asked me to come over, I was never going to run the show. They had Steve Levitan, who went on to do Modern Family and clearly didn't need any help from me. I did sit in the corner, trying not to be arsed that I had to come up with a joke. Mostly I was just there to radiate Britishness.

It was great to learn, there were fourteen writers in the room. One did the rude stuff. There was one woman I think, it was a very male environment. They looked after me, it was [production company] Carsey Werner, who were great. But it never quite flew and the casting wasn't quite right. But I loved the experience, LA is great fun.

The Savages was meant to be your take on Everybody Loves Raymond.

Yeah, I love that show. I saw some live recordings actually, I was sitting in front of Ray Romano's real wife. I was watching her quite closely to see what she was finding funny, quite distracting! Because all of his life was in there. I loved that it kicked against the prevailing ethos and it was one plot done at a pace that reflected real family life, quite slow and grinding. So I wanted to do that and did fail by some margin, but working with Geoffrey Palmer was worth the process. We knew, don't put the kids on screen as much as you can, but you've got to see them a bit and we never quite got that balance right.

Then you did Wild West. Do you think it was ahead of its time, starring as it did Dawn French and Catherine Tate as a co-habiting couple?

Well I like to think I'm a trailblazer. It was Catherine Tate's first starring role, she had a small part in Men Behaving Badly. I don't want to dwell on the failures, though I'm quite proud of it. Dawn French is at her eccentric best as the character. I remember there was a show that took writers round the country to talk about their work.

I talked to a Cornish fisherman, this must have been after the second series - rightly, he spoke his mind. I won't do the accent, but people down there hated it. It's a notoriously hard accent to nail. But we loved making it, and in the manner of How Do You Want Me?. It's sort of real, but not real.

It had a very melancholic air to it.

It did a bit, yeah. You want to reflect the slowness of most of our lives. Two series, we had good fun doing it.

I don't want to dwell on the shows that didn't make it, but you reunited with Neil Morrissey for two series of Carrie & Barry. I thought he and Claire Rushbrook had great chemistry.

You always want to make a funny show and I did think there was something to be said about a couple. Neil was great in it, but you want to inspire interest in the audience and it felt like that slipped under the radar a bit.

You worked with David Nobbs on Reggie Perrin. It's rare to have the original writer involved with a remake or reimagining of their own work; what was that process like?

He was such a lovely man and we were on a bit of a hiding to nothing. I think we hit the right comedy beats but it's hard, as the BBC found when they reinterred comedies in the last ten years, a whole range of them. It's just hard. Thematically I think it's more relevant now, the idea of us all going mad in corporate environments. Martin Clunes is as good as you're going to get for playing that 'on the edge of madness' thing. But the original series was fantastic and so beyond what we were used to.

His books, by the way, I highly recommend them, are brilliant. Second To Last In The Sack Race, there's two or three of them. I'm apologising I suppose for daring to try to recreate David Nobbs's genius, but it was great working with him. I did most of the writing because I think he just wanted to, he was more of a novelist at that stage so he was there to say "don't do that".

Did he give you lots of tips or did he say "this is your reinterpretation of it"?

He didn't, I think he'd have known as a writer, guidance is one thing, but he knew I didn't want him standing over my shoulder. This is not to denigrate him, but he was a great anecdotalist, so his role was to amuse us with his excellent stories. He'd written for Tommy Cooper and lots of people I didn't know about beforehand. He was a lovely, affable man.

Do you have any plans to write a new sitcom?

I don't really. I've moved, as the world has, towards drama. It's nice that there are finally more shows that blur the line between comedy and drama. It was ridiculous, the idea that if it's an hour, it's drama and if it's half an hour it's comedy. Things like I May Destroy You, which is hilarious but also works as a drama. So in a way you don't need to sit down and say "I'm going to do a half hour sitcom", you can create a real world. But I love the idea that there's another pure half hour comedy in me, because if I've learnt one thing doing drama it's how much I like the silliness of jokes piling up on each other, they really are very different.

The trouble with drama, I find, is that most of our lives are not about murder or massive jeopardy and yet we have to keep the audience with us. Narrative drive is very important but the trouble is we end up creating troubles and dramas for people where actually I'd rather just see them in their own lives having the kind of minor crises that we have. In drama, you have to make that work, I'm not explaining it very well but narrative drive, that's why murder in all its forms is such a God given gift, because people want to know who did it. People don't want to know so much whether someone will get their washing machine fixed. Those real-life dilemmas and problems I do find more interesting in a way than "the serial killer strikes again before the end of Episode 3".

The Durrells strikes such a good balance between comedy and drama. It's such light, sunny show.

Yes, and also I don't think soaps are watched as much now. I looked at the statistics the other day just to show I'm a comedy professional, and production values are being squeezed. They are less ambitious, obviously, than Netflix shows so people watching are thinking it's more visually banal. But they do that job of showing, particularly the older style of Corrie, where you would have that balance there. They're still on and still relatively popular, they haven't been replaced really by drama series. They play that role of showing life as it is without deaths. I know there's the odd death in EastEnders.

Christmas Day usually.

Yeah, for a special treat we get to kill somebody. That said, I have done the odd murder script. I don't think I'm doing them very well because I haven't actually made one yet.

Is the sequel series of The Durrells, set in Bournemouth, still on the cards?

You never know. Ten years later, we'll see if anybody bites. People are interested but whether it's the right thing to do is another question. But they're a fascinating family and obviously we've taken their lives and slightly tweaked them for TV consumption, but I hope I've done them proud as people. The same people were doing interesting things after the war but maybe the innocence is gone so we've got to find a new way of doing it.

You changed tack recently with Finding Alice. Did that challenge a new facet of your writing skills, crafting a thriller?

It did and also I'm co-writing it with Roger Goldby, who I know because he directed episodes of The Durrells and I get on very well with him, he's written a couple of films. It's good to mix it up a bit. It's his idea and it's true I probably wouldn't have had the courage to pitch a show about bereavement. But for all my going on about silly jokes, through all these shows, even Men Behaving Badly and Is It Legal?, is the sadness of middle age, feeling stuck in one life and having not made the most of it, so it's all there.

The seriousness is very much there if your husband has just fallen down the stairs unexpectedly and died. So I did like doing it and working with Keeley Hawes is great whatever it is. I hope we captured the awful tragic comedy that accompanies, not every death, but a few people found the tone a bit disconcerting. You don't want to see someone crying for six hours.

People laugh at funerals, it's a coping mechanism.

Yeah, it's a cliché to say 'It's what he would have wanted', but there aren't many people who would have wanted the desolation of their loved ones, moping or worse. Also, you don't need a bereavement to have a psychological disorder these days, we're all so aware of how close we are to madness and depression, so that's a great area to exploit. I shouldn't say this because I like to think I'm a fully creative writer, but other people's ideas often - in this case it was Roger's idea - just sound better than my own. So it's nice not to have to do my own work but instead say "Yes, let's work together".

You've done a lot of adaptations, do you adhere to the source text or do you prefer to try to translate the tone?

In a first draft I will try to do a faithful adaptation. Partly because I spent several years as a full-time translator, which is all about trying to get as much of the original into the English version. I thought it was disrespectful to throw things out. But now you've really got to go to town. Viewers are demanding and you can't just say "it's a nice scene in the book". But I do like the form.

We had it with The Durrells actually, people vociferously hating the fact that we'd taken liberties with the truth. But I was quick to point out - as did people who like the show - so did Gerald Durrell. When he wrote his stories, a lot of it was a tissue of lies but it was entertaining. The viewer's experience comes first rather than some crazy notion about the truth. I think I've got better at knowing what to keep and what to lose. You have to add things. I've found with The Durrells and The Larkins, which I'm working on at the moment, if you take a book you've got to heavily process it.

Years ago I did The Railway Children, and I loved the film. We had Jenny Agutter as the next generation, playing the mother rather than the daughter. They made some choices in the film, and it's a brilliant film, but they were slightly odd. But if you go back to the book you can do it in different ways. In terms of the crass business of actually selling a show commercially, broadcasters love a book.

There's a built-in audience.

There is. The Darling Buds Of May. Not many people, as a percentage of the audience, have actually read it; although they should. It's very short. Something like Normal People was so brilliant. I haven't read the book and I sort of don't want to. I thought that, by all accounts, they proceeded in an orderly fashion through the book and the pace wasn't forced. It did make me wonder whether, in the past when I adapted things, could I have been more faithful? It's a weird dynamic. You need to keep the audience completely plotted up and keep them wondering about things, but also sometimes it is nice to say "We're going to take our time over this".

You also wrote Amy's Choice, an episode of Doctor Who when it was under the stewardship of Steven Moffat, who also comes from a sitcom background. Did he give you a lot of freedom on the script or were there very strict guidelines?

There are things you learn. I think he gave me the idea of dreams. There was a bit of negotiation with the old Doctor Who hands, which I actually re-watched, all the David Tennant years with my kids. I was so thrilled to be writing an episode and I remain thrilled by it. We got to go to the new TARDIS, they were just changing over and Matt Smith came in. I was very excited, my kids were beyond that. A great family experience, we all have our one or two Doctors.

You get a talk at the beginning, you know "His name isn't Doctor Who, it's The Doctor", which even I'd worked out. I'm not really into sci-fi but the mixture of bold storytelling and quips. He's a great, witty writer, Steven, so he could tell me the Doctor Who lore and legend and I can just do my version. Mine was towards the end of the series and the budget was running out, so I wasn't allowed any spectacular monsters. I just had old people. Old people are the scariest people of all, which I'm allowed to say because I'm nearly there myself.

It must have been nice writing a show your kids could watch.

Yes, they watched The Durrells but they were a bit old by that stage. There haven't been many things.

You did write on Flushed Away. What was it like with the meddling film studio executives and all the other clichés?

At least with that you haven't got any illusions. You're a cog in a wheel. There were British writers before me and after me, I did jump ship slightly because I had written the same scene quite a lot. They put you up in a nice hotel in Santa Barbara and paid for all the family. The hours were quite long, but Jeffrey Katzenberg himself, head of Dreamworks, came in, to his credit, looking at the artist's version of the scene you've written. I was blown away by his attention to detail. Dropped the ball slightly on Quibi, his last venture. But I did like the experience.

You get spoiled writing a British TV show. You write it, the actor says it. Over there it's a whole machine. I love animation, it was fast tracked because we were up against Pixar's Ratatouille in the 'rat film race', which we won, though not critically. Officially it was a speedy thing but it still took three years. I don't know how people can work on the same film for two or three years.

Is that one of the things you like about creating your own shows, the variety?

I do. I'm quite obedient with notes so it's not like I have a vision and I'm going to stick with it, I wouldn't have worked long in TV if I was that grand. I do like that it's a collaboration, don't get me wrong. But in animation it's collaboration times one thousand. Everything you're seeing is something that they think is their version of it. Do a bit of everything, that's got to be good advice. Whenever I try to formulate what advice to give to writers, I wouldn't say spend two years writing a novel that nobody is going to publish, but it does teach you the basic skill of sitting on a chair in front of a screen, or in my case a typewriter in the early years. That's quite a basic part of the job really.

If you want to write, you do at some point need to actually sit down and do the writing.

It's true. I'm worried I'm starting to lose that interest of hour after hour in my own company. That is a fundamental skill, although a lot of people will bypass it by co-writing and they're never alone with the page, except with a novel. A co-written novel is a rare beast. You do learn different skills depending on what the genre is. My first interest was the theatre so I'm writing more theatre now. They all feed into each other. The danger is that whatever genre you're working on, you're looking over your shoulder. If I'm writing drama I want to be doing some silly jokes, if I'm doing silly jokes I want to be doing drama. But that's a nice problem to have.

You've translated plays, have you had a go at writing your own original play?

I have, I think I might even get one on. I love translation and Restoration plays so I've been working in that area. I do like period stuff. The world has always been complex, but modern life is so complex and here are so many things you've got to be careful about, not blunder in. So I do like to go back. Things were simpler. The further back you go, the more freedom you have to make it up.

You also have a film on Amazon Prime called Down Dog. Has that fulfilled your cinematic ambitions?

No, I just did a rewrite on it really, it was quite low budget. It's such a tough world making feature films. I suppose people decide that's the bigger experience, going to the cinema. It's never replicable on TV. But I did have a good experience. I've done some ITV ninety-minute things, which were kind of movie-lite experiences, which I enjoyed doing. They're hard to do, I can see why they're not doing them much now.

I watched one you did with Martin Clunes called Beauty, which was a sweet story I thought.

Yeah, it was Tim Firth's idea to do a series of one-off dramas under the umbrella of 'trapped'. I think he must have looked ITV executives in the eye and said "honestly, it'll be cheap, because it's called Trapped so it'll be limited expense and limited actors". So I had Martin Clunes trapped in an ugly body playing a toff. Tim Firth's one was trapped in a supermarket, Jonathan Harvey did Von Trapped, about a Sound of Music obsessive. It was an odd series, but TV should throw up these odd things every now and again.

See Also: 30 years of Men Behaving Badly