Will Sharpe

Unknown writer gets his big TV break with Flowers

Will Sharpe was born in London but until the age of eight he lived in Tokyo. He was educated at Winchester College, then went to Cambridge, where he read classics and joined the university's dramatic club, Footlights, subsequently spending a year with the Royal Shakespeare Company.

TV preview: Flowers, C4

This is not your conventional sitcom then, but nor is it anything like Camping or The Mighty Boosh. It's sitcomland but tipped off its axis in a different direction. There are moments which will make you laugh - particularly the house party from hell in the first episode - but this is a series that stretches the genre to snapping point.

Coming soon to Channel 4 (25 April, same day as Game of Thrones - squeeeee) is the very peculiar Flowers. I'm strangely drawn to it, even though I'm not 100 per cent sure I like it yet.

Julian Barratt of The Mighty Boosh and Olivia Colman of everything else star as unhappily married couple Maurice and Deborah Flowers. They live in a tumbledown house in the country with their dysfunctional grown-up children and a young Japanese illustrator called Shun (played by the show's writer, Will Sharpe), who draws the pictures for Maurice's children's books.

It feels a bit out of time, a touch Royal Tenenbaums-y, and it's hard to sense the tone from episode one. But Barratt is all charisma with a churning internal maelstrom and Colman is typically brilliant at Deborah's vulnerability and quiet fury. Plus she gets to wear some pretty fantastic capes. All in all, I'm on board, if a bit confounded. I want to see more.

Everything you need to know about Flowers

Today Channel 4 announced details of their new dark new sitcom Flowers that partners Broadchurch's Olivia Colman and The Mighty Boosh's Julian Barratt.

A tiny cult is growing around this bewitching British oddity. It's a strange, disorientating mock-documentary about a middle-class family who are accused of murder. Their apparent 'victim' is an odd stranger who the father (Chris Langham, the disgraced star of The Thick Of It) meets while walking his three-legged dog next to a local pond. A melancholic Langham is wonderfully underplayed, in contrast to comedian Simon Amstell's overpoweringly wacky psychotherapist. The first feature by twentysomethings Will Sharpe and Tom Kingsley, it scored several awards and a Bafta nomination - not bad for a self-distributed debut made for just £25,000.

Black Pond: Chris Langham was our ideal casting choice

Young directors Tom Kingsley and Will Sharpe's debut feature-length film starred Chris Langham in his first role after prison. They explain to Daisy Bowie-Sell why casting him was the best possible decision.

What an intriguing, and unsettling little movie Black Pond (2011, Black Pond, 15) is. At the Baftas its makers (director Tom Kingsley, writer/director Will Sharpe and producer Sarah Brocklehurst) were nominated for an outstanding debut award, and there is plenty here to suggest that they are an ever-so-slightly surreal force to be reckoned with. The story of a family who unwittingly achieve tabloid notoriety as a killer clan, the film mixes faux documentary interviews with off-kilter (and carefully coloured) scenes from a waking dream of life, interspersed with animated legends of lost ladies of the lake and three-legged dogs. It's peculiar stuff, occasionally funny, often poignantly uncomfortable, and consistently weird, like some subdued English relative of David Lynch's American gothic oeuvre. Chris Langham and Amanda Hadingue provide a suitably awkward mainstay as the collapsing couple at the centre of the drama, although Simon Amstell appears occasionally to have wandered in from a different (and more overtly comedic) movie as a madcap phoney shrink taunting Sharpe's mockable Tim. Extras include deleted scenes and the Sharpe/Kingsley short film Cockroach.

DVD: Black Pond (15)

Tom Kingsley and Will Sharpe's low-budget debut is haunting, moving and very funny.

There's an element of chutzpah in Black Pond, the opening scenes of which feature disgraced actor Chris Langham reflecting on a scandal that has resulted in his character being splashed across the tabloids. Cutting close to the bone, it's the sort of thing that could easily have backfired had the ensuing film not been such an accomplished, well-observed and refreshingly oddball work. Put that down to the performances and to first-time directors Tom Kingsley and Will Sharpe, whose ability to mix the comedy of extreme discomfort with astute insights into contemporary middle-class mores takes the film in surprising directions. That's important, because the film reveals at the outset the nature of the scandal that has tainted the brilliantly named Tom Thomson (Langham) and his family. What follows is a sort of mock-doc reconstruction of the events preceding it, with after-the-fact reflections and surreal dream sequences deepening our understanding of the characters in strange and poignant ways. A very promising debut.

Review - Black Pond

One of the strongest British debut features to bow this year, brittle, sepulchral comedy Black Pond bodes very well for the future careers of co-writing and helming partners Will Sharpe, a thesp who appears here, and Tom Kingsley, a director of commercials and musicvideos.