Bad Sisters writer speaks at the BBC comedy festival

Sharon Horgan says there’s less ‘bullshit’ involved in making comedy in the  UK compared to America.

Speaking about pitching shows to British broadcasters, she said: ‘No one lies to you. You don’t get bullshitted. I’ve been in US rooms where they tell you a show is happening, you leave the room pumping the air and then get told 30 minutes later that they’re not going to do it.’

Horgan also spoke of another difference in working the UK: ‘I’ve always felt with Motherland  you get notes when you need them, not for the sake of it.

‘There’s real trust for your original vision. Whereas in the US studio system, the studio is pre-empting what your network will say, so we’ve got this extra barrier. It’s frustrating.’

The creator of shows such as Catastrophe and Bad Sisters was speaking to her Motherland co-writer Holly Walsh at the BBC Comedy Festival in Cardiff this afternoon.

Walsh opened the session about asking about Apple TV+ hit Bad Sisters, with Horgan noting she ‘couldn't believe how long it took to write 10 hour-long episodes’ but added: ‘I never really thought, well, this is a drama and I must approach it in a different way, because it's the same old shit,’

Horgan said  the writing process was similar to her previous US show Divorce ‘in that we had a room of about 10 writers’ but that the process became ‘even more intense on Zoom’ as much of the work was done during lockdown. ‘It’s more exhausting, because you can't get up and you’re entirely there in that box. It felt like hard work.’

She added of the team: ‘Everyone has certain strengths. For some people that it's dialogue, some it’s characters and in a room that size and that many episodes you need someone keeping a bird's eye view on it all.’

But she said that despite tightly structuring the series, she hadn’t written episodes 9 and 10  before they started filming  ‘because things change as you shoot. You recognise that some relationships really worth focusing on or you realise in the edit that certain things are not playing out the way you hoped they would. But you've always got to have an idea of what you want to happen and you have a loose outline.’

Speaking more about changing the show as they went along she noted: ‘Luckily we were a really tight group of people with the same point of view and ambition for it. We had this on Motherland that  jokes we think are so clear and obvious, everyone else is blind to. Sometimes that will happen [so the script has to be tweaked]’

She explained how she got into comedy by ‘entering writing competitions and new comedy competitions, and  through sketch’ – including writing ‘really dark, terrible stuff’ on Monkey Dust with the late Harry Thompson –  ‘then submitting sitcoms’.

Thompson came up with the idea for her breakthrough show, Pulling, which she wrote – and refined – with playwright Dennis Kelly.

‘We felt we wanted a version of our lives on screen,’ she said. ‘We definitely wanted it to be told through female characters, because we felt there wasn’t much of that.

‘It’s  weird now to say, but we wrote a pilot, we got an offer for the pilot script. And got the series picked up off of that script. And we didn’t have to film anything. We’d never written anything like that before, just this script. It was a great.

‘That first script took us about five or six months. We really thought, "well, this is our shot."  because we had never written anything narrative before.’

Horgan said that even with her track record, and that of her production company Merman, which she runs with produce Clelia Mountford,  she still gets ideas rejected, and that still hurts.

‘I do get heavily invested in everything that I've written and everything that we develop with Merman. I always think this, this could be a thing, because otherwise I wouldn't be working on it. So the disappointment is, is deeply felt.

‘But sometimes it's not taking no for an answer and  finding other routes.’

Published: 25 May 2023