Interview with Big Mood creator Camilla Whitehill

Big Mood is returning to Channel 4 soon with Nicola Coughlan reprising her role as Maggie, who has bipolar disorder, and Lydia West as her best friend Eddie… Or possibly ex-best friend as they haven’t spoken in the year since their major falling-out at the end of series 1. Here, the comedy’s creator, Camilla Whitehill, below, talks about how it came about, writing jokes around mental illness and where she takes her inspiration from.

I understand you wrote the role of Maggie specifically with Nicola Coughlan in mind. How did that come about?

I’ve known Nicola for – I forget every time – I think it’s 17 years this year. We met at drama school in Oxford and stayed friends ever since. So when I started developing Big Mood, I was just like, well, obviously Nicola would play the lead part. She’s my favourite actor and one of my favourite people. 

And then I just never really asked her. I sort of told her she was doing it, and luckily she was just like, ‘Okay, that’s fine.’ If she hadn’t been able to do it, I can’t imagine it, really. She’s so easy to write for. It’s like a dream.

When did you get the lightbulb moment for Big Mood?

My first job working in TV was with [production company] Dancing Ledge, who made Big Mood. I worked on their show Porters, and afterwards they said they’d love to develop a show with me. 

They did a really good thing – instead of saying come back with an idea and we’ll see, they gave me a development deal and said let’s decide the idea together. That meant I could go back and forth loads of times until I found what felt right for both of us.

I always wanted to write about female friendship. Always. They’re definitely the most interesting relationships in my life. Female friendships are still dismissed as a bit silly by most people – even if they pretend they don’t think that – and it’s my mission to get everyone to understand that the best and most interesting relationships are the ones that women have with other women.

Eddie and Maggie have, I’m sure, fulfilling active sex lives, but you don’t really see it because that’s just not the thing about them that interests me. What interests me is their relationship with each other.

That age, in your early thirties, is such a time of change – everyone around you starts giving birth, getting married, moving across the world. Friendships you built in your twenties might not survive that, or they might. I know for sure there are friendships I had in my twenties that just didn’t make it through, for no one’s fault other than that everyone’s life changed so much.  

And then there are others that are forged in iron and nothing could undo them. For Maggie and Eddie, they have the additional challenges of Maggie’s mental illness and Eddie’s emotional restrictions, which mean they are constantly, sort of accidentally, winding each other up.

Big Mood is very funny while also dealing with mental health. What tone were you trying to capture?

When I was trying to give tonal references I’d say things like Bojack Horseman – which maybe sounds weird because it’s a cartoon, but it straddles comedy and drama so well. Or Master Of None, or Search Party – where you have the space to go big and broad with comedy when you want to, or as silly as you want to. 

I find the entire concept of genre quite restrictive and needlessly so. Life as I see it is making jokes in between horrible things happening. That’s kind of how I write.

I keep a notes app of things that really make me laugh in real life, and most of them never find their way in. But if one of my friends tells me a story I find funny, it’ll find its way in there more than likely.

 My mum came to set when we were filming this series for the first time, and it happened to be when we were filming a scene where  a line about Mr Big dying on a Peloton [in Sex And The City] was quite literally copied from my own mum. I’d forgotten to warn her, and when she heard it she looked at me and rolled her eyes, but it was just too fun not to take. The funniest people in the world are just real people.

How did you approach writing series two?

You can really freak out about it, but then you just have to remember it is just a TV show and all you can do is your best. There’s no real right or wrong answer to what happens in a series two.

I wanted to see what would happen if there was a love triangle for Maggie and Eddie. You see it a lot in romantic relationships on TV, but I was really interested in seeing it play out in a friendship, because it’s so much more complicated to negotiate. 

I was also very interested in healing – what healing actually looks like. I wanted to explore genuine healing, which I think is what Maggie represents this series, and then also capitalism’s idea of healing – what can be sold to you, what can be told to you that will help you. The wellness industry and its effect on people really interests me. 

Everyone’s just trying to survive, but there are also a lot of people trying to sell you healing in a bottle or a 30-day yoga programme.

Mental health narratives can easily tip into being very dark or quite preachy. How did you avoid that in writing about bipolar disorder?

To me, mental illness is quite funny. I mean, everything is, really. Any obstacle that’s thrown in your path is funny if you look at it from a certain position. 

It’s all about how people cope with problems, and people are often bad at coping, and those coping mechanisms are frequently hilarious. There’s a natural humour to it that maybe is hard to see for some people but seems clear to me.

But in series two, I also really wanted to show that having a mental illness doesn’t mean you’re always in crisis. It doesn’t mean it ever goes away or that it isn’t an influence on your life – but because Maggie is in such acute crisis in series one, I didn’t want to give the impression that this is what bipolar disorder always looks like. 

I also made a deliberate choice to avoid therapy scenes altogether in series two – that’s been done, and it’s a slightly too easy way into those narratives. If you’ve seen the scene before and you know it, don’t write it.

Published: 8 Apr 2026