Bigger and better
As BAFTA winner Mr Bigstuff returns for a second season, creator and star Ryan Sampson tells DQ about making the Sky comedy, writing a series for fellow lead Danny Dyer and how he juggles multiple roles behind the scenes.
When Mr Bigstuff star Danny Dyer scooped the BAFTA Television Award for male performance in a comedy in May this year, he was full of praise for series creator and co-star Ryan Sampson.
“I’m really proud of the show and Ryan, in particular, who wrote this with me in mind and said he would never have made it without me and gave me all the funny lines. It’s incredible,” former EastEnders star Dyer told the press after collecting his first mask statuette.
By that time, season two of the Sky Max series had already been filmed and was in the edit, after Sampson had just four-and-a-half months to pen another six episodes in between making season one and reprising his acting role in another Sky comedy, Brassic. Season two of Mr Bigstuff now launches in the UK today.
“I was really happy with last series,” Sampson tells DQ. “But there’s a degree to which you’re pitching an idea for a show throughout making it. So I’ll look back at season one and there’s some bits that maybe look a little bit not quite as sharp as I’d like them to.”
Then when he reassembled the cast and crew for S2, “everyone’s gone, ‘OK, we know what we’re doing,’ and it feels like we had about one-and-a-half times the budget, but actually we didn’t. It’s just that everyone’s immediately going, ‘This is how we do the thing you’re making.’”
Full of the swagger, bravado and charisma for which Dyer has become known on and off screen, Mr Bigstuff centres on Lee (Dyer), who finds himself living in “idyllic” suburbia when he is reunited with his estranged brother, carpet salesman Glen (Sampson).
Picking up just two weeks after the end of the first run, S2 follows the fallout from the pair’s discovery that their dad is not actually dead – and the brothers are handling the news very differently, leading them on a quest to track him down. Meanwhile, Glen’s fiancée Kirsty is taking charge in the bedroom and the boardroom – but one badly timed kiss and a mysterious blackmailer threaten to bring everything crashing down.
Harriet Webb returns as Kirsty alongside Adrian Scarborough, Fatiha El-Ghorri, Victoria Alcock, Ned Dennehy and Clive Russell. Season two additions include Rula Lenska, Linda Henry, Alan Ford, Tom Hanson, Parth Thakerar, Shobna Gulati, Shaun Williamson and David Mumeni.
A familiar face on screen thanks to roles in Brassic and Ancient Rome-set ITV comedy Plebs, Sampson says he had been writing scripts for about 15 years without anything “very big” getting made. He also wrote and starred with Webb in Waiting, an online series for Comedy Central UK.
“But I was always slogging away to try to make a TV series. If you told me at the beginning, ‘By the way, nothing’s really gonna come of this for 15 years,’ I might not have carried on going,” he admits. “You wouldn’t put yourself though that. But you always think, ‘Maybe it’s this next one.’ So you string yourself along.”
The idea for Mr Bigstuff came to Sampson after Dyer appeared in an episode of Plebs, as the notion of them starring in a series together “is the most ridiculous thing I can think of.” He also heard a whisper from a Sky commissioner that putting them together would be funny, so he “cynically engineered” a story that could feature them both.
But after writing the script, he was soon disheartened to find the then-EastEnders star wouldn’t be available due to the daily demands of the BBC soap. “So I spent a lot of time apparently wasted because I just didn’t think that far ahead,” he says. “I thought they had holidays. I thought they were just going to be able to slip in and out of a soap.”
Just a few days later, however, after a consolatory night out with friends, he spotted an early edition of a newspaper pasted with the headline ‘Dyer quits ‘Enders.’
“From that point, everything fell into place really well. It was amazing,” Sampson continues. “He was in an episode of Plebs in Bulgaria, and I was taken aback by what a good actor he is.
“There are certain types of actors who have an emotional sensitivity. Sometimes those people in life can have quite chaotic minds because they’re so open to anything going on, but it makes for a really good actor because whatever emotion is suggested to them, they go into that mode – and Danny is like that. So I was like, I definitely want to work with him.”
He then created the “ridiculous” story in which he and Dyer play brothers and started writing it into a series. “But then what happens, weirdly, is you start to write it and you realise you have to just draw on stuff from your life. Everything becomes quite autobiographical, even though it is an imagined relationship and an imagined world with these very specific characters, with lots of influences from your own life going into it.”
In particular, the “looming sense” of grief Glen and Lee share over their late mother echoes Sampson’s own experience of loss following his own mother’s death a few years ago. “Without meaning to, that became the central thing I was writing about,” he notes. “It’s really strange. You can go, ‘Right, I’m about to imagine two brothers,’ and then you look at the last 20 pages and you go, ‘Well, you’ve actually written a lot of just your own heartache or whatever.’”
With two characters at opposite ends of the physical and emotional spectrum, Sampson also found himself writing about perceptions of men and masculinity. “I feel like a bystander in that sometimes, where I see people very straightjacketed by an idea of the type of masculinity that they want to adhere to,” he adds. “I find it really interesting, so that pops up quite a lot behind everything.”
The story for S2, which centres on the brothers’ search for their father, was partly formed in Sampson’s head as he was working on the first season, and the tight timeframe to deliver all six scripts ensured he remained focused at all times.
“I was amazed at how much time you don’t waste when you have no time,” he says. “Ordinarily, the standard is six months for writing a series. That’s a no-frills amount of time. And so writing the second one was very spicy. But it turns out if you just do nothing else, if you cancel all your social life completely and when your friends are going on holiday, you’re like, ‘Nah, my partner can go with you, but I can’t,’ it was a very intense slog for that amount of time. But it’s made for a really good series. It’s come together somehow.”
A lot of the writing took place at Sampson’s kitchen table, while series executive producer Hayley Sterling proved to be the perfect sounding board for his ideas. “I’ve found the single most important thing for the survival of the show so that your ideas carry forward is having a producer who understands it and wants to fight for it,” he says. “I’ve accidentally got the producer who is my dream. She’s bulletproof. She’s just like I am. She sees exactly what is the best version of it and is very harsh on me if it’s not quite right. But it makes it get there in the end.
“Initially, I was very unsure about it because she’s really young for being a producer. But my God, there are times when she’s come to set and she’s had one hour of sleep because a location fell through, and instead of doing the easy thing, which was to move everything or fudge it a little bit, she’s like, ‘I’m going to just work all night to find a solution.’ TV producing is just the weirdest job, where people have to be so determined and laser-focused.”
As an EP himself, Sampson has also found support from Sky to make the show his own. He has been across the edit of every episode, particularly relating to the music, to maintain the show’s authored voice and aesthetic.
He’s also thinking about the edit when he’s on set. “Sometimes you don’t have time to talk about how you imagine it would be shot. You can have a great relationship with your DOP and director, but they might not be putting it together in their heads in the same way you are,” he says. “So sometimes I have to go, ‘Hang on, is there a shot of this thing? Because there might be a chance that we want to cut to that.’”
While this level of involvement is “very draining,” Sampson says the extended dialogue on set means his ideas will land as intended. He’s now also sure to explain every beat of visual gags in the scripts, lest the production team don’t quite know what he imagined.
“There was one point in season one where Lee appears in our house and I pretend it’s a home invasion,” he remembers. “I fend him off with an object and he goes, ‘What you gonna do? Poke me with the ‘objet d’art?’ That only worked, I realised, if he was holding a big metal heron ornament. I’d seen one in someone’s house at some point, but then people go, ‘OK, for this joke, we’ve got a candlestick or we’ve got a vase.’ ‘Oh no, I should have said it’s meant to be a three-foot-tall metal heron.’”
The show’s balance of humour and drama means the story never gets too saccharine before a joke is used to undercut the emotion. In fact, Lee and Kirsty spend more time together in season two because Sampson recognised the chemistry between Dyer and Webb. “They’re so funny together,” he says. “They’re making each other laugh and we’ve cut out a bit where they actually do make each other laugh. But it’s really fun to see those bits.”
Sampson was keen to avoid expanding the world of Mr Bigstuff too far in S2, however, resisting the temptation to introduce too many new characters to ensure the focus stayed on Glen and Lee. In fact, he highlights Netflix series Ozark as a show that also told a sprawling story with just a handful of main characters.
“Another trap I love to put myself in is ‘don’t skip a day.’ Don’t show me a day and then show me two weeks later [on screen] when we all get a chance to breathe and forget about it,” he says. “In Ozark, for example, you feel like everything is a direct consequence of everything else. So season one [of Mr Bigstuff] is a week and then season two is another five days. These people are having a really bad four nights. I just like it there because I don’t need to see you going to bed and forgetting about things. I want there to be a constant pressure on everyone.”
Sampson has now turned his thoughts to a potential third season of Mr Bigstuff, though he is adamant he doesn’t want to do a show that “just goes on forever.”
“Sometimes I feel with TV series, there’s no overall plan. They’re just going forward,” he says, “and sometimes you get a bit bored of that. But then other times you feel like there’s a grand plan, even though there probably isn’t. I was really reluctant to get on the Game of Thrones wagon, but you watch it and you go, ‘I’m so compelled by people’s slow trajectories upwards to power’ and vice versa.
“I’m not comparing us to Game of Thrones, but how do you tell a story across multiple seasons? The interpersonal drama is one thing, but having a trajectory is the other thing so you feel like we’re en route to our ultimate destination. That’s something I’m grappling with a little bit.”
Does that mean he already knows the ending for Mr Bigstuff? “I think so,” he adds. “But I can’t say.”
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Moonshine: The show centres on a dysfunctional clan of adult half-siblings battling for control of their family business, a ramshackle summer resort on the south shore of Nova Scotia.
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tagged in: Aaminah Ahmed, Catherine Tyldesley, Danny Dyer, Fulwell 73, Harriet Webb, Jeff Mirza, Jon Pointing, Michelle Greenidge, Mr Bigstuff, NBCUniversal Global TV Distribution, Phil Daniels, Rebecca Benson, Rosie Cavaliero, Ryan Sampson, Sky, Sky Max, Sky Studios, Universal International Studios