Jack of all trades
Mobility star and writer Jack Carroll tells DQ about creating the BBC comedy short about three friends on a school bus, where he gets his sense of humour and why he hopes the short could be the pilot for a full-length series.
An actor, writer and comic, Jack Carroll was thrust into the public spotlight a decade ago when his stand-up comedy secured him second place in the 2013 edition of Britain’s Got Talent.
Carroll was just 14 when he entered season seven of the long-running TV talent competition, and a year later he was nominated for a National Soap Award following a role on daytime medical drama Doctors. Since then, his comedy career has continued to build off the back of his own shows as well as appearances on Live at the Apollo and Frankie Boyle’s New World Order, Sky comedy Trollied and feature film Eaten by Lions.
Now, the self-deprecating star has written and is starring in his own BBC Comedy Short Film. Mobility, which launches on BBC iPlayer today, draws on his own disability – Carroll has cerebral palsy – to tell the story of three friends on their way to school for the first day of Sixth Form.
Mike (played by Carroll) is looking forward to a bit of social mobility, thinking he is better than the group of so-called ‘loser’ friends he’s somehow accrued, and aspires to higher things. But for now, he’s stuck with powergeek Sunny and Dan, a lad who only communicates in one-liners and put-downs.
Mike thinks he can do better but he’s going to find it hard to shake them off: Mike, Sunny and Dan all take the mobility bus to school. Mike has cerebral palsy, Sunny uses a wheelchair and Dan has Down’s syndrome. So they are all trapped together – at least for the ride to school.
“I’m very pleased that people are finally going to get to see the show, because we finished filming on June 7 last year, so it’s getting up towards a year,” Carroll tells DQ. “I watched it again the other day and I’m still ever so proud of it. I’m really looking forward to sharing it with the viewing public. And I think they’ll get a kick out of it.”
Though he didn’t use a mobility bus himself during his school days, the star says he could relate to being in that kind of situation – friends whose foul-mouthed banter and bickering hides the genuine warmth they have for each other, particularly when the prospect of a girl or different class timetables threaten to split them up.
“That kind of piss-taking to get through the boredom of the commute is a universal thing, regardless of whatever else you’ve got going on,” he says. “And what we tried to do with the show in a broader sense is to find that universal stuff everyone can relate to, even though ostensibly it’s a show about a group of kids with disabilities. There are universal situations and themes in that hopefully everyone can kind of go, ‘Oh, I can see a little bit of myself in that.’”
Carroll jokes that in the wake of Britain’s Got Talent, “I tried to do as little formal education as possible,” instead seeking to build his stand-up career and blend it writing and acting. BGT viewers still recognise him in the street, though Carroll says the amount of time that has passed since the competition means he finds it hard to fully identify with it.
“I’ve been able to move on from that [experience], but not leave it. I wouldn’t want to leave that behind entirely because it’s a huge part of my career and gave me a foot in the door and a platform to be able to do what I’m doing now,” he says. “I was really pleased and proud of what I did on the show, so hopefully I’ve just carried it with me while I’m doing all this other stuff.
“Doing my stand-up tour, the material changes and ages along with you. People do slightly get a bit of a shock when the tone of what you’re doing changes. But then they settle in because there are a lot of similarities between what I’m doing now and what I did then. It’s just become slightly more adult as I have.”
Now writing for television, he says penning the mobility script waz a dream come true. He had first been approached with the idea by co-writer Tom Gregory, who wanted Carroll’s input on a story that in the beginning was just about Sunny and Mike on the bus.
“I thought there was something about two characters who have differing ways of viewing the world being stuck in a place they can’t really get out of,” he says. “From there we just started putting ideas back and forth over Zoom, and then we got a series document in shape.”
That document made its way to executive producer Sam Ward from Test Mouse Productions, who came on board and pitched it to the BBC. Tiger Aspect Productions then also joined as coproducer for the film, which packs its 10-minute running time with plenty of jokes while managing to round out its three main characters.
Carroll also knew he would be starring in the short from the beginning, giving the production the added benefit of having a writer on set at all times even if Gregory wasn’t available. And once the rest of the main cast was in place – Zak Ford-Williams plays Sunny, with Reuben Reuter as Dan – the scriptwriters took another pass and tweaked it based on their performances.
“We saw how great Reuben’s timing was for one-liners and we gave him more of those. And Zak brought a little bit of a slightly arch quality that we also put into Sunny a little bit more,” Carroll says. “Then I gave myself the majority of the funny lines, as is my right. That was the great thing, we worked with the actors, but the core structure of those three was there from the beginning.”
The director’s role might have been particularly challenging, with the camera barely leaving the inside of the bus and cutting between close-ups of Mike, Sunny and Dan. But Carroll says Akaash Meeda (The Lazarus Project) got the visual style “bang on,” praising his comedy instinct and sense of timing to keep the film moving, despite the bumps the characters face along the way.
“I’ve been on stuff in the past where if it stops [between takes], the comedy gets absolutely strangled because people get bored and you can see it in the performance,” the actor observes. “Comedy is all about keeping engaged and keeping quick-witted. And if it’s stop-start, it’s suffocated a little bit. Akaash just did a really good job of keeping that energy up, and I think you can tell that in the finished product.”
Shooting took place over three days, with an additional day for rehearsals. “It was pretty fast-paced,” Carroll says. “But we had a very talented crew who were used to working under that pressure. Going into it, I’d heard horror stories, as just because it’s your thing, it’s not guaranteed to be a nice thing to make. Actually I’m very grateful to say it was.”
With every production Carroll has been involved in – his other credits include Father Brown and Ladhood – he has always taken an interest in the craft of making television. That attention to detail magnified tenfold on his own production, and he describes working on Mobility as a great learning experience.
“The pervading feeling was the buzz of seeing what was in your head come to life in reality,” he says. “That was a real buzz for me and that’s the thing that’ll keep you wanting to do that again.”
Notably, Mobility comes at a time when the television industry is seeking to improve representation of disability both in front and behind the camera. Carroll himself draws on his own disability in his stand-up comedy and it informs a lot of the humour in the script. But it quickly fades into the background as the characters and their quick-fire back-and-forth ripostes take centre stage.
“That’s what I want to do with my creative work,” he says. “It’s not to dismiss it, because obviously it’s a huge part of my creative life and my life. But it just becomes an incidental. There are times when it comes into the foreground a little bit more, but I would want to make it incidental and you get those universal themes from it without having any experience of disability.”
His hope is that the BBC Comedy Short ends up being developed into a full-length series, having written and produced Mobility as if it were a sitcom pilot.
“It’s a great initiative from the BBC in terms of letting people do their thing and explore different ideas,” he says. “But I think from our perspective, we would love to be able to explore that further. Hopefully people want to see more of it.”
Carroll is now looking forward to filming a comedy show due to air this Christmas, “and a couple of things I’m definitely not allowed to talk about.” He’s also booking new dates for his ongoing stand-up tour as he looks to juggle comedy with writing and acting. “I like to feel employed, so I wouldn’t want to give myself the luxury of discarding one discipline for the other. I like to do a bit of both, if I can.”
tagged in: BBC, Jack Carroll, Mobility