Keeping up appearances
Just Act Normal creator and writer Janice Okoh joins executive producer George Ormond to discuss adapting for television her award-winning play about three siblings fighting to stay together after their mother’s disappearance, and the challenges of production on a limited budget.
Playwright Janice Okoh’s darkly comic, award-winning stage play Three Birds debuted in 2013, telling the story of three young siblings – Tiana, her brother Tionne and little sister Tanika – trying to stay together following the disappearance of their mother.
Now, more than a decade later, a TV series expanding on that original story and its abundance of supporting characters arrives on BBC Three.
Under the new title Just Act Normal, it marks the first TV roles for newcomers Chenée Taylor, Kaydrah Walker-Wilkie and Akins Subair as Tiana, Tanika and Tionne, respectively.
When their mum disappears, the trio must fight to hide the truth from the outside world in order to stay together as a family. But as Tiana struggles to keep their regular lives afloat, Tionne displaces his grief and Tanika tries to convince her teacher to adopt them, chaos erupts when their mum’s hapless drug dealer Dr Feelgood moves in.
Romola Garai plays the warm-hearted teacher, Ms Jenkins, with Sam Buchanan as Dr Feelgood and Ivanno Jeremiah as fun, laid-back father-of-three Leo. Singer-turned-actor Jamelia is the larger-than-life Fake Jackie, a stand-in for the siblings’ missing mum, with Jennifer Metcalfe as Leo’s new partner Candy and Talitha Wing as Instagram model Rome.
The series has been at least six years in the making after Okoh first started writing a pilot script at the request of producer The Forge (Help, Generation Z). But ever since the play was first performed, she always thought it was a story destined for the screen.
“That’s what I always felt,” Okoh tells DQ ahead of the show’s launch today, “so I think it’s amazing that it has happened. Not all the plays feel like that. But this one, I just felt it needed more of a life.”
That sentiment has been borne out in Okoh’s approach to writing the six-part series, where she has kept the play’s original bookends and filled out the story in between with a blend of new characters and more insight into some of those who already existed.
“Some of the characters in the play are just mentions, rather than fully formed characters, so it was just bringing those to life, giving them more story and breaking it out, basically, and making it more fully formed.”
It was The Forge executive producer Beth Willis who initially started development on the project with Okoh before fellow EP George Ormond picked up the reins. “I was delighted to take it on because I loved the script. I just thought Janice’s voice is so unique, and she has such a particular view of the world,” he says. “I loved the balance of humour and emotion. I loved the originality of the story and the way Janice unfolded that story. And Janice had already spent quite a lot of time developing, first with Beth and Anna Price, who was a development producer, and then with Jade Taylor, who came on as the producer.”
There were four scripts in various stages of completion when Ormond partnered with Okoh, who describes the writing stage as “the best time” of making Just Act Normal. “It was a laugh,” she says. “There was a lot of laughing in the room. It was fun.”
“It was such fun just imagining where Janice was going to go with those characters,” Ormond adds. “You know when you’re working on something where the characters have story potential, and the combination of the situation that Tiana, Tionne and Tanika are in and the characters who surround them – Feelgood, Fake Jackie, Leo, Ms Jenkins – it’s such a rich brew of characters.”
For Okoh, it was about imagining what she’d like to see those characters do, and the circumstances in which they might find themselves, with each episode having a different story “motor.” In a bid to escalate the sense of danger facing the siblings, she added the police to the story, while threats to their future appear in unlikely or well-meaning guises such as Ms Jenkins, who increasingly takes an interest in Tanika and what’s going on in the family.
Yet Just Act Normal always returns to her chief motivation for creating the story, which is to open a discussion about grief and loss. “I still think that’s a taboo topic,” she says. “I really think the show’s done that really well, through all of them. That’s what the show is about. So each character does it in a different way, and each way is valid.”
Okoh – who appeared in the DQ100 2024/25 – also wanted to spark debate about working-class black children, and how the “system” or people respond to them. “It was a big thing for me to have darker -skinned protagonists because, growing up, I didn’t see many shows reflecting me, so I really wanted to reflect that experience. I did push for that a lot in the show.”
The story of Tiana, Tionne and Tanika is also an aspirational one for young people setting out in life who may not always find the accepted path is right for them. “I wanted the kids to aspire not just to go to university, because I think that feels like a middle-class aspiration, whereas there are other talents that people have,” Okoh notes. “I put that in Tiana, and I wanted that to be as valid as Tionne wanting to go university. I just felt like I wanted to show more rounded characters, really.”
Tionne proved to be the most difficult of the siblings to write, seeing as he is a more internalised figure than his sisters. “But his story really just shines through,” Okoh says. “Even though he doesn’t say that much, he’s got such great presence.”
Then when it came to beginning production, “it’s been a baptism by fire,” says the writer, who has previously worked on TV shows such as period drama Sanditon. Just Act Normal is her first original series.
“I’m used to writing for theatre where it’s just me, and radio where it’s just me. I’m also writing a novel where it’s just me. So writing for TV, where it was very collaborative, wasn’t easy for me,” she admits, “but I think I’ve learnt a lot from it. I can see more how useful that is, to be honest, because there were things I wanted that were not the best for the show.
“Obviously there were some things I really fought for, [such as] my comedy, which I think was really great. So it’s just a mix, isn’t it? Trying to push for what you want, compromising and seeing that other people offer better things. I couldn’t imagine the tone, and the look is amazing. It’s a dark show, darkly written, but it’s come through really well. And the music, I just think it’s been amazing.”
Music plays a big part in the series, with many recognisable tracks embedded into the scripts by Okoh for particular sequences, not least an in-car singalong to TLC’s No Scrubs in the opening episode and the use of Rihanna’s Diamonds in episode two.
But while Ormond might have been sweating about the cost of licensing the commercial music, “it was just part of it. It was part of the scene so it had to be in it,” Okoh says. “I didn’t even think [about the cost]. I was like, ‘Oh my God, we can’t get the song? I don’t want to lose that scene.’ But we got the music.”
At a time when the British television industry is in a state of flux amid rising costs and a commissioning slowdown following the streamer-led era of Peak TV, Just Act Normal is an example of how a show can be made for a limited budget with a BBC licence fee and without an international coproduction partner. Distributor Banijay Rights and tax credits also contributed to the budget.
“This is a British show for BBC Three, made for under £1m [US$1.32m] per episode,” Ormond says, “and it was actually really enjoyable meeting that challenge and figuring out what was most important and what really matters [to the show] and how you put that on screen. That’s a good conversation to have.”
In Nathaniel Martello-White (The Strays), Ormond and the production team found a director who could create something “special” despite the financial restrictions, while Okoh was also involved in balancing the scripts to ensure the money was spread across the six episodes.
With the series set in Birmingham, a shift from the original play’s London backdrop, the production established its unit base at an empty college campus in Coventry, where the siblings’ flat was built in a gym.
That base also doubled for scenes set in the show’s primary school, as part of an effort to ensure approximately 50% of the series was shot at the base. “We used the approach that we’d taken on [Channel 4’s school-set drama] Ackley Bridge,” Ormond says. “Nearly all of our locations should be a short drive from our base, and because of the world we’re in, because of the world it’s set in, because the choices that Janice had made, that was achievable.”
Several days’ filming took place at Birmingham’s Broadheath House, which doubled as the show’s “hero estate” where Tiana, Tionne and Tanika live. Outside of scenes filmed in the studio, the whole series was shot in available natural light.
“We’ve done that before on a couple of shows and it’s an interesting process,” Ormond notes. “It frees you up. It makes you focus on the characters and the actors. You don’t spend lots of time lighting. It gives it a particular look and feel, and you need a DP who can embrace that and run with it. Adam Barnett was absolutely the right choice to deliver on that. So those are examples of making choices about how you use your resources and then trying to make those creatively benefit the show.”
Perhaps the most important decision on the show, however, was casting the three central leads. Ormond and Okoh had discussed how the series “lives or dies” on the key trio in a show with “really demanding” scripts.
“Janice coming from theatre, she’s a character writer, writing sometimes quite long scenes. They really require nuance and complexity from the cast,” Ormond says. “So we knew Nat Martello-White would be an actor’s director, as well as delivering the vision. So that [the director] was the first key choice. And then Shaheen Baig, our casting director, is just incredible at finding talent. She did a really big search and found Chenée, Akins and Kaydrah. We were so lucky to have her because it was a pretty rigorous process.”
The casting process was “really frightening,” says Okoh, “especially for the little one, to find Kaydrah, because it was such a demanding role. I think Kaydrah’s phenomenal. She’s just so natural.”
“Janice has written a character who is really intelligent, very charming and is effectively grooming her teacher into becoming a surrogate mum,” Ormond adds, “and Kaydrah delivers all of that. So the casting was absolutely central. It was probably our biggest challenge of the whole thing.”
Okoh is now thinking about ideas for a potential second season, while reflecting on the “long haul” it took to make the show. “I feel like I’ve learned so much,” she says. “You fight for the main things, but not everything. Pace yourself.”
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tagged in: Banijay Rights, BBC Three, George Ormond, Janice Okoh, Just Act Normal, The Forge