Make or Break
In Channel 4 comedy Break Clause, a former couple navigate their break-up while living under the same roof. As DQ watches filming in Manchester, creator Jess Bray and executive producer Mark Freeland explain the power of this domestic story with “epic” emotions.
Amid the darkness of production stage four at Space Studios Manchester, Samuel Bottomley and Lara Ricote are sitting on the set of a sparsely dressed flat. Boxes of coat hangers and house plants sit in the bare living room beside a red sofa and yellow dining chairs. In the bedroom, an unmade bed is surrounded by bags of belongings and an empty clothes rack.
With DQ watching, production on Channel 4’s upcoming comedy Break Clause is coming to the end of its 80-day shoot. But in this scene, there’s nothing to laugh about. Instead, it’s full of sadness and possible regret.
The six-part series follows Ben (Bottomley) and Lil (Ricote) as they navigate the end of their relationship while continuing to share their London flat. At this pivotal moment, the pair look set to sign the titular form that will end their shared tenancy – but will they go through with it?
As filming takes place, series creator and writer Jess Bray observes the action on a monitor just outside the set – “a typical London flat, except in Manchester” – while director Alice Snedden runs through a few takes with Bottomley and Ricote. When she’s happy and ready to move on, she tells the stars: “That was great. Really, really great.”
“I’ve got to thank Alice for being so generous to allow me to be here,” Bray tells DQ. “A lot of directors potentially wouldn’t want the writer being around so much, but Alice is also a writer, so she understands it’s really beneficial having me around, and it’s been just great.
“We had all this rehearsal time with them up here, and I was still just rewriting. Then watching scenes with Alice, I will always let her do two or three takes, and then I’ll step in and go, ‘Do you know what, that line possibly isn’t hitting in the same way,’ or because it’s comedy, ‘Let’s try some alts for jokes.’ I’ve learned so much about writing being on set. It’s one thing writing a script, it’s another thing writing a producible script.”
Produced by BBC Studios Comedy for Channel 4, in coproduction with Germany’s ZDFneo, Break Clause started life eight years ago when Bray wanted to write a show about a relationship – “a really epic story about a seemingly small thing.”
“I wanted to make a domestic story feel really epic,” she says. “Because with first loves, those emotions often are pretty epic. And I think I have done that actually. It’s weird reading back the script I wrote in 2017/18. There are big chunks of it that are in this series, which is pretty surreal. It’s really odd that I haven’t got any better at writing. But in a way, I have achieved it because I wanted to make something simple about love, and specifically first love.”
Bray describes Lil as a “worldly person” who grew up in a family that was rich in possessions and experiences, but not so rich in love. “She’s cultured and sees the world in very bright colours, and she’s very funny,” the writer says. “She’s very optimistic, very romantic.”
Ben is also a romantic, but in a slightly more grounded way, having grown up in a family that was full of love but having been exposed to less of the world. They first meet when they are both studying in Leeds – Ben is from the Yorkshire city while Mexican-American Lil arrives to study architecture – before moving to London.
“What drew them together is that she possesses this worldliness that he aspires to, and he possesses this groundedness that she aspires to,” Bray explains. “What keeps them together despite their situation is this tether that can’t really be explained medically. It feels other-worldly, but there’s just this insane connection they have, and they can learn a lot from each other. So they stick around.”
Set across six months, the story dips in and out of Ben and Lil’s relationship, picking up with them at key moments and leaving viewers to guess what might have happened to them in the interim. But one of the challenges was bringing in the show’s supporting cast into the fray.
“When they’d left Leeds, they’d left their home town, they’d left their gang of mates who are so great and funny. A challenge was going, ‘OK, are we going to give them a new gang of mates in London, or how are we going to bring in the old gang?’” She then decided to bring them back organically, “so we have a christening back in Leeds, we have a Thanksgiving dinner they’re invited to down in London.
“The six-month structure also gave me the chance to do something I really like doing, which is throwing an audience in at the start of an episode and going, ‘You’ve got some catching up to do. Things have happened that I’m not going to tell you about.’”
However, Bray never wanted to paint either central character as a “monster” when the reasons for their break-up come to light. “I never wanted there to be a goodie and a baddie, and so playing with those dynamics across the six episodes, across the six months, was really interesting to me,” she says. “How can we slightly redeem ourselves? It’s not black and white, someone’s journey to redemption.”
Much like true love, the path to making Break Clause didn’t always run smooth. The series pitch went out to “lots of people” but Bray kept being told there wasn’t a hook and that there was no reason to keep watching. “And I thought, ‘There absolutely was,’” she says.
“The hook is the situation they’ve been put in. Lots of people did want much higher-concept shows, and I just pushed back against that, because the emotions are huge. To me, that’s far more interesting than a big epic in space. I want to see really human stories and human emotions just dialled up in a real world – high chemistry over high concept.”
She adds: “Ben and Lil have always been the heart of this story. And I’m proud of myself for not veering away and throwing them in a mass shooting event. I’m glad I stuck to my guns and went, ‘No, I think their break-up, and potentially make-up, is the thing.’”
Break Clause was later commissioned by Channel 4 for its Comedy Blaps strand, with a 15-minute short airing in 2024 also starring Bottomley and Ricote. But Bray didn’t want to just shoot the first 15-minutes of her pilot script as a taster of the full series she imagined. Instead, she wanted to make the “most compelling” piece of television possible and showcase every aspect of Ben and Lil’s story.
“I knew that in 15 minutes I couldn’t do everything I wanted to do with these characters, so I thought I needed to leave everyone wanting more, and leave them on a big cliffhanger, basically,” she says. “We just got so lucky with who we cast and how it looked, and that was so much down to Alice and Lara and Samuel, and it informed the series in such a huge way.”
A full series was subsequently commissioned last summer to air this year. Global sales are being handled by BBC Studios, which will present the series to buyers at its BBC Studios Showcase during next week’s London TV Screenings.
Executive producer Mark Freeland, from BBC Studios Comedy, first saw Break Clause as a spec script written by Bray. He couldn’t believe it hadn’t been picked up, as “the writing was so good.” But as Bray had discovered, he recognised the challenge of getting a commission lay in the fact it was a romantic comedy, with no “great twist.”
“There’s no great concept. It is a romcom, except what I loved was that you jump time between episodes, so the gap in between episodes is almost as intriguing,” he says. “It has a light format to it, which is cool, and the writing was so naughty, rude and prepared to be silly.
“Having done a lot of audience sitcom in my time, which is now sadly a lost art – Miranda and stuff like that – I really like funny. I really like scenes and episodes that deliver, and [Bray is] prepared to write really funny jokes.”
Freeland believes the lack of romcoms on screen is “a piece of national vandalism in the UK,” with drama more profitable and comedy harder to sell. “Less-good comedy is more exposing than less-good drama,” he notes. “No one seems to care if a drama isn’t good. People really care if a comedy isn’t.”
The exec also believes Break Clause has a warmth and humanity to it that “the world needs more of,” particularly when a lot of comedy does have a “cruel edge,” whereas “this has nothing but love and goodwill.”
After writing on We Might Regret This and The Outlaws, Bray felt she had been through a training camp for writing Break Clause, having watched someone else’s show go from script to screen.
“With this, the nicest thing has been having a bit of more of a hold of the thing as a whole,” she says. “You know there’s a cohesive tone throughout, and I’ve loved being across it all, which is a weird thing to say, but I wrote all the episodes.”
Bray has also been across other elements of the show, working closely with Snedden, production designer Luana Hanson and costume designer Sara Hassan. “So I was always there for the final conversations when they were OK’ing last looks and things, and Alice would bring me into any conversation I wanted to be in,” she says. “But it was more when it felt important to story or character. Other than that, I could be a bit more hands-off, actually.”
One element of the show Bray didn’t know she would care about so much, however, was the old text messages between Ben and Lil that flash up on screen. “I’ve loved working with the graphic designer and he goes, ‘Right, we need some text messages between them before this text. Should I just write them?’ And I’m like, ‘No, no, no, no.’ That has been, weirdly, my favourite thing to write, like, ‘Had a really good lasagne last night.’ I want to write in their voices. It’s been my favourite thing. Thank God I’m here for that.”
Freeland believes audiences will come to care for Ben and Lil because of the chemistry between Bottomley (How to Have Sex) and stand-up comedian Ricote (Mitchell & Webb Are Not Helping). They are joined on screen by a supporting cast featuring John Thomson, Lucy Black, Catherine Cohen, Charly Clive, Hammed Animashaun, Michael Workéyè, Jessica Knappett, Nathan Foad, Assa Kanouté, Jack Shep, Tamika Bennett, Jack James Ryan and Lucas Jones.
“There are treats all over the cast. Everyone is amazing, but it hangs on their chemistry,” Freeland says. “We always knew that if they had no chemistry, it could be a bit of a surface watch, but they are so cute and funny and warm. You believe it.
“Working with someone who you genuinely don’t quite know what’s going to happen next is really amazing,” he says of Ricote. “She’s quite an exceptional human being in lots of ways. She’s got an energy. It was very obvious when I met her that she was something different. She’s unique.”
As for Bottomley, “Sam is so funny,” the exec adds. “Someone like Sam, so experienced and so skilled, you can see him modulating his performance. I still marvel at that. He’s a very clever boy.”
Looking ahead, Bray has a “solid three-season arc” in mind for Ben and Lil. But until she gets news of a potential return to Break Clause, “I will always be dreaming of where Ben and Lil are next,” she says. “But I’ll go and have affairs with other shows while decisions are being made.”
Like that? Watch this! Suggested by AI, selected by DQ
Starstruck: A 20-something Londoner who sleeps with a man she didn’t know was a movie star wakes up to find he actually wants to date her, leaving her juggling zero-hour contract jobs, chaotic flatshares and a very public almost-relationship.
Stath Lets Flats: A painfully inept letting agent in London tries to impress his dad and secure rentals for equally hapless tenants, turning every viewing into a comedy about bad housing, bad timing and even worse communication.
The Flatshare: Two cash-strapped strangers agree to share a one-bedroom flat and even a bed on opposite shifts, falling for each other through passive-aggressive Post-its and overlapping emotional baggage before they ever meet properly.
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tagged in: BBC Studios, Break Clause, Channel 4, Jess Bray, Mark Freeland, Studios Comedy, ZDFneo