No regrets
Friends-turned-TV collaborators Kyla Harris and Lee Getty tell DQ how they drew on their own experiences to create BBC comedy drama We Might Regret This, delving into its themes of friendship and romance and how they hope to lead the charge for disability representation on screen.
Before they started working together, Kyla Harris and Lee Getty adhered to one rule throughout their 20 years of friendship – they never commented on or criticised each other’s work. Harris is a visual artist and Lee a writer, but to discuss each other’s creativity felt like a “danger zone.”
“I think that was actually insecurity,” Getty tells DQ. Then when they did start collaborating and giving each other notes on different things, they realised they had a “real creative language – one that would lead to them on a seven-year journey to make BBC comedy drama We Might Regret This. The series draws on the real experiences of and friendship between Harris, who as a wheelchair user requires a personal assistant (PA), and Getty, who once fulfilled that role.
“We had talked a lot about that – that there must be some way to show this world that we inhabit and these strange experiences,” Getty continues. “Then when shows like Transparent and Girls came out, we started seeing there was a way to approach it that was authentic enough, but also comedic and nuanced enough to really get across what we hoped to portray.”
Harris picks up: “But first and foremost, we wanted it to be funny because, in all of the situations we found ourselves in, there was just such fertile ground for comedy. A lot of people don’t think that when it comes to disability, and specifically having to rely on someone for your daily needs. We wanted to upend the tropes of tragedy and inspiration that you see all the time.
“What was weird was we wrote all of these scenes that would be outlandish and outrageous and also very authentic, and then I forgot I had to act in it. That I’d have to then perform those scenes was a bit of a surprise.”
The six-part series stars Harris as Freya, a 30-something Canadian artist and tetraplegic who has moved to London to live with 50-something lawyer Abe (Darren Boyd). But though their romance is on the fast track, Freya’s disability means her PA is never far away – and when Freya struggles to find the right person for the job, her impulsive best friend Jo (Elena Saurel) takes it on.
On screen, Freya and Jo aren’t the only characters based in reality, with Harris stating that the ensemble – which also includes Sally Phillips as Abe’s ex-wife Jane and Aasiya Shah as Frey’s former PA Ty – are all amalgamations of people Harris and Getty know or have talked to. They have also drawn on the experiences of their disabled friends to further draw a line between their own relationship and that between Freya and Jo.
Examples see the well-meaning but clumsy Ty walk in on Freya and Abe during a particularly intimate moment, while Jo undergoes PA training at the hands of an uncompromising ex-military tutor (Lolly Adefope) who uses a dummy to demonstrate how to ease constipation through rectal stimulation.
“There is actually training where they do stimulate the anus of a rubber dummy. That does happen,” Harris says, “but Lee never went on that training. I’ve never been on that training. But PAs would tell me about the training they would do. So it’s very much inspired by our lives, but nothing in there has actually happened [to us].”
“We try to find that authenticity mostly in our friendship. And we also found some of the tensions and jokes in that collaborative space of helping as a PA and also being friends,” Getty says. “Those tensions are emotionally true, even if the scene itself isn’t really what happened or I’ve never really gone through that. We tried to find the emotional truth.”
Abe, however, is entirely fictional, and Boyd played a part in shaping the character once he was cast for the role. Another key figure behind the scenes is executive producer Ash Atalla (The Office, The IT Crowd).
“The dynamic between a disabled person, their PA and their partner is something we’ve even spoken about with Ash, for example, who is a wheelchair user,” Getty adds. “When he saw our concept, he understood the strange dynamic of having a partner in a space with a PA, so we drew on different people’s experiences of that as well.”
Produced by Atalla’s Roughcut TV (Big Boys, Stath Lets Flats) in association with Village Roadshow Television for BBC Two, the project first emerged seven years ago when Atalla loved the pitch for the series and took it to Channel 4, which commissioned a script and then a pilot.
However, development lost momentum during the pandemic and C4 passed on the series following a change of leadership. It was then taken to the BBC, which wanted to pick it up – so long as a US partner was brought on to co-finance it. That led Atalla to canvass for potential investment across the Atlantic, and Village Roadshow decided to come on board as a coproducer.
Meanwhile, Harris and Getty were writing the series, with Jess Bray (The Outlaws) and Sarah Kendall (Frayed) also penning episodes.
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“I didn’t really know how to write beforehand,” admits Harris. “We watched Transparent and we were both like, ‘Oh my gosh, there needs to be a series about disability.’ And Lee was like, ‘Let’s write it.’ Then we just did it.”
The friends, who are both Canadian, would break down the story together before taking particular scenes and writing them with “free rein.” Then they would exchange their work and be “brutal” with each other.
“We would just delete everything the other person wrote, or keep a little bit or work on it if it felt like it was working,” Getty says. “We would just pass it back and forth, back and forth until we really couldn’t tell who had written what. Then with the other writers, we got feedback on their scripts and then took a final pass and oversaw the tone of all of them so that they worked together.”
“There were definitely scenes we had in mind [to include] but we didn’t really know where it would go,” Harris says. “So it was kind of a surprise to us, but that was part of the creative process.”
From the situations Freya and Jo find themselves in, to the humour across the series, authenticity informs every aspect of We Might Regret This. “That’s what felt very natural,” Harris notes, comparing the use of comedy to that of Donald Glover’s Atlanta. “It’s not like every three lines you get a gag. We’re not those kind of slapstick comedy writers. But we did just find that any scenario we got in where people would normally feel ashamed or embarrassed or fearful was just hilarious to us, and we knew we couldn’t be the only people experiencing this.”
One scene sees Jo helping Freya to pee in an alleyway using a catheter because the office building they were in doesn’t have a disabled toilet. But Jo, the self-anointed “pied piper of piss,” ends up getting splashed in the face with urine. “Oh, it really stings. Oh, and it’s salty.”
“Some of those more extreme scenes, like peeing in the alleyway, are very much embellished and made up,” Getty says. “I have had piss in my mouth. I admit that has happened. But a lot of other things have not happened. We’ve kind of embellished them, but they seem to translate. They were just such unique circumstances that the humour was naturally there a lot of the time.”
Though it surprised Harris that she might have to play the scenes they were writing for Freya, she had always harboured hopes of starring as her fictional self on screen. “Before I was disabled, I wanted to be an actor, and after I had my accident and became disabled, I got the feedback that I wasn’t going to be cast in anything,” she says. “I hadn’t seen a wheelchair user on screen before who was actually a wheelchair user, so I thought I wouldn’t be able to pursue acting.”
During development, C4 and Roughcut supported her with acting lessons, but she still had to audition for the chance to play a version of herself. The BBC then continued to support her, with Harris working alongside an acting coach during pre-production and filming.
“So many people are asking me if I want to act again. Uh, yes, I am available. My diary is clear, so call me,” Harris jokes. However, she admits it was difficult to separate herself as an actor from her other jobs as co-creator, co-writer and associate producer on the show.
“Lee really took on the lion’s share of writing just before we were going to be in production. Then I would try to focus on acting while I was actually on set, but sometimes it was a bit difficult because you do put the other hats on or wear them all at the same time,” she says. “Lee was just incredible and took on so much for me so I could try to focus on the acting.”
“As a friend who had never seen my friend of 20 years act, it was absolutely wild to see her just turn on this ability I had no idea she had,” Getty remarks. “She’s a really good actress. That’s one thing everybody unanimously agrees on. She would just turn it on and be incredible in all these scenes. It was such a pleasure to observe, and also kind of scary.”
Long before the cameras began rolling, Harris and Getty sought to ensure every aspect of the production was accessible as possible. As well as offering their own thoughts and suggestions, they worked with access coordinators Julie Fernandez, Ella Glendining, Sara Bolder and Alison Smith to support and shape that environment.
Every detail on the show also needed to be completely authentic. “We wanted other disabled people to look at that catheter and know that was the right one,” Getty says. “We wanted these weird details about disability to be very accurate. But we worked with such incredibly collaborative people. Our director, Nick Collett, and our producer, Inez Gordon, were always bringing us back into the creative process and making sure it was our voice and our show and that it was really fantastic.”
But as Harris explains, the access coordinators on the show weren’t there just for the disabled people among the cast and crew. “Making the set accessible for disabled people benefits everyone,” she says. “We also really hope to shift the industry to have better working hours, because it’s just such an exclusive environment because of its intensity. We just hope that changes.”
She compares the progress of disabled representation in the television industry to a ballroom dance. “It’s quick, quick, slow. You think you’re getting ahead and then it’s like, ‘Oh, we’ve gone backwards.’ We hope there’s progress being made, and hopefully this will be part of that progress.”
In We Might Regret This, viewers will certainly see the world from Freya’s perspective, not least due to some of the filming techniques used. In one instance, DOP Will Hanke rigged a camera to Freya’s wheelchair so it would move through a scene with her.
“Will was such an amazing DOP because he really took it on like, ‘What can we do about disability that hasn’t been done before?’ Because there’s so much that hasn’t been done, it became a really exciting creative challenge,” Harris says. “Nick, the director, was thinking I’d be quite still in the scenes and there would be lots of movement around me. But actually the scenes with the most movement are the ones I’m in.”
Through the story, Freya faces up to figuring out what it means to be a disabled person in a non-disabled world, and how it affects her perception of herself and of other people. “She’s trying to work that out while being in a relationship with Jo and being in a relationship with Abe, so they really influence her journey with that too, and she influences them,” Harris says.
“It was always the intention to make it a show about messy relationships,” adds Getty. “Everybody has different needs, and they all meet their needs in different ways. That was always the core theme. But it’s also about Freya’s perspective.”
Perhaps the most important relationship on the show is the one between Harris and Getty, who made a promise to support one another through making the series no matter what pressures or stresses they faced. “That’s the one thing that could not be broken,” Harris says.
“In a way, so many of our friendships are actually our most important relationships. Lee and I have just honed our communication skills, and we really do operate as one brain a lot of the time. If we spend too much time apart, I feel like I’m not fully expressing myself and vice versa, and a lot of that is what makes the show unique.”
tagged in: BBC, Kyla Harris, Lee Getty, Roughcut TV, Village Roadshow Television, We Might Regret This