Who’s the Daddy?
Writer Danielle Ward, director Damon Beesley and executive producer Phil Gilbert discuss their partnership on BBC Three series Daddy Issues, the challenge with comedies, and working with “dream” stars Aimee Lou Wood and David Morrissey.
In the age of streaming, when audiences have an extraordinary array of choices at the touch of a button and aren’t slow to turn off something they don’t like, launching a new comedy might be the toughest task of all.
But the makers of Daddy Issues, a classic odd-couple series starring Aimee Lou Wood (Sex Education) and David Morrissey (Sherwood), are feeling “bullish” about the state of funny TV ahead of the show’s launch on BBC Three and BBC iPlayer this Thursday.
“I’ve been in the industry a long time now and I’ve seen a few cycles of comedy dropping out of favour slightly with commissioners, but it never really drops out of favour with audiences,” director and executive producer Damon Beesley tells DQ. “Dramas do better overall, or they’re more bankable. You can do a drama that’s kind of middling, and it will still sort of work. But as someone once said, if you make a comedy that’s just sort of middling, it’s like you’ve done a shit in someone’s front room. They can be quite polarising; the bar’s a lot higher to enjoyment but when they work, they work really well.”
“Daddy Issues feels like it sits in that sweet spot,” says fellow EP Phil Gilbert. “It feels like it should be a comedy drama, the kind of comedy dramas we’ve seen in the past 10 years, but actually in its DNA is something quite traditional and quite classic sitcom. It feels to me like a very contemporary version of what a sitcom should look like.”
Written by Danielle Ward, the series introduces two deeply flawed characters who just happen to be father and daughter. When Gemma (Wood) discovers she is pregnant after a mid-flight hook-up with a stranger, she’s left to rely on her kind-but-useless father Malcolm (Morrissey), who is struggling following the break-up of his marriage and living in a bedsit for divorced dads.
After Malcolm moves into Gemma’s flat, they experience dating disasters, toxic friendships and messy family dynamics, as well as encountering a dangerously sociopathic antenatal teacher.
“Danielle was very clear that she wanted to write something that was funny first,” Gilbert says. “She very much wanted it to be joke-heavy, with big set pieces and characters you love spending time with – the kind of thing that could just return and return. So that was always what she went for. She used her own experiences as a jumping-off point, but really she wanted to write a big, funny, silly sitcom. That’s what she’s done.”
The show’s opening scene sets the tone, as Gemma and a mystery man are found in what transpires to be an airplane toilet. Notably, it was also a sample scene Ward sent to Fudge Park Productions – set up by Beesley and fellow The Inbetweeners co-creator Iain Morris – when she first pitched them the series.
“That was when all of us at the company thought, ‘She’s got something. This is a really great idea,’” Beesley says. “She’s a brilliant writer, and that opening scene just really grabbed everyone. It does a really good job. It’s interesting enough, it’s really engaging, it’s clear who the protagonist is straight away and it just delivers. That is a smart way to open a comedy because it is a really hard thing to do. Hopefully audiences are going to enjoy that, and then that leads you into the rest of the story.”
Distributed internationally by Fremantle, Daddy Issues arrives on air less than a year after it was first announced by the BBC. But this wasn’t a fully formed project that Ward had been pitching for several years. Instead, several versions of ‘Gemma’ had featured in some of her scripts, while she had written a scene featuring Gemma and Malcolm four or five years ago because the characters are so reminiscent of her and her father.
Ward then wrote the whole series in three months, with each episode set around a particular milestone during pregnancy, from the moment Gemma’s baby bump becomes visible to her first NCT (National Childbirth Trust) class.
“The seed of Malcolm is my dad, but when I wrote episode two he became a really different character,” Ward explains. “My parents split up and I went to visit my dad, who was still in the family home, and the only thing that worked was the toaster. It was Christmas and he was like, ‘I’m just gonna have toast for Christmas.’ I was like, ‘Oh my fucking God, what is wrong with you?’ So there was an element of that [in Malcolm].
“Gemma’s frustration with her dad is probably more me, and Gemma’s independence from the people around her is probably me. But by the time we get to episode two, they’ve really turned into their own characters. Malcolm for the rest of the season isn’t my dad, and what David’s done with the character, I only do 50% of that character building. When you hand it over to the actor, if you’re working with a good actor, they bring so much more than what you’ve put on the page. And Aimee Lou and David are both exceptional.”
Gilbert had previously read some of Ward’s scripts, but they weren’t quite right for Fudge Park. Then when Ward sent him the first 10 pages of Daddy Issues, “they were just so instinctively funny and silly but oddly truthful as well. They really resonated,” he says.
“It just felt very much in the wheelhouse of what we’ve done over the years in terms of the comedies we’ve written or we’ve produced at Fudge Park and our former company Bwark,” Beesley notes. “It felt instantly relatable. They felt like characters that could be a lot of our viewers straight away. There’s a truthfulness to it and her writing is bold. She’s definitely joke-driven and wants to go for the jugular, but she’s really hypersensitive to all the tragedy and awkwardness of human interaction as well, which she does brilliantly.”
“There’s a world in which the show could be just a litany of really horrible men and you hate spending time with them and you wish the worst upon them,” Gilbert adds. “But what she’s able to do is write very warm, vulnerable characters whose rubbishness is properly exposed. That’s the great thing about it – she’s made it very universal. It doesn’t feel like some written vendetta against terrible men. It just feels like some vulnerable humans on show and, actually, we can slightly love them for their vulnerability and their failings.”
When it came to finding the show’s stars, the team secured what Gilbert describes as “a dream cast.” For Ward, Wood was “always” Gemma, and the writer even listed the actor on a document she used during her pitch meetings with broadcasters before the BBC snapped up the series. At that same stage, Malcolm “was just a character” and it was Gilbert who suggested Morrissey – an actor known for dramatic roles but who has comedy credits including Inside No 9.
“There was never any other name,” Ward says. “We went to him. I was pretty much expecting David to not do it, but I was like, ‘It’d be amazing if he did.’ In two days, he read it and got back and said he loved it. We were very lucky.”
By the time the lead actors signed on, Ward had written the first two episodes – but it gave her plenty of time to begin writing for them in the roles after her initial discussions with the pair. She then went away to write the rest of the series.
Like Wood and Morrissey, Ward is also an executive producer on the show, which meant she could have more involvement across the entire production than a writer might traditionally have in the UK. She went on location recces and was involved in every key decision, while she also attended every day of the edit. “Without doing some spreadsheets with budgets on, I don’t think I could have done more,” she says.
But with experience as a stand-up comedian and a writer on TV shows such as In The Long Run and Brassic, Ward found stepping up to pen her first original series wasn’t as intimidating as it might otherwise have been.
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“I’ve been working in comedy for 20 years and writing scripts for a really long time, and I’ve learnt my craft, I’m fast and respected and I know what I’m doing,” she says. “It was obviously intimidating having to write it in three months. No one does that, but it felt really good. I felt really confident; I’m really confident in what my comic voice is and I’ve been through the process of working out who I am on the page in the same way that I was working out who I was on stage for years.
“The main difference was I just got to be more involved. Sometimes you’re writing a script [for someone else’s show] and you’ve got a really clear idea of who a character is, but then they come back with an actor that you wouldn’t necessarily have chosen and the performance isn’t really what you would have wanted, but that’s the job, so you have to hand it over. The great thing about Daddy Issues was it’s my decision at the end of the day.”
Directing the six-parter alongside Catherine Morshead (The Full Monty), Beesley used references such as Colin from Accounts to bring a “pretty domestic but beautiful and cinematic” visual style to the series.
“The camera doesn’t always have to be flying around. It’s different textures for different projects,” he notes. “Here it feels really real and human, and we just wanted to capture that. There’s ambition in the way we shot it but, ultimately, it’s a performance piece.”
A big part of his role was giving the cast confidence to play on set. “It’s quite exposing and vulnerable being in a space where you think you can be funny,” he says about appearing in a comedy, “so a lot of what you do is trying to create an environment for people to feel really emboldened to go for it.”
Wood and Morrissey certainly found a chemistry on set together, and Beesley would often have to break up the laughter between takes to ensure the day’s shooting schedule was met.
“We’d got a little bit behind schedule, but we got to the studio thinking, ‘This will be the easy part and we will catch up.’ And actually, Aimee and David, from the minute they were in that studio on their own, they were just having so much fun,” recalls Beesley. “They genuinely couldn’t stop laughing at each other. They just had that spark, and it was fantastic to be watching that. It’s such a huge part of what the show’s charm is.”
The exec describes cast chemistry as the biggest challenge in making a comedy, with no major set pieces that required logistical problem-solving akin to Neil’s waterslide mishap in The Inbetweeners 2. For that he praises Bafta-winning casting director Aisha Bywaters, who also brought together a supporting roster that boasts Arian Nik, Sharon Rooney, David Fynn, Taj Atwal and Sarah Hadland.
“You fail or succeed in casting in comedy. In any comedy, you can have everything together. But if you don’t get the casting right, it just doesn’t hang together,” he says. “Everyone just clicked. My main concern going into anything as a director is just to go get that casting right. When it’s not right, it’s really telling.”
He also picks out Ward as an example of the talent Fudge Park wants to work with: “What we’ve always been about primarily is just discovering talent and working with them. We do love championing the talent and we love Danielle. Danielle Ward, superstar. We’re very lucky to work with her.”
“I’ve just written what I think is funny,” adds Ward, who cites Peep Show, Bottom, Red Dwarf and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia among her own inspirations. “I love comedy, I’ve always loved comedy. I’ve been a comedian since I left university. The idea I was going to turn around and write dramedy, I was like, ‘No.’ I can do that, but this was always going to be a proper comedy.
“I don’t know what audiences want. I’ve just written something I think is funny, and that’s the best thing you can do as a comedy writer. If you’re trying to chase an audience that isn’t you, that’s really difficult in comedy.”
tagged in: Aimee Lou Wood, BBC, BBC Three, Daddy Issues, Damon Beesley, Danielle Ward, David Morrissey, Fremantle, Fudge Park Productions, Phil Gilbert