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The Guardian
7 hours ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Such Brave Girls: TV so hilariously savage it will make you yowl with pleasure
I love watching real-life siblings on-screen. They bring a knotted history to every interaction, the way they look at one another, or don't. They may love each other; they're definitely stuck with each other. Daisy May and Charlie Cooper were the last to bottle such contradiction; I'm delighted we now have Such Brave Girls (BBC One, Wednesday 2 July, 11.40pm), returning for a second series, in which creator Kat Sadler stars alongside her sister Lizzie Davidson. Cattier than Longleat, it features some of the most savage writing on TV, and makes me yowl with pleasure. It's about traumatised women making terrible choices. Bear with. The ever-excellent Louise Brealey plays Deb, whose husband abandoned his family 10 years ago after popping to the shop for teabags. In financial trouble, she spends her time trying to lock down relations with drippy, slippery widower Dev, played by Paul Bazely, explicitly for his big house. Single-mindedness has made her grim, grasping and less maternal than a stressed hamster. Bad news for daughters Josie and Billie, who give off the stench of joint captivity, and have split into twin coping strategies: one depressed and passive, the other overconfident, bullish and equally lost. There are many jokes about sex, all three women wildly pursuing or running away from ludicrous men. But its most adult theme is desperation, which every character is thinly masking. One of the funniest running jokes is the way Deb and Billie dismiss the 'haunting presence' of Josie. Deb has no time for her depressed daughter's big feelings, interest in art or grapples with lesbianism. Life is about finding a man and moving in with him. She urges her to 'Remember the family crest! Ignore, repress, forget.' Scowling harder than Kanye West, Davidson gets to spit the most deliciously vicious lines. 'She only shaves one leg,' she hisses of an unmarried aunt, 'so when she sleeps on her side she can pretend a man is spooning her.' She's no fan of Josie's rare smile, either. 'Your mouth's doing the right thing, but your eyes are calling Samaritans.' Having turned her obsessive attention away from drug-dealing Nicky, she's now chasing a much older, married man. (They meet in the mornings, as he's too tired to get an erection at night.) 'There's nothing wrong with having an affair, right?' she asks, a shade of self-awareness crossing her face. 'I honestly think it might be the most feminist thing you can do,' responds Josie. The first series announced Sadler as a brilliant voice. Her writing pitilessly skewers the discourse around pop-feminism, queerness, sexuality and mental health. Pitiless does not mean unempathetic – the show was born of personal experience. During lockdown, Sadler revealed to Davidson that she'd spent time on a psych ward after twice trying to kill herself, and her sister admitted she was £20,000 in debt. They found themselves laughing. If you're in a raw place, the fun they have with self-harm, workplace shooting, dissociation and the self-delusion required to live a lie until you die, may be too much. For most of us, it's the medicine. Directed by Simon Bird of The Inbetweeners, and co-produced by A24, there's big underwriting, too. The first series saw a few mannered performances from the supporting cast, but these have settled in now. Its female trinity remain a scream, as the story tacks farcical in ways I won't spoil here. Let's just say they're riding that family crest like a surfboard into disaster. Dark comedy is a phrase overused, and perhaps meaningless. Granted, you have to be the kind of person who finds a mother warning her daughter, 'Try not to poison this family with your personality' funny to get Such Brave Girls. I'd argue that is the central brain-stem of the British psyche. There are strains of Peep Show, Julia Davies, Sharon Horgan and Fleabag. Like them, the show has no message other than that life is absurd, pain inevitable and people ridiculous. That makes it more clear-sighted and honest than any show telling us what to think. And you get sisters tearing strips off each other. Truly, there is eloquence in blood.
BBC News
13 hours ago
- Entertainment
- BBC News
Such Brave Girls: The dark comedy inspired by 'bleak' dating scene
Horrible snogs. Hideous outfits. Heinous bursts of laughter, that's how real-life sisters Kat Sadler and Lizzie Davidson describe the new series of their BBC comedy Such Brave Girls."Being able to have schemes and do twisted things and [to] come from a female perspective, that was really exciting," says Sadler, who wrote the Bafta-winning dark Brave Girls follows sisters Josie (Sadler) and Billie (Davidson) who, along with their mum Deb (Louise Brealey), are desperately trying to keep their heads above water financially and their relationships the rave reviews for series one, the siblings were unsure how the series would be received. "We do talk about a lot of taboo subjects," Davidson says of the comedy, which addresses mental health, parental abandonment and abortion in a not-so-sensitive series one, we see Billie go to an abortion clinic dressed as a witch while another episode sees mum Deb tell Josie her "haunting presence" is dampening Deb's boyfriend's series took home two Baftas – one for best scripted comedy and one for emerging talent: fiction for Sadler. Approaching a follow-up was "nerve-wracking", Sadler admits, explaining how the two bronze awards on her bedside table now seem to loom over her. "I feel like they're judging me," she Davidson feels the success has helped them get away with more this time around and Sadler agrees, adding: "I've really put the characters through the ringer this year. It's more depressing, but maybe more funny." 'The funniest person in the world' Davidson says the series is influenced by their upbringing: "Growing up in an all-woman household, it was just us two and Mum, I think that's the way we see life, like scheming in the bathroom."Much of the action in the show takes place in the lavatory, with the women plotting to make money or manipulate their their characters are cutting in the way they speak to each other, off-screen the sisters are far more earnest, with Sadler explaining how Davidson's off-hand comments have helped her work through plot points that she's been stuck on for adds that she feels lucky to have her sister in the show. "She's the funniest person in the world," she aback and slightly teary, Davidson explains how she'll read early drafts of the script from Sadler under her covers, laughing and jealous of her sister's talent."I hate her. I hate her. I wish it was me. It's so brilliant how nuanced the writing is," she says smiling. The siblings' dynamic is not the only thing influencing the comedy, with Sadler explaining their mum will often send her ideas for plots. "She's really invested," Sadler of series one, she ran through the prospective storylines with her mum."It's not her, but it's definitely inspired by stories that happened to us. So I wanted her to be happy with it," Sadler adds."She signed off everything - she's got the darkest sense of humour of all of us." 'Worst nightmare' Sadler says a lot of her writing is fuelled by the things she sees online and in the news, like the "bleak" dating the new series, mum Deb says the girls are "better dead than single" - a sentiment that runs through the series as the sisters try to cling on to their says she became interested in the idea of being intentionally single, after seeing it all over her TikTok feels this has become more common and adds that a lot of her friends are single. One recent report found that the four most popular dating apps in the UK - Tinder, Hinge, Bumble and Grindr - had all lost UK users between May 2023 and May writer says that while there's lots of empowering things about being single, "it's also very lonely" and she wanted to satirise this idea in her show by having it be the girls' "worst nightmare." With the new series, Sadler wants to continue to "skewer" topical issues and taboo subjects. She says she's particularly proud of how they handled Billie's abortion storyline in series one."I'm so sick of seeing stories about pregnancy and that maternal instinct immediately kicking," Sadler says, adding, "that's not reality for a lot of people. It's not how I feel." 'The truth of being disgusting' The "most important" thing for Sadler was to keep complex women at the centre of the comedy series and to show how grotesque the women can be towards each scenes in the series revolve around the siblings and their mother spewing vicious comments at each other."I think that we haven't seen it before, really, the truth of being disgusting and the way that we talk about each other."You can watch Such Brave Girls on BBC Three and iPlayer on Thursday 3 July.
The Guardian
15-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘Who else can we annoy with our show?': Such Brave Girls, Britain's most gleefully offensive comedy returns
Few writers take criticism well, fewer actively court it. Kat Sadler, however, has an insatiable appetite for negative feedback. When crafting her BBC sitcom Such Brave Girls, the 31-year-old frequently runs the scripts past her younger sister and co-star Lizzie Davidson – but she isn't looking for praise. Instead, 'she wants you to tear it to pieces', says Davidson. 'She loves it.' 'I get off on it,' confirms Sadler, with matter-of-fact melancholy. 'You're like: yeah, yeah, yeah,' says Davidson, mimicking her sister's dismissive response to compliments. 'Now tell me what you didn't like about it.' Unfortunately, Sadler's masochistic streak isn't getting much gratification at the moment: where Such Brave Girls is concerned, complaints have been very thin on the ground. The first series of this vicious and relentlessly outrageous BBC sitcom – in which Sadler and Davidson play Josie and Billie, a pair of desperate, delusional, self-obsessed sisters tiptoeing around their perpetually furious mother – was met with a unanimously enthusiastic response from critics when it aired in the winter of 2023: a slew of award nominations followed; soon after, it won the Bafta for best scripted comedy. This was an exceptional achievement for two reasons. First, because the pair's success seemed to come out of nowhere. Sadler had been a joke writer for hire on TV comedy entertainment shows (Mel Giedroyc: Unforgivable; Joe Lycett's Got Your Back), while Davidson was an aspiring actor marooned in interactive children's entertainment (a particular grim job at a Shrek-themed show attracted bratty kids who seemed to enjoy insulting the cast). Second, because Such Brave Girls was a product of extreme low points in both their lives: during lockdown, the sisters had a phone call in which Davidson confessed she had accrued £20k of debt and Sadler revealed she had been sectioned after trying to end her life twice. Miraculously, the pair managed to see the funny side, and decided to channel their collective misery into a sitcom – keeping Sadler's mental health issues for Josie, but transferring Davidson's debt to their fictional mother, Deb. The result is a remorselessly hilarious show about depression, anxiety, sexuality, abandonment, dysfunctional relationships and poverty that never gets close to worthy, earnest dramedy; something you could probably predict from the very first episode, in which Deb orders Josie – who has been experiencing low moods and panic attacks – to cheer up as her 'haunting presence' is negatively affecting Deb's new boyfriend's libido. I first spoke to the pair a couple of weeks before series one aired. At that point, the sisters (who have different surnames as Sadler is a stage name) were giddy with nerves, grappling with the surreal prospect of their semi-autobiographical sitcom being broadcast to the nation; each day Davidson would refresh the TV planner in the hope of glimpsing it in the schedules. We meet again in December 2024, on the set of series two. Since the show's rapturous reception and Bafta win – an invitation to the British comedy firmament if ever there was one (past winners have included The Office, Peep Show, The Thick of It and Derry Girls) – I assume their lives have been transformed into a whirlwind of showbiz thrills. Have they? 'I wish they had,' says Sadler, eating lunch in a shabby makeshift green room during a brief break from filming. 'You need to hear about the day we won the Bafta. It was just weird.' The pair got an Uber home from the ceremony, 'and it was just like: well, back to our lives. I got up the next morning, went to the office and carried on writing.' Meanwhile, Davidson – a gifted comic actor – immediately went back to her job in a clothing shop. 'And nobody said anything!' says Sadler, still astonished. 'I didn't even take my makeup off from the night before, I just turned up and was like: hey guys!' Davidson recalls. Having envisaged a victorious return to the shop floor, she was quickly brought back down to earth. '[My colleagues] were just like: the shoes are there,' Davidson sighs. She's due to go back to her day job the month after we speak. The pair may not feel like superstars, but the Such Brave Girls set certainly has a buzz about it. Although the action is set in the West Sussex commuter town of Crawley, the show's interior scenes are filmed in a defunct school on the outskirts of Liverpool, and the BBC's director of comedy Jon Petrie and two other senior producers have also made the long journey north-west to check in on one of their hottest properties. Britcom giant Simon Bird, AKA Will from The Inbetweeners – who wrote Sadler a letter asking if he could work on the series after falling in love with the pilot – is once again in the director's chair (in this case, one of the chintzy armchairs in the sisters' fictional living room). I watch Sadler and Davidson perform a two-hander, which differs markedly from that day's script; the pair alter and edit the words as they go along, sometimes for clarity, sometimes for extra laughs and sometimes just because someone forgot a couple of their lines. It is clear that Sadler is genuinely not precious about her dialogue; Bird also seems very relaxed about the on-camera brainstorming. 'There's lots of flexibility, but you also get that sense that Kat knows what it is,' says Sherlock's Louise Brealey, who plays the sisters' mother, Deb. 'They're guardians of their characters,' says Sadler, about the cast. 'So often the thing they want to change is right. It will be something I haven't noticed.' Brealey plays Deb as a fellow Northamptonshire native, so usually makes minor changes to the phrasing to suit her accent, which she amps up for the show. 'You do an accent?' chips in Davidson, with mock confusion. Brealey rolls her eyes. 'They tease me, this is a running joke.' 'It's so subtle,' continues Davidson, as the sisters descend into hysterics. 'Get fucked,' says Brealey. 'My real voice is posh!' It is hard to imagine Josie and Billie baiting Deb with such impunity: the Such Brave Girls matriarch is an extraordinarily cynical, appearance-obsessed woman on the verge, desperate to hang on to her man/meal ticket Dev (Benidorm's Paul Bazely) and ready to brutally lay into her firstborn at a moment's notice (her targets include Josie's ketchup usage, depressive episodes, unshaven legs, round shoulders and androgynous dress sense). Is she going to be as horrible in series two? Sadler jumps to her defence: 'I don't think she's horrible, I think she doesn't mince her words.' Brealey isn't so sure. Actors are meant to be eternally sympathetic to their characters, she says, but 'I would say she's pretty much a monster'. Brealey is clearly very different from Deb: effusive and extroverted, she sings loudly while having her makeup touched up and cringes as she recalls filling pauses in production by performing showtunes for the crew. Josie and Billie, on the other hand, began life as exaggerated versions of the sisters themselves. As well as her mental health issues, Josie shares Sadler's belief that trauma is an interesting personality trait; ever the self-flagellator, she seems to revel in sending herself up. Josie, she insists, 'is the worst one, because she's such a pure narcissist. She really believes she's the main character – everything revolves round her.' Like her character, the real-life Sadler comes across as thoughtful and amenable – but doesn't share her fictional alter ego's cartoonish passivity; Josie is people-pleasing to the point of ridiculousness. Davidson, meanwhile, tells me she identifies with Billie's 'obsession with attention', which her character often attracts via aggro melodrama. In person, she is mischievously irreverent but far more laid-back than Billie, who also works in the bleak world of children's entertainment (an opportunity for many strikingly incongruous costume choices; in one episode she arrives at an abortion clinic dressed as a witch). Series one of Such Brave Girls covered Josie's attempts to get a girlfriend while blocking out the constant presence of her clammy, cockroach-like boyfriend Seb (Freddie Meredith), while Billie pursued her noncommittal 'soulmate' Nicky (Sam Buchanan) with unhinged devotion. In the final episode, the pair attend their paternal grandmother's funeral, hoping to confront their father, who popped out for teabags a decade ago and never came back. (When I tell Sadler I'd presumed that bit hadn't actually happened, she replies: 'No, not teabags.') If series one was the long-awaited debut – into which Sadler could channel all the rich raw material she had accrued over her lifetime – series two is the difficult second album, requiring less literal truth and more imagination. Sadler initially didn't let herself think about a follow-up – it would have been 'too heartbreaking' if it hadn't been recommissioned ('Like: what do I do with all these thoughts?!'). The writing process was daunting and exhausting. 'I have gone loopy. Lizzie's had to do a lot of mental health work on me this year to keep me going,' says Sadler. 'A lot of phone calls, a lot of day trips, a lot of shopping,' nods Davidson. A breakthrough came when Sadler decided to turn up the intensity: the money aspect is 'more stressful, the house is more cramped – everybody's stuck'. Her north star was a determination 'to make everyone's lives worse'. I can confirm that series two is Such Brave Girls 'squared', as Brealey puts it: all the women's romantic, financial and existential problems remain but intensified to nightmarish proportions. Sadler also decided to make a list of hot-button topics to weave into the script: 'stuff that had been annoying me in the news or a concept I'd seen people get irritated about online. Then I'd think: how would our characters deal with that?' The answer, usually, is in the most unenlightened way possible: in series one, depression is an irritant, not conforming to beauty standards is 'selfish', therapists are cashing in on other people's misery, trauma is a turn-on, sex is just something to 'get through', and suicide is used as emotional blackmail. Series two, meanwhile, mercilessly satirises the idea of contented singledom, and puts uproariously novel spins on age-gap affairs and coercive control. This is one of the secrets of Such Brave Girls' success: it combines contemporary relevance – the show is essentially about a depressed woman grappling with her sexuality – with an utter lack of compassion and empathy. Yet while the show rebels against the sanctimony that has plagued modern comedy, it doesn't hark back to old-school political incorrectness. The jokes about Josie's exponentially serious mental health issues do not punch down because they closely mimic Sadler's own experiences. 'If you lived it, if it has truth, you can get away with anything,' she says. Still, in a landscape of warm, big-hearted, issue-led comedy, Such Brave Girls feels deliciously risque. For series two, Sadler was focused on 'how nefarious we can make our characters' and 'who else we can annoy with our show'. 'How much offence we can cause,' adds Brealey. Does Sadler think the show caused offence? 'I don't really look online at that stuff,' she says, brow furrowed. If she had, she wouldn't have found much pushback. Such Brave Girls has achieved a rare feat: a not safe, not nice and genuinely boundary-pushing sitcom that hasn't caused any discernible upset. Which, for a criticism junkie like Sadler, might not be the news she was hoping for. Series two of Such Brave Girls airs on 3 July on BBC Three and iPlayer. The charity Mind is available on 0300 123 3393 and Childline on 0800 1111. In the US, call or text Mental Health America at 988 or chat In Australia, support is available at Beyond Blue on 1300 22 4636, Lifeline on 13 11 14, and at MensLine on 1300 789 978
