Smash hit

Feminists have accused Cherry of rewinding the portrayal of married women back to the early Sixties before the Pill gave them some say over whether they became mothers. But Cherry’s point is that just because women have choices does not make them resigned to their consequences.

“The whole series is about choices. These women make choices every episode about ways to kind of fix their life, usually bad ones — that’s where the fun comes in. I think of my own life, where I was an out-of-work writer, pretty desperate. I had chosen to be a writer. I had chosen show-business. And I’d made some other, smaller choices along the way. I was living with the consequences of those choices and I was desperately unhappy and concerned and fearful for my future.”

Cherry’s weight and girth — his voluminous trousers are held up by a pair of Oliver Hardy-style braces — suggest a legacy of unhappiness that may not even now have been fully resolved by success. But the series, thank goodness, is not called Desperate Scriptwriters and its subject is not him but (well) his mother. In it, her personality is split between two of the housewives. Lynette, who gives up her career to become a full-time mother but hates motherhood, is Martha Cherry in the early years of marriage. Her later incarnation is Bree (like Mrs Cherry a porcelain-complexion redhead), who is fixated on imposing the “perfect home” on her family.

As a substitute, for what? An unhappy sex life? “Well, I don’t know much about my parents’ sex life, but I do think that my mother is very much — was and is — a lady and wants to conduct herself in a way where she’s gentle and kind and good to people and wants people to be ‘pleasant’. She wanted us to behave like her and we just fought her every step of the way.”

In the penultimate episode Bree’s husband, Rex, has a heart attack. Rather than speed him to the hospital, Bree leaves him clasping his chest on the stairs as she attends to more pressing domestic chores. “I never leave the house with an unmade bed. You know that,” she tells her children.

Is that what his mother had done when Truman had a heart attack? “Yes, although in fairness to my poor mother, my dad, for about four or five, maybe even six years straight, he would have a heart attack, like, once a year. It got to be a fairly common occurrence in the family to be woken up in the middle of the night by the sounds of my parents preparing to go to a hospital. They started having these marital problems and one night she just made the bed before taking him. I think she was annoyed that she had to get up again — he forgot to take his medicine or something — and I think maybe, yes, there was a part of her that didn’t care if he made it to the hospital on time.

“I was 20, maybe 22, and I remember at the time going, ‘Mom, why aren’t you taking him to the hospital?’ And it was just one of those weird family moments where she said, ‘Well my day has started and when my day starts I make the bed. You know that.’ And I went, ‘Oh-kaaaay’.

“But thank God for my family’s weirdness; now I drive a Lexus because of it.”

In another recent episode, Rex and Bree’s teenage son, Andrew, announced that he thought he was gay. Bree responds that she would still love him “even if he were a murderer”. I make a wild stab and ask if this was his story, too.

“Yes, that whole story was based on me. That was the first thing she said to me. ‘I’d love you even if you were a murderer.’ I looked at her and I just thought, that almost sounds nice.”

Like Andrew, Marc was taken to see a Christian counsellor who said he could be “fixed”. Like Andrew, he was also told by his mother “the word’s not gay, it’s sodomy’.” And did he, like Andrew, resolve to wait and wait, then take a terrible revenge? “No, I didn’t do that.”

But isn’t Desperate Housewives, his revenge? “Oh no. No. It’s actually — it’s my way of honouring my mother. She’s gotten her face in TV Guide in America. No, I did not turn into a psychopathic teenager. Andrew’s a sociopath. I was not. But I was hurt.”

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