When Sharon Horgan sat down to write the one-off finale of her much-celebrated
BBC comedy series Pulling, she thought: “Let’s just f***ing kill them
all. Let’s kill all the characters!” Horgan, the show’s 39-year-old star and
co-writer was, it is safe to say, coming from an unhappy place. Pulling,
a glorious ribald and Bafta-nominated sitcom about the romantic
misadventures of three female flatmates in dead-end London, had been
unceremoniously axed by BBC Three (where it originated) after only two
series. Thus the finale, conceived as a 60-minute special, and an attempt to
get closure on the Pulling universe, had become a bittersweet
commission.
“Our perception of it all is that we were disappointed,” Horgan says today,
discussing her and her co-writer Dennis Kelly’s reaction to the Pulling
debacle. She is sitting before a plate of croissants and fruit in the
anonymous white office of a West London publicity firm. She wears
super-skinny grey denims and a silky mauve top, and speaks in long bustling
sentences that seem to be perpetually on the cusp of a quip, and that
finish, wherever possible, with a telling self-deprecating dig.
“We would’ve liked to have written more,” she continues. “But they, BBC Three,
seemed to have changed their output and seemed to be much more for kids.”
She pauses, and adds the careful mollifying clause (she still has a contract
with the BBC after all): “But we were delighted to do it in the first place,
and so we’ve got to think about that before we start throwing our toys out
of the pram.” She then concludes with the comic payoff: “Maybe they felt
that we were just too old and haggard for it.”
Luckily for Pulling fans, the urge to annihilate the show’s
protagonists was eventually subsumed by the desire, she says, “to write the
funniest programme we could. We wanted to go out on a high, and we wanted
people to see that it could still be funny, and to think: ‘Aww, it’s a shame
that it’s finished.’ ”
And certainly the resulting special will be catnip to Pulling devotees
and a high-octane hour of post-feminist ache and aggression for the
uninitiated. Here, typically, the gang are still together, yet mired in
misfired romantic crises of their own making. Horgan’s neurotic,
selfobsessed Donna is now dating a slick City banker who forces her to have
sex on a bed of £20 notes while barking: “Look at my money!” Karen (Tanya
Franks), the alcoholic schoolteacher, is stuck with an unreconstructed
chauvinist who bans her from wearing make-up and criticises her meat pies.
While the soft-touch Louise (Rebekah Staton) has returned from a
globe-trotting exodus with an obsessive dimwit boyfriend in tow. And all
along the spectre of Donna’s former fiancé Karl (Cavan Clerkin) hangs in the
background, threatening finally to resolve the show’s central
will-they-or-won’t-they conundrum.
Thankfully, the Pulling trademarks are still there: the sharp and
scabrous one-liners (“I always thought female ejaculation was a myth, until
last night — I nearly took his eye out”); the surreal set pieces (Karen’s
boyfriend is tortured with flour and tampons); and the sudden bursts of
physical comedy (Louise’s dejected lover does a fantastic leap from a
hot-air balloon). Mostly, however, it’s in the tone. Pulling
has always had a ferocious commitment to ripping back the veneer of social
niceties in female friendships and romantic entanglements. This is a show,
the very antithesis of Sex and the City, that looks at the
singleton’s world of romance with a bleak black heart. Here sex is mostly
uninspiring, relationships are unfulfilling, and life is experienced through
a numb alcoholic haze. It’s no wonder that Donna, midway through the second
series, utters the cri de coeur: “It’s all pain. It never goes away.
We’re all doing to die, in pain and alone.”
Horgan says that the show’s world view comes from looking back at her twenties
and realising “that there were not many happy tales to tell. Just a lot of
time spent in the pub, wasting time.” She says that Pulling
began, in some ways, as a riposte to Sex and the City. “We always
thought: ‘There needs to be an alternative to Sex and the City,’
” she says. “We need to see women the way they really are — and not just
meeting up for lunch three times a day in Manhattan. At the same time we
knew that we wanted to write about our twenties in shared low-level
accommodation in London, living with people, without a pot to piss in.”
Horgan, who had been writing for The Catherine Tate Show and the
animated comedy Monkey Dust, got her chance when the producer Harry
Thompson (Da Ali G Show) approached her and Kelly with the idea of
creating a show about single girls in London called Pulling. “It was
weird to be given the name,” she says. “Because when we’d finished the
scripts, we thought: ‘It’s not about pulling. There’s pulling in it, but
it’s about these girls in this shit situation, trying to make the most out
of their limited means. But we couldn’t think of a better one.”
She says that Pulling is half autobiographical, half fantasy. And that
it speaks of that time when all her relationships with men “were pretty
hollow and kind of empty. When I think about it now, they just seemed like
people who passed me by.” The disgusting stuff is true too, she says. “When
Louise is with this guy in the first series, and she says that nothing is
going to happen between them, and yet she rushes upstairs and washes her
fanny — I know loads of women who’ve watched that and can relate.” And then,
of course, there’s the boozing. She says she was worried, initially that she
might be castigated for the amount of drunkenness that the show portrayed,
but then she realised, for her at least, that this was truth. “A lot of the
people I met and the things I ended up doing were because of booze,” she
says. “It’s a huge part of life. All your stories are booze-related, and
most of your relationships are begun in booze.”
“I did a lot of drinking as a youngster,” she continues, warming to the topic.
“And when it becomes part of your life at such a young age, it stays part of
your life.” She paints a picture of the teenage Sharon Horgan, hugely shy,
yet quietly witty, and one of five children growing up in Co Meath in the
Irish Republic to an Irish mother and a New Zealand father (and turkey
farmer). She describes her childhood as idyllic, with room to roam and
siblings for company. Her youngest brother, Shane, would eventually become
an Irish international rugby player, and the other siblings would become
documentary makers, radio producers and actors. But for now she would be
content with writing funny school essays called “I Like Chips” and having
extremely short-term relationships with “the local loser boys — if it lasted
a month it was a really big deal”.
She tried art school in Dublin, but couldn’t finish the first year. “I didn’t
feel I was good enough. I thought I was a charlatan,” she says. “So I
thought: ‘I’ll go to London instead, and spend a year there.’ And I’m still
here.” In London she drifted from drama classes in Lambeth to the low-end
theatre circuit (where she met her future writing partner, Kelly), into a
series of dead-end jobs and empty relationships that would subsequently
define the world of Pulling. It wasn’t till she was 27, and watching
her thirties approach, that she snapped out of her lethargy, enrolled for an
English degree at Brunel University in Uxbridge, and began writing comedy
sketches with Kelly (who she met again one night in, naturally, the pub).
These days Horgan says that everything and nothing has changed about her and
her life. Yes, she has won a British Comedy Award, created Pulling,
written the Five comedy Angelo’s and starred in the Channel 4
comedy Free Agents (where she played a spikier, smarter version of
Donna, but one with the same drinking habits) but she still has a “shit ego”
and is racked by fears and doubts about her own talents. “I worry about not
being funny. All the f***ing time. I’m writing this script for the BBC at
the moment, about a prison, and it’s full of really mental police squad
style craziness. And I worry about it not being funny.”
It is, nonetheless, a good time to be a female in comedy, she says. Where
funny TV was once all about the Harry Enfields, the Fast Shows and
the Father Teds, it is now equally in thrall to the distaff comedic
voice. “I don’t even separate female comedy from male comedy any more,” she
says. “Catherine Tate and people like that are just as huge as Little
Britain. And because there’s traditionally always been fewer females
writing comedy than men, it actually seems to be a bonus, being a woman.”
Socially, though she cringes while she says it, she still likes to go out and
get falling-down drunk. “Unless I was going to give it up entirely, being
catastrophically drunk is still part of my life,” she says, adding that
nonetheless she can do it only once a month now, because she has children —
Amer (ten months) and Saidhbh (5 years) with her husband Jeremy Rainbird,
the CEO of the advertising agency Addiction. She describes Rainbird,
affectionately, as “quite posh, like, rar, rar, rar,” and says that when she
met him at a party, with her younger brother Mark, her sibling’s advice was:
“Whatever you do, don’t end up with that guy!”
And then, finally, there’s America. She may be working on BBC scripts, but all
doors at the moment seem to be pointing to the US. Pulling, for
instance, has been picked up for a remake by the network ABC, and Horgan and
Kelly have been consulting on the scripts. She has an LA agent too, who
landed her a screen test for an upcoming network drama, Parenthood —
she turned the offer down when she discovered she’d have to commit to the
series for six years (which would have meant a full-time move from her
Hackney home). Best of all she’s snagged a deal with the cable channel HBO
(makers of, ironically, Sex and the City), for whom she’s writing a
comedy script about two competitive sisters. It’s the prospect of this
script working that seems to excite Horgan the most and in a closing moment
of unguarded wish-fulfilment she maps out here career thus: “It goes from,
‘All I want to do is have my own sitcom,’ to ‘All I want to do is have an
award-winning sitcom,’ to ‘All I want to do is make it in America’. ”
She catches herself, and the self-deprecation quickly kicks in. “All I really
want to do is to keep doing this job,” she says, like someone embarrassed by
the arrogance of ambition. “All I want right now is for things not to end.”
The finale of Pulling is on BBC Three on May 17 at 9pm
