Compassion project
STEPHEN GRAHAM AND JODIE COMER ON COVID DRAMA HELP…
The latest drama from Jack Thorne (His Dark Materials, Enola Holmes) unites Liverpool acting royalty Stephen Graham and Jodie Comer in state-of-the-nation single drama Help, assessing how British care-home residents and workers were failed so catastrophically during the early months of the pandemic. Graham plays Tony, who’s living with Young Onset Alzheimer’s, and Comer is Sarah, his committed but inexperienced carer. Here they talk about the pressures and importance of the project.
How did Help come about?
STEPHEN GRAHAM: I was at some awards thing with Jack and asked him to write something for me and Jodie. He told me he’d been speaking to Jodie about doing something set in Liverpool, so that was where it began. Later on, we workshopped a few things, then Jack had this other idea about Covid and a care home. It was a real collaboration between the three of us, because Jodie and I are executive producers on this as well. It’s nice to sit at the grown-ups table!
This story will feel personal for a lot
of people. Did that mean added pressure for you?
SG: We’re fortunate to be a part of something that gives a voice to people who wouldn’t be able to put their case forward normally. There’s a duty of care we have as storytellers to treat this matter with care and get it right, and the attention to detail here was exceptional. I spoke with people suffering from different types of dementia, and we had a wonderful nurse who showed us what to do and how to do it, which gave all the cast the freedom to play and find the characters.
JODIE COMER: The timing makes it even more important we shed light on this, because care homes weren’t spoken about enough for me
– I hope this might start some new conversations. I’d never done a project tackling something so serious and relevant, and it’s been really fulfilling. I spoke to a lot of care workers because I needed to grasp the emotional journey of these people. It was striking how matter-of-fact they were about these harrowing experiences. Their resilience and courage were humbling, but we needed to capture the joy and love in these care homes as well.
SG: That black humour is the only way to cope, sometimes. I got to understand the frustrations of dementia patients. Like Covid, it’s a horrible, unfair disease. I spoke to a lovely Irish fella, a lorry driver who stayed in his own house but set fire to his kitchen by mistake, so I made Jack write that in with the social worker going, “No, that’s gone too far now.” So Tony’s
‘I HOPE THIS MIGHT START SOME NEW CONVERSATIONS’
JODIE COMER
been in the care home for eight to 12 months.
Why do Tony and Sarah bond?
JC: She has a lot of heart, but her family have low expectations of her and she has low expectations of herself. Then she finds herself in this space where, she feels like she’s good at something and can give and receive so much from it. She makes a connection with Tony that she’s been missing in her life.
SG: He sees a mirror image of himself, someone slightly mischievous, and she also reminds him of his sister who passed away when he was young. He hasn’t met anybody like her since then, so that Pandora’s box gets opened.
How odd was it to film a story about inadequate PPE [personal protective
equipment] provision when you had all the on-set protection you needed?
JC: We were shooting through different periods, so we were constantly going: what was the advice they were being given at this point? It all felt so contradictory: we felt like our characters should be wearing PPE but at that point they were told they didn’t need it. Even acting it, you realise how laser-focused you have to be in care work. Other people’s lives are dependent on you doing this correctly and being careful.
How important was it that this was a Liverpool story?
JC: It brings so much heart to the story. I know and see so many Sarahs, women who can be very misunderstood and are seemingly angry at the world when they have so much to give. Liverpool is rarely on screen and the city has a spirit about it – I was always asked about losing my accent early on in my career, so to celebrate that now is lovely.
SG: A lot of people don’t know that Jodie’s from Liverpool, although she bangs on about it quite a bit… To see what Jodie does with this character, a woman finding herself through adversity, her performance is up there with Julie Walters in Educating Rita or Pauline Collins in Shirley Valentine for me. And the ensemble – Ian Hart, Cathy Tyson, Sue Johnston – was majestic. Some of the scenes were pretty intense, but we had such a laugh as well, we really did. Gabriel Tate
HELP IS COMING SOON TO CHANNEL 4 AND ALL 4.