For years they starred as the frazzled mum and dad in TV’s Outnumbered while married to other people. So how DID it blossom into real-life love?
ANYONE who enjoyed watching them on screen as Sue and Pete Brockman — by turns despairing, amused and horrified by the strains of family life — could be forgiven for thinking they actually were a couple.
So it is little surprise that Hugh Dennis and Claire Skinner, the parents in the sitcom Outnumbered, have found love with each other.
With the series relying heavily on improvisation rather than a rigid script, it was evident there was a natural chemistry between the two actors. However neither of them mentioned it much in interviews.
Now, in a poignant twist of fate, they are an item, some time after both ending long marriages. Romance blossomed when they made the Outnumbered Christmas special in 2016, two years after the transmission of what was to have been the final series in 2014.
At the time, Skinner, now 53, and Dennis, 56, were single. She described the filming as ‘mad, scrappy, tiring and fun’ but above all ‘happy’.
Within six months, the Outnumbered mum and dad were an item in real life.
Dennis’s marriage had folded first, in 2015, around a year after the end of series five. He and Kate Abbot-Anderson have two grown up children.
Then, in early 2016, Skinner and husband Charles Palmer, a TV director who is the son of Butterflies actor Geoffrey Palmer, also parted ways. They have two boys.
Since then, the Outnumbered couple have been pictured strolling in South London together, where Dennis has a £1.2 million (€1.35m) penthouse flat. She is said to spend a lot of time with him.
The bishop’s son confirmed the romance on Sunday, saying: ‘I am very, very happy, we are so very happy... It’s nice and yes, it’s so lovely.’
He sounds smitten indeed, to the point of being tongue-tied.
His fiercely private new love — an alumna of the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art and the Royal Shakespeare Company who is into serious theatre, unlike affable Dennis who is a ubiquitous presence on panel shows — has yet to break cover.
CURIOUSLY, though, she was talking about her ‘husband’ in interviews long after she and Palmer were said to have split. In 2015, not long before the marriage ended, she had described her wedding day as the best day of her life.
The collapse of her marriage seems to have been abrupt. Perhaps there is a clue in another interview she gave in 2015 when she described how Outnumbered made her and Dennis close.
She said: ‘Situations like reloading the dishwasher just after my partner has done it... I think most people are able to relate to those things. The family gets pushed to the -nth degree, and there are some wonderful observations on family life.
‘I think we all found out a lot about each other’s marriages and it was quite comforting to know everyone bickers as much as we do about daft things!’
So, 11 years after starting to work together, and having bonded over mutual grumblings about conflict in their respective marriages, a very slow-burning attraction has blossomed into a love affair.
It is said that this is the ‘real thing’ for both — and not merely one of those on-set flings which are common in the acting world.
One friend said they are ‘very much in love and have been for the past year’ with family and close friends aware of the relationship.
The friend added: ‘It’s the most wonderful love story; they found one another at the right time in their lives and it’s rather sweet.’
Quite so — although Dennis’s daughter Meg, 19, sounds a little pained on the subject. ‘I am aware of what has happened. My mother does not want to talk about it. Neither do I,’ she said.
The pairing — which plays to the powerful human yearning for happy endings — is not perhaps as obvious in reality as on screen.
Claire Skinner is Left-wing, sensitive and serious, Hugh Dennis is an effortlessly natural comedian who was the head boy at his private school.
The daughter of a shopkeeper, she says her parents instilled in her the virtue of hard work.
She cut her acting teeth working with director Mike Leigh. He cast her in Life Is Sweet and Naked. She has also been in Harold Pinter’s Moonlight and has played Desdemona in Othello.
She met her husband when he was part of the camera crew on a 1997 TV adaptation of Anthony Powell’s A Dance To The Music Of Time with Simon Russell Beale. She recalled: ‘It was day two, I had to take all my clothes off and stand behind the camera and there he was.’
They set up home and had sons, William, now 19, and Henry, 16. She said: ‘I think I’m a groovy, rock ’n’ roll, feminist mum, but I’m not sure. I quite like doing the laundry, all the lovely smells, so that’s not very rock’n’roll.’
She describes herself as ‘wildly insecure’ and a ‘chronic people-pleaser’ and adds: ‘If I’m not careful, I can bend myself into the shape of a pretzel.’
FAME came with Outnumbered and she modestly said her character, frazzled working mother-of-three Sue Brockman, is ‘far warmer and nicer’ than she is. ‘It’s that fantasy mum thing,’ she added.
She said she was partly attracted to the sitcom because it rang so true, and by the nurturing atmosphere created by directors Andy Hamilton and Guy Jenkin.
When she was hired, she says she was ‘in the thick of parenting’ herself. ‘My kids were six and eight. I thought: “Yes, absolutely, I get this completely.” I liked the way both the mum and dad were a bit slippery at times.
‘There’s one episode that has Sue rifling through another child’s book-bag, trying to see what grades and feedback that kid has got to compare it to her own. Every parent wants to do that!’
You get the sense, however, that the light-hearted whirl of a comedy like Outnumbered is not Skinner’s natural terrain.
While making the series, which began in 2007, Skinner interspersed more challenging work such as a role in Ibsen’s very dark Little Eyolf and a turn in an adaptation of Jane Austen’s Sense And Sensibility.
She was recently in an improvised drama about feminism and commented publicly: ‘Dear God, there’s still a lot of misogyny out there!’
Outnumbered’s success changed Dennis’s career, too. He went from being a comedian recognised for his partnership with Steve Punt to a household name. He said people would grab him in the street and insist he visited their house to see how Outnumbered mirrored their lives.
Viewers found it painfully accurate, particularly the way it portrayed the relationship between the parents and their children. An American version was made, and a Hollywood film.
For Dennis — the son of a somewhat eccentric vicar-turned-bishop — it seemed that success had come effortlessly. As a child, Dennis walked the family cat on a 30ft washing line as if it were a dog, he was head boy at University College School in London and so studious at Cambridge that he was given the nickname ‘Desk’. He
started work at Unilever, marketing Denim aftershave and Timotei shampoo, and performing comedy at evenings and weekends.
He later carved out a career on radio and TV which includes Mock The Week.
He was divorced from his first wife (who said he was devastatingly boring) in 1993 and fell for Kate Abbot-Anderson. Dennis recalled that he pretended to have forgotten his notebook and returned to the studio to find it, to get another chance to meet her.
They married in 1996 and had children Freddie, now 21, and Meg. He has said home life was similar to Outnumbered, and what he hoped to pass on to his children was the ability to be happy in life. There was little hint his marriage might be ending.
He said he felt ‘vague stirrings of disenchantment’ when he turned 50, but dealt with it by taking part in the open stage ofthe Tour De France for amateurs.
‘After 12 hours of cycling through the mountains, I was sorted. I realised I was no longer an alpha male and just got on with the rest of my life.’
Viewers will hope Skinner and Dennis find the happy ending in real life they tried so hard to secure for their three children as Mum and Dad Brockman in their fictional TV home.