‘My prep for coronavirus? Wine and Frazzles’
Star of comedy ‘Breeders’, Daisy Haggard tells Guy Kelly about parenting fails – and her mother-in-law’s death at Dignitas
Daisy Haggard can’t deny it: she’s a coronavirus prepper. “Oh God, yeah,” the actress says, “the delivery arrived and my husband thought I’d gone completely mad. But I’ve just taken this whole thing as an excuse to have a big shop. I always like to have the house ready for a party at any time.”
What could we find in her Covid-19 bunker? “Well, quite a lot of wine, which I think is always helpful in an apocalypse, then tins of beans, a bit of pasta, some nappies, and Frazzles. Loads of Frazzles. Honestly, if we’re all forced indoors, just come round and we’ll have a party… You don’t need to bring anything.”
Haggard, 41, is great: open, cheery, and lightning quick to laugh – mainly at herself. Today we’re meeting in a hotel library in central London, where she carefully pours two cups of ginger tea (“this’ll protect us for the day”). But at the moment she is spending the majority of her time at home, south of the river, where she can be found writing, looking after her daughters – Elsie, five, and two-year-old Wendy – and procrastinating. A lot.
“Mmm, very, very good at that,” she says. “Looking up lost dogs, internet shopping… My latest thing is going on Google and seeing how big all our neighbours’ gardens are. I’ll do anything not to work.”
Shortly after Wendy’s birth, Haggard was at home when she was called and asked to audition for a new Sky sitcom. She couldn’t think of anything worse. “I thought, I’ve just had a baby, I’ve got big milky boobs and I’m so tired. Why would I get it?”
That why isn’t too tricky to fathom. Apart from being one of our finest television comedy actors (as displayed in dozens of credits, from Episodes to last year’s Back to Life, which she co-wrote), her situation was perfect: the part in question was a tired and grumpy mother of young children in London.
Reluctantly, Haggard had her husband, the musician Joe Wilson, hold up the lines, and just read them – tiredly, grumpily, barely acting – aloud to a camera. She got the role.
And thank goodness for that. Breeders, which begins tomorrow night, follows the lives of Paul, played by Martin Freeman, and Haggard’s Ally, as they cope with juggling two young children, full-time careers, ageing parents, a mortgage and their own relationship. Like the BBC’S Motherland and Channel 4’s Catastrophe, it shows the realities of parenting with a darkly comic honesty.
Written by The Thick of It’s Simon Blackwell and Chris Addison, it’s even edgier than its recent forebears, in fact. Early in the series, Paul is so desperate to get the children to sleep that he puts them in the car, drives to a quiet spot, parks up, and wakes to find himself surrounded by police.
Postnatal depression is covered, there is what the show calls “grief sex”, and a lot of swearing. After watching it, I wasn’t quite sure I wanted children any more… “Yes well, I call it the ‘condom show’,” Haggard says, cheerfully. “I love it because it shows parenting fails, rather than Instagram parenting.
“Those shots of people doing yoga with a baby balanced on their cervix while they sip detox tea… you think, ‘How did you do that? You have a flat stomach but it’s only three months? How come your baby never cries?’ That’s everywhere. So it’s nice to see the other thing.” For Haggard, real parenting is “joyful, maddening, and constantly funny – I’d recommend it.” It’s also been surprisingly productive. In her 20s, she’d tell herself that she couldn’t possibly write, because she had to see friends, or go out for drinks.
“It wasn’t an immediate thing. When you have your first child you wander around for six months going, ‘Who am I again?’ But then it kicked in that if I didn’t want to be away from them – and I didn’t – I had to just get things done.”
It’s no coincidence, she says, that she wrote Back to Life – about a prisoner freed after 18 years and attempting to integrate back into her old life – after becoming a mother, and she is ploughing through scripts for a second series already. “I almost had too much time before, I didn’t know how to focus it. Now it’s like, got an hour? Do it in an hour.”
The Viking-bearded, friendly looking Wilson is one half of the musical duo Solomon Grey. He and Haggard met on an acting job more than a decade ago, then re-met seven years ago (she initially didn’t remember; he did), and married exactly 12 months after that. Elsie came the following year.
“It was all quite quick. But we were in our mid-30s, so we just jumped in and thought, ‘you’re good fun, let’s do it.’” Haggard is the youngest of six, her parents the television director Piers Haggard and the Australian glass artist Anna Sklovsky. She was raised in London, and is the only of her siblings to go into acting (“Dad thought he’d got away with it”), when she auditioned for The Ruth Rendell Mysteries, directed by her father, at 17.
“He didn’t actually want me to be in it, but was auditioning people at the house and I just read along. The producer asked me to, and Dad gave in,” she says. He didn’t go easy on his daughter, making her do 95 takes of one scene, and banning her from taking any more roles until she’d finished school. They both had anxieties about nepotism.
“He was chronically worried about it, but of course I wouldn’t have got that part without a dad that did that job,” she concedes. “I was incredibly privileged in that sense. At drama school I’m sure people talked, and rightly so – I had a massive leg up. But then when I left drama school I worked in a gym on reception for about 10 years… It took a long time.
“The most important thing is to know you can never go, ‘Oh, it was really hard for me, my dad was a director…’ ”
Haggard senior and Sklovsky still live nearby, and help with childcare.
‘Death is going to happen, so we need to teach our children about it’
Wilson’s father is also local, but his mother, Sandy, died in 2016. Eight weeks earlier, aged 66, she had been diagnosed with a brain tumour and given three months to live. She chose to end her life at Dignitas, the Swiss assisted dying clinic. Wilson accompanied her, and later wrote an album celebrating her life.
“He is amazing, and so was that whole thing,” Haggard says, softly. “It was weird, but sort of a special time, too. I think, culturally, we all need to be a bit better about death. It made me and Joe think about that. I’d like to write something about it. It’s going to happen, so we need to teach our children about it and not be so afraid.”
The children, she says, actually played a key role in breaking the tension of the event. “We were laughing. The day Joe came home [from Switzerland], our one-and-ahalf-year-old pulled down her pants in the kitchen and just did a poo on the floor. It was strangely liberating.”
Dark, honest and made all the more human by the welcome chaos of being a parent. It could be a scene from Breeders.
Breeders begins on Sky One tomorrow night at 10pm