Aisling Bea and Sharon Horgan turn comedy This Way Up.
How comedian Aisling Bea’s dark new comedy about mental health came to life
Just when you have a big female-driven comedy gap in your viewing list, along comes This Way Up, Channel 4’s new show written by and starring comedian Aisling Bea, with sharon horgan co-starring as her sister, shona. the six-part series had the working title Happy AF while it was in production – with horgan’s company Merman – and is the result of Bea and horgan’s plan to make a tv show that they hatched a few years ago. “Myself and sharon met for the first time filming the pilot for Dead Boss and we fell deep in love,” said Bea of their close friendship in real life. here she tells us about the show’s journey to our screens.
Why’s it called This Way Up? the show is about moving forward not breaking down, so I wanted “up” in the title. so it’s hopeful as a show, but also it is what you put on the outside of boxes when you don’t know what is inside but the person who put it together does and knows that it may be a bit more fragile than it looks. you must handle it with care, even though it may not appear to need it. Does this feel like an exciting time to be writing comedy?
I wanted to make a show I wanted to watch, I love Catastrophe, Girls, Fleabag, Transparent, Atlanta. those are the shows I watch and so the type of writing I like to do.
You’ve said before that writing this on your own was a necessity because parts of the show are quite personal. the show is a work of fiction, which draws on lots of personal bits and pieces. If I pointed them all out it would take away from the fact that I laboured over it to put it together as a show. so I would rather you watched it and enjoyed it, rather than go, “oh, apparently that actually happened”.
Did Sharon have many ideas about Shona?
I wrote the part for sharon so the big task for me was making her still for sharon but making shona different to the sharon of Catastrophe.
so – I think sharon will agree – the sharon of Catastrophe is a lot more self-involved. the shona of my show leans way more into the extremely caring and sensitive part of the Madame horgan I know.