‘Never work with your brother again!’

How The Tourist’s screenwriting siblings raised Diana’s ghost, and ignored Dawn French, to make it big

By Stephen ARMSTRONG

The first series of The Tourist – in which Jamie Dornan, as an amnesiac mystery man, barrels across Australia in search of his true identity – was the mostwatched new television drama of 2022. Action-packed, occasionally hilarious, and very, very dark, it concluded with Dornan’s character taking an apparently fatal overdose after learning that he was a certain Elliot Stanley, drug smuggler and killer. Just as he was fading out of consciousness, he received an affectionate text from Helen – a local cop, played by Danielle Macdonald – then his eyes closed. As endings go, it felt pretty definitive.

Yet, says 44-year-old screenwriter Jack Williams – who, with his brother Harry, 42, is the brains behind The Tourist – “I think, in our optimistic minds, we always thought there was a ray of hope. Fundamentally, we like a happy ending.”

The Williamses – who are also responsible for writing such hit dramas as The Missing, Baptiste, Liar and Angela Black, as well as producing Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s blackly comic breakthrough Fleabag – have joined me over Zoom, from two separate rooms. Harry’s is cluttered, with an acoustic guitar hanging on the wall; Jack’s is pristine. “We always say there’s a happy ending, a sad ending and a ‘huh?’ ending,” Harry explains. “It’s more interesting if you have to think about it.”

He adds that although they hadn’t written the first series of The Tourist with a sequel in mind, the chemistry between Elliot and Helen had a screwball comic potential they couldn’t resist. “We were fascinated by what would happen if they made a go of it,” Harry says. “What does it look like if those two embark upon that relationship?” With Elliot’s criminal identity now known, they were attracted to the challenge of having to write a plausible romance between killer and cop. “If [the theme of ] the first series is ‘Can I remember?’, the second series is ‘Can I forget?’”

The result is a blend of hightension thriller with offbeat Coen brothers-style comedy – crooks singing along to daft songs in the middle of a crime, a heartbroken cop with a secret in her basement and a pensioner mother with the instincts of a mob boss. Although they are best known for the most twisted of dramas, the Williams brothers – sons of the novelist and screenwriter Nigel Williams and producer Suzan Harrison – got their start in comedy: the first script on which they collaborated was a pilot for Dawn French that was never picked up. Jack recalls that he had the job, then asked Harry to help, but at the end he was advised by French, “Never work with your brother again!”

Jack smiles at the memory. “When I see her face on panto posters, I do chuckle slightly to myself,” he says. “You’re allowed to find things not funny, you’re allowed to give notes, but don’t be a dick about it and bring family into it – that’s just mean, Dawn French.”

Their last outright comedy was Channel 4’s controversial 2012 cartoon sketch show Full English, which one tabloid newspaper branded “the sickest cartoon ever”, after it featured a skit in which Princess Diana’s ghost fought with Jade Goody’s. It’s fun to imagine that the scene was in the back of screenwriter Peter Morgan’s mind when, in the latest series of The Crown, he summoned Diana to talk to Charles from beyond the grave.

Jack grimaces. “Us and Peter Morgan, we’ve both resurrected Diana as a ghost and it’s gone down very badly. Oh, man, the reviews for that show,” he sighs. “And the channel hated it. We got a call saying it was coming out on Mondays at 10.30pm. They were going ‘It’s a good thing! It’s going to work…’ It didn’t work. It was horrible.”

Harry adds that “that was part of the reason we said let’s never do comedy again. So we wrote The Missing with no jokes at all, because if you’re talking about paedophiles, you really shouldn’t be cracking one-liners. Then, with The Tourist, we tried the comedy out again, very nervously.”

In between, of course, came Fleabag. Do they ever feel their contribution to that show, as producers, went underrecognised? They both shake their heads. “The only collaboration Phoebe needs is for someone to stop her throwing her brilliant ideas

away,” says Jack. “About our biggest contribution to the whole thing was just going ‘That’s great, why do you keep changing it and second-guessing yourself?’ She would be rewriting in the make-up chair before shooting any scene a million times.”

“We’d love to work with her any time, on anything,” adds Harry. “We just can’t afford the millions Amazon gave her” – in 2019, WallerBridge signed a $20million-a-year deal with Amazon Studios, for which she is now developing a Tomb Raider television series – “and I think she’s quite happy without our help.”

BBC One, Christmas Eve, 8pm Can they fix it? Yes they can: the handicraft skills on display in this cosy series put even those of Lapland’s elves to shame.

The team’s festive fix-up jobs include mending a mechanical Christmas cake and restoring 100 paper models of Santa.

The Repair Shop

The Great Christmas Bake Off