Straight in

...

I think it's one of real frustration because I think he made the wrong call.

I think we really need to boil this down to this is all about money.

This is all about money and corporate sponsorship and the price of when you become a brand, you then have to slightly forfeit your personal thoughts and opinions because they are gonna be at some point in conflict with what a brand or what all of this money and all of this capital is asking of you to be.

And I think Ed Sheeran, I'm, I'm, I fi- I fi- I find myself actually being, feeling quite stressed about it because he to me has appeared to be someone who actually hasn't been apolitical, has actually-

Yeah

...

Was there a specific personal friendship that inspired the central friendship in Big Boys?

Yeah, there was about three or four of my friends that inspired the character of Danny.

Kind of three of my friends who are still here and o- and one who isn't.

There was a real prevalence in the conversation about male suicide, particularly young male suicide, when I was becoming an early adult, and I think we've seen like a big rise in campaigns to get men to open up and get men to talk.

And all of that stuff's really important, but I think it has to come within a framework of something a little bit more substantial.

I kind of, like with Big Boys, wanted to write these two male characters that don't always actually know what to say to each other, but they're there for one another still.

Yeah.

So it felt-- I was hyper-aware of it because I think I'd struggled with it myself.

So tell us about Good Grief, because you'd written this a while ago, right?

Yeah, I wrote it.

I started writing it when I was like... 20, 21.

So it's a show that was my first ever Edinburgh Fringe show.

I did it in 2015 and we sort of brought it back 10 years later.

So I could kind of send up myself in a weird way and like cringe at the jokes that I wrote in 21 that I now go, God, why was I saying that on stage every day for a month? But also all of the lines from that show, there are lines from Good Grief that ended up in the very final episode of Big Boys.

And I think I was writing that TV show for so long, I forgot that, like, my bread and butter was being on stage.

Oh,

... like that

...

it suddenly just came out of me.

And it's because I've been doing, I've set up this commission with the Roundhouse, which is an amazing, like, art...

Well, you've performed at the Roundhouse before.

Like art center meets music venue.

Underneath the main stage there's all these, like, creative hubs for young people to go and explore creativity, to go and start learning how to DJ, or rehearsal rooms, or start up a radio station, blah, blah, blah.

Oh