Crashing, Channel 4 interview: writer Phoebe Waller-Bridge on her new sitcom about property guardians living in a London hospital

New voice: Phoebe Waller-Bridge talks up her new Channel 4 sitcom Crashing
Adrian Lourie
Gabriel Tate7 January 2016

Half-a-dozen metropolitan twentysomethings falling in and out of love, dealing with their mistakes, confusion and pain. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? But Channel 4’s new sitcom Crashing offers a couple of important twists on a well-tried formula.

First, this isn’t Nineties New York, so there’s no cosy Friends-style flatshare. Instead, the characters are property guardians, effectively circumventing London’s sky-high rental market and paying rather less to act as sanctioned squatters in a disused hospital.

Second, it’s written by one of the country’s most promising young playwrights. I meet Phoebe Waller-Bridge in the incongruous surroundings of a Channel 4 boardroom — albeit one decorated, rather appropriately, with distressed wallpaper motifs. Tall, bright and engaged, the 30-year-old is a born enthusiast, clearly delighted at how her screenwriting debut has turned out.

Crashing initially sprang from a pair of short plays. “The stimulus for them was to find the moment something exciting could have happened between two people but doesn’t because they bottle it at the last minute,” she explains. “I always wanted to write about what happened to these people after this moment.”

One play featured best friends-cum-unrequited lovers Anthony and Lulu (played by Damian Molony and Waller-Bridge on television), the other “electric, exhausting” Sam (Jonathan Bailey) and shy, excitable Fred (Amit Shah).

Production company Big Talk (Rev, Him & Her) encouraged her to develop the characters for a series. “It was great to dig a bit deeper,” she says. “I spent so much time working towards this moment, thinking, ‘Why doesn’t somebody give me a goddamn TV show?’ And then they give it to you and you’re like, ‘Are you insane?’”

The transition from stage to screen wasn’t without its traumas. “The characters and situations came flooding out, but the damn structure…” She thumps the table for emphasis. “Planning their journeys is a horrible slow poo of a situation. It’s so satisfying when you get there but my brain was bleeding for months.”

Not that you’d know it. Crashing is an effortlessly engaging and confident debut, skilfully weaving new characters in with the original quartet, when the lives of happily engaged Anthony and his fellow property guardians are turned upside down by the arrival of the annoyingly perky Lulu and a middle-aged divorcé (Adrian Scarborough). “I’d want to hang out with Lulu without giving her any responsibility,” says Waller-Bridge. “She thinks she’s cooler than she really is, but she’s genuinely terrified at having to grow up.”

Crashing taps into millennial concerns of work, money, love, accommodation… “By your mid-twenties you’re supposed to have a pretty good idea about those,” says Waller-Bridge, “but I hadn’t ticked any of those boxes. I couldn’t even see them.”

'It’s this amazing commune: each floor has completely different rules and there’s huge politicking over loo rolls'

&#13; <p>Phoebe Waller-Bridge</p>&#13;

While Crashing is filmed in the Royal London Hospital in Whitechapel, the inspiration for the setting was the derelict Middlesex Hospital near Big Talk’s offices in Fitzrovia.

“We knocked on the door and this very stressed yoga teacher appeared,” she recalls. “She was very suspicious because property guardians are often viewed with suspicion themselves, but she did open up eventually. It’s this amazing commune: each floor has completely different rules and there’s huge politicking over loo rolls. It’s a flatshare on a huge scale, a city within the city.”

Would this way of life appeal? Waller-Bridge looks pensive. “Well, it’s a funky way to live but not a safe one. You don’t really have any tenancy rights and you have to treat your bedroom door like a front door — always have a lock on it in case Creepy Dave from upstairs pays a visit. I might have thrived in my early twenties, when I had more room in my life for baths exploding and walls falling down, but the idea of 15 people sharing a Porta Shower now is a pretty bleak one…”

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Waller-Bridge has always lived in London, having grown up in Ealing and recently bought a house in Kensal Rise with her husband, director and writer Connor Woodman. “I really feed off the city,” she says. “There’s a cosmopolitan neediness to my characters, and it’s important that they talk and move quickly, because London is so fast-paced. There’s an anonymity about living here that can be really liberating but also really limiting.”

I had read that she was a show-off as a child. “I’ve got to stop saying that!” she laughs, before admitting that yes, she was and indeed is a goofball — albeit a slightly eccentric-sounding one. “I used to leave poems at the top of the stairs and wait for my mum to find them,” she says, cringing. “That’s how I rebelled! One was about this frog who sat on a windowsill thinking about things, only it wasn’t as profound as that sounds. In the end a kid pushes it over the edge with a pencil. It was a really long, painful poem but my mum was very polite about it.”

Waller-Bridge channelled her extrovert creativity into drama at her girls’ school in Marylebone, where she played “mostly men” until a teacher suggested applying to Rada. After three productive years there she left full of hope: “There was a lot of period stuff around, so as a poshy with curly brown hair people told me I’d be fine.”

'When you work on Broadchurch you carry the power of knowledge around with you'

&#13; <p>Phoebe Waller-Bridge</p>&#13;

The reality was very different. “Tumbleweed,” she says, hindsight enabling her to laugh loudly about it. “Two years with nothing going on hit hard, but I’m so grateful because I met Vicky, started up the company and wrote more.”

Vicky is Vicky Jones, the playwright and director who is Waller-Bridge’s best friend and frequent collaborator. The company is DryWrite, their showcase for new and aspiring writers which also doubled as an outlet for Waller-Bridge’s own flickering aspirations.

“We’d give a brief to writers to do a 10-minute play, then produce several on one night,” she explains, “but it was all anonymous so no one knew who’d written what. One night a writer dropped out and Vicky nudged me to do it. The brief was to get the audience to heckle without them knowing that’s what we were trying to do — and my play got one heckle! That was when I knew I wanted to keep going.”

The cast of Crashing
Channel 4

Two years after her acclaimed turn in a starry revival of Noël Coward’s Hay Fever, 2013 was Waller-Bridge’s breakthrough year. Her one-woman show Fleabag — an outrageous, outraged commentary on the deleterious effects of our oversexualised culture — won her a Fringe First award at Edinburgh, before transferring to the Soho Theatre and earning her the title of Critics’ Circle Most Promising Playwright and nominations at the Evening Standard Theatre Awards and Oliviers. “It was incredibly daunting,” she says, “and I had a really tight deadline that basically forced me to get it written — but the response was amazing.”

In screen acting terms too, Waller-Bridge is still carving out a profile, popping up in Abi Morgan’s The Iron Lady, the BBC’s adaptation of Sarah Waters’s The Night Watch and Sky1 comedy The Café. She’s probably most recognisable as barrister Abby Thompson in the second series of Broadchurch.

The role of Marianne Jean-Baptiste’s sidekick delighted her father (who had harboured hopes that she might become a lawyer), in spite of Abby’s venality. “There was a frisson around the show,” she says. “When you work on Broadchurch you carry the power of knowledge around with you.”

It exposed Waller-Bridge to an entirely new level of scrutiny — something she regards with cautious pragmatism. “It’s really exciting but nerve-wracking as well, because you lose control of your own image and other people make assumptions about you. But if people want to watch stuff I’m making and give me work, the best way I can ever articulate my personality is through my writing.”

Despite having another comedy in the works for the BBC and a possible second series of Crashing in the pipeline, Waller-Bridge is also mulling over directing and pining for theatre. “I’d love to do a really big filthy musical. Or a big family play. Or a sick crime drama. Or combine the three!”

One thing she won’t be doing is taking a break. “For me, writing is the hard labour and performance is the fun bit, the cathartic release. Being on set in that cold dripping hospital felt like a holiday to me…”

Channel 4, Monday, 10pm

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