Flowers

Monday 25th April sees the launch of Channel 4’s innovative new 6x30 comedy-drama starring Olivia Colman (The Night Manager, Broadchurch) and Julian Barratt (The Mighty Boosh, Nathan Barley) and written and directed by BAFTA-nominated Will Sharpe (Black Pond).

The six-part series will run over the course of a single week, with the first two episodes running back-to-back as a double bill from 10pm on 25th April and then running an episode per night until the finale on Friday, 29th April.

Flowers is an imaginative, cinematic show about an eccentric and dysfunctional family struggling to hold themselves together. Maurice (Barratt), the author of illustrated children’s books The Grubbs, and music teacher wife Deborah (Colman) are barely together, but yet to divorce. As Maurice fights inner demons and dark secrets, Deborah tries to keep the family together at all costs and becomes increasingly suspicious that Maurice is in a secret homosexual relationship with his Japanese illustrator Shun (played by show creator Will Sharpe).

The Flowers family live in a creaky, crumbling old house with Maurice's ailing mother Hattie (Leila Hoffman) and their maladjusted 25-year-old twins Amy (Sophia Di Martino – Friday Night Dinner, Mount Pleasant) and Donald (BAFTA-winning Daniel Rigby - Eric and Ernie, Cardinal Burns, Undercover). Both are competing for the affection of neighbour Abigail (BAFTA-winning Georgina Campbell – Murdered By My Boyfriend) as they struggle to burst through the confines of their arrested development. Anna Chancellor plays Aunty Viv, Deborah’s vivacious sister.

Swinging from the profane to the profound, the Flowers family and their often self-inflicted crises, are surrounded by odd neighbours who become the agents of further heartache and misfortune. Despite living on top of each other the family will do anything to not communicate, pushing them and their struggles with love and life to extreme and ridiculous places.