Lee and Dean: Interview with Mark O'Sullivan and Miles Chapman
Category: News Release
Explain a little bit about Lee and Dean – what’s the show about?
Mark: It’s a sort of bromance, really, isn’t it? It’s two guys who have been to school together, grown up together.
Miles: They’re kind of joined at the hip. They work together, they live together, they go on holiday together, so there’s very little time they’re apart.
Mark: It’s a sort of regular friendship, in many ways, but there’s a bit more going on, especially for Dean. It means a little bit more to him than even he realises at the beginning. It’s the story of what happen when they both have to face up to the future, and what each one of them wants out of life.
Miles: Lee is one of those people who’s always just lived the life of going and getting drunk with his mates, going on holiday when he wants, chatting up women, and then all of a sudden he meets someone he really, really likes, and he realises it’s time to settle down. And I think all of that is quite unsettling for Dean. And it effects Lee a great deal as well.
Mark: They’re almost in a relationship. It’s got everything apart from sex.
Where did the idea come from? Did it start out with the characters, and develop from there?
Miles: Yes, it did. Mark and I have known each other for 15 years, and one of the things we’ve always done is just arse about with characters. So Lee and Dean came from two blokes who just happened to work in a factory.
Mark: They were sort of clichés. “You alright, mate?” “I will be when it’s Friday.”
Miles: And then it developed and we thought “Perhaps they’re builders.” Cos we had an extension done in our house, and the people that did it were just unbelievable – incredible characters.
Mark: We do lots of different characters. We’re most at home playing elderly women. But when characters start getting under our skin, we just can’t help but want to get to know more about their world, and everything about them. We spend a lot of time in character.
Miles: It’s like the builders in my house – at face value, they have a very normal life, they work, they have lunch, they go for a few beers after work, watch Sky Sports. But like anyone, you scratch the surface and there’s a lot more going on. The building site is not the sort of place you’d be emotionally expressive, perhaps even intellectual, because that’s almost seen as a sign of weakness, so we thought it would be brilliant to put that sort of dynamic into that environment. It opens up a lot of things.
The show is, at times, almost unwatchably, excruciatingly awkward. Why do you think we have taken to that kind of embarrassing comedy so much?
Mark: Because that’s life, isn’t it? I don’t think I go through a day without a moment like that. Whether it’s something I do or someone around me does, or something my kids say. Life is a bit excruciating, isn’t it?
Miles: And I think it just adds another emotional level to stuff as well. Mark and I generally find excruciating stuff very funny. Mark has said before that one of the things that makes him laugh that he shouldn’t laugh at is when people argue. It’s often the way, when you find something really uncomfortable you get a fit of the giggles. I’ve felt like that at a funeral before.
Mark: Our instinct is to giggle at everything, and when things become bad or difficult, is to laugh. Find the funny.
It’s also very sad, in places. Did you set out to tug on the heartstrings?
Miles: Maybe not as much as we ended up doing. Characters aren’t characters unless they have flaws and they have humanity, and there’s pathos within relationships. Without that, the characters are so one-dimensional. If characters have got more depth to them, you’re more likely to forgive them, or to understand why they’re like they are. That’s always important to Mark and I. I don’t think we intended to go quite as close to the marrow as we did.
Mark: When we were first plotting the story, we knew quite early on that we wanted things to be quite heart-wrenching. And then, in the edit, we started getting a bit nervous about just how much pathos and how much drama there was. But I think we’ve arrived at something that works. I love people saying that it makes them cry as much as I love people saying it makes them laugh.
You’ve got a great supporting cast – had you worked with any of them before?
Miles: The boys – as in Nightmare, Sheets, Little Dean etcetera, with the exception of Jason Barnett, who plays Midnight – they’re all our mates.
Mark: They’re not actors. More than half the cast are non-actor friends of ours who we just knew would be brilliant. There’s no artificiality.
Miles: Just be who you are. Because it was improvised, we said to them “Just be who you are, say what you would normally say, given the circumstances.” And it just totally worked. Mark and I tend to surround ourselves with people who make us laugh anyway, and we just asked them to play themselves, and they’re all bloody brilliant.
Mark: It was a bit risky, especially for Channel 4, trusting us to make a show when we’ve never made a series before, and trusting us to let our mates come in and just make stuff up on the spot.
Miles: Mark, who plays Shitty Mick, he’s my oldest mate, I’ve known him 31 years.
Mark: And Brian, who plays one of the bark-rubbing judges, I was in an amdram production of ‘Oliver!’ with him some 30 years ago.
Miles: What more could you ask than making a comedy with your mates? It’s a dream!
How did you guys meet?
Mark: Our wives were best friends at Secondary School, so when I met my wife 14 years ago, she said “You must meet Miles and Jill.” If I’m being really honest, I thought anyone called Miles was going to be a bit of a prick…
Miles: He wasn’t wrong…
Mark: But we hit it off straight away, and we realised we had the same sense of humour. Thank God we found each other!
Miles: And then we just thought “Shall we start writing some stuff?” And we really, genuinely didn’t think anyone would take it seriously, but they did, and here we are.
So what’s happened between then and now? What have you done?
Mark: I was teaching at the time.
Miles: And I was at Which? Magazine.
Mark: And I decided to give up teaching and get into film-making, because I’d done a bit of video stuff earlier in my life. And so we decided to start writing together. We started writing a character on Twitter, and then we wrote a pilot for that, and that got picked up by a production company, and then that didn’t get made, and we spent about a year being quite angry. So we decided to make our own stuff, about five years ago, and the first thing we made got picked up by Channel 4.
Miles: Flavours. Our good friend (and Lee and Dean’s other writer) Sam, bought a new camera that had a brilliant video facility on it, and we decided to make something. We’d always had these characters, Delphine and Vic - we made it in a day, put it out online, and it just went ‘boom!’ and that was it.
You’ve done plenty of shorts, but is it an odd process, sitting down to write a five-part series? Is there a lot of pressure?
Mark: Yeah, there was. What we tried to do was treat it like a very big, long ‘short’. It’s what Channel 4 encouraged us to do – to not really change the way we worked too much. That’s why we still had our mates in it. So yes, it was a huge labour of love, it was very pressured, and at times incredibly hard.
Miles: But it’s turned out to be a joy. And because we don’t have an official shooting script, things change on the day. We put sample dialogue in, but nine times out of ten we’ll use something else. The beats are absolutely cast iron, where we need to get to in a scene, but the rest we can just riff around.
Dean is an amateur poet. Was it quite difficult, writing his poems? Because they’re not terrible, are they?
Mark: Yeah, originally we were going down the “Let’s make it completely shit,” route, but actually he’s not awful at it, and it is the best way for him to really say what he wants to say.
Miles: As the series grows, so does his poetry and his insight and his ability to create stuff, because his world’s changing. He’s being truthful about what he wants. I think a couple of the poems are actually quite beautiful.
Not only have you written and starred in the show, you’re directing and producing it, in spite of this being your first TV series. Did you ever think “What the hell are we doing?”
Miles: Every minute. “Why the fuck are we doing this?” It was really exciting, but there were particular days or weeks where it was really tough. It’s a bit like a plane taking off, you get to that point of no return, and then you have to keep going.
Mark: I was trying to get all of that out of my mind and do it the way we’d always done it. As soon as you stop, and go “Look, there’s 120 people staring at us, expecting us to lead this,” you want to be sick. It was fucking hard work.
Miles: And we did surround ourselves with an amazing team. All the actors and the crew were fantastic, without exception. Proper family. I don’t think there was one cross word between anyone on the entire shoot.
Mark: Apart from me and you!
Miles: Oh yeah! But that was pressure. And Mark’s making directorial decisions while I’m making production decisions, and sometimes they conflicted. Antlers can lock sometimes. Plus you’re trying to perform, plus you’re trying not to be precious about what you’ve written.
Mark: But I wouldn’t change a moment of it.
Miles: Me neither. I’m so proud of what we’ve achieved. We never ever thought we’d ever get an opportunity to do anything like this.
Lee and Dean are really into bark rubbing. Have you tried it, as part of your research?
Mark: No, we didn’t.
Miles: We could lie, and say that we did.
Mark: We had to do quite a lot of it in the shoot, and it’s strangely pleasing.
Miles: It was difficult to come up with something Lee and Dean would do together in their spare time. The obvious thing would be to go and watch the football and have a few drinks. What I love about the bark rubbing is that it’s the most unlikely thing. It’s kind of lovely. It shows that Lee is different when he’s away from the group of lads. He’s quite sensitive. If you think about it, the only person who’s ever nice to Dean is Lee. He’s so put upon, the poor sod.