Sara is a single, 40-year-old vet who can neuter a tortoise with one hand yet can’t utter three words to her parents: I’m gay. Her deadline is the parental visit already in the diary, so friends Jamie, Justine and Daniel hijack her birthday and hire life-coach Toria to bulldoze her inertia. Cue therapy via dog-show disasters, disastrous blind dates and a slow-burn flirtation with Eve, an attractive dog-walker who keeps turning up at the practice.
Perkins wrote the six-parter from inside her own closet; she had carried the premise for a decade before feeling able to script it. Filmed in and around Manchester by RED Production Company, the series pairs traditional studio audience laughter with a candour rare for pre-watershed BBC Two: the central character is gay, the word lesbian is spoken without coy euphemism and the emotional stakes stay high even when the farce involves runaway ferrets or accidental ketamine overdoses.
The cast is stacked with British comedy talent: Joanna Scanlan steals scenes as the gloriously unhinged Toria, Nicola Walker deadpans as solicitor Justine and Dawn French cameos as Sara’s unwitting mother. Perkins herself plays Sara with the self-deprecating timing that made her a panel-show staple, but the scripts refuse to let her simply charm her way out of trouble.
Ratings started above a million but drifted downward; the BBC quietly declined a second run. What survives is a brittle, good-hearted time capsule: the last months before equal marriage arrived in Britain, when coming out at forty still felt like a life-ending rather than a life-beginning moment.
Production Details
BBC Two / 1 Season / 6 Episodes / 2013
Created by: Sue Perkins
Writer(s): Sue Perkins
Producer(s): Jim Poyser
Cinematography: Mark Partridge
Main Cast
Sue Perkins as Sara
Shelley Conn as Eve
Nicola Walker as Justine
Joanna Scanlan as Torla
Steve Oram as Daniel
Dominic Coleman as Jamie
Jeff Rawle as Donald
Harriet Walter as Angela
Bekka Bowling as Chiara
Tom Burke as Ben
Dawn French as Frances
Mark Heap as Brian
