Will Stefan Golaszewski ever tire of watching people unload the dishwasher? \u201cGosh, you never know \u2013 it\u2019s possible,\u201d concedes the creator of beloved BBC sitcoms Him & Her and Mum. For now, however, Golaszewski\u2019s brand of intense social realism remains as meticulous as ever. In his latest series, the quotidian acts that make up a lifetime \u2013 replacing the hand soap, leaning on the kitchen counter while folding a slice of ham into your mouth and, of course, unloading said dishwasher \u2013 are given just as much screen time as some of the most soul-wrenching experiences imaginable.<\/p>\n
Babies (he\u2019s sticking with the does-what-it-says-on-the-tin titles) stars Siobh\u00e1n Cullen and Paapa Essiedu as mid-30s married couple Lisa and Stephen. We meet them en route to a family function, yet when they arrive Lisa can only face Stephen\u2019s relatives for a few seconds before fleeing the pub. Actually, it\u2019s just one relative: his cousin\u2019s new baby. We soon discover the pair have recently suffered their first miscarriage. Unable to share their grief and disappointment with friends and family, they are forced to rely solely on each other \u2013 not ideal considering Stephen\u2019s attempts to comfort Lisa include an offer of a Solero and a trip to feed the ducks. The terror and cruelty of baby loss is all here, but Babies\u2019 portrayal of our collective failure to address it is just as unsettling.<\/p>\n
double quotation markThe experience isn\u2019t something I\u2019d seen reflected on TV \u2013 and it isn\u2019t something that people talk about<\/p>\n
For 36-year-old Cullen, making Babies was eye-opening. The Dublin-born actor \u2013 hitherto best known for Irish comedy-drama The Dry \u2013 is of an age where having a family is \u201ca subject at the forefront of a lot of our minds, whether we want it to be or not.\u201d Before she was cast as Lisa, the reality of miscarriage had been a mystery. \u201cIt\u2019s crazy to me that I had come this far without knowing so much. It gave me a massive insight into what so, so many people around me are now going through or have gone through.\u201d Crucially, Babies underlines the \u201cclumsiness we can all have with each other\u2019s feelings \u2013 the way we speak to each other without any knowledge of the world of shit people are often living through. One off-the-cuff comment can really hit someone based on what they\u2019ve gone through that day or that year.\u201d<\/p>\n
Golaszewski wrote the script years after experiencing baby loss himself. He is keen to stress that the show isn\u2019t autobiographical, \u201cbut it\u2019s something that I\u2019ve been through. That experience isn\u2019t something I\u2019d seen reflected [on TV] and it isn\u2019t something that people talk about. And then when you do go through it, suddenly everyone comes out the woodwork and tells you their stories.\u201d<\/p>\n
Emotionally distant \u2026 Charlotte Riley as Amanda in Babies. Photograph: BBC\/Snowed-In\/Amanda Searle<\/p>\n
Why does he think the subject is shrouded in silence? \u201cBecause it\u2019s death and death is always hard to talk about. But I think it\u2019s even harder to talk about because a lot of people don\u2019t consider it to be death and they medicalise it. There\u2019s a disjoint between the personal experience and the societal reception.\u201d One reason for this, he thinks, is that \u201cit\u2019s generally considered a female-centric situation. Maybe if it had been happening to men\u2019s bodies for the past thousands of years it would have quite a totemic place in our society.\u201d<\/p>\n
In Babies, it\u2019s not just Lisa and Stephen\u2019s marriage that is under strain. Another theme is dysfunctional male friendship, which manifests in an extremely depressing storyline involving Stephen and his odious schoolmate Dave (Jack Bannon), whose inability to reckon with his own feelings makes him a horrifyingly lacklustre father to his young son. When Dave enters into a strange situationship with an emotionally distant older woman (Charlotte Riley), it seems to create a rift between him and Stephen. But in truth their connection has been faltering for a while \u2013 something the show demonstrates via reams of monumentally witless banter.<\/p>\n
To me, Dave and Stephen\u2019s inane back-and-forth seems bleak beyond belief. Did Essiedu \u2013 who likens their friendship to old milk (\u201cit\u2019s on the turn\u201d) \u2013 recognise this kind of conversation from real life? \u201cOf course I would hope that if you were a fly on the wall with me and my male friends, you wouldn\u2019t see us talking too much like that,\u201d he grins. \u201cBut I can\u2019t say that you\u2019d never see us bantering.\u201d Golaszewski has obviously thought deeply about the pair\u2019s badinage. \u201cIf you\u2019ve got two men who are uncomfortable showing any kind of vulnerability or emotion \u2013 and there are so many men like that in the world \u2013 they have to bring down the shutters of banter. It\u2019s a way of appearing to speak but the effect of the words is the same as silence \u2013 it is meaningless. Two cats can walk past each other without saying anything, but for two humans it\u2019s very hard.\u201d<\/p>\n
When Essiedu first heard about Babies, he was prepared to take the job no matter what. \u201cI grew up watching Him & Her and was obsessed with Mum,\u201d says the Londoner, who found fame thanks to Michaela Coel\u2019s I May Destroy You and has since become one of our most acclaimed actors (next year he\u2019ll play Snape in HBO\u2019s Harry Potter reboot). \u201cWhen you get a script through from someone you admire, you hope it\u2019s not rubbish because it\u2019s like, \u2018Oh maybe I\u2019ll do it anyway.\u2019 I read it and it wasn\u2019t rubbish. It actually was just extraordinary.\u201d<\/p>\n
During filming, Essiedu realised Golaszewski\u2019s dedication to recreating real life on screen is actually the result of painstaking planning. \u201cWe are literally saying exactly to the comma what Stefan\u2019s written down. Every single \u2018um\u2019, every single \u2018like\u2019, every single \u2018well\u2019. And trust me, if you don\u2019t do it right, you\u2019ll know about it!\u201d<\/p>\n
Building a connection \u2026 Paapa Essiedu (Stephen) and Siobh\u00e1n Cullen (Lisa) in Babies. Photograph: BBC\/Snowed-In\/Sam Taylor<\/p>\n
Although his work has always been staunchly naturalistic, Babies is a long way from the crowd-pleasing sitcoms Golaszewski started out with. After establishing himself in the comedy world as part of Footlights-formed sketch troupe Cowards alongside Tim Key, Tom Basden and Lloyd Woolf, he debuted as a screenwriter with 2010\u2019s Him & Her, which starred Sarah Solemani and Russell Tovey as two loved-up dossers in their 20s. It was iconoclastic \u2013 breaking new ground with a scene revolving around Solemani\u2019s Becky doing a poo \u2013 yet riotously funny. Next came 2016\u2019s Mum, a heart-stealing cringe comedy about a put-upon widow (Lesley Manville). Most recently, Golaszewski moved into drama with Marriage, which chronicled the lives of Nicola Walker\u2019s Emma and Sean Bean\u2019s Ian in what some felt was movingly truthful \u2013 and others alienatingly tedious \u2013 detail.<\/p>\n
For Babies, Golaszewski has changed tack. \u201cMarriage was quite stark observation. The realism of Sean Bean moving his shoes around in a hallway \u2013 the choice to make that so naturalistic \u2013 was to enhance this idea of observing a relationship and from that to zoom out to the idea of togetherness more generally,\u201d says the 45-year-old. In Babies, the naturalism\u2019s purpose is to \u201cbuild an emotional connection and bring the audience in. With Marriage I was slightly more keeping the audience out,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n
Something else that helps foster emotional connection is Golaszewski\u2019s theme tune: a sweet, disenchantment-steeped Billy Bragg-meets-Kate Nash indie ballad performed by the writer-director himself. Originally Babies was going to be set to \u201cdance music\u201d but by the time he\u2019d changed his mind the production had run out of money, \u201cso I just did it for free\u201d. Golaszewski had originally been \u201creally against any kind of score\u201d because of music\u2019s \u201cdirectional\u201d (ie manipulative) nature when it comes to the audience\u2019s emotions. I must admit his soundtrack made me cry more than anything else.<\/p>\n
Stylistically, there is something about Babies that seeps directly into your mind\u2019s eye: afterwards, it\u2019s hard not to feel you are in one of Golaszewski\u2019s dramas as you wipe down the sink or scroll on your phone in bed (one of Lisa\u2019s main coping mechanisms). More profoundly, it leaves you with the sense that we urgently need a better way to talk about miscarriage. Cullen says filming it made her a \u201cmore conscientious and kind\u201d person; Golaszewski hopes Babies will broaden the conversation already happening in the media. \u201cYou now see articles where people talk about these things, which feels really healthy,\u201d he says. When you experience baby loss, \u201cyou just feel so alone. The more people can be honest about it, hopefully the easier it will get for the next batch of poor souls going through it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Babies is on BBC One and iPlayer on Monday 30 March.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Will Stefan Golaszewski ever tire of watching people unload the dishwasher? \u201cGosh, you never know \u2013 it\u2019s possible,\u201d…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":371487,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[93,61,60,282],"class_list":{"0":"post-371486","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-tv","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-ie","10":"tag-ireland","11":"tag-tv"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/371486","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=371486"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/371486\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/371487"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=371486"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=371486"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=371486"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}