Angry neighbours, terrified actors and working with his wife... Stephen Mangan on making his new sitcom

Asked if I was interested in remaking a successful American show for the UK, my first thought was Pucks – the disastrous (and fictional) ice-hockey sitcom ‘starring’ Matt LeBlanc. I’d spent the past seven years in Episodes – a show all about how transplanting a successful TV show to a different country proved a massive mistake.

The target of Episodes was the Hollywood network-TV machine and its tendency to destroy subtlety, wit and finesse, but travelling the other way across the pond hasn’t often worked for scripted comedy either. Remember the UK remake of The Golden Girls – Brighton Belles? Pulled off air halfway through its first series. Married… with Children – 11 series, 263 episodes in the USA; Married for Life – one series, seven episodes in the UK.

With a few notable exceptions, the first iteration of an idea is normally the best. And often the cultural factors that gave birth to the idea do not travel well. For example, the American version of Dad’s Army was always going to be tough to make work, and indeed the results were awful – ‘Don’t tell him, Pike’ became ‘Don’t tell him, Henderson’ and a lot of the jokes seemed to revolve around men touching each other’s bottoms.

So, offered the chance to remake Lisa Kudrow’s brilliant Emmy-nominated four-series hit show Web Therapy, I baulked. In it she played a therapist who has decided that traditional hour-long sessions contain too much waffling, with clients blathering on about feelings and dreams, and that the actual nitty-gritty can be achieved in about three minutes.

She offers three-minute therapy sessions online but her main focus, it becomes apparent, is always her own self-interest. It was very funny, it worked really well, so why remake it? I reckoned I’d need some good reasons to even try; I came up with three.

First of all, it occurred to me that I could take the basic premise, that a therapist gives sessions to clients online, strip away almost everything else and start again. We could create a world from scratch, making it contemporary, relevant and British. And an entirely new show. Lisa agreed.

Secondly, the format provides a way to harness all the best things about improvisation (of which there are many) and can help mitigate the bad things about it (of which there are also many). I’m a huge fan of improvisation but it’s very difficult to make work in a conventional comedy.

It can produce inspired moments and also long, rambling, incomprehensible sequences that don’t go anywhere. If it’s used on screen at all, it is usually in a ‘mockumentary’, where the documentary style lends itself to editing out stuff that doesn’t work.

But with this particular format – two people on a Skype call on desktop computers – you can shoot both sides of the conversation at the same time and then, crucially, you are able to edit it down. A 20-minute improvisation can become a two-minute scene.

You can harness the brilliant and inspired, lose what doesn’t work. And thirdly, our use of technology has moved on even since the last series of Web Therapy almost half a decade ago. We rely more and more heavily on the myriad ways we can communicate. Phone calls, emails, texts, WhatsApp, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Skype, FaceTime, Snapchat – on and on.

Everywhere you go you’ll see people hunched over devices, sending and reading messages, posting, tweeting, blogging. It feels less and less like real communication and more like a never-emptying digital in-tray that needs constant attention.

Seeing a therapist live and work in this hectic environment felt interesting. Therapy is all about listening, attention to the interior, genuine communication. The modern world seems increasingly to make that difficult, and that felt a good juxtaposition. Therapy in a hurry. Life in a hurry.

The next step was to find a UK broadcaster. Channel 4 instantly saw the appeal. However, as this was going to be a partly improvised show we had no script to show them, and spending a lot of money on a comedy without some actual jokes written down in advance scares the bejaysus out of broadcasters. They gave us a bit of money, we pulled together the best cast we could and we shot a short taster tape. It went well and we were green-lit. Hang Ups was born.

The show was to be made by the production company my wife, the actress Louise Delamere, and I had set up a couple of years earlier, Slam Films. What better way to test the solidity of our marriage than by going into a famously high-pressure, super-stressful working environment as partners and co-workers?

Louise produced the taster tape, so we decided she’d produce the series too. Sleeping with your producer means that if you are not careful the work conversations never end. There were periods when from the moment we woke up until we fell asleep we’d endlessly discuss the show.

Our kids, after a while understandably fed up, imposed a ban on us discussing work at home. Art reflects life and when you watch the series you’ll appreciate the irony of us both, in real life, being so absorbed in our work that it drove our kids to distraction. To load the family jeopardy even higher, Louise’s brother Robert, who had directed the taster tape, would direct and co-write the series with me. The family that makes TV shows together, stays together, right?

In writing the scripts, it was important to Robert and me to try to reflect as much of society and as many different generations as possible. We gave our lead character (therapist Richard Pitt, played by me) a wife, two siblings, two living parents, two teenage kids with various mates, his own therapist, a best-mate neighbour, a supervisor and a huge pile of problems.

Therapy is really all about the clients so in order to get to know our lead we would need to know about his world, to see him outside the sessions as much as possible while not losing the central premise. Add in the clients, some one-off, others returning, and we realised this was a show that would require a very large cast – we needed 42 gifted improvisors. 

We had one thing on our side though. Normally a huge part of the filming process is taken up with moving cameras, lights and scenery. A complex scene might take a whole day or more. But in Hang Ups the camera, on the whole, doesn’t move, so you can shoot much more quickly. Charles Dance plays my father; he appears in every episode but always via FaceTime.

He came in and we shot his entire part, his whole series, in one morning. Richard E Grant plays my therapist and again we shot his part in half a day. Forty minutes of improvising and his scene for one episode is in the can. Throw Richard into a different costume and we’re on to the next episode. It happened so quickly that I wouldn’t be surprised if neither of them had any recollection of ever filming in the show.

We looked to recruit a group of actors who’d be happy to try improvising, brave enough to commit to a project with no script in the normal sense of the word; actors who’d be up for trusting that this process would work, and smart and witty enough to pull it off. We were delighted by the response and put together a talented big-name cast. With only one exception, everybody we asked to be in the show said yes.

So we needed an imposing and authoritative father? Fantasy casting would be Charles Dance – we got him. An emotionally unstable wrecking ball of a mother? Celia Imrie please. An actor who could play my wife with warmth and still be very funny? Katherine Parkinson. My eccentric brother and sister? Conleth Hill (Game of Thrones) and Jessica Hynes (Spaced).

The actors, some enormously experienced, would all turn up in a state of high anxiety. It’s unsettling to sit down in front of a camera without knowing what’s going to happen, to feel that the onus is on you to provide the comedy in a comedy.

David Tennant said he’d never been so nervous before a shoot. Paul Ritter (Friday Night Dinner) and I have faced the thrilling but excruciating blind panic of a Broadway opening night together – he said that paled next to this experience. But the leap of faith you have to take is that, given the right characters, the right actors, the right preparation and the right set-up, something interesting will happen. And it always did.

Our problem was not searching for enough stuff to fill the show, but having to leave out brilliantly funny moments. It saddens me that the world might never see David Tennant doing his Jerry Hall impersonation, but there was no room for it.

This is an unusual way of working. Robert and I had written a very detailed episode-by-episode, scene-by-scene, beat-by-beat script but there wasn’t much there in the way of actual dialogue. I’ve been in many shows that have used improv in order to help with writing – Green Wing, Nathan Barley and I’m Alan Partridge to name a few – but by the time you start filming you leave the improvisation behind and shoot a carefully written script. Not on Hang Ups.

If actors were playing a therapy client we’d give them their character, the issue they were calling about, some background information, all well in advance. Then on the day, turn on the cameras and film it.

No rehearsal. Every day we were taken down paths we could never have imagined. It was always surprising and frequently moving, shocking and very funny. When we asked Sarah Hadland (Miranda) to play a client, the wife of an unfaithful Tory MP, we didn’t expect her to tearfully recount being made to run through the showers at school by a sadistic matron shouting, ‘Look at her bald tuppence!’

Monica Dolan (W1A) plays a client who has been emotionally arrested since the death of Princess Diana and there is something both so silly and so profound in the way she portrays a woman who has put her whole life on hold for the past 20 years. And the improvisations produced a lot of filth, it has to be said. Richard E Grant decided that all one’s emotional problems stem from one’s relationship with one’s anus.

He might be right, who knows? The actors felt a part of the creative process and relished it. Although this is a comedy, we wanted the therapy sessions to feel truthful, so my producer/wife sent me to a humanistic psychotherapist and we carefully went through each fictional client, case by case, to determine the best route to take with each session. The last thing we wanted was to make this a show laughing at people with mental-health issues. We had to be cleverer than that, but we wanted the issues explored to have some basis in reality, too.

We also wanted to reflect modern life: Lolly Adefope (Josh) plays a social-media narcissist, more concerned with reaching one million Instagram followers than with building real friendships; Paul Ritter plays a domineering and abusive sex-pest boss; Daisy Haggard (Episodes) plays a woman so determined to see the bright side of every situation that she has emotionally cut herself off from the genuine trauma in her life.

The next issue was the shooting style. The world is full of cameras; they’re everywhere. On phones, tablets, desktops; on baby monitors, on cyclist’s helmets, front-door monitors; for reversing in cars, security cameras. We seem to live and communicate through all these machines, so why not shoot most of the show that way? Using phones and bike-helmet cameras, for example, helped to give a sense of movement.

We rented a large house in a smart London area and unwittingly walked into a raging neighbourhood dispute. Due to previous bad experiences with film crews, some of the well-to-do locals threatened to form a cordon to prevent actors reaching the set, conjuring images of a human chain of disgruntled retirees squaring up to Charles Dance.

One anonymous caller warned of dire consequences if we tried to film: ‘There are things we can do you can’t imagine,’ the impressively sinister plummy voice warned. A tree surgeon was hired to rev chainsaws yards from where we were shooting and it took some sensitive negotiations to save our filming schedule that day. I think we saved a tree in the process too.

The result, five weeks later, was 90 hours of original, hilarious footage – for a series of six half-hour episodes. The editors certainly earned their money. My marriage to the producer survived, brother is still talking to sister, brother-in-law to brother-in-law, and our kids have their parents back. We may all now need therapy though. Hang Ups is coming soon to Channel 4.

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