Meet the stars of Ralph & Katie who are making television history

Back in 2020, when Leon Harrop got a phone call at home from dramatist Peter Bowker, he thought he must be pulling his leg. Harrop, who has Down’s syndrome, had played Ralph, a young adult with the condition, in three series of Bowker’s hit BBC One drama about autism, The A Word. In one of the big set piece moments of the last series, Ralph got married to his girlfriend Katie, played by Sarah Gordy, who also has Down’s. Bowker was ringing to say that he was making a spin-off show about the couple, as they embark upon married life in their own home in the Lake District. “I was talking to Pete,” says Harrop, “and he said, ‘Oh, we’re doing Ralph & Katie.’ I said, ‘What? Is this a joke?’ And he said, ‘No, it’s not a joke, it’s real.’ And I went absolutely mad, jumping around. I was so excited.”

I’m talking to both Harrop and Gordy via video-call, and the actress confirms that she couldn’t wait to get started. “I love Peter Bowker. I love the way he works. He has a great imagination. It feels great to be with your friends and your work colleagues,” she adds. “We have a great time together. And working with Leon is fantastic.”

Both are experienced actors. Harrop, now 30, appeared opposite Stephen Graham – his favourite thespian, along with Maxine Peake – in Jimmy McGovern’s The Street as far back as the Noughties and has gone on to play roles in Casualty, Moving On, and Sky One’s Brassic. Gordy, 46, has a string of stage and screen credits that include Upstairs Downstairs, Call the Midwife, and last year’s ITV crime drama The Long Call, alongside starring roles in plays such as Crocodiles at the Royal Exchange in Manchester and Ben Weatherill’s ambitious Jellyfish, in which a single parent seeks out a romantic partner, a young man with Asperger’s, for her daughter (Gordy). It transferred for a run at the National Theatre. “Acting live is totally different from when you’re on set for television,” she tells me, although she has been doing the former for a long time. “I began acting with my sister when I was a little girl. I did loads of plays in front of my family and also did school plays, and things like that.” She takes inspiration from the best. “One actor I admire is Dame Judi Dench... I love the way she disciplines James Bond.”

Harrop, who lives in Bolton, where he grew up, with his parents Tanya and Dave, also began acting at school. Filming the six 30-minute episodes of Ralph & Katie, though, had its challenges for both actors. There were a lot of lines to be learnt, and Harrop found it helpful to work with inclusive performance coordinator Jess Mabel Jones, especially when it came to articulating more difficult words. “If I’d say something and it was not right, Jess would say, let’s do mirroring. So, she would say the line, and then I’d stop, think, and say the line myself.”

Harrop, who seems to have a natural comic timing, ran into a slightly different issue working with the actor Craig Cash, who co-wrote and starred in The Royle Family with Caroline Aherne. Cash plays Ralph and Katie’s next-door neighbour Brian in the show, “We were a double act,” Harrop says. He did, however, sometimes find himself corpsing when they were in scenes together, “Every single thing he’d do, he’d make me laugh,” Harrop tells me. “In some scenes, I’d get caught laughing and say, ‘I’m sorry.’”

Much of the series was shot in a studio in Manchester, while the front door and back garden scenes at the couple’s home were filmed in different villages – Bollington in Cheshire and Ramsbottom in Greater Manchester – 30 miles apart, and not actually in the Lake District. But there was still the Northwest climate to deal with. “It was pretty windy and pretty wet,” says Gordy. “It always rains on set, always. And I get freezing cold.”

The perfectionist Gordy also had to get used to the intense demands of the script and the filming schedule. Both actors were required on 38 out of 40 days on the shoot, meaning rest days were almost non-existent. “I always set my alarm clock early so I can learn my script and be Katie, and sometimes I’m a bit slow waking up, and I found that difficult.” She often rehearses lines with her mum Jane at home in Lewes.

Gordy works hard to get inside the skin of Katie. “I always think about the character in my head,” she says, “Whenever I read books, I can have another character running in my brain. And it helps… you can open your mind to other characters.”

Does Gordy think Ralph & Katie will change the way that people think about people with Down’s syndrome? “It’s not about Down’s syndrome,” she stresses. “It’s about the person behind it, really.” The series, she hopes, will encourage viewers to see beyond the “label” attached to anyone who is neurodivergent, and realise that everyone with Down’s has their own unique personality.

This, in essence, is the argument against those who would claim that Ralph and Katie are token characters intended to represent all people with Down’s syndrome in a box-ticking exercise by Bowker and the BBC. And Gordy believes that the more such characters appear on television, the more people will learn to see the individual with the disability, rather than just the disability itself. Harrop, for instance, would like to take a run at a role that might surprise people. “I’d like to play a villain,” he says. “Someone who goes around murdering people and gets away with it.”

A 2021 report by the campaign group Underlying Health Condition revealed that, while 22 per cent of the UK population have some form of disability, they are represented by only 8.2 per cent of on-screen characters, and an even smaller 7 per cent of television employees, although both these figures have been rising in recent years. In his MacTaggart lecture at last year’s Edinburgh TV Festival, the screenwriter Jack Thorne complained that “commissioners haven’t taken the opportunity to tell disabled stories” and bemoaned the lack of representation in front of and behind the camera. Ralph & Katie addresses that across the board. Director Jordan Hogg has cerebral palsy, while the screenwriting team is made up of five of Britain’s emerging deaf, disabled and neurodivergent writers, working alongside the veteran Bowker, perhaps still best known for the boundary-pushing musical crime drama Blackpool, and the Belfast-set Troubles drama Occupation

Playing characters from different time periods has also led Gordy to find out about the lives of people with Down’s syndrome in British history. “I have been doing research… I did two costume dramas, period dramas, and going back in time, they always treated people with disability in a horrible way. They called them useless idiots – which is an insult,” she says passionately.

“When I was doing Upstairs Downstairs, my character was hidden, and her brother was looking for her, and he finally met her.” Gordy played Pamela Holland, who had been born in India, and sent by her mother to a residential facility, a secret she covered up by telling relatives that her daughter had died. “And that was between the First World War and Second World War. People had that attitude between the two wars.”

On stage in Jellyfish, Gordy tackled issues around sex, dating and Down’s syndrome. In Ralph & Katie, we see the couple in bed together and drinking alcohol. It’s important Gordy says, so that we see them as adults. “I always drink wine when I have my dinner,” she notes, “and it gives the feeling that Ralph and Katie are adults first, and they’re always there when they need each other.”