Blame Brassic on Dominic West. While filming Pride, the rousing 2014 film about gay Londoners finding solidarity with a hardscrabble Welsh community during the miners’ strike, West was acting alongside lanky live wire Joseph Gilgun, who would regale him with wild tales of growing up in Chorley in Lancashire. Tickled by anecdotes like the theft of a shetland pony, West encouraged Gilgun to mine his formative years for material that could become a TV show.
Gilgun teamed up with screenwriter Danny Brocklehurst, no stranger to authentic northern humour after working on Channel 4’s Shameless. The result was Brassic, a headlong comedy about a rowdy gang of scallywags, chancers and wheeler-dealers trying to stay one step ahead of the law and local heavies in the fictional northern town of Hawley. As well as repurposing the ducking and diving of his youth, the autobiographical elements extended to Gilgun’s likable ringleader Vinnie O’Neill coping with being bipolar. That key character detail also meant a recurring role for the plummy West as Vinnie’s relentlessly inappropriate GP Dr Chris.
