“Mark, why are you doing this?” Mark O’Sullivan asks himself this in the opening moments of My Sexual Abuse: The Sitcom. It’s a fair question, and one that you can imagine the comedian and writer’s close circle posing to him before he embarked on this bruisingly raw excavation of trauma. There are very few people who would feel comfortable opening up on national TV about being sexually abused as a child. There are even fewer who’d sign up to create a sitcom about their experience (as opposed to, say, a darkly comic drama in the vein of Baby Reindeer or I May Destroy You). Fewer still would make a film about that whole process.
But that’s exactly what O’Sullivan has done. When he was a boy, he was abused by a member of his extended family. Decades later, when he was in his thirties, he gave evidence in a court case that eventually led to his abuser being convicted. Now he has written a short comedy episode about those events, in the artificial, “deliberately cartoonish” style of an Eighties family sitcom, and has invited a Channel 4 camera crew to capture its making. The result is a curious, confronting cross between documentary and public therapy session, with some dark punchlines thrown in too. All of this grapples with the question: how can you find humour in something so horrifying?
