Robert Popper began his career writing for The Big Breakfast characters Zig and Zag. He then worked as commissioning editor for comedy and entertainment at Channel 4, where he helped launch Bo’ Selecta!, Black Books and Spaced. He was the producer for two series of Peep Show, script editor on all three series of The Inbetweeners, and co-wrote the first half of the first series of Stath Lets Flats with Jamie Demetriou in 2018. His own creation, the acclaimed sitcom Friday Night Dinner, ended with its sixth series in 2020. Now Popper is back with a brand new female-led comedy, I Hate You, starring Sex Education’s Tanya Reynolds and newcomer Melissa Saint as two flatsharing best friends in their 20s.
Hi, Robert! What’s your process for dreaming up a new sitcom?
Well, it starts with this … [gestures to wall of Post-It notes].
Isn’t rule one to find a situation where characters are thrown together but can’t escape?
I’ve never really thought about it like that. I’m always trying to define the mood of the show, as opposed to thinking about the whole premise. With Friday Night Dinner, I came up with the title first, remembered how my family spoke to each other, growing up, and thought: “That’s my show.” I wanted to do something about a similarly intense friendship, where you can’t explain the you-had-to-be-there moments. I’ve said so many times: “I hate my friends,” because they’re so close, they can fucking annoy you. The title sums up the show: when you’re so intensely close, you love but hate each other.
The bickering siblings and friends you’ve written in the past (Adam and Jonny in Friday Night Dinner, Mark and Jez in Peep Show, the Inbetweeners) have all been male. Did you find it hard writing for the characters of Charlie and Becca, two bickering women?
I’ve always enjoyed writing women. I mean, if you can’t write female characters, then you’re not really a writer. They’re not much different from us blokes. They still talk crap. All my friends who are women still talk crap half the time. And I love that. I just love crap.
Was this also a deliberate attempt not to have two white blokes as the main characters?
You can still have two white blokes. It depends on what story you’re telling. [Channel 4 comedy] Bad Boys is two white blokes, and that’s fantastic.
Like Friday Night Dinner, are parts of I Hate You also drawn from your life?
A lot is taken from what friends have said. There’s a bit in the first episode where the girls start going out with men in their 80s. That came from a friend who would say: “I’m seeing my old friend tonight.” I’d say: “How long have you known him?” and they said: “No, he’s my old friend. He’s 85.” It was quite mysterious. In the opening scene of episode two, Becca spots a bouncer with a fly on their head and wonders: “What would happen if I swiped it off?” That happened to me once. I also used to regularly pass this chalkboard with my buddy in LA that said “Dog adoptions available” and change it to “Dog abortions”. He thought I was an idiot, so that’s a recurring joke, too.
Like many of your characters, Becca and Charlie’s relationship could be described as “messy”. Have you ever had a messy relationship with someone you’ve, say, worked with?
When I was at Channel 4, Iain Morris – who went on to co-write The Inbetweeners – also worked as a commissioning editor. Iain’s office was bare but my walls were covered in all these insane scripts that random people had sent in. If I was on an important phone call, he’d walk into my office and tear one up in front of me. When E4 launched in 2001, we got these E4-branded bouncy balls, so if he was on an important phone call, I’d get a massive handful of balls, throw them at his face and shut his door. We took our jobs very seriously!
Can you remember any of the pitches people sent in?
There was one with pictures on the front of a dog with swastikas all over it, which definitely took my attention. [The premise was that] Hitler had trained his alsatian to do the Sieg Heil salute, and was deciding whether to invade the Soviet Union or Britain. The British trained an identical alsatian so they could switch dogs, so when Hitler said: “Shall we invade Russia or Britain?” the dog would walk over the map and salute over Russia.
How far did that get down the production line?
Not far! Another guy sent in a proposal that Iain and I became obsessed with. It was a sitcom based around instructions of how to build a remote-controlled car, in tribute to his dead father. It was very confusing, with lots of diagrams …
You’ve surely had some of your own bonkers ideas for sitcoms? What’s been your biggest wasted opportunity?
Peter Serafinowicz and I – who I worked with on [science spoof] Look Around You – tried to write a sitcom called Peter and the Wasp, about a guy whose flatmate is a bad-tempered wasp. We got quite far and even pitched it to the BBC. But then we thought: what’s going to happen in episode four, when he’s got bored of stinging people? He’d probably just fly off.
I Hate You will air later this month on Channel 4.
