Daisy Haggard on series two of Back To Life and being starstruck by her co-star Ade Edmondson

Virgin Radio

8 Sep 2021, 10:31

The dark-comedy goddess joined the Chris Evans Breakfast Show with Sky to talk about the second series of her acclaimed TV show and fan-girling her co-stars.

Daisy told Chris about the BAFTA-nominated show: “It’s about a lovely woman in her mid 30s returning home from what we realise is an 18 year prison sentence and she's returning to the small town where this terrible thing happened many years ago.

"She's moving back and trying to rebuild and start to live in a town where everybody hates her. It shouldn't be funny, but sometimes it is."

Where did the idea come from? She explained: “I was really obsessed with how we vilify women who do something wrong, how we - as a society - perceive women when they've committed a crime compared to men. 

“How it's portrayed in the media when it's a woman compared to a man and so that's always something that's really interested me and then, just really bluntly, I had to move back home with my parents who were driving me completely crazy and telling me how to load the dishwasher and it was at that moment that this idea was born.

“So it was a combination of all those things and also I love things that have a big heart about new beginnings. There was something about the messy combination that just excited me and so I had to go at writing it."

On her character Miri, she said: “She goes back into basically her teenage bedroom with posters of her old idols (most of who are dead) and all her old things like her cyber pet, her hair crimper, all those things and she is trying to start life in her late 30s. The second season opens with a full head of crimped hair.

“We have Ade Edmondson coming back as the father of the girl who died in the first season and he's a real threat to Miri and it's a real thriller element, but he's a human, he’s grieving, he's a person. He plays the part beautifully and I think that it allows everyone to have vulnerability and be flawed because that's what makes people interesting.

“Miri is an eternal optimist and very vulnerable. At the centre of it we've got this person who did something absolutely awful but she's so full of hope that you end up backing her."

On fan-girling her co-stars, she shared: “Ade tweeted me saying how much he loved the show and it was really well timed because me and Laura (Solon) were writing the next season and he put himself in our heads. The next thing he knew, he was being offered the part of the bad guy.

“He was great, he was so much fun. I was very starstruck.”

All 6 episodes are available to watch now on BBC iPlayer via Sky Q.

For more great interviews listen to The Chris Evans Breakfast Show with Sky, weekdays from 6:30am on Virgin Radio, or catch up on-demand here.