Why my new hopeful BBC drama Babies is the culmination of a decade's exploration into grief

This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine.

Between 2012 and 2015, my wife and I experienced a long series of traumas around pregnancy that changed everything.

I had, till then, lived a kind of Google life. I’d been writing a sitcom called Him & Her (BBC Three), starring Russell Tovey and Sarah Solemani, about a carefree, cloudless couple, and while I was glad to be coming to the end, I’d imagined I might return every so often for specials, at Christmas, for ever perhaps. That would no longer be possible. I was unable to write with the same abandon. I would spend the next ten years, and three TV shows, dealing with what had happened.

It was only recently I realised my second show, Mum (BBC Two), starring Lesley Manville and Peter Mullan, about a woman rebuilding her life after loss, was really about me. I had no idea at the time. I thought I was cleverly using the sitcom in the classic mode and its iterative form as a Trojan horse to explore all kinds of important things.

I had no sense it was therapy. We’d had a son at last, which felt biblical, and a mortgage, and then more trauma, and then against all the odds a daughter, and when life throws things at you, you don’t have time to stop and turn them in your hands and notice what they are.

I don’t choose what I write. The ideas appear at the windows and thump till I let them in. I’d love to give it all up. Imagine the peace. But then a new thought arrives, and with it an itch, and there I go again, awake at three in the morning, putting fires out in my brain.

Next came a drama called Marriage (BBC One), starring Sean Bean and Nicola Walker, a study of togetherness in mid-life. My purpose, formally, was to bend the norms of a drama like a ruler. At times I let it snap. I needed a harder, cleaner truth. I’d tell anyone who’d listen, and some who wouldn’t, “Plot is to life as burger is to cow!” I was thirsty for austerity, railing against the need for easy answers. It had been a complicated lockdown.

My purpose emotionally was to speak, again, of life as it is, not as the commercial demands of television need it to be, of words as they are spoken, of spaces as they are felt, of the incommunicability of emotions, and to do that without having to tickle the audience or feed them sweets. Grief lay at its centre like a sleeping lion.

Writing perhaps is like beating a sofa to get rid of the dust. But there’s so much dust. There’s nothing cool about what I do. I write nakedly in the arms of love. Because look at us all on the bus, in the pub, with our families and friends in the park, seeking joy, togetherness, tonality, stability, love, clarity, beauty, kindness, chasing the chance to be happy like a boy at a bag in the wind.

By now my youngest son was born, and I guess somewhere among the giddy chaos of three young kids I was ready to translate those earlier traumas more explicitly into a story. My new series, Babies (BBC One), starring Paapa Essiedu and Siobhán Cullen, arrived. While not autobiographical, it is a love story about a couple going through repeated pregnancy loss.

It sounds miserable but it’s not. It has at its heart hope. There’s a happy ending. It’s an attempt to speak truthfully about an experience that remains unspeakable, that is treated as an illness and not grief, and find a way for those who have been through loss to feel less alone.

I pulled the show like a worm from the ground. It just kept coming. The writing is a lonely, endless process. Apart from an initial concept script, I show no one anything till it’s all been done. Then a team of kind, clever people point out my millions of mistakes and help the thing to actually work. By the time I come to shoot, the scripts are set in stone.

I’ve never used improvisation. It’s far too imprecise. I’m careful of every word, every sound, every move, every beat. I give the actors the branches, they provide the swing. The actors tend to be terrifically patient with me and together we go on a journey of, shall we say, unusual specificity to find the absolute truth of each tiny moment.

It takes actors of great skill, humanity, intelligence and courage to achieve what Paapa, Siobhán, Jack [Bannon] and Charlotte [Riley] have in Babies. I’ve been so lucky over the years to get to work with many such brilliant people.

Babies felt to me as I wrote it the culmination of a decade’s exploration into grief. Perhaps more will come. It’s a waveform. But as I shot the show, as I watched Paapa and Siobhán crackle into life on my monitor, as they revealed themselves to be two of the greatest actors of their generation, it dawned on me I’d actually written once again a love story.

Babies, I discovered, is at its core about something that powers all of my writing and always emerges from my stories eventually, like spring. It’s about the beauty and joy and complexity of sharing your life with someone you love.

While Him & Her was a response to the wonder I felt at falling in love with the person who would become my wife, everything since has been a variation on that wonder, at my luck, at her sparkling mind, at what it is to sit beside her on a sofa, at how she always finds a way to make me laugh, and here now with Babies at the way we dragged each other across the wastelands of the apocalypse, the person who from the moment I met her has run through every word I write like electricity down a wire.

Babies begins Monday 30 March on BBC One and the whole series will be available on iPlayer that day.

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