With Mum and Him & Her, Stefan Golaszewski took the sitcom to new heights. Now he’s stepping into drama – with a series about ‘messy, tricky, glorious’ wedded bliss, starring Sean Bean and Nicola Walker
‘Baftas are essentially baubles,” says Stefan Golaszewski. “They’re very nice to have, but not central to what I do.” The multi-award-winning sitcom writer is speaking ahead of the launch of his new series, Marriage, which proved more of a challenge to write than he was prepared for. Yes, Golaszewski wrought three series of phenomenally wry television from Lesley Manville in Mum. True, he created Him & Her’s four hilariously toilet humour-packed seasons about a slacker couple, played by Russell Tovey and Sarah Solemani. But as he sat down to write Marriage, he couldn’t help feeling he was getting it wrong.
“There was something about my writing I wasn’t happy about – something stopping me achieving what I wanted,” says Golaszewski. “So after Mum, I took time out to reteach myself how to write.” His realisation? There’s a fundamental lack of honesty in making people chuckle. “When you write a comedy,” he says, “the dialogue is sherbet: it fizzes in the moment and then it’s gone. The point of the words is to make people laugh. But I was interested in using dialogue to seek a deeper truth. When you write a comedy, there’s a ceiling on your ability to be truthful – and for me, being truthful is the key.”
