Holly Walsh interview: 'Comedy is like the church – a lot of female vicars, not many female bishops'

“I’m glad we’re talking on the phone and not via Zoom because I just got sun cream in my eye and it would look like I was winking at you,” says Holly Walsh. “I want this interview to go well but I’d hate to overstep any marks.”

Now that’s cleared up, my conversation with one of the country’s funniest comedy writers can proceed. As well as Walsh’s superb new BBC series, it’s a conversation that takes in topics as diverse as darts, badgers, boarding school, the contents of Sharon Horgan’s fridge, being a vicar’s daughter and breaking limbs by jumping off piers - punctuated by occasional interruptions from 39-year-old Walsh’s two pre-school children and her cat. Which is called, naturally, Courgette.

The Other One, her very funny sitcom which begins a full series tomorrow after a successful pilot in 2017, is about dead bigamist fathers. Which sounds unlikely mirth fodder, admittedly, until Walsh explains how its unusual premise is ripped from real life.

“My mate’s mum went to this surprise party where the birthday boy turned up late, making an excuse about having met his friend for a drink first,” she recalls. “Except his friend was among the guests waiting in the dark to surprise him, so everyone knew he was lying. I loved that story. It felt like a ready-made sitcom moment.”

That’s how the series begins. The unfaithful fibber in question promptly has a heart attack when the lights are flicked on and the assembled throng shout “Surprise!”. However, the plot twists don’t stop there.

“Somebody else told me about their parents’ male friend who secretly had two families and deliberately gave both sets of children the same names to make all the lying slightly easier. So I basically combined these two anecdotes about terrible men from the Seventies,” laughs Walsh. “Although I was less interested in the men who caused these problems and more in the fallout affecting all these messed-up women around them.”

Welcome, then, to The Other One: a comedy about a girl called Catherine Walcott and another girl called Catherine Walcott. Half-sisters who have no idea the other exists until their father drops dead and it emerges that he had a secret family in a nearby town.

It stars Rebecca Front (The Thick of It) and Ellie White (aka Princess Beatrice from The Windsors) as the middle-class mother and daughter who are initially horrified to discover their counterparts are less Rotary Club, more sticky-floored nightclub. The down-to-earth pair are played by Siobhan Finneran (Downton Abbey’s villainous maid Miss O’Brien) and Lauren Socha (Misfits).

What begins as a culture-clash comedy - White’s uptight Cathy works in corporate insurance, while Socha’s Cat is a tracksuit-clad Deliveroo driver who boasts she’s “completed Tinder” - soon turns into something sweeter and more nuanced.

“It’s The Odd Couple,” says Walsh. “Two people who are opposites always make good comedy. But Pippa [Brown, her co-writer] and I agreed early on that as well as their differences, we wanted to explore their similarities, especially where their relationships with their dad overlapped. They’re not stuck hating each other, they’re trying to make this new sort-of-sisterhood work. The moments where they connect are often the funniest. It’s a love story in a sense. What they miss about their dad, they find in each other.”

So which of The Other One’s odd couple sisters more closely resembles the Guildford-born, Cambridge-educated Walsh herself? “I’m 100 per cent Cathy, the square one,” she cheerfully admits. “It wasn’t a stretch to write her. I too have a gold Duke of Edinburgh award which I will tell anyone about at any given opportunity. In fact, please make sure you mention that in the article.”

The Other One’s pilot episode aired on BBC Two in 2017 and was well-received. A full series was duly commissioned. How come the three-year wait? “I went and had a baby, didn’t I?” deadpans Walsh. “Sorry about that. Typical bloody woman.”

I ask if it’s a coincidence that the two love interests for Front’s character are played by Neil Pearson and Stephen Tompkinson, who both happen to be alumni of Nineties newsroom sitcom Drop the Dead Donkey. “Oh God, busted,” laughs Walsh. “That’s only so my parents love me, because they were huge Drop the Dead Donkey fans. My dad was very impressed by that. Because I tell dick jokes for a living, I have to win them back over somehow. And my mum’s a vicar, so I do everything I can not to show her up.”

Walsh’s mother got ordained during her 50s, around the same time as her daughter changed her own job from working in art galleries to stand-up comedy.

“We had our career crises at the same time,” she says. “My mum went back to university, got ordained and the job has since taken her all over the country, so my parents’ lives changed dramatically. She’s a brilliant vicar who gets really involved in the parish. That was really inspiring and she was so supportive of my career switch too. I like to think we’re now doing a similar job from opposite ends of the spectrum.”

Walsh’s current day job is as a writer on parenting sitcom Motherland. For the past few months, the writing team have been busy working on series three.

“It’s really helped me stay sane, actually,” she says. “We’ve been having daily script meetings on Zoom, which has given me structure. And I love the people I work with, so it’s like seeing friends every day, which has stopped me feeling lonely. It’s worked pretty well. The only difference to our normal writing process is fewer trips to Pret, which has probably put a massive dent in their profits.”

She’s tight-lipped about storylines but does reveal: “It picks up straight after series two, when Julia’s [Anna Maxwell Martin’s character] mum collapsed at the school sports day. That’s the starting point for the new series and it goes onto explore their relationship.”

Walsh admits working on Motherland gives her a chance to vent about the frustrations of parenthood: “My husband watches it going ‘God, why did you make that sound negative? When I said it, it was positive.’ We all pinch scenarios from our real lives. [Co-writer] Helen Linehan is this font of amazing school-gate stories but some are so nuts we can’t use them because they’d seem too preposterous, even for a comedy.”

Does knowing they’re in the presence of a Motherland writer make fellow parents feel awkward about talking to her? “If anything, people tell me more stuff,” she says. “Friends have forwarded me brilliant PTA emails or WhatsApp threads. I warn friends that I’ll steal their stories and there’s a chance it’ll end up in the show. I don’t want to piss off my muses. I’m like a detective with his informants. I’ve got to keep my sources sweet.”

Linehan’s husband, Father Ted creator Graham Linehan, was part of the original Motherland writing team but departed after the first series. He’s since become a controversial figure on Twitter for his outspoken and seemingly un-PC views on transgender issues. Walsh is wary when I ask about him.

“I really valued what he did on series one,” she says carefully. “The whole idea of barely seeing the kids on-camera and them hardly talking, that was all Graham’s. He did a great job. I dunno… I still work with Helen, obviously, and she’s brilliant. So a lot of good came out of all that.”

In less awkward news, Walsh’s other co-writer is the prolific Sharon Horgan (Catastrophe, Pulling, Divorce). Since meeting on a Radio 4 comedy show - Walsh was the intern at the time but Horgan says “she was the funniest person in the room” - they’ve been working together for the past decade.

“Our working relationship is just about what makes us laugh,” says Walsh. “She’s a very generous collaborator and makes me funnier. Working with Sharon, I raise my game. It’s like playing tennis against someone better than you - you might lose but you’ll play better tennis. We also talk a lot about what we’re having for lunch. If we’re working at her house, it’s ideal because she’s got one of those fridges which are full of things you want to eat. I don’t think Sharon would mind me telling the Daily Telegraph that the contents of her fridge are amazing.”

After serving her time on the stand-up circuit, Walsh graduated to the hallowed ground of TV panel shows. “In the early days, I was often the only woman,” she says. “They do feel like a more female-friendly place now but there’s still got a long way to go and we shouldn’t get complacent. There needs to be a lot more diversity of voices, in terms of race, gender, background, disability, everything. It’s still a white male-dominated world. Very brilliant, very funny white men but still a majority. It’s still very rare to get a female host. It’s like in the church - there are a lot of female vicars but not many female bishops.”

There’s just time to discuss two things: her freakish arm injury and her love of badgers. Yes, badgers. But first, how on earth did Walsh come to break her arm and dislocate her shoulder by plunging off the pier during the annual Worthing Birdman festival?

“It’s such a stupid story,” she says. “It was for a kid’s TV show a decade ago. I gamely did the stunt and smashed my arm to bits but was rescued by a lifeboat crew and the incredible NHS stuck me back together. People often ask how I got my massive scar and I say: ‘Well, I was dressed as a damsel in distress, being chased by a Nazi, jumped off Worthing Pier in a mock helicopter and ended up in hospital for a week. If you don’t believe me, look on YouTube.’ I still can’t straighten my arm and have a four-inch metal plate in there. But hey, if you’re going to permanently disfigure yourself, you might as well do it in fancy dress.”

Finally, Walsh began her showbiz career aged just six when she appeared on an ITV children’s wildlife show talking about badgers. “I was a celebrity at school - for two days,” she says. Badgers were also her specialist subject when she appeared on Celebrity Mastermind in 2012. Why the lifelong passion for all things brockish?

“My parents are really into wildlife and used to take us badger-watching,” she enthuses. “They had a van because they were picture framers and would drive us to remote woodland at night. It must have looked so dodgy, like they were abducting children, shoving them into a van and driving them into the woods under cover of darkness. But it was such a magical thing, staying up late and being part of this hidden world.”

I point out how Queen guitarist Brian May currently seems to be king of the badgers. “He’s the human representative of the badgers, sure, but it’s an unelected position,” Walsh points out. “I’d love to take that mantle one day.”

The Other One starts Friday 5 June at 9pm on BBC One and will be available as a boxset on BBC iPlayer