TV NOW – March 2013
Comic duo Barbara Bergin and Gary Cooke talk to Doug Whelan about their comedy series On The Couch, which pulls the curtain back on the uncomfortable world of couples’ therapy…
If you want to get something done, you better do it yourself. That might be the ethos employed by the stars of On The Couch, TV3’s new comedy series that explores what goes on behind closed doors in a psychiatrist’s office. Gary Cooke and Barbara Bergin, both seasoned performers and writers, took the initiative by creating, writing and shooting On The Couch on their own time and with their own money before pitching it to TV3, who loved the idea and commissioned the series.
In On The Couch, which follows straight after Champions League games on TV3, four very different couples endure therapy with very different results. Gary and Barbara play all the roles, and (as Barbara puts it), the audience takes on the role of the shrink. “You can really put your characters under pressure that way,” she says “by keeping the focus on them. They are never off the rack, so to speak. It’s about the awkward situations they’re in and how they deal with them. It’s got a lot of heart, but it can be quite dark. You might call it tragic-comedy.”
Both writer/performers agree that the best results when creating a programme like On The Couch comes from rolling up your sleeves and doing it yourself. The best way to write about the way that people think, is to be the person doing the thinking, if you will. Lots of comedy programmes – even some of the best ones – are written by committee, whereby there are 10 layers of production, a writers’ room, an executive producer, rewrites, the lot. Gary and Barbara simply locked themselves away and started coming up with characters and situations that best make people laugh.
“The hope in writing for yourself,” says Gary, best known for his hilarious turns in Après Match, 2is that you can get to places quicker by kicking ideas around and trying them out as you’re going. When you’re working with loads of departments – writers, directors, producers and so on – it can get diluted very quickly. This way you can create things on the spot and mould them as you go, rather than working through the layers.
The duo first worked together on stage more than 10 years ago; in a Roddy Doyle play called Guess Who’s Coming For The Dinner, which was a Dublin-based retelling of the classic 1967 drama about racial tension in a middle class family. “Gary claims we met before that, but I don’t remember,” laughs Barbara. “But that was when we became friendly. A few years later we appeared together in a play called Macbecks, a soccer satire [Gary played Wayne Rooney, Barbara played Colleen!] and that was when we started talking about trying to write something together. Eventually the time was right for us to get into it and that’s when On The Couch was born.”
Getting anything off the ground in this day and age, be it a new TV series, can be quite a difficult challenge, but Gary insists that self belief and perseverance is what it takes. “Having the idea is one thing,” he says, “but it requires commitment and cooperation too. If you’ve got the desire to do something, you can make anything happen.”
Wise words which Barbara sagely agrees with. “It’s very rare that there aren’t obstacles, but it didn’t feel like a hard road because in the beginning we were just playing around to see if we could bring our ideas to fruition. Our comfort in performing together definitely helped during that phase; the way things are done sometimes, if there had been more people involved the idea would have been pulled apart before it was fully formed but we were able to take our time and bring these couples to life. It’s great to have that dynamic, and be able to gauge what the other person is doing and where they want to go with an idea.”
One thing we must wonder about a programme like On The couch, which features characters in a quasi-documentary setting, addressing the audience directly, is are these characters based on any real-life figures? Friends, neighbours, family members? “Not at all!” Barbara exclaims. “We wanted a broad mix of people that would contrast well with each other and we wanted to explore a mixture of themes too, so we shaped them based on what we wanted them to say and do, rather than basing them on anyone in particular.”
“You don’t import characteristics as though you’re ordering off a menu,” Gary adds. “Dare I say it, it’s an organic process, as pretentious as that sounds! We gave them traits that we knew we could mine humour out of, and bit by bit you circle it until you know you’ve got it.”
The pair clearly work well together and admire one another, and Barbara agrees that the project was somewhat blessed from the beginning. And once TV3 came on board along with Ireland’s Broadcasting Authority (which handles the licence fee-funded Broadcasting Fund), adding to their impressive and ever growing list of original Irish programming, everything fell into place.
“It’s great hat TV3 are always adding to their roster,” Gary agrees. “It’s good for them from a commercial point of view, it’s good for the industry because there are more avenues for people like us to explore, and it’s good for the viewers because there is always a demand for new Irish shows. The more of it that’s out there, the better.”