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A parenting nightmare Martin Freeman and his co-creators recall how they drew on their own experiences for Breeders, the no-holds-barred Sky 1 comedy Sky
opened the door and f****** exploded.” Dreams can be wild – stories that our minds involuntarily create as we sleep. While most of us forget them the next morning, Martin Freeman had one five or six years ago that became the inspiration for a TV series. “I knew I had gone through this many times in real life… I was going up the stairs to go and shout at my children,” he recalled. “With each step, I was talking myself down: ‘You know you’re better than this, and they won’t respond positively.’ “I thought I’d got the better of my temper before I opened the children’s bedroom door…” The opening scene of Breeders, a raw, pacey, sweary comedy about parenting, produced by Avalon and FX Productions and broadcast on Sky 1, was taken directly from Freeman’s dream. Created by Freeman, director Chris Addison and writer Simon Blackwell, the 10-part series aired last spring and is an uncompromising look at modern parenthood. A second series was commissioned in May and is due to air later this year. Addison and Blackwell have impeccable comic credentials, having collaborated with Armando Iannucci on such masterpieces as The Thick of It; Blackwell wrote for the brilliant Peep Show. “That scene became the opening episode of a comedy that spoke to what it truly means to be a parent in my and Chris and Simon’s shared experience,” said Freeman. “We found enough common ground between the three of us – all the stuff you don’t say in polite society and all the truths you’re harbouring about how you sometimes speak to your kids.” Freeman plays fortysomething passive-aggressive parent Paul, juggling the stresses and strains of fatherhood, work and maintaining his relationship with his wife, Ally, played by Daisy Haggard. There is a lot of Freeman in Paul, who, alongside Haggard, Addison and Blackwell joined broadcaster and journalist Edith Bowman to discuss Breeders for an RTS event. He acknowledged that he is, in effect, playing himself. “If there is ever a character that is as close to me as possible, then it’s Paul, and it’s unashamedly so.”
Breeders