“And no penises,” Mountford chips in. As the pair dissolve into laughter, Horgan muses that, when it comes to the company name, “we should have a better story”.
Stories are important to Horgan and Mountford, who are rapidly building a business on them. In the past fortnight alone, Merman has signed a three-year, first-look deal with Sky Vision and has had two pilots announced: for the BBC, Motherland, co-written by Horgan, Holly Walsh, and Graham and Helen Linehan, and for Channel 4, The Circuit, a comedy about a series of disastrous dinner parties reuniting Horgan with Pulling writing partner Dennis Kelly. Then there’s the hat trick of Royal Television Society award nominations for Catastrophe, plus wins at Friday’s Broadcasting Press Guild Awards for Best Comedy and Best Writers for Horgan and co-writer Rob Delaney.
“We had no idea that Catastrophe would be the success that it was,” Horgan says. “For years, I said that it doesn’t really matter if no one is watching as long as you’re proud of what you’ve made. Now I feel it’s much better when more people see it and appreciate the story and characters. It was a really hard slog to make two [series] within a year – it killed us a bit – but apart from that …”
Horgan and Mountford met on The Increasingly Poor Decisions of Todd Margaret, as actor and producer respectively. Mountford had worked in theatre and radio, and in television as a freelance producer and head of comedy at RDF. She also devised A Young Doctor’s Notebook starring Jon Hamm and Daniel Radcliffe. Horgan’s breakout hit as a writer-performer was in the brutally funny noughties comedy Pulling. And now there’s Catastrophe. Clearly they are talents at the top of their game – so what convinced them to team up?
Source: The Guardian