Superheroes in Suburbia
John Freeman chats with Paul Mendelson, the creator of My Hero, about the state of British TV comedy, writing and flying babies...

DOWN THE TUBES: You've said in the past you don't know where the idea for My Hero came from but once you got it, how long did it take to bring to screen?

PAUL MENDELSON: Well in a way, I can see how it came about. There's this strange thing where ideas just pop straight in to your head and suggest some sort of process. But I know I always like writing romantic comedy and I know that a close friend of mine is a very high-powered lawyer. And when a client snaps his fingers he's got to be there, just like a superhero. He travels all round the world. His partner is obliged to leave whatever's happening. That's an interesting premise really. How do you make that funny? That's what started me off.

Ardal O'Hanlon and Emily Joyce, stars of My Hero. Photo © BBC.

My Hero is what we call a High Concept, a Big Idea show. Cheers isn't a Big Idea; neither is Friends. That's not to disparage them, they're brilliant. It's all in the characters, it's not in the actual intrinsic idea, which is called High Concept. There are very few High Concept comedies come along. They come along every so often. Goodnight Sweetheart was a High Concept comedy.

I come from advertising and there really are only two things you can do in advertising -- High Concept and redundancy. Basically, you have to have a high concept idea because it sells the product. So I'm trained to think in what they call in advertising The Big Idea. Which is why the first thing I wrote, although it wasn't the first thing to be put on air, was So Haunt Me which was about a house which was haunted by a Jewish mother. That's really High Concept.

And then the next high concept show was My Hero, about a woman being married to a super-hero. That must be the way I think, because of my advertising training, as opposed to most comedy writers' training, which is comic sketch shows.

I think one of the reasons Ardal accepted the role [was because it was High Concept]. He's told me he was offered dozens of comedies after Father Ted -- four a week-- and I said, "What made you chose this?" and he said, "I could see it." It actually had a visual element. Most situation comedies don't have a visual element but My Hero does.

DTB: Did you read any comics growing up?

PM: Oh, Batman I think.

DTB: Ah, DC Comics characters...

PM: Yes, I'm not so knowledgeable about others Spider-Man, the Marvel ones. I grew up with Superman and Batman in the early days. And I watched the TV shows of Batman, the original one with Adam West.

DTB: So having got the concept, how did you sell it to the BBC -- or did you sell it to Big Bear, the production company first?

PAUL MENDELSON: Well, I tend to try to write a treatment of it. And the first time I ever went to the BBC with it, quite a few years ago, I was asked to write a script by a producer. So I did, and the Head of Comedy said, "Well I really like it apart from the super hero element," so I thought... "Well... sorry?"

But a few years later I saw a friend of mine, John Stroud who's the director of My Hero, who had directed So Haunt Me. He's a brilliant director. I said, "Have a look at this" and he had a look at it and said "Well I really like this," and he showed it to the Head of Comedy at the BBC, Geoffrey Perkins, who also really liked it and that's how it got started.

He was hugely supportive of My Hero and he'd also produced Father Ted, so he suggested Ardal for the lead.

DTB: Somebody mentioned to me that Craig McLaughlin had actually auditioned for the show...

PM: Yes, we did a pilot with Craig. John suggested Craig because he'd been directing him in Bugs. Craig was wonderful: he played it very American. He did that very well, he was marvellous. But we did some research and the British are very parochial in their comedy and they said why have you got an Australian whom we know from soaps? And why is he playing an American? Why can't they be English? But they liked the concept.

Interestingly, in the pilot Mrs Raven just had a few lines -- she was running the health food shop. Well, everybody said "We adore this woman, she's fantastic!" and we said "Oh right, let's expand her" and so we had her running the health centre and of course, she's become huge.

DTB: Were there any problems getting My Hero off the ground, compared to your other shows, such as May to December?

PM: Well initially there were, because of the casting. I mean there's always problems these days. People have the courage of other people's convictions, so there's always problems because every decision's always got to go right up to the very top.

People are concerned -- they say they aren't -- about ratings. They know that viewers won't stay with things the way that they used to. I don't think you can get many slow burners on mainstream TV any more -- I think you have to be in there straight away. Viewers will switch instantly, which is why My Hero struck gold because it was so visual and so in your face.

DTB: Do you think that's partly due to the way in which television is now shot. The way scenes are one every one minute, two every two minutes at most?

PM: Yes I think people have the attention span of newts! It's also movies. Movies are very quick. Scenes in movies are very short. To have somebody sitting around, two people talking to each other on mainstream television is pretty unheard of. So you have to be quick.

DTB: Which goes back to High Concept.

PM: High Concept, and peoples attention span.

DTB: Did it take a long time to cast the show?

PM: We did a rehearsed reading to start with and we cast some of them then. We cast Emily Joyce right from the outset and also Lil Roughley (Ella Dawkins). Gerry McNulty, who plays Mrs Raven, played lots of different parts in the first one before we ever created Mrs Raven and was wonderful. So when I created Mrs Raven for the pilot we did with Craig, we got her back in.

The fascinating thing is you can go through a load of actors and actresses all of who are wonderful and about three will make you laugh. And that's what happened with Emily. Lots and lot of really good actresses came in, but Emily was the first person we saw which was really weird. And you just thought, "This person's funny".

I'm not an actor but I know from actors I've worked with, they say that comedy is the really hard thing.

DTB: So what can we expect from the third season? You've had the pregnancy, which you are very fond of...

PM: Well, of course you could have guessed! Every series I do has a pregnancy. You can expect a flying, talking baby. You can expect the first episode to be "How do we explain this to the grandparents? What happens and how can you persuade the baby to be quiet?" Although not every episode is about the baby, the baby is involved in every episode. And a superhero who's the baby's dad. But it's really about George and Janet, but the baby obviously changes the focus.

There isn't so much a serial element in it, the episodes are sort of independent from one another but I think they take it into new areas. We examine the Achilles heel that a super hero would have and we invented this thing that he can do about erasing people's memories which seemed to be pretty convenient but then what happens if he erases his own?

I don't want to say what other things there are because I'll give too much away, but they are all very different and, what I'm very concerned about, they all bring out an aspect of a superhero's character.

DTB: Which enables you to create more ideas for the fourth season...

PM: Oh sure. This one, please God, could run and run because it's not just about George and Janet, they are the focal point but you've got all these other characters. And they can impinge on each other.

DTB: Yes, you mentioned Mrs Raven. Which is the most unexpected character in terms of the way the show's progressed? Has any character changed tremendously since you first came up with them?

PM: I think we've given Tyler more than we thought we would, because he was just so wonderful. Phil Whitchurch is such a clever actor and Arnie [Lou Hirsch], well now he's working in the health food shop with Tyler and George. Arnie's more integrated into the series than he was before, which is nice because it became difficult to have to keep flying over to New York or Vegas for George to see him. We've done that joke in a sense. We know George can fly anywhere to see his friends. And to have a super-hero, a lapsed super-hero on hand who can give the wrong advice from his vast experience is quite fun.

Plus, Piers and Mrs Raven are like a double act now. In some instances we have sub-plots, which don't necessarily involve George and Janet, they're a bit more Piers and Mrs Raven and they are a nice relief from the main plot. Your A plot and your B plot if you were. It's nice when they come together but sometimes they're separate and they go their separate ways. The characters are all so large, except for Janet, who is like the voice of sanity.

DTB: Is she, essentially, is the audience character?

PM: She is in a sense the audience. We'd like to think it's her series, really, because she says he's My Hero. She's the voice of sanity, but because Emily Joyce is such a good comic actress, we've made sure that we don't leave her out of the comedy. She's brilliant, absolutely brilliant.

DTB: It's a tremendous ensemble cast and they seen to have brought so much to the show.

PM: They're lovely and they adore each other. They're genuinely fond of each other. Which I think is part of what happens when you're casting. You make sure you cast people whom you think are going to get on, but also John Stroud, the director, has created such a lovely spirit that it makes a very warm friendly show.

I haven't had the experience but other people have had the experience where the cast have hated each other. When you're doing a nice family comedy you want them to like each other. People I know who have come into the audience have said that it comes across. You feel that they get on with each other.

DTB: So what sort of input does the BBC have?

PM: Well, My Hero is an independent production for the BBC. Big Bear hire all the people, all the people they hire are freelance. We're not even using the BBC studios -- we're using Teddington, which were the old Thames Studios. But it is a production for the BBC so Geoffrey Perkins, as was and now Sophie Clark-Jervoise as the new Head of Comedy, they're the executive producers of the show. BBC pay Big Bear to make the programme. We own the rights but the BBC own the programmes.

DTB: So if you wanted to make a book or magazine from the show...

PM: I think it would be probably a joint deal. I think we have to do it jointly with them with videos...

DTB: Actually that's a question that fans have asked me, when is it coming out on video?

PM: Oh well, tell the BBC please because we have been encouraging them to do that! Hopefully it will come out on video and we'll also think of things like lunch boxes.

DTB: I can see the catchphrases being used...

PM: Exactly -- the thing that kids have caught on to is the silly greeting George and Arnie do, and Piers saying "I'm always here".

DTB: Do you find a short commission, six episodes, highly frustrating? Do you think a show like My Hero would benefit from a longer run like a US sitcom?

PM: Well, we've just done 10 for this season. So yes I fully agree that it would benefit.

The biggest difference between British and American sitcoms is that somehow they've all got to be winners, people in American sitcoms have to be winners whereas we tend to celebrate the loser in some way. So I think we're maybe more true to life. We're not just wisecracks and gags.

Not that My Hero is a good example, but I like to think we have a bit of depth. Although, having said that, when the Americans do pathos they do it brilliantly. I don't think at the moment in many ways we could teach them a great deal.

DTB: How about irony?

PM: No, they're not big on irony. Though if you look at Frasier, that's got irony, it's got wit, it's got sophistication and it's a mainstream comedy that might just scrape onto BBC2 in this country. Really, you can't imagine a comedy about two psychiatrists getting on mainstream British television.

I think we have a different sense of wit to them. They have sort of wisecracks, and what they somehow seem to accept is that not everybody will get our jokes but we're going to do them and some of them will be for the people who might not get them. Sometimes you feel maybe with British comedy, mainstream, that every joke has to be got by every single member of the audience otherwise it's not worth having. Maybe sometimes you wonder are we dumbing down a little bit?

The stuff that I tend to like tends to be on BBC2 interestingly, or Channel 4. But interestingly, the stuff I like to write is on BBC1. But I like to write the stuff for BBC1 maybe because I don't see it that often.

DTB: What's the things that you'd like to do on My Hero that you haven't yet, or are you still pushing the envelope?

PM: I don't know. I think each time we do it, we're going wilder. Its silly, but actually the challenge is to contain it in a way because essentially, it's a sitcom. It's not Red Dwarf, we can't go anywhere. We're set in the present day. The humour comes from having a superhero in a normal setting.

It's exactly the same as what happened with So Haunt Me. I wanted to write a Jewish series. But there was no point writing a series all about Jews. There are 350,000 Jews in Britain out of 60million people, so who's going to be interested, most people have never met a Jewish person? But by putting a white Anglo-Saxon protestant family haunted by a Jewish ghost, suddenly you have the two things impinging. And what makes My Hero a BBC1 show, as opposed to a BBC2 show, is the fact that it's set amongst ordinary people in an ordinary suburb as opposed to space. So for me the challenge is not to go so mad that you become a sci-fi series.

DTB: Yes, you want to keep it reigned in, because if you don't your audience won't understand it.

PM: I think if we made it sci-fi we'd lose a lot of our audience. I don't think they're watching it because it's a sci-fi show, I think they're watching it because it's funny. It's odd and it's different. But I'm hoping that Red Dwarf audiences would watch ours but I think an awful lot of our audience wouldn't watch Red Dwarf. Because we're talking about nine, ten, eleven million people. Red Dwarf is not a mainstream show.

The nicest thing, from my point of view, about My Hero is that it was the first series in a long time on BBC that people watch as a family. People watch it with the children. And I gather from friends that it's also become quite a cult in universities, a lot of students watch it, because they like Ardal.

I think a lot of comedy series in the 8.30 slot get watched by a lot of older people, but this is getting a big young audience.

DTB: So, for the fourth season, where do you hope to take the show? (Without giving too many stories away).

PM: I think I'd like to sort of ring the changes again, so that when people watch the first episode it's not quite necessarily what they expect. It doesn't just leave off where the last series ended because I think these days you have to keep surprising people, you don't want them to think "Oh I've seen this". I think you'd want to give them something so they'd know this wasn't from the previous series, like this series we're just about to do, there's a baby, there wasn't a baby apart from the last episode in the last series. So you will know straight away you are watching a new product.

DTB: What do you think the future of sit-com is going to be?

PM: Do you know, I don't know because I think up until My Hero and My Family they were thinking that family comedy was dead and now suddenly I think the 8.30 spot has become quite coveted and revered so that's changed.

DTB: My Family's wonderful.

PM: My Family's great. That's collaborative, they sit around a table and they really work on it. It was created by an American, Fred Barron, who wrote for Seinfeld, The Larry Sanders Show, and created Caroline in the City. He's heavy duty, he's a wonderful guy. I know people who work on them. Two of the writers on My Family have written one of the episodes of the new season Ian Brown and James Hendrie and it's wonderful.

DTB: So for you, what makes a great sitcom?

PM: I think actually the characters make a great sitcom. More than the situation, it's the characters that sustain it. And what more do you want than to laugh? Although, interestingly in the ones that I've done, prior to My Hero, and also with some stuff that I'm going to try and do on radio as well, I actually like to ring the changes.

DTB: Yes, you couldn't ring in the changes more than you did with May to December...

PM: She had a miscarriage, and that was actually one of the funniest episodes. Her having a miscarriage wasn't funny but it happened in the midst of them doing a murder mystery evening and suddenly the atmosphere changed, and you suddenly go into another mode. And the audience was there with you and it was wonderful.

That's what I like doing. My Hero's fun and it's daft and I love doing it but I still like to do things where you can move people.

DTB: Paul Mendelson, thank you very much.

This interview first posted: 20 July 2002. This interview took place 12 March 2002
PLEASE NOTE: Any links to external web sites in this interview must not be taken as any validation by Mr. Mendelson of those sites and are entirely the selection of John Freema