By Laura Craik

Published: Thursday, 22 September 2022 at 12:00 am


This interview was originally published in Radio Times magazine.

Some people baked banana bread over lockdown. Others learnt Mandarin. But Daisy May Cooper co-wrote Am I Being Unreasonable?, an offbeat comedy thriller about obsessive friendships, women on the edge, a freak accident and a dead cat.

Imagine the gnarliest Mumsnet thread come to life and televised, and you’ll get the vibe. “We were very inspired by reading those [Mumsnet] posts,” laughs co-writer Selin Hizli, on the question of whether the show’s title is an allusion to the parenting website’s most overused phrase. “Those posts are so brilliant,” laughs Cooper. “Women talking about how awful their marriages are, and all the other women go, ‘Leave the b*****d.’ They could write that their husband sneezed, and they’d still go, ‘Leave him!’”

Ask how the series came about, and you get a surprisingly candid answer. “It was because I was desperately unhappy in my marriage, but didn’t realise it at the time, and then lockdown put this massive spotlight onto it,” says Cooper. “My daughter had asked me to put a pair of dungarees on a Sylvanian Family squirrel. It was like the straw that broke the camel’s back. I was completely broken.”

In fact, at the time of writing Am I Being Unreasonable?, Cooper and Hizli’s lives very much mirrored their characters’, with both women eventually splitting from their partners (Cooper shares a daughter and son with hers, while Hizli shares eight-year-old twins).

“As Daisy says, you don’t realise you’re unhappy until [lockdown] magnifies it,” says Hizli. “We didn’t realise how much we were missing that really important friendship as a source of comfort and connection. That was the starting point for our writing, and also talking about other female friendships that we’ve had, and how some of them get really toxic and make you doubt yourself more.”

The plot centres around 40-something mum-of-one Nic (played by Cooper), a cantankerous character bored by her marriage and grieving a loss she’s unable to share with anyone else. When Jen (Hizli) arrives in town, the two soon form an alliance fuelled by a shared love of kitchen discos, crushing hangovers and bitching about other mums.

“Nic and Jen are both damaged, but who isn’t?” says Cooper.