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Eighteen years after the final outing for Coupling \u2013 season 4\u2019s Nine and a Half Months \u2013 aired on BBC Two, the award-winning sitcom from the pen of Steven Moffat is arriving on streaming courtesy of BritBox<\/a>, with all 28 episodes set to land on the platform on 20th January. Moffat himself admits to being curious as to how it holds up, having last watching a complete episode \u201cover a decade ago\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t think I\u2019ve watched the show since it went out, probably,\u201d he tells RadioTimes.com<\/a>. \u201cI don\u2019t know particularly why but I don\u2019t really watch old shows. I mean, I\u2019m not lacking in sentiment or nostalgia at all. But once they\u2019re done, I just don\u2019t watch them again. I don\u2019t know that I\u2019ve watched a whole Press Gang<\/a> since I did my DVD commentaries with Julia [Sawalha], which was before I did Doctor Who [in 2009].\u201d<\/p>\n The series, which explored the friendships, dating lives and sexual misadventures of six friends in their early thirties, was based at least in part on Moffat\u2019s own life and the early stages of his relationship with television producer Sue Vertue (now his wife) \u2013 he recalls first pitching it to her, after a fashion, following \u201ca boozy lunch\u201d with a friend. \u201cI turned up at Sue\u2019s office, which was at Tiger Aspect at the time, slightly worse for wear, and wrote the word \u2018Coupling\u2019 down on a piece of paper or an envelope or something \u2013 and I said to her, \u2018Remind me to talk about this later\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n She did, and Moffat later laid out his concept for a comedy series about the early stages of dating, when you\u2019re \u201cplaying at being a couple\u201d but can\u2019t quite shake the mindset of being single. \u201cIt\u2019s role play. You don\u2019t really know what you\u2019re doing. You really are just saying, \u2018Look at this, we\u2019re so grown up \u2013 we turn up places together, we send joint Christmas cards\u2026\u2019<\/p>\n \u201cIt just feels like an awful lark, as opposed to what it becomes later. It becomes much better later. But, you know, it\u2019s really not the same life as you\u2019re leading a few years later when you\u2019ve got kids and you really are welded together.\u201d<\/p>\n Describing himself as a \u201cnervous introvert\u201d, Moffat was also keen to explore what he calls \u201cthe terror\u201d of dating, with his mixed feelings on the matter being personified in Coupling\u2019s lead characters. \u201cI never really even thought of them as a group of friends, I just thought of them as different bits of my brain \u2013 particularly the three boys. It\u2019s the brutally confident one who wants a shag [Patrick, as played by Ben Miles], the absolutely terrified one who also wants a shag but can\u2019t get past his own terror [fan favourite Jeff, played by Richard Coyle] and the negotiation in the middle of those two impulses, which was Steve [played by Jack Davenport].\u201d<\/p> Back then, Moffat says he wasn\u2019t at all nervous about pulling from his own life and experiences and putting it all on-screen. \u201cI probably would be now, but it was a less censorious time. So no, I was quite gleeful about it. I mean, also, there\u2019s nothing like hiding in plain sight. You know, journalists would ask us at the time we were making it, \u2018Are any of the characters based on you and Sue?\u2019 and I said, \u2018Well, have you looked at the names?\u2019 \u2013 they would be genuinely astonished, they hadn\u2019t noticed that the two main characters have got our names, and indeed live in our house, because the location we used for Steve\u2019s flat was actually our house at the time.\u201d<\/p>\n Though the characters played by Jack Davenport and Sarah Alexander did indeed take their first names from Moffat and Vertue, he insists that naming the former\u2019s character \u201cSteven Taylor\u201d was not in fact a nod to the Doctor Who companion of the same name played by Peter Purves. Instead, it was a nod to Moffat\u2019s previous BBC sitcom Joking Apart, which was again semi-autobiographical and featured Robert Bathurst\u2019s character Mark Taylor as his surrogate. \u201cI just thought I\u2019d make [Steve] the unknown brother by giving him the same surname and then realised, of course, it was the name in Doctor Who. But you know, in all honesty, nobody knows that. I mean, if you even know that Peter Purves was in Doctor Who, I bet real human beings don\u2019t know what his character\u2019s name was.\u201d<\/p>\n Cast alongside Davenport, Alexander, Ben Miles and Richard Coyle were Kate Isitt as Susan\u2019s neurotic best friend Sally and Gina Bellman as Steve\u2019s possessive ex-girlfriend Jane. Though aspects of each character were originally based off of Moffat\u2019s own neuroses, he says the actors\u2019 own personalities quickly began feeding into their on-screen personas: \u201cYou start writing their voice quite early on and that ends up completely supplanting what you imagined they sounded like.\u201d<\/p>\n Moffat wrote every single episode of Coupling, with a single director also helming all four seasons: Martin Dennis, already a sitcom veteran by the late 1990s having helmed episodes of \u2018Allo \u2018Allo, The Upper Hand, and Men Behaving Badly, and still in demand today with recent credits including Friday Night Dinner and The Goes Wrong Show. Dennis was, Moffat says, \u201cadroit, as you\u2019d expect, with jokes \u2013 which is why everybody wanted him and still want him\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cMartin has a great precision about how jokes work, and how you keep actors under control over the few days of rehearsal. Rehearsing a comedy is rather grim, because it gets less funny every time you do it. On the first day, it\u2019s hilarious, then everyone gets bored of the jokes and starts putting extra bits in\u2026 \u2018Wouldn\u2019t it be hilarious if I tripped over the carpet as I came in?\u2019 \u2013 Martin would keep in his head what was funny about the joke when he first read it, or when he first heard it at the readthrough, and preserve that and not lose confidence.\u201d<\/p>\n Rehearsals for Coupling\u00a0took place in a church hall off\u00a0Kensington High Street, with episodes then being filmed both on location and at Teddington Studios in Richmond upon Thames (since demolished to be turned into housing). The experience of debuting his scripts in front of a live studio audience was not, Moffat admits, his favourite part of the production process. \u201cOh, it\u2019s awful. I can\u2019t tell you how awful it is. I used to simply write the word \u2018help\u2019 on the back of my scripts. I think Sue\u2019s still got some of them.<\/p>\n \u201cSometimes it goes wrong. Sometimes an actor muffs the line before your best joke. Sometimes \u2013 in fact, frequently \u2013 you have to do the scene several times, so your jokes are trotted out again, in front of a studio audience that have already seen it and are desperate to get to the next part of the story, and if that scene contains a joke that doesn\u2019t work, and is dying, that\u2019s even worse.\u201d<\/p>\n