D aisy Haggard says she’s sorry, but she is a bit tired. We are in a cafe down the road from where she lives in south London, and as she gets the coffees in, she explains that she was up for most of the night with her two young daughters, who are five and two. They wanted to ask her questions about space. Having established the location of the sun and the moon, her two-year-old then started going through a list of everyone she knows. “And saying who she likes, and who she doesn’t like – oh my God, it’s three in the morning,” says Haggard, giggling. “So this will be a really bad interview.”
It isn’t usually proper to describe any person over the age of 12 as giggly, but Haggard is irrepressibly giggly, and it is infectious. She has the air of a person who seems either delighted by everything, or delighted by the potential of everything to be entertaining. It makes sense that her career has been heavy on the funny stuff because, in person, she is very funny, and she appears to have been in almost every decent British comedy of the last 20 years or so, from Man Stroke Woman to Uncle to Psychoville to Episodes. Last year, she wrote and starred in her own, the brilliantly idiosyncratic Back to Life, about a woman returning to her home town after serving a life sentence. It rightly appeared on many of 2019’s best-of lists.
Today, though, and appropriately, given the bad night’s sleep, she is here to talk about Breeders, in which she stars. Haggard plays Ally, who is married to Paul (Martin Freeman), and the show deals with the more exasperating side of parenthood. It came from an idea Freeman had, and as Paul he regularly loses his rag, sometimes calling the kids rude names to their faces. They have stunt scripts that they use for the scenes with the child actors that substitute the swear words for less crude language. “Unfortunately, I find it hilarious,” says Haggard, setting herself off. “You have fudge, which is a bit boring, but the one that just killed me was that rather than cock, it was clock. I couldn’t get through that scene. I got hysterical. ”
Along with comedies such as the Letdown and Motherland, Breeders shows the unvarnished side of life with young kids. Why does she think there is an appetite for that? “There’s a line I say, which is:‘ Who is happy with two kids under the age of seven? ’” She says. “It’s not shiny, parenting. I am someone who genuinely loves it, but it is lovely when you see people behaving worse than you as parents. ” Try as she might, however, Haggard can’t hide the fact that, unlike the characters in Breeders, she does seem to love being a parent. She admits this in exaggeratedly hushed tones. “Me and my husband were saying:‘ We’re really having fun. ’I think because I’m a bit of an idiot and so is my husband.” So we were like: ‘Two more total twats to play with.’ ”
When she auditioned for Breeders, she had only just had her second baby, and she taped herself for it in her kitchen. “I had the newborn baby in a car seat that I was jigging, and my other child was watching In the Night Garden, and I was a bit angry because I was tired.” She laughs. “We had such a small window before she started screaming, and I thought:‘ I’m never going to get it. ’” But for a show about harried parents it is easy to see why it did the trick. The tape went down well enough for her to be called in to read with Freeman.
Haggard shot a pilot for Breeders, then went straight into filming Back to Life, which she co-wrote with Laura Solon. Haggard has been writing since she was a child, but this was the first of her scripts to make it to screen. She was 41 when it came out (she’s 41 now), and seems thrilled by the fact her previously steady career has taken off when it has. “My differences are so clear: I don’t need to be rich, I don’t need to run the world, I just need to earn as much as I can to support everyone, then have a big break and be with them. ” She is careful to acknowledge that it’s different for everyone, but she has worked more since she’s had kids, and has made that work for her. On the Nick Helm comedy Uncle, she asked for a clause in her contract that allowed her to take breaks for breastfeeding. “We need to make sure people don’t feel like they’re out of the game just because they decide to have a family.”
Back to Life came from Haggard’s curiosity about the way women are vilified for serious crimes in a way that men are not. It tells the story of Miri, a curiously optimistic woman who returns to her parental home having served 728 years in prison for an initially unspecified but clearly very bad crime. “We’re so much less forgiving of women, we don’t? When a guy kills someone, we’re like, awww. ” She puts on a cute voice. “‘ Poor guy. Got so much testosterone. ’And I always found that really fascinating.”
Even though it is a comedy, Back to Life has plenty of dark moments, and I wonder if it changed the perception of her as a familiar funny face. “I think probably, yes. I think people thought: ‘Oh, she doesn’t just do a strange noise.’ ”As Myra, the humorless comedy exec in Episodes, she did do a strange noise, as well as appearing alongside Matt LeBlanc. “I had someone babysitting, and she’d Googled me, and…” she giggles, “she started crying because I’d met Joey.”
Haggard had not planned to specialize in comedy. “I thought I was very serious,” she says. “I remember being down to two jobs, and one was a serious gritty northern drama, playing a footballer. I did not do well in the football audition. And one was a comedy. ” It felt like a fork in the road, and she got the comedy. “But actually, comedy is brilliant. If you’re not afraid to be a complete idiot, which I’ve never been afraid to do, then just do comedy, because it’s really fun. ”
I ask which shows she thinks were turning points in her career. She gamely says she thought they all were. “I always think:‘ This is the one! ’I worked in a gym on reception and I quit six times. ‘Goodbye! I have got the job! The one! I am in Green Wing, I’ve got six scenes, I’ll see you around. ’” She leaves a perfect beat. “‘ Hello, can I come back? ’That was my life.”
She has spoken before about how her father Piers Haggard, who directed Pennies from Heaven and the John Mills version of Quatermass, was not keen on her becoming an actor and tried to dissuade her from it as a teenager. “I think now he’s OK,” she concedes. He had, she says, always supported her writing. “So I think he’s really happy I wrote something that was made.” When she was 20, she wrote a film that, astonishingly, has never seen the light of day. “It started off all right, then you can see where I hit puberty. Suddenly, the painter-decorator arrives, he removes his top and it all gets a little bit horny. I remember my dad reading it and going: ‘This is quite good at the beginning,’ then going, ‘Oh, God …’ ”
We finish our coffees. Haggard wants to get some more writing done on the second series of Back to Life, and she is excited about what she is going to write next when that is done. She has four ideas, she says. Will the painter-decorator make an appearance? “Maybe not the Brad Pitt handyman,” she giggles. “Not that, but something else. I’m going to write some films and a drama. ” And, of course, she’ll still be funny. “I want to write something really silly, as well.”
Breeders starts Thursday 12 March, pm, Sky One
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