Such Brave Girls season two: Creator and star Kat Sadler on the worst aspects of yourself on screen

There’s a character in a TV show. Her name is Josie and she’s a young woman in her 20s.

She’s lying in bed when she senses her husband is about to suggest that perhaps they take some time apart. Before he can finish his sentence, she interjects. “I’m pregnant”, she tells him. Only she’s not.

Cooking up a fake pregnancy to keep a partner is, objectively, a bad thing to do. Yet when Josie does it, all you can do is cackle and laugh. You don’t hate her for it. You don’t even judge her.

That’s the comedic genius of Kat Sadler, who not only plays Josie, but also created and wrote Such Brave Girls, a riotous, spiky and provocative TV series, which is now in its second season.

Such Brave Girls is centred on three women – mum Deb (Louise Brealey) and her two adult daughters, Josie (Sadler) and Billie (Lizzie Davidson). They’re hustlers, spinning tales, exploiting people and generally behaving awfully just to survive.

They are, bluntly, ratbags.

Deb is only dating Dev (Paul Bazely) for his money, except his interpretation of feminism is Deb always pays for half the bill.

They’re so nakedly self-serving, often ignorant and always narcissistic, so it’s a delicate dance of creating characters that always go further than you think they will, and then also wishing that you had the gumption to say that awful thing you wanted to say.

When timid TV and movie executives are forever scared of alienating the audience with “unlikeable” characters, especially unlikeable women, it’s a minor miracle that Such Brave Girls ever made it to air. When Sadler pitched the show, there were definitely those conversations.

“It was about holding your nerve, and luckily I think I managed to win most of the battles that I was fighting for, and it means that now I can go worse and worse every year, and that’s exciting for me,” Sadler told The Nightly.

“There were definitely battles at the start and particularly because comedy is in such a fraught and delicate place at the moment. There are lots of pressure to try and make things appeal to everyone. It was about fighting a bit of that pressure to fight for the fact that I think the best comedies come from a really authentic place where they’re not trying to cater for everyone.”

To be clear, Sadler isn’t talking about nasty comedy that use the marginalisation of minority groups as punching bags, the favoured “humour” of the “you’re not allowed to be funny anymore” brigade.

It was more she wasn’t interested in playing nice. “The show is never punching down, it’s from characters coming from real experience, from a real struggle in sheer desperation, turning to vanity and narcissism, which is what my family did, what me and my sister did in those times, and same as my mum,” she said.

“You do just focus on the wrong things, it’s just how you cope.”

Sadler drew from her own life when she dreamt up Such Brave Girls, and Davidson, who plays her onscreen sister is also her real-life one, and her scripts start as notes stuck on a wall, made up of stories from interviewing her mum and her sister, or talking to her friends.

“I love hearing stories. That’s my favourite thing. Meeting up with someone for a drink and being like, ‘How’s that date, tell me everything,’ and they know that what I mean is everything. I want to me where you met, what time you met, what they were wearing, what did they say. I’ve always been that kind of person.

“I love it when people seek me out to tell me something funny that happened to them or a funny way they handled some trauma.”

The exaggerated drama and comedy of Such Brave Girls is underpinned by the fact Josie, Billie and Deb have been through the very real pain of abandonment and associated traumas, and the constant precarity of being one week out from destitution.

There’s a lot of compassion in the series, and that’s why, as a viewer, you never want to judge them too harshly, or find them so irredeemable that the only reaction is to turn it off.

Sadler poured the worst aspects of herself and her family into the show, the parts of a person that we all have and are afraid to show the world. Only in her case, it’s very much on display, an experience that is both exposing and cathartic.

“It’s been quite freeing,” she said. “It’s obviously quite vulnerable, taking bits of trauma or perhaps the worst things you’ve ever thought, or controversial opinions you might have, and then put them on screen, that’s scary.

“Or talking about trauma in the way that I do is scary. People will take it the right way (or the wrong way) but we’ve been really lucky in that people have found the show, know what place it’s coming from, and relate.”

The reviews for the first season were glowing, as have the ones been for the second, and the series picked up two BAFTAs. It made season two easier in that there were fewer battles to fight, now that the industry and the audience have a measure of what it is.

“There are lots of lovely, sensitive comedies that are great, and not to knock them, but it wasn’t necessarily what I was craving or wanted to watch or felt representative of what it was like for my family and for me growing up.

“Hopefully that proved we’re onto something.”

Such Brave Girls is streaming on Stan