TV pilot for Jack Docherty's Start/Stop

Jack Docherty is to pilot a BBC One sitcom about relationships, likened to a cross between Cold Feet and House of Cards.

Stop/Start is an adaptation of his Radio 4 comedy Start/Stop, about three long-term marriages, in which the characters routinely 'pause' the action to share their inner thoughts with the audience.

With 'some very bleak views on relationships and how they can struggle', Docherty suggests that the sitcom, commissioned as part of BBC One's revived Comedy Playhouse strand, is a more 'realistic' portrayal of middle-aged marriage than previously seen on the channel.

'You say “cynical” but if it didn't ring true, people wouldn't laugh at it, so I guess people out there feel like this too,' he says of the radio show. 'I remember doing the pilot and saying to the cast, “I think we'll have to hold out nerve here, because there won't necessarily be a lot of laughs”. And yet right from the off, there were huge laughs from the audience. It felt like we'd tapped into something.

'Hopefully, if it goes to series you'll see much more triumph and togetherness.'

He adds that the BBC have put him under no pressure to 'soften' or make the storylines 'more cuddly'.

'The original TV script had an intercut of the couples having sex at the end which I was asked to take out' the Scot explains. 'I was happy to do that because they wanted to keep the option of showing it earlier in the evening. Which is fine... We have a little bit of that off-screen now.'

Originally set in suburban Edinburgh but now in a notional 'anytown', Stop/Start focuses on Rob and Cathy, who've 'been married for ages and it shows', with Evan and Fiona’s marriage one big, noisy argument punctuated by noisy, make-up sex. David and Alice have just moved in next door. He’s in his sixties she’s in her thirties and everyone loves Alice. Except other women.

As well as writing the script, Docherty will reprise his role from the radio as Rob, although the character was named Barney in the two series of 14 episodes, which ran from 2012 to 2014.

No other cast details have yet been released. But Chortle understands there are big names involved, including established cast members and newcomers.

Kerry Godliman played Cathy on Radio 4, with John Thompson and Fiona Allen as Evan and Fiona. Charlie Higson was David, with Katherine Parkinson initially playing Alice before Sally Bretton took over in the second series.

'Not to get too poncey about it, but they're sort of meant to be old money, new money and no money' he says. 'Upper-class [David and Alice], middle-class [Rob and Cathy] and working-class [Evan and Fiona], soft of, in very broad terms.

'Anything that's got relationships with three couples in is going to call to mind Cold Feet or Coupling. Those shows were about being in your thirties. But this is consciously Uncoupling to an extent.

'When you hit your forties, fifties, sixties, do you stay in the relationship? Particularly after the kids leave home?'

Stop/Start is being made in-house by BBC Scotland's comedy department, and Docherty explains that its erosion of the fourth wall will ape the direct-to-camera asides of Ian Richardson or Kevin Spacey in political drama House of Cards.

'We've tested it a couple of times already and it's interesting how quickly you accept it.'

The switch to television does not necessarily mean the end of the sitcom's original incarnation though.

'Radio 4 want another series. And I'd be happy to do it' Docherty says. 'It might get complicated if we go to [television] series because I'd have to write it then, but I'd be sorry to say goodbye to the radio because it's been fun. In an ideal world we'll do another radio run so there'll be more material to cannibalise.'

After the return of the Comedy Playhouse pilots last year, BBC One commissioned a full series of the Scottish mountain rescue sitcom Mountain Goats. Monks, which featured Seann Walsh as a hapless monk and Over To Bill, which starred Hugh Dennis as a newly sacked weatherman, were not picked up.

Although Docherty is unsure whether Scot Squad, the spoof reality cop show in which he starred as the head of the Scottish police force for BBC One Scotland, is to receive a UK-wide broadcast or second series, he confirms that another of the recent comedies he's appeared in, Pappy's flatshare sitcom Badults, will not return to BBC Three.

Badults and Crims' Ben Kellett will direct Stop/Start and the producer is Rosemary McGowan. It was commissioned by Shane Allen, controller of BBC Comedy and BBC One controller Charlotte Moore. Steve Canney is executive producer.

The pilot will be recorded on March 12 at BBC Scotland's Pacific Quay Studios. Audience tickets are available here.

Published: 13 Feb 2015