Another theme in Contractions is the pros and cons of departmental romances. By a curious coincidence Davis met the father of her children at the office, too.
The “boyfriend” referred to earlier is Julian Barratt of The Mighty Boosh. Both his series and Nighty Night were made by Steve Coogan’s production company, Baby Cow, which was where their paths crossed. Not that Coogan has ever frowned on their relationship in the way that Davis’s manager frowns on Emma and Darren.
Along with Coogan, Ricky Gervais, and Ruth Jones and James Corden of Gavin and Stacey, Davis is at the forefront of the current generation of performers who pen their own distinctive material.
As a writer herself, does she have any difficulties delivering somebody else’s lines? Davis is full of praise for Bartlett, and feels they are on such similar wavelengths that it was never an issue: “The weird thing is that because I’m really fussy I usually want to change things, but I didn’t with this. If you like the work it’s really enjoyable interpreting it.”
There is, she admits, a further appeal to working on someone else’s project: “I’ve constantly got writing ideas, but they are on the back burner now. I can’t work in the flat because it is so small and the twins sleep different hours. When one wakes up the other goes to sleep.”
Davis came late to comedy. At university in York she studied drama, but was laid low with glandular fever, which took two years to shake off. She then drifted through menial jobs until her mid-twenties when she started to write and perform. After sporadic radio jobs she sent a tape to Steve Coogan, which he enjoyed so much that he invited her to work with him. The rest, as Alan Partridge might say, is comedy history.
Her own parents, however, had mixed feelings about her profession, particularly Nighty Night, with Jill working her way through the local male populace while her husband was in hospital with cancer.
Her father loved it, but her mother was less keen. “I think they wanted me to join the RSC,” she giggles. “My father shares my sense of humour, whereas my mother only really enjoyed me when I was in things like Persuasion and The Alan Clark Diaries.”
Rob Brydon, who worked with Davis on the twisted character comedyHuman Remains, says that she was the dark one during writing who always wanted to push things further. So where does this perverse streak come from? Religion seems to cast a shadow over Davis’s life. She has previously described her upbringing as “normal, with a bit of fundamentalism”.
It is not something she retracts, but she is keen to clarify herself: “There are a lot of vicars in my family tree, so there was a presence of that. It wasn’t Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, not really heavy. Maybe I was just really sensitive to the Punishing God thing. I was not locked up, though, and I was allowed to see boys.” The way she twinkles suggests that the latter freedom was particularly important to the teenager growing up in Bath.
If the Church and Steve Coogan played their part in forming Davis, the other major influence is Chris Morris. Davis worked with him on his warped sketch show Jam and there are distinct hints of Morris inContractions – business jargon, humour played straight and detached, the laughs coming from everything being slightly tilted on its axis.
Davis agrees: “Yes, I thought of Chris, too. He has lots of dead baby stuff in his work. And Contractions also has that strange dispassionate tone, like a parallel universe. Almost sci-fi.” In one memorable Morris sketch, a plumber comes to repair a boiler and a mother asks him to fix her recently deceased toddler. Davis admits to being more sensitive, but still finds that sort of thing funny.
In Contractions, her brittle, brutal manager asks Emma to bring in her baby’s corpse to comply with company policy: “I can give you the leaflet.”
Motherhood clearly hasn’t changed Davis that much. She is still a person of extremes in every sense: “When I found out that I was pregnant with twins I found it funny and typical of my life that I’d either have no children or two in one go.”
So has parenthood changed Davis in any way at all? “Being a comedian means you don’t have to grow up. But being a parent you do.” Though even the grown-up Davis is still playing it for laughs.
