Romesh Ranganathan's guests on the latest edition of The Ranganation tonight are comedian Roisin Conaty and Made In Chelsea's Jamie Laing. They join the hand-picked focus group The Ranganation as they chew over the lighter elements of this week’s news.
It's always good to see Roisin Conaty on television. Conaty is best known as the star and creator of the hit Channel 4 sitcom GameFace, which sadly, has not been recommissioned. She was recently a guest on Angela Scanlon's latest Thanks A Million podcast, where she talked about sobriety and meditation: "I always feel like I have a brain that's all over the place. It's got a lot of channels and they're always on. My brain is like going into a sports bar where there's 55,000 channels and people just screaming for chicken wings... I'm sober and I'm so grateful for my sobriety. I'm so grateful for my sobriety and my meditation helps with that."
Conaty also talked to Scanlon about making GameFace: "We made the pilot in 2014 and it didn't get picked up. And I was really devastated. I just felt like, I was building to this moment. I felt like the pilot was good and then just nothing. I was at sea, cause you're the person then who's made a pilot that didn't get picked up. And that feels like it's endless... Just at that moment... it's the commissioner. You're not in control of it. In that time, when I thought it wasn't going to get picked up, I wrote another script. And that got picked up. I wrote another script and that's also with someone.
And then GameFace got picked up two years later but, in that time, my writing improved so much because I was writing other things. What I learnt about TV and how to make TV, just those two years... I felt quite like 'Why have I had to wait two years? We've killed the show.' What I learned, and even now, I wasn't a one-show writer and that, by writing other stuff, it showed me where I needed to change. That was a huge one for me. I was able to re-examine the show as a whole... It was only, I would say, going into the second series of GameFace, I was able to really appreciate those two years... I'm glad because the second series is so different to write to a first."
Listen to Roisin Conaty on Thanks A Million with Angela Scanlon and Roisin Conaty on Apple, Spotify and all podcast providers.
