‘I like to make it as authentic as possible’: Kat Sadler on mining her own trauma

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There’s a brief moment towards the end of the new season of British comedy Such Brave Girls, where it feels like things for the show’s main characters might actually work out. If not a happy ending, at least not an awful one.

But no.

“No! That doesn’t fit with the rules of the show,” says creator, writer and star Kat Sadler. “I get tempted, but it’s not allowed.”

Kat Sadler, creator, writer and star of Such Brave Girls at the 2024 BAFTA Awards.

Over Zoom from the UK, Sadler says that things are worse than ever for the show’s dysfunctional family this season, which dropped last week on Stan.

Unlike her on-screen character, Sadler is upbeat and all smiles – but not the smile she gives Billie in an episode in which Josie experiences a rare moment of happiness, and Billie is taken aback, telling her “It’s like your mouth’s doing the right thing, but your eyes are trying to call the Samaritans”. And that’s not even one of the show’s savage lines.

A twisted family sitcom, Such Brave Girls follows single mum Deb (Louise Brealey), struggling under mounting debts, and her daughters, the perpetually miserable Josie (Sadler), who revels in her mental health struggles, which elicit annoyance from Deb and boredom from the self-absorbed Billie (Lizzie Davidson, Sadler’s real-life sister), who, so desperate for love, is willing to overlook multiple red flags from on-again off-again boyfriend.

Things are bleaker than ever for Josie (Sadler), who is cajoled into marrying Seb (Freddie Meredith) in season two of <i>Such Brave Girls</i>.

All three are damaged, dealing with the trauma of the girls’ dad walking out on the family – he went out to get teabags a decade ago, and has never returned.

Deb spends much of her time trying to land another man/meal ticket, such as the hapless Dev (Paul Bazely), whose most attractive feature is his “massive house”, Billie obsesses over a man who isn’t interested and Josie, recently released from a psych ward and grappling with her sexuality, is busy trying to “find herself”.

The show depicts depression, abandonment, self harm, suicidal ideation and trauma in a manner that you’d normally only see in earnest drama or a mandatory workplace training module. Has there ever been a comedy in which a character uses suicide as emotional blackmail?

Lizzie Davidson as Billie, Louise Brealey as mum Deb and Kat Sadler as Josie in <i>Such Brave Girls</i>.

A former stand-up comedian and writer-for-hire, Sadler conceived the series while under section in hospital in 2020, after having made two attempts to take her own life. She called Davidson to tell her she’d been sectioned, and Davidson then confessed that she’d racked up a debt of £20,000 - and they both burst out laughing; a common response in their family to dealing with trauma.

Before Such Brave Girls, Sadler had never drawn on her own experiences for her writing, but she had been storing some up.

“I was writing for other people and for radio shows and comedy shows, where you wouldn’t be able to say the kind of things that we’re saying,” she says. “That was why I went so dark with this show.”

She also used to have a blog for analysing her personal life. “I didn’t think I’d ever bring it on to TV in front of millions of people, but here we are.”

Dysfunctional families are common TV tropes, but Such Brave Girls is so much more; mercilessly satirising everything from self-harm to pop-feminism can’t have been an easy pitch?

“It did come as a bit of a response to the fact that there’s an obsession with personal stories in TV,” Sadler says, “so in that sense it was ... what people were looking for. But I used that to my advantage and then went like, well, how do I subvert that expectation?”

Safe to say Sadler subverted many things. Such Brave Girls is bitingly funny sitcom where no character has a moral compass, no taboo is off limits and almost every scene is unrelentingly uncomfortable.

If you’ve lived it, Sadler says, you can get away with anything. And a soft approach was not something she wanted to use, particularly in her portrayal of mental ill-health.

“I think that’s an unhelpful way to process mental health,” she says. “That’s not how we talk about it, and it makes me feel worried whenever people talk about it like that. Or if it’s featured in a gentle comedy, and it’s dealt with in a sensitive way, it makes me feel embarrassed to talk about it in my real life.”

She wanted to make people laugh while still depicting “the kind of … numbness that comes with it.”

Sadler’s melancholy Josie is the butt of many a vicious joke, but she lights up when people discuss her trauma – there’s a scene in the first season in which she and another woman share their personal damage in an increasingly erotically charged exchange.

“That’s a bit of me,” concedes Sadler, “and it was also part of this response to TV being obsessed with ‘authentic trauma’. I wanted to put that to the foreground and put that into my character and have that … be shown and for people to see how grotesque it is!”

The first season was a surprise hit, and Sadler did not see it coming, especially the double BAFTA awards – one for best scripted comedy and one for Emerging Talent: Fiction – last year.

“Have you seen my speech? You can tell that I am not there. I left my body.” In the video of the ceremony, Sadler and the cast are on stage accepting the award, and she looks genuinely freaked out. She hadn’t prepared an acceptance speech, not having allowed herself to think they might win.

Sadler last year with her unexpected BAFTA award for scripted comedy. “I was just so shocked.”

“Because then you can get disappointed. I was just so shocked. I think we also felt so lucky to just be in the room with all these celebs that it just didn’t even occur to me to prep anything.”

She and Davidson didn’t even hang around to celebrate their win. “We did one small circle of the room, and then we just left because we were like, ‘we’re going to say something wrong’. Me and Lizzie do not fit in those rooms; we never say the right thing. We were like, get the award, one victory lap and then out the door – then you won’t have the anxiety the next day of like, what did I say to someone?”

Very on-brand for Josie; Sadler is cheerful and buoyant during our chat, but Josie seeps out occasionally. She and Davidson grew up with a single mum, who now contributes ideas for the show.

“No-one in our family would ever dream of doing anything like this – and she can’t believe it’s happening. She didn’t understand at first; I think she just thought it was like, a funny web series for YouTube,” Sadler says. “I think she only really thought it was real when we won the BAFTA and her friends texted her, saying, ‘Is that your kids on TV, your girls on the stage?’ Now she’s loving it.”

And mining their life for more stories. “It’s actually quite insightful, and also really harrowing – she’s been telling me stories that I wasn’t aware of during our childhood that I can use for the show!”

Sadler grabs her phone to read me a text her mum sent her. “She’s just watched the new season, and she texted me ‘God bless our dysfunctional family’.”

Sadler and Davidson “go out and live their lives” and then report back to each other to see if there’s anything they can use. “I like to make it as authentic as possible, particularly anything to do with the trauma side. And then we like to see how far we can push the audience.”

She’s thrilled with the BAFTA win, but even more so with the feedback from viewers. “People find me on Instagram and say, ‘oh my god, that is so my family’. Those are the best messages because they are the ones, the people that it’s for, you know,” she says.

“That’s the best feeling.”

Such Brave Girls is streaming now on Stan.