Such Brave Girls creator Kat Sadler: ‘There’s still a lot of poverty porn on TV – I’m not interested’

When Such Brave Girls bagged the Bafta for Best Scripted Comedy in 2024, it was confirmation that creator and star Kat Sadler had built something special against all the odds.

Such Brave Girls is bold. And its comedy can be brutal. The themes are heavy and important. Across the first series, Sadler’s comedy covered depression, abortion, poverty, loneliness, closeted queerness and desperation. But it is also – and this must be stressed – one of the funniest British comedies in years.

The series took shape after Sadler, who stars as Josie, called her sister from hospital and told her she’d been sectioned after twice trying to take her own life. Lizzie, who co-stars as Josie’s sister Billie, responded by revealing she was £20,000 in debt and really struggling. Then they both laughed – this was their family’s way of dealing with trauma or trouble.

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Sadler had already been mining her pain for stand-up comedy material. Now she had a starting point for a sitcom, with her character leaving hospital in the first episode, following a mental health crisis.

In the second series, Josie returns to hospital. And Sadler again found the fuel for her writing within her own life.

“My perspective on the mental health system is angrier this year because I lost my best friend to suicide when series one came out,” says Sadler, when we meet in South London. “That gave me a real fire to talk about it.”

In the new series, Josie is finally granted some mental health counselling – ironically, for the crisis she was enduring two years ago.  

“It’s like whack-a-mole, isn’t it?” Sadler says, eyes rolling, a mirthless chuckle.

“But my best friend was on the waiting list for such a long time. There’s not a system that fits people’s needs the right way. It’s a scary time.

“Mental health is a big topic. But I wanted to keep reminding people that it is an element of Josie’s character and is always with me. And I wanted to keep it funny. I don’t want to bang a drum and bum everybody out by talking about how depressing it is. Even though it is.

“If I’m making people angry, at least people are talking about it and maybe something will change. It can’t go on like this. People can’t be left in limbo. I feel myself in that limbo sometimes and it’s just purgatory.”

Sadler worried whether people would get on board with such an uncompromising comedy tackling serious and complex issues around mental health.

The solution, she says, “was to put as much truth into it as possible, tell people that it’s my story and own it”.

“If it’s your experience and comes from an authentic place, people understand the story you’re trying to tell them and the tone you’re talking in.”

Poverty underlies the entire series. The foundation of so many of the family’s issues are the constant struggle to survive. In the show, Lizzie’s real-life debts were transferred to their fictional mother, Deb (played, brilliantly and against type, by Louise Brealey).

Deb’s mission to marry dull-but-solvent Dev (Paul Bazely) – who she sees as a one-way ticket to security for the family – is ongoing. And her attempts to make the family ‘respectable’ by forcing Josie into a relationship with another unsuitable suitor are shocking at times.

“I love themes – and one I was thinking about a lot this series was the connection between love and money,” Sadler says, dismissing any idea that Josie might find happiness this series.

“Positive relationships are not allowed in the show. No one’s allowed to be happy. That’s the number one rule.”

Brilliant one-liner follows brilliant one-liner in Such Brave Girls. Stereotypes are skewered. This is the sad poetry of everyday lives of struggle, with laughs found in the harshest of climates.

And because Such Brave Girls is pierced with a such a radical honesty and underpinned by so much truth, it means that however outrageously the characters behave, however questionable their decision making, and however and monstrous the communication between them, there is still, somehow, hope and joy at its heart.

“I always interview my mum before I write a series,” Sadler says. “One of the most harrowing things she said was describing being in debt as like you’re trapped under a sheet of ice and you want to scream for help but no one can hear you. It’s terrifying. That was very upsetting. I get a lump in my heart talking about it, picturing my mum going through that.”

This is a family unit that says the most brutal things to each other. And they say them because they can. Because there is a connection that can’t be undone by harsh words, a bond forged in the heat of trauma survival surviving and maintained in the face of extreme poverty.

“There’s still a lot of poverty porn on TV and I’m not interested,” says Sadler, as we dissect the lack of nuance in depictions of poverty.

“It doesn’t represent me and my family going through our financial struggles when I was growing up. It doesn’t resonate with us at all. We were all still very vain! We all still loved the little luxuries that get you through. My mum would say she was choosing between ‘the food shop or this cream I really want’. The superficial vanities you might think don’t occur to people with money issues are still prevalent.”

Writing has been Sadler’s way of processing her own trauma. But now it is also her full-time, high-pressure job.

“I’ve definitely been someone who gets through trauma by making it into a joke,” she says.

“And it comes in waves. Sometimes writing is the only thing I can do when I have one of those crashes. But now I am investigating my relationship with writing. There are pressures around it that there never used to be. So I wonder whether I should start writing something for myself that I don’t show anyone. I am at this weird point, I have to work out what’s for me and what’s work.

“When I’m particularly anxious, I get such a tightness in my chest when I open my laptop. And it’s hard digging back through stuff. But then I go through the catharsis of turning it into a plot where my character does something that maybe I wouldn’t do or doesn’t take shit in the same way, which has been a helpful journey for me.”

Does it give you a power over the pain, a sense of control?

“Yeah, I feel stronger. A lot of it is based on my sister’s life as well. And she loves the idea that she gets to be on TV and the people that fucked her over have to watch. So to be on stage and win the [Bafta] award – when all the people that made us feel small had to watch – was very cathartic.

“I run everything by my sister. She’s very honest. She’ll tell me if I’m being too wordy – because that’s my complex. I want people to think I’m clever because I got called stupid growing up. We had a very tempestuous household, it gave us a complex that we’re never good enough.

“Ultimately, it’s made us try really hard. We were never told we could achieve anything. And now I’m a workaholic! It’s been crazy and surreal and exciting to prove, especially to my mum, that we can achieve things.”

Such Brave Girls is on BBC One and available on iPlayer now

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