Press clippings

Damian Lewis vampire comedy The Radleys is now filming

Kelly Macdonald, Sophia Di Martino and Shaun Parkes are amongst those joining the cast.

Andreas Wiseman, Deadline, 13th June 2023

Gym comedy Peacock returns to BBC Three for a full series

BBC Three has recommissioned the gym comedy Peacock for six new episodes following a mini-series last year. Allan "Seapa" Mustafa will return as personal trainer Andy Peacock, struggling to adjust to a woke world of selfies and Instagram.

British Comedy Guide, 24th May 2023

Peacock, review

Gym sitcom skewers the hollow masculinity behind the pecs and the posers.

Gabriel Tate, The Telegraph, 25th April 2022

Gym sitcom Peacock confirmed for BBC Three

Peacock, a sitcom starring Allan 'Seapa' Mustafa as a personal trainer working at a gym, is coming to BBC Three later this year.

British Comedy Guide, 31st January 2022

Sweetheart - BFI Flare 2021 review

This British comedy is a very BFI festival selection and not dissimilar to Days Of The Bagnold Summer in its exploration of parental relationship and the end of childhood. Sweetheart feels a little drawn out but captures the terrifying excitement and vulnerability of first love.

Maryam Philpott, The Reviews Hub, 25th March 2021

Movie review - Yesterday (2019)

Although it might be difficult to judge the staying power of Yesterday, especially when viewing it through the prism of Curtis' biggest hits of 15 - 20 years ago, it is undeniably a fun ride.

Tori Brazier, Flickering Myth, 5th May 2019

How Flowers tackles mental health with humour

"He's trying to wrestle with his new equanimity, a new peace of mind," says Julian Barratt of Maurice, the melancholic children's author he plays in Channel 4's cult comedy-drama, Flowers, which returned for a second series earlier this month. "But, really, it's catching up with him. It's catching up with all of them."

Lily Pearson, The Independent, 25th June 2018

Flowers returned for a second one-off, glorious, maddening week (all six episodes shown on consecutive evenings). First shown over a similar week in 2016, it is, if you remember - and if you watched it back then, you will - an exceedingly quirky week in the company of the Flowers clan, with a dank underbelly of quietly desperate depression. It is almost indefinable, certainly impossible to shoehorn into any known genre - but it's constantly and crazily inspired, inventive, gloomily funny. It will drive some people to dark places. It will drive some people to reach for the off button.

This outing was even odder, and even better. Julian Barratt and Olivia Colman excel as a depressed children's writer and his increasingly estranged wife, who is struggling to remember what she's for, apart from caustic disillusionment, which allows her to come out with some winningly cruel lines. After Barratt has mused again on his "major depressive disorder", she snaps: "Oh, just call it depression, Maurice. It's not a Nobel prize."

But they are relatively in the shadows as regards their children, the unimaginative failure Donald and his sis Amy, who was struck by lightning last time round. Daniel Rigby and Sophia Di Martino are sublime in their characters, with Amy hard to watch as she descends - via some crackling lines ("At least I don't have to watch you piss your scent all over the moral high ground like some demented incontinent barn animal") - to febrile madness.

As to what it's about, apart from Amy's visions of cursed German ancestors... I think it was, in the end, about something rather serious happening to Shun, the Japanese houseboy/illustrator played by Will Sharpe, the writer/creator, and himself bipolar. But I can't be sure. And I only think this because, after Shun was left contemplating, with quickening melancholy, a tall tree in the penultimate episode, the entire last one was a series of his flashbacks to his first few days in the Flowers household - a joyous, flowery, celebration of a loopy, tangled, untidy English family in the English countryside, all dusk and drink and beauty and looming shadow. As I say, indefinable, but sometimes indefinably lovely. And a brave recommission from C4, with brave issues tackled.

Euan Ferguson, The Guardian, 17th June 2018

Flowers, series 2 review

Fiercely imaginative and emotionally truthful

Ben Lawrence, The Telegraph, 15th June 2018

C4's Flowers is much more than just a 'dark comedy'

Flowers, which ran all week on Channel 4, was thrillingly good to watch -- but is, I now realise, extremely tricky to summarise.

James Walton, The Spectator, 14th June 2018