Richard Pinto interview

Boomers. Image shows from L to R: Maureen (Stephanie Beacham), John (Russ Abbot), Carol (Paula Wilcox), Trevor (James Smith), Alan (Philip Jackson), Joyce (Alison Steadman). Copyright: Hat Trick Productions
Boomers. Image shows from L to R: John (Russ Abbot), Maureen (Stephanie Beacham), Alan (Philip Jackson), Joyce (Alison Steadman). Copyright: Hat Trick Productions

Boomers writer Richard Pinto talks about creating the series...

What inspired you to write Boomers?

Watching family and friends in their sixties, newly retired, struggling to cope with new routines, having to spend more time with each other, dealing with new challenges to mental and physical health, and thinking 'That's really funny'.

What makes the series different?

I think the fact that it's friends-oriented rather than being based on family relationships. Too often this generation is only represented in the way it relates to younger generations, as if they're only validated by that connection to younger people.

In fact, like every generation, they have just as much, if not more, interaction with their group of friends. They tend to have way more active social lives than people of my generation - my parents are out with their mates every night of the week.

Boomers is character-based comedy, centred on a small world - a retirement community in a Norfolk seaside town. Why did you decide to set it there?

This community's world view is perhaps slightly narrower than people in a more cosmopolitan area - across all age groups, not just the sixty-plus - and there may be a few more flags of St George fluttering from bungalows; but our characters are all prepared (to varying degrees) to embrace change and new ideas.

The overall outlook of the characters in Boomers seems upbeat?

The world inhabited by them is full of exciting opportunities, and people who look to the future rather than the past. In my experience people in their sixties are better at enjoying themselves than other generations.

They're the Golden Generation if you like, the touchstone for our evolving post war society - they missed the grimness of the Second World War, discovered sex and drugs in the sixties, survived drink-driving and avocado bathroom suites in the seventies, rode the property wave of the eighties, got rid of the kids in the nineties in time to enjoy the benefits of the FaceTime and Selfie age in the 2000s - my mum spends more time on the internet than all of my teenage daughters put together.

Boomers. Image shows from L to R: Trevor (James Smith), John (Russ Abbot), Maureen (Stephanie Beacham), Carol (Paula Wilcox), Joyce (Alison Steadman). Copyright: Hat Trick Productions

Although Boomers might be about retired people, they're newly-retired?

That's important because it means they're the new kids on the block; the youngest people in their community, learning as they go along 'how to be retired'. Obviously this highlights another truism: we never stop learning. But the older we get, the more difficult it becomes to take new things on board. We struggle with it. And the more we struggle, the funnier we get.

So the series is about three couples, and the pressures that retirement puts on their relationships:

I think the conversations they have ring true across generational divides. Having to spend more time with your spouse can be difficult, because by the time you retire you're set in your ways, and you just end up getting under each other's feet.

One long-suffering wife once described retirement as 'twice the man on half the money'. Perhaps It's not surprising then that the 60 plus age group has the fastest growing divorce rate of any demographic group - the 'Silver Splitter' phenomenon. "Will you still need me when I'm 64?' Maybe not..."

Published: Monday 11th August 2014

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