In 2011, George Michael fell into a coma during a bout of pneumonia. When he came to, the London-born singer began to speak in a strange accent. Doctors were perplexed, fearing potential brain damage.
Michael soon recovered and the reason for this behaviour was revealed. He was obsessed with Julia Davis’s 2004 comedy Nighty Night. “It’s the funniest thing I have ever seen,” he said after he recovered. “We spent a lot of time doing funny impressions of the main character and I came out of my coma talking in her West Country accent.”
“That was amazing,” says Davis of the incident, as we catch up on her sitcom – or sick-com as it was originally marketed – turning 20. It is testament to Davis’s writing prowess (Camping, Human Remains, Sally4Ever, Hunderby) that she could make a character as toxic as Jill Tyrell penetrate someone’s psyche so deeply that they woke from a coma wanting to be her.
Jill – “a very attractive woman in her mid-20s with a lust for life and a flexible spine” – is a narcissistic murderous psychopath. She pretends her cancer-stricken husband, Terry (Kevin Eldon), is dead, as she tries to woo the latest arrival to the neighbourhood, Don (Angus Deayton), while trying to push his wheelchair-using, MS-suffering wife, Cath (Rebecca Front), out of the picture, all while duping a lovestruck oddball Glen (Mark Gatiss) out of his home and money. The customers who come into Jill’s beauty salon, and her assistant Linda (Ruth Jones), barely get treated better.
“When people tell me they love Nighty Night, I get a thrill,” says Jones. “I have a quiet respect for them because it’s not mainstream. It’s almost like a guilty pleasure they whisper in your ear.” Such were the show’s comic extremes – murder by Angel Delight, buckets of illegally extracted semen – that some cast members, such as Felicity Montagu and Deayton, never told their parents they were in it.
Gatiss is quick to bat away the categorisation of it as just being “dark”. “I find that label tiresome and reductive,” he says. Davis echoes this: “People always go on about how it’s so dark, terrible, offensive … it’s just ludicrous.”
Twenty years on, Jill is a comic creation that sits alongside Alan Partridge and David Brent in the canon of cringe. “I wish I could say it’s based on one person, but it isn’t,” says Davis. “She’s just some spirit of rudeness. Like an amalgam of people or attitudes I’ve come across I find very rude, but very funny.”
Davis’s upbringing, which she has called “strict, Christian, church-going and repressive”, clearly seeped into her work. She says she grew up in a “suburban world of tense formality”, which is the precise backdrop she created for Jill to wreak havoc in.
But there is a fundamental difference between creating cruel characters and making cruel comedy. Nighty Night is not overtly mean but certainly embraces the skin-crawling awkwardness that comes from allowing brazen insolence to run amok in a polite, pent-up world. “A lot of British people are so internalised,” says Davis. “That’s why extremes come out – because everyone’s keeping so much in all the time.”
The show’s tone has led to misunderstandings, though. “When people didn’t like it, they violently didn’t like it,” says Davis, pointing out a joke about an asthma attack that landed her a brutal letter. “The line was: ‘You know my views on asthma, Linda, take a deep breath and get over it,’” Davis recites perfectly in Jill’s voice. “Then someone wrote: ‘I hope Julia Davis dies of an asthma attack.’” Davis and Jones are asthmatic. “In that scenario I think, fuck you, because that’s funny,” Davis says, and Jones adds: “I knew how to wheeze [on camera] because I know what it feels like to wheeze [in life]. In that scene, the cameraman was shaking with laughter and had tears running down his face.”
This was common on set, with endless corpsing destroying takes. “It’s the most brilliant and painful thing,” Gatiss says of trying to do scenes with Davis (which are evident in the series one outtakes). “I was jamming my fingernails into my palms desperately trying to get through it.” The chemistry between the pair was so good – or “dangerous” as Gatiss describes it – that they had to be separated during later scenes.
Jill’s noxious legacy has penetrated Davis’s life. “People think I’m going to be scary or horrible,” she says. “I don’t like that because I feel like I have to overprove myself in the other direction. I don’t like upsetting people. In real life I really want to be liked, but in art I don’t care.”
Was there not a thrill in getting to play someone so twisted? “It’s not my fantasy,” Davis says. “But what I did find in playing Jill, because she’s much louder than me, is that I would feel more relaxed after a scene. Internally I’m quite tense, so it was definitely some form of therapy.”
Eldon also points out the gulf between Davis and her monstrous creation. “It’s always amused me hugely that such a lovely, sweet, kind person has all these non-Disney ideas bubbling in her imagination,” he says. Eldon’s character bore the brunt of this. Jill held a fake funeral for Terry, complete with a gravestone that doubled as an advert for her beauty salon, and in the end he was held hostage and chained to a bed in a nappy. “The nappy scene was filmed on a stiflingly hot summer’s day in a small house stuffed full of crew with all the windows closed and blacked out because it was supposed to be night-time,” says Eldon. “I was the luckiest guy on set in my nice cool nappy. All the other suckers had to sweat it out in clothes!”
The show tapped into a quintessential British sensibility of repressed passive aggression so successfully that Davis even upset local residents when filming. “I was jogging around in my bra and knickers [trying to seduce Don] in a suburban cul-de-sac,” she says. “This woman came out and started saying, ‘Oh, we don’t like her.’ But to her dog, with me standing right there!”
The show, says Gatiss, is “the very definition of a cult comedy. It follows me all over the place and people still come up to me and say lines.” It has also been passionately embraced by the LGBTQ+ community. The Vauxhall Tavern hosts drag-like competitions in which people battle it out to be crowned Miss Jill Tyrell. Davis and Gatiss have even chatted about turning up, unannounced, as Jill and Glen.
Despite Nighty Night remaining a beloved comedy, there’s an element of unfinished business for Davis. She was unsatisfied with the second series, which swapped the claustrophobic confines of suburbia for Cornwall. “I felt that second series pressure,” she says. “It’s got some really funny bits, and I love everyone in it, but it went too cartoony. But that’s what happens when you experiment … we’ll just have to make a third series.”
Is that on the cards? “It’s so fun to think about Jill with kids,” says Davis. “I know what she would do in any situation. Which is really rare. I haven’t had that with any other character. But I put too much pressure on myself. It would need to be a really strong story to make it worth revisiting.”
For now, though, Davis is happy Nighty Night continues to delight and disturb two decades on. “I am proud of it,” she says. “I love that it cheers people up, which is kind of crazy.”
• Nighty Night is on BBC iPlayer
