I sat down with the co-creator, co-writer and lead of the hit radio four comedy, The ManyWrongs of Lord Christian Brighty, now into its second series. Here’s how it went.
Simon: Firstly I want to go right back to the start. How did Lord Christian Brighty come about?
Christian: It was birthed out of doing stuff during lockdown when your livelihood disappears and your ability to perform goes away.
I’ll do a shout out to Isaac HP; Brighton stand up, who is very, very funny. He’s a brilliant live comic and he posted a thing, at that time, saying, “TikTok is a place where there are more people watching than there are making stuff. As a comedian, you should be doing this.” And I thought, well, that’s a way to build an audience and get to have the career back.
And so I started creating for TikTok but I was also watching Poldark at the same time. I was living with my mother in law and my fiancé Amy, who I co-created the radio show with. I was going away and writing my TikToks, but I was also really enjoying Poldark. I’d watch some of it stood behind the sofa and I’d be like, no, I need to go upstairs and work. I’d get bits of it like court gossip. I was like, wow, this world and show is amazing. So I then filmed some videos in the style of that and then expanded into the whole world of period dramas.
I knew I didn’t want to write about myself, so the moment I found the playground of period dramas, it was great. I thought okay, I can get rid of that first difficult question of what I was going to write about and then start having fun with it.
I then booked to do a show at Brighton Fringe, having already called it Playboy. I thought I was going to do a bunch of different characters. But I thought no, just do this one character for the whole show, which I much prefer for a character show.
It was called Lord Christian Brighty because it was really clowny and based on me. It was developed it with Dan Lee’s who’s a great clown and teacher. We basically found all of these games, like me being shot by arrows and falling in love with members of the audience; it was really game based.
After that I took that show to Edinburgh, but soon realised the clowniness was getting in the way. The show was really a character show, not a clown show, but the name of the show had already stuck. I think if I was making a character from scratch I would have chosen a different name, because now people don’t trust that Christian Brighty is my actual real name.
Because the character and I have the same name I’m in this weird situation where I’m writing for myself, for this character, but it’s not me, but it’s got a lot of me in it. It can be confusing.
Sometimes, with other comedians, I go wow, that’s amazing narcissism and self interest you’ve managed to put into that character. And you meet them and you go, where did that come from? How do they access that? Who knows? And so, similarly, I think, the Lothario-ness of Lord Brighty was a repressed, previously teenage, Christian Brighty’s desire to be comfortable in one’s own sexual power; to use that as an embarrassing phrase.
He came out from those bits of myself that I wasn’t fully living out of. He also came out of thinking about all of the terrible men who were saying awful things. Lots of the final stage show was like a found theatre piece of quotes of what bad men had said to my friends and put in mouth of Lord Brighty. It is interesting how similar this historical rake bastard character is to the modern fuck boy,
So it really developed through a confluence of the context of lockdown, getting excited about this period of time and the live work I did in Brighton. Which was he first place ever did it.
Simon: As well as the live show, you’re still doing TikTok. How long did it take to go from zero to people being interested in the character?
Christian: It’s a really good question. I started doing TikTok with a David Attenborough parody. I’d take video clips of Planet Earth, the TV show, and do a David Attenborough silly narration to them.
I think I did six of those. And then one of them got more views than the others. I was like, oh, wow, this is working. I kept going with that and managed to build an initial TikTok audience of 700,000 followers. But I think I realised I can’t translate that into a show that people come and see. All I’m doing is making David Attenborough more famous. And he’s fine. He’s doing absolutely okay.
After that I forced myself to do a video a day for a month and they all sucked. They suck so badly. But one of them got 20,000 views. And I thought, okay, well, there’s something in being on this.
It was maybe another month to get to a place where I could replicate the initial success, but it was a really lovely time of generative creativity where you give yourself permission to fail and do anything. I think I get stuck now sometime because I don’t give myself permission to fail as much. I feel like there’s like an external expectation from an audience or my own high standards.
But I should ignore that because if you think that way then you’ve already lost. You have to make things outside your comfort zone to make anything good.
Simon: You were doing TikTok and the live shows. How did you then translate it to radio? Did anybody co-write?
Christian: Yeah, my partner Amy Greaves co-wrote the live show with me and she voiced the character of Duchess Jessica – Duchessica, too, from the tech booth.
We were then very intentional that anything we do going forward, we were going to be co-creating. Luckily we were quite quickly approached by a guy called Ben Walker who works for DLT Productions.
They made a Radio 4 sitcom called the Casebook of Max and Ivan. I was listening to that when I was at clown school and I just found it amazing. It was so funny. The joke rate was so high. The style of writing was so good that I binged the entire thing.
When I saw that that was in his back catalogue, I was like, absolutely, I want to work with you. As a creative, Ben is just fantastic.
In the live show, we shot the rake (Lord Brighty) and killed him. The show was about manipulative, gaslighting men, so it was a nice celebratory moment at the end of it when he dies. But for a sitcom, what do you do with a terrible man when you’re resetting to zero each episode?
I was adamant I didn’t want it to be the Christian Brighty one man show. I wanted it to be a real sitcom where there is balance between the characters. I know it’s my name in the title, but it’s just as much about Babs and Churley, these other characters, as it is about Lord Brighty. I think it is a much better show because of that decision.
Simon: When did you decided to make the show about three central characters instead of one?
Christian: I’m not embarrassed to say, it took quite a while to work it out. We just knew that we didn’t necessarily want to do a show that was rooted in the romance.
I think romance works really well for a film or a single season of Bridgerton. And then we move on. We don’t want every episode to be stuck in a will they, won’t they scenario at it’s core. There had to have something else to it.
There was one version of the show that was going to be a wife strike, where all ladies in London had gone on strike, but we couldn’t get it to work. So we decided to make it about the bad man in the centre. Then Babs came. For whatever reason she gets through to him and he sees the error of his ways. Sort of.
Babs is kind of an angel on Lord Brighty’s shoulder with Churley much more wanting to keep the old status quo.
What took a while in the writing and is much better than the second series, is not making Babs right all the time though. It’s quite boring if “the angel”is just saying what the writers think and is kind of always right. Whereas we’ve made much greater pains this series to make Babs wrong in a very different way from Lord Brighty, in that she’ self righteous and doesn’t doubt herself and is very angry and violent. I mean, she does a revolution very badly in the end of season one, so we’ve done more things like that.
We are making her come to life more by torturing her with the pain of her own failures and the fact that she isn’t quite who she imagined she is.
Simon: I really love the idea that Lord Brighty’s on a redemption mission, like a lot of people who have had an almost life ending experience. Although, unlike most, he’s a massive narcissist.
Christian: Well, I think the funniest thing about it is, he’s like yeah, I need to fix all my wrongs and do the right thing, and what are they, and how would I do that? Because I don’t really know what I’ve done wrong.
The engine at the core of him is the gap between him being told for the first time that he’s not perfect and the unknown of the things that he’s done wrong. That insecurity that is powering him right the wrongs without knowing what he’s actually doing.
If you have somebody who thinks that the sun shines out of their arse and they’re God’s gift and their entire life they’ve been told they’re never wrong, they’d be desperate are they to get back to that place to feel okay again.
It’s also massively destabilising for Churley, as his servant, as Lord Brighty changes. It’s a little bit like if Boris Johnson or Nigel Farage said they need to undo all of the harm that they’ve caused. People around them wouldn’t want to believe it. It would make them look at themselves and their complicity in the situation too. Which would be a tad uncomfortable all round.
Simon: What can we expect in the second series?
Christian: So in this series we go to Scotland for a little bit and play with Outlander tropes, using that backdrop as a playground,
We look at the really funny way in which English people appropriate Scottish identity to give themselves something interesting to feel about themselves. Brighty’s obviously Scottish because he owns a good chunk of Scotland. Why wouldn’t that make him Scottish?
The English fad for Scotland has historical precedent,. The Victorian’s made up all of the clan tartans. That was created as a way of getting money out of people.
Queen Victoria created the English idea of Scotland so much that Balmoral was demolished and rebuilt to look more of a Gothic castle because of her fetishisation of Scotland. What a rotter. Anyway, so, yeah, we go to Scotland.
We have a heist where we meet a old flame of Brighty that destabilises Bab’s whole idea of who is Brighty is to her? If It’s possible that he could be in love with somebody, what does that mean for their relationship?
My favourite episode in series two is the one where Brighty goes to church, sort of in the vein of other recent bad men who’ve found that Christianity is a great way of either sanitising one’s image or seeming like you’ve fixed it. So Brighty discovers that and immediately is delighted that he could right all of his wrongs in one fell swoop. It’s a dangerous idea, which obviously goes horribly wrong because you can’t put an absolute pervert in the centre of a little parochial church and believe that any of them are going to be able to resist him; he’s a force of nature.
Simon: What’s different in Series 2?
Christian: Last season we recorded it in front of a live audience, which was amazing. Those two days were incredible. We did it in Hoxton hall, which was an actual music hall from the Victorian era.
I think the biggest change for this series is that we decided to do it all in the studio without an audience instead. I’m really happy with that as a choice because as much as last series were amazing shows, I think in nowadays we don’t really have many audience facing sitcoms and people aren’t really used to it. We were wanting to lean into romance and big sweeping vistas of the period drama universe. This was easier to achieve in the studio and meant that we got to have a richer thing as an end product.
It also meant the actors could relax and play more with the script. We had a good chunk of the cast come back. Jessica Knappett (Babs) made me laugh so much in the studio. Colin McFarlane (Churley) was just phenomenal across both seasons.
The madness behind Knappett’s eyes came alive as she was able to fully play this deranged maid who’s been lifted above her station and now thinks that she can change the world. The confidence that she brings to this, to every decision that this idiot makes, is just fantastic. She’s so good in it.
Colin, with the smallest noise or inflection, can just find something entirely new in a line. That’s the joy of doing the series with such good actors.
Writing for these voices and these people who give the characters so much was so nice this time around because you’re not just guessing or creating characters from thin air now, you now have their voice in your head as you create.
Even then, they find new things in the script, ways of approaching a line and being funny that you couldn’t even imagine, that still surprises you. It’s that that has made the whole experience such a joy.
You can Listen to The Many Wrongs of Christian Brighty, series two, on Radio four on Saturdays at 11pm and series one and two on BBC Sounds anytime.
See the Christian Brighty Programme webpages on the BBC: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002xnts
