Failure is a big theme in Jessica Knappett’s Drifters. The show, which returns this week, centres around the character of Meg, an emblem of the hopeless twentysomething muddling through a quarter-life crisis. It’s a pandemic experts have recently labelled “suspended adulthood” and something the former hospital caterer/waitress/vending machine assistant/qualified masseuse from West Yorkshire knows all too well: her 20s, particularly the latter end of the decade, were a conveyor belt of inadequate blokes, booze and shoddy employment.
“I was definitely having a meltdown. I call it ‘The Wilderness’. Which is when I went into a period of my life when I was just drunk and going on too many dates, shall we say … sleeping in too many people’s houses that were not my own. Having a jolly good time. But looking back at it, very self-destructive. I think I was just trying to binge drink my entire youth away.”
Much like Meg, Knappett lived in a loft and liked to stay out “as long as possible because I just didn’t want to go back and climb up my rickety ladder and sleep on my futon”. She also speaks with the same warmth and irreverence as her clownish Drifters character. Aside from that, the parallels now are few and far between. Fresh off a flight from LA, Knappett got married last month – and her show, now in its fourth season, is the highest-rating sitcom on E4.
Initially sold as the “female Inbetweeners”, the show was written in 2011 amid the recession that spawned this generation of ‘suspended adults’. “When I first started writing, I had no money and I was working in a call centre,” Knappett recalls, “and I remember buying a box of tampons and a sandwich and my card getting declined and being like: sandwich it is! Things like that don’t happen to me any more,” she says a little disappointedly. “I am basically like Eminem on his second album.”
Unlike recent drama-comedies that have swept the critical board – Master of None, Transparent, Fleabag (friend Phoebe Waller Bridge has writing credits on three Drifters episodes) – there is very little despair or chewy intellectualism embedded in Knappett’s series. Instead, it is a show based around shagging, eating and drinking that works with slapstick humour, gross-out silliness and a lot of ruthless ribbing between its key characters, Meg, Laura and Bunny.
In the first episode of this new series we meet Andrew – a right-on Corbynista who values Meg so much he won’t have sex with her (until she tricks him with a notion Knappett refers to as “the cum bluff”). Representing the shifting gender roles, he is a world away from Meg’s love interests in series one, two and three, boyfriends who are largely primal beings with basic functions.
“When I first started doing interviews about Drifters I remember someone asking me if I was a feminist and if I would ‘dare’ use the word feminist. It just wouldn’t happen now. It was this huge taboo, and now I feel like men are walking around saying it and, actually, that has just happened in the past five years. I made a joke about it in an episode, that ‘women are really in right now’. Like, feminism has become really hot, hasn’t it? Women are on trend as a gender,” she says sarcastically.
Key to Drifters’ success is also its setting in Leeds. Although she lived in London for some of her 20s – a city which left her “financially crippled” – Knappett, who was brought up in Bingley, West Yorkshire and went to university in Manchester, was keen to place her world in the north of England.
“So much stuff is based in London or has RP accents. Not everyone lives in London. Well, unfortunately nearly everyone who writes comedy for television does. And if you don’t then you will be travelling down on a train to London five times a week, which is what happened to me,” she says.
She believes the north is still underrepresented in the media, and although its visibility is slowly improving, there is a long way to go. “I am sure we have had more regional comedy in the last few years and that’s a great thing. There is a huge drive not just with getting women on the screen but racial diversity. I’d just like to see the same efforts made with class now. Because that’s something we are kind of lacking in,” she says.
“If you are a commissioner and you are looking for some scripts you’re not necessarily going to get them from working-class people. You might get them from ‘once’ working-class people, at the most really … and you might get them from someone who is middle class who thinks they know a lot about writing about the working class, but that’s a problem because then you don’t get authentic voices. I haven’t really seen anything since Shameless portray real working-class hilarity.”
Class isn’t at the forefront of Drifters, but plays a discreet role. Meg’s cousin Bunny is a giddy, posh amateur actor; possessing very little talent but the ego of an A-lister. Meg and Laura, meanwhile, routinely fail to make ends meet. Its subtle realism about contemporary Britain sits alongside other comedies such as Chewing Gum, People Just Do Nothing and Raised by Wolves.
Before the interview ends, we talk about Meg’s future; one that seems to remain in the endless postgraduate slump. For her part, Knappett faces a new challenge. She no longer has to climb a rickety ladder up to a futon, but the next phase of adulthood brings its own barrage of pressures and expectations.
“I went to my GP and he saw that I’d turned 30 and gave me a big lecture about getting on with it – I was like, you didn’t ask me if I wanted children! It’s crazy. It’s a huge burden for women to navigate but men simply don’t have to worry about it. I mean I’m stating the fucking obvious, but that’s probably why there’s a lot of women making comedy. There’s generally a biological reason why women are telling these stories! It’s a way of making the pain go away. Isn’t it? The dreadful pain and suffering: let’s laugh at it until it doesn’t hurt any more.”
She’s being very deadpan. But like all good jokes it’s rooted in reality.
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