Sharon Horgan

As she releases glossy comedy-drama Bad Sisters, the writer and actress talks about her ambition, the alarming prospect of privatising Channel 4 and why ...

“A lot of the projects I’m involved with are through Merman and that way I get to scratch a lot of itches and kickstart a lot of shows. “I suppose it is a little bit to do with being older and thinking — this sounds morbid — but what do I want to spend the rest of my years doing,” she says. I don’t think the public are fully aware of what it means and what Channel 4’s status is. “I find it scary to aim really high because what happens when you get there and you just have to upkeep it? “And as much as I love entertainment just for entertainment’s sake — I spent a portion of the summer watching Love Island — I do want to feel like there is a bit more to what I put out there. “A lot of what we do is with female creators and that was purposeful, it’s how we wanted to begin the company and it made us quite distinctive in that area,” she says. It saw a couple working through the breakdown of their relationship amid the heartbreak and financial worries of Covid. It’s a tale about manipulative partners and the fierce bond of sisterhood — and it’s the latter which proved a pull for Horgan (she is one of five siblings). “I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do next [after Catastrophe] because I loved that show very much and it’s a bit tricky to jump headlong into the next thing,” she says. But that’s a walk in the park compared to the lead-up to showing your work to the world. “It just takes time but I think the days of thinking that shows made by women are just for women are over.” Eighty-to-ninety per cent of who I get stopped by in the street are women — and a lot of those are Irish women,” she laughs.