Two decades on from its first screening, Julia Davis' sitcom Nighty Night remains a benchmark in cringe comedy, embracing (in the words of the Guardian's Daniel Dylan Wray) "the skin-crawling awkwardness that comes from allowing brazen insolence to run amok in a polite, pent-up world".
To mark the anniversary, Wray spoke to Davis, who revealed that playing Jill Tyrell - and permitting herself to say the unsayable - was "definitely some sort of therapy". The downside, however, is that she's often confused with her comic creation: "People think I'm going to be scary or horrible. 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."
Also quoted in the article are other members of the show's all-star cast, including Mark Gatiss and Kevin Eldon (who claims to have been glad to be made to wear a nappy all day). Gatiss insists that describing the show as "so dark, terrible, offensive" is "just ludicrous", but it's a telling detail that "some cast members, such as Felicity Montagu and [Angus] Deayton, never told their parents they were in it".
The unscrupulous awfulness of Davis' character still resonates today - most recently, in the figure of the mum in Kat Sadler's excellent Such Brave Girls. Highly recommended.
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