Five minutes with… Douglas Is Cancelled stars Hugh Bonneville and Karen Gillan
Alex Kingston and Hugh Bonneville in Douglas Is Cancelled.
“How many times do I have to tell you? When you’re out in public, and civilians can hear you, you must be balanced, boring and bland.”
That’s the advice that middle-aged, highly respected newsreader Douglas Bellowes, played by Downton Abbey and Paddington star Hugh Bonneville, 60, is given in order to maintain his reputation in an increasingly volatile world. It’s also the advice that he appears to have ignored, judging by the social media storm he finds himself in after an off-colour joke he made at his cousin’s wedding gets tweeted about by a fellow guest.
His colleague Madeline, played by Doctor Who star Karen Gillan, 36, might be sharper, younger and more tech savvy, but her retweeting the incriminating post escalates things, leaving Douglas questioning her motivations.
Douglas Is Cancelled, equal parts gripping and hilarious, tells the story of the broadcaster as he navigates the speculation, hysteria and online storm, struggling to escape the controversy intact and avoid the fate of being “cancelled”.
Ahead of the four-part comedy-drama, written by Primetime Emmy and Bafta Award winning screenwriter Steven Moffat, coming to ITV1, let’s hear from Bonneville and Gillan about what we’ve got to look forward to.
As always, the script. It constantly surprised me with its changes of direction and tone. It made me roar with laughter but, as with all good satire, the laughter gradually turned to ice as the questions raised by the comedy became more stark… harsher.
Some of the twists and turns are toe-curlingly funny, but by the end, the lights have gone out, the fun has evaporated and we’re into dark territory.
To read the whole thing in one sitting was as riveting as it was uncomfortable. Hopefully, the audience will have a similar rollercoaster experience.
Douglas is a perfectly decent, pleasant man who’s doing a good job and is well liked for what he does. He thinks so, too.
Even when, a couple of years ago, he welcomed a younger colleague, Madeline, onto the sofa beside him he felt secure, safe in the knowledge that the warm, avuncular relationship he had with his protegee wasn’t a threat to his own position.
Is he smug? I wouldn’t say so. Unguardedly confident, definitely. But, just as the dinosaurs didn’t know they were a dying breed, Douglas is blithely unaware that the next generation is smarter, more streetwise and capable of sheer ruthlessness when the chips are down. Or when wrongs have not been righted.
That’s his blind spot. His fatal flaw. That’s what’s at the heart of his character. Hubris.
Where to even begin with Madeline? She started off as a very determined young girl who set her sights on getting into this particular industry. She was a huge fan of Douglas. She grew up watching him. She would rather watch him on TV than cartoons – she was a strange child like that!
And then, she just dedicated her whole life to pursuing that. She went through a few experiences along the way that shaped her, and
she quickly realised that she needed to harden up a little bit. She needed to put a guard up as she was exposed to more and more things within the industry. And so, when we meet her at the start of this drama, you just can’t quite get a read on her.
The idea is that you don’t quite know what her motivations are, and you don’t quite know whether you can trust her or not. That was really fun to play.
Definitely. It taps into so many strands of what’s current in terms of our views on ethics, behaviour in the workplace and in our wider society, what we can and can’t say, what we can and can’t do, what’s acceptable, what’s beyond the pale.
Steven Moffat’s drama is a kaleidoscope, looking at all those things at once through the prism of these identifiable characters, against a backdrop of current affairs lite. Which is how we all seem to be living at the moment. News as another consumable.
It’s very interesting to see how it’s playing out. Cancel culture has been around since the word scapegoat was used in the Bible for people being thrown out of society for not holding generally accepted views. It’s always been around us, it’s nothing new.
What’s different today is that the pile-on of the mob is now instantaneous. The speed at which truth and lies accelerate via mainstream and social media is exponential and extraordinary. The way a metaphorical corpse can be mutilated and stamped upon by a mob anonymised by fingers typing at warp speed. ‘Right, killed that one several times over. Who’s next?’.
He is one of my favourite screenwriters. He can give you a zinger like no one’s business. It feels like there’s great showmanship to his work. It has a verbal gymnastics type of vibe. So with Steven, you get writing that’s really funny and has tremendous flair, but is also completely realistic. That’s what I am such a fan of.
I dropped out of drama school after two months, so a lot of my acting training happened on Doctor Who… I felt incredibly familiar with the rhythms of Steven’s writing. So as soon as I returned to it, I was like: “Oh, I know how to do this. I’ve got this.”
Steven is a superb satirist. As sharp with the absurd one-liner as he is with the dark and dangerous themes that lie beneath. Like all great comedic writers, he draws his audience in with laughter, then deftly inserts the knife… and twists it.
- Douglas Is Cancelled starts on ITV1 on Thursday June 27 at 9pm.
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