Created by and starring Tom Basden (After Life), the new series of Here We Go sees the return of the all-star cast Jim Howick (Ghosts), Katherine Parkinson (The IT Crowd), Alison Steadman (Gavin & Stacey), Freya Parks (This Town), Jude Morgan-Collie (A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder), Tori Allen-Martin (Unforgotten), Mica Ricketts (Best Interests), Ed Kear (The Batman), and Jon Furlong (The Last Kingdom).
The third series continues to follow the chaotic Jessop family as they navigate new jobs, love, loss and family gatherings. Mum Rachel (Katherine Parkinson) is starting her new life as a therapist. Dad Paul (Jim Howick), now a police constable, continues his quest to gain the respect of his peers – and his kids. Uncle Robin (Tom Basden) and wife Cherry (Tori Allen-Martin) are busy with a new arrival, baby Atlas, while Amy (Freya Parks) is still figuring out life as a 20-something. Grandmother Sue (Alison Steadman) has moved back into the family home and Sam (Jude Morgan-Collie) is, of course, on hand, capturing all the calamity on camera from bungee jumps to riverside baptisms. Series three also sees a family holiday to Malta, where, of course, nothing goes according to plan.
With a stellar guest cast, series three of Here We Go is packed full of familiar faces, including Jane Horrocks (Absolutely Fabulous), Robert Glenister (Sherwood), Jamali Maddix (Hate Thy Neighbour), Susannah Fielding (This Time With Alan Partridge), Seb Cardinal (Bridget Jones: Mad About The Boy), Ed Kear (The Batman), Jon Furlong (Adolescence), (Massive Dad), Sunil Patel (Mandy), Kevin ‘KG’ Garry (Ted Lasso), Kathryn Drysdale (Bridgerton) and Stevie Martin (Taskmaster).
Here We Go is a BBC Studios Comedy Production for BBC iPlayer and BBC One, with BBC Studios handling global sales. The series was commissioned by Jon Petrie, BBC Director of Comedy. The series is created by Tom Basden and the Executive Producers are Josh Cole, Will Sinclair, Tom Basden and Steven Canny. The Commissioning Editor for the BBC is Gregor Sharp.
Here We Go returns on Friday 25 July at 9pm on BBC One and BBC iPlayer. The full series will be available on BBC iPlayer from this date.
FM
Interviews with the cast of Here We Go
Tom Basden (Robin) and writer, creator and Executive Producer
We’re on series three now, how was writing the new series compared to the first two?
What comes with a third series is that you know the characters really well by now and you can really tailor storylines for both the characters and the actors and what you think everyone’s going to enjoy. I think you can be a little bit more ambitious with the stories. On a later series, you can try things that are a little bit more crazy or a little bit more strange. In this series, for example, they go to a live action role play festival and there’s an episode where they get locked in the house. Some things are maybe easier to do in the third series because the audience knows the characters too.
What else can we look forward to in series three?
There’s an episode where the family go to Malta, which took a lot of persuading production! That episode is huge fun and also an opportunity to meet Rachel’s dad, Michael, played by Robert Glenister, who’s just fantastic, and gives us a lot of background to Rachel’s family, which has been hinted at in series one and two, but we’ve never really seen up close.
Where do we pick up the Jessop family this series?
Paul is now working as a policeman. He’s finished his training, and he’s started his job, which he isn’t finding easy. He’s struggling to fit in and make friends. He also gives Rachel a speeding ticket by mistake. Rachel is now at a point in her therapy course where she needs to find people to counsel, and so she starts offering advice to members of the family, including couples therapy to Amy and Maya with disastrous consequences. Robin and Cherry are now happily married and expecting a baby for the first part of the series. Then the baby is delivered in quite dramatic fashion. Sue is now living at home with the Jessops. Her flat has gone to Amy and Maya, and Sue is living in amongst the family where she is both a help and a hindrance in equal measure. Now that Maya’s left university, Amy and Maya are struggling to find their way as a young couple in the real world, making money and being self-sufficient. Sam’s doing his best, he’s started his A-Levels and trying to complete his Duke of Edinburgh award this series.
What is it about Here We Go that audiences relate to so much?
You can follow the Jessops through the stages of life as you do your own family. We obviously take the Jessops to weird and wonderful places and put them in difficult and funny situations. But there’s always a kind of spine to the show of those stages in life, stages in family life that everyone goes through, that everyone can relate to.
How has Robin changed since series one?
Robin is attempting to grow up in series three. He’s attempting to be a more serious figure, someone who is a role model for his son, Atlas, who appears as the series goes on. He’s not always finding that easy. He still collects football stickers, and he still does quite stupid things, particularly that Cherry doesn’t always know about. I would say he’s somewhere between a 13-year-old boy and a 30-year-old man.
How do you find the creative process given you’re the creator, writer and cast?
I love making this show. I really enjoy coming up with ideas for the Jessops. My favourite part of the process is when the cast read the scripts as we have a big readthrough together, and everyone sees what we’ve got in store for the next series. We really have such a great time filming the show. We’re all on set together because of the way it’s shot. We’re often shooting quite long scenes or sequences which means everyone’s there all day, and we have a huge amount of fun. Particularly the scenes shot in the house, we get to really play around with that and even though we don’t always have much time, and it can be tiring filming, we do manage to have a lot of fun and find a lot of extra comedy as we go along.
Alison Steadman (Sue)
What can we expect from Sue this series?
More madness! She’s a great character and she’s always full of fun. They go to Liverpool this series, which is Sue’s hometown, and that was really fun to film.
There are some real laugh-out-loud moments, what was your favourite scene to shoot?
One of my favourite things was watching Paul (Jim) being baptised in the river in the final episode. It was just absolutely hilarious, as Jim always is. He only has to turn his head left or right and I am on the floor laughing! That scene was absolutely brilliant.
You’ve played some truly iconic characters in your career, what keeps you excited about coming back to Sue each series?
Well it’s the wonderful stuff that Tom writes, you just never know what he’s going to come up with. He’s just brilliant. I just love the series because it’s so much fun. With the world the way it is, just to be able to switch off and actually find a bit of warmth and fun in the world is very important, and I think that’s what Tom gives us with the series.
Katherine Parkinson (Rachel)
Rachel is starting her new career as a therapist; what storylines can we expect to see around that?
She ends up not being quite as talented a therapist as she might think and ends up causing a bit of damage along the way. She tries to use her therapy training to talk to her dad and gets quite strongly shut down, so she isn’t maybe as emotionally intelligent as she likes to think she is.
Rachel and Paul’s dynamic is great, what do you think makes watching them as a married couple so interesting?
I don’t think Jim likes it when I say this, but I feel like there is a healthy amount of hate, in a realistic way with a long marriage. Of course you love them deeply, but equally sometimes you talk incredibly openly with one another and sometimes you cannot bear to be around them. I think that’s what makes it funny for me, it really reminds me of my parents growing up; how quickly they got to shouty-ness and then how quickly they recovered, was often quite comical.
Do you share any similarities with Rachel that you have brought to the series?
What I like about Tom’s writing for Rachel is that she’s quite laid-back sometimes, almost worryingly so, then briefly neurotic, and then laid-back again. I think that I am probably like that in real life too, a toxic mix of both the neurotic and the deeply un-neurotic, worryingly laid-back and then the other extreme too. I think that’s good. Sometimes I get frustrated with the ‘neurotic sitcom wife’, which is a trope I remember seeing quite a lot when I was starting out. I always felt that the women I saw around me were often not like that. I like that Rachel gets things wrong as much as Paul does, and although she thinks she’s the leader and the organised one, she also gets it really wrong.
Do you have a favourite episode or scene from this series?
I suppose the funniest moment to watch was Paul (Jim) being baptised in episode seven. I think we enjoyed it so much because Sue’s telling him about the sewage just before he goes in, it was so well played, and Jim did it so brilliantly.
My favourite episode has to be the Malta one, we had a really nice time there. Robert Glenister who play’s Rachel’s Dad was amazing, and I really liked the dynamic with him.
Jim Howick (Paul)
Paul is now a police constable, how is he finding that?
Paul’s entry into police work hasn’t been without its pitfalls. He’s struggling to socialise and to assert any kind of authority, which is the basic principle of being a police officer. So he’s still the butt of everyone’s joke, and it’s even more demeaning. Poor PC Paul!
The dynamic between the family is great to watch, do you think that Paul is always trying to earn his family’s respect?
Despite the relentless ridicule, I think he believes that he already has his family’s respect. He maintains that they look up to him as an athlete, a responsible adult, a beacon of inspiration! Of course we know that really he’s none of these things. Maybe that’s unfair, he does often save the day, and he’s got a very strong moral compass, even if he can be a selfish man baby.
Paul’s on-screen relationship with Rachel is hilarious, what do you think makes them so relatable as a couple?
Probably the banter? Scoring points with their children? They love each other dearly and are clearly best friends but there’s a level of pettiness in their communication born from some kind of jealousy or resentment. They’ve had their own personal career disappointments in the past that’s left them unfulfilled, so they take that out on one another and then regret it and kiss and make up. Fairly normal I suppose.
Do you have a favourite moment or episode in this series?
It’s hard to pick one out but I think my favourite might be episode two with the new neighbours. The prospective buyers are old friends of Rachel’s and her and Paul get incredibly excited about what this could mean for their lives. They try way too hard to impress them and, as we know, they’re really not impressive. Desperately awkward and very funny. We had a lot of fun making it.
The baptism episode was also fun. Newsflash! I get wet again. And seeing Katherine wrapped in masking tape trying to walk (genuinely, not acting) was hilarious! Tom has written another excellent series and I’m sure everyone’s going to love it.
How has Paul changed from series one to series three?
Deep down I don’t think he’s changed an awful lot, it’s been a very slow evolution. He’s followed his dream to become a police officer but without any real aptitude, it’s just dressing. Like his many medals and trophies, his police badge is just another bauble.
Tori Allen-Martin (Cherry)
Congratulations on baby Atlas! What can we expect to see from Cherry this series as a new mum?
Her priority is trying to look good. Obviously, I really feel for new mums, I’m not privileged to have children of my own yet but I would never put pressure on new mums or indeed anyone to do anything to their body, particularly after you’ve just birthed a human. I send love to whatever your choice is, but Cherry is subscribing to the idea of trying to get back to the gym as soon as possible, and that’s her journey.
As you can imagine in true Cherry fashion, she’s not that interested in anyone other than herself, including her own child, so she likes baby Atlas the most when he’s asleep and when someone’s saying he’s cute, other than that she’s not that bothered. She dumps him on the Jessops a lot.
The relationship between Cherry and Robin is great to watch. Why do you think Cherry gives Robin such a hard time?
I actually think Robin deserves it a lot of the time, because some of his behaviours are crazy. He proposed to her at his own football game for example, and he makes her LARP this series where Cherry has to dress up in a wimple and go with a bunch of people dressed as orks in a field, so I actually think he deserves a lot of what he gets. I think their dynamic is very co-dependant and that’s their sort of toxic push and pull love story, but it works for them. She definitely finds Robin incessantly annoying but also appreciates that he’s a good man. I imagine that Cherry has been with a lot of bad boys in the past and Robin is probably the tonic to that, but of course she’s going to give him a hard time, that’s their dynamic and that’s Cherry, nobody gets off lightly with her.
Did you have a favourite scene to film this series?
We had a wonderful day where we got to eat this wonderful Bulgarian bread, which was basically just pastry and cheese. All I had to do was sit down, eat that and be surrounded by people being funny, so that was a highlight for me.
It was also very enjoyable watching Paul (Jim) being baptised in a lake in the middle of nowhere. We were in a rural area of natural beauty in the UK and Jim got dunked in a lake repeatedly, which was very funny. Something for viewers to look forward to.
Freya Parks (Amy)
How is Amy coping with life post-teenager? Does she have any life plans this series?
Although she’s 21 now and not a teenager anymore she still acts like one and is trying to figure out what she wants to do in life. She tries her hand at all sorts of stuff – like modelling. That’s a hilarious episode! Even though she doesn’t live at the family home anymore, she’s always there, getting in the way, making her mum do her washing etc. Pretty much acting like a university student who hasn’t quite got to grips with adult life just yet.
Are you similar to Amy in real life at all?
I do find I come out with things that are so Amy and I have to remind myself to shed her a bit after filming, otherwise I’m too blunt and sardonic for my own good. I’ve also definitely started projects and given up quite early, which is similar to Amy, but I like to think I’ve grown out of that now and persevere more. I’ve got a lot more hobbies and passions than Amy. We both play bass guitar though, and a bit of keys, so we have that in common.
What was your favourite episode to film and why?
I have to say it was really lovely filming in Malta for episode six. I also really enjoyed episode three, the LARPING episode because there were some really fun costumes. I particularly enjoyed seeing Katherine and Jim in theirs, they really suited them. It was a very fun day frolicking in the forest. There’s a lot of genius slapstick this series, something different in each episode, so there’s plenty more chaotic Jessop fun in store.
How has Amy changed from series one to series three?
Her dry wit is still very much cutting through the chaos, although she does find herself in some very silly situations this series.
I also think she’s learning more about the consequences that come with her actions, discovering more about her and Maya’s relationship too, about that developing and just understanding how to be in a relationship as a young woman. Other than that, she’s pretty much the same gal, the Amy we know and love but with much longer hair!
Jude Morgan-Collie (Sam)
What can we expect to see from Sam this series?
As ever, Sam watching his family getting up to their usual, crazy shenanigans. Sam is trying to be a bit more independent this series, but in all honesty, this is to no avail, as wherever he goes, the rest of the family are right there with him.
How do you keep a straight face during filming?
Luckily for me, I don’t have to keep a straight face as I’m nearly always behind the camera. Most of the time I am laughing!!
Sam is always on hand to capture the chaos on camera, did you have a favourite scene to shoot?
Obviously it was amazing filming in Malta for the holiday episode but I also really loved a scene where I’m in an old cottage in the middle of nowhere, eating stew – and I’m actually on camera for that. You’ll have to watch to see what that’s all about…
Mica Ricketts (Maya)
What was it like filming series three of Here We Go?
Very fun and very lively!
What can we expect to see from Maya this series?
We see more complications with her relationship with Amy. We also see more of an adult side to Maya this series.
What was your favourite episode to film and why?
The LARPING episode was my favourite. The costumes were brilliant and everyone was so energised. It was such a strange set and the extra-ness of it was adding to the comedy of the episode, it was class.
Do you share any similarities with Maya that you have bought to the series?
I have abilities to be like Maya in some ways, for example I can take things just as seriously as she does in certain situations. So, I don’t think it’s too hard to adapt myself to Maya, but I also don’t think we’re too similar. I can definitely relate to the character.