Starring Amy Huberman, Emun Elliott and Stephen Wight, Doctor Who writer Tom MacRae’s sitcom Threesome returns to Comedy Central this autumn for a second series.

Alice, Mitch and Richie have put their hedonistic lifestyle behind them, and are taking their parental responsibilities completely seriously. What parent wouldn’t settle an argument using ‘spin the baby’? But it’s not all plain, sensible sailing from now on.

> Buy Series 1 on DVD on Amazon.

CultBox caught up with Tom for a chat to find out more…

Did you feel more confident writing the second series of Threesome than you did the first?

“I’d not done comedy before and I’ve not had my own show before, so to do it second time round is, yes, a lot less of a learning curve, and I think it’s probably much funnier this year – although I’m pleased with last year as well.

“It’s just kind of working out how to double the gag count, which is quite a knack, and having had the opportunity to make various mistakes, not so much in filming but in the writing where you’d try and they wouldn’t quite work. This year round it’s much easier to go ‘actually let’s not even go down that avenue with that story, I know that won’t work’.

“And it was just nice knowing who the cast were going to be and having the same set back and pretty much the same crew. So it’s like going back to school. Last year was like the first year at a new school. “

Does the second series feel a bit different now that Alice has had her baby?

“Yeah, well it was always designed, like most comedies, to specifically evolve, because [Alice] is not pregnant in Episode 1, she has the baby in Episode 7. I mean that’s a huge change, and obviously they’ve now got a kid.

“It was always designed that it would metamorphose to an extent, but at its heart it is exactly the same show. It’s the same energy, it’s the same mix of naughtiness and warmth, but not going out and getting drunk and taking drugs this year because they’ve got a very small child.

“So they are trying to be responsible and they are trying to be good, but there’s the chaos that comes with having a baby, Richie having to go back to work, Mitch needs to get a job now, Alice gets lonely ‘cos she’s on her own so I had to find new friends. And they have this way of making things fun.

“So just looking after the baby they find ways of turning it into little games, but they are trying to become more responsible. Last year they were trying to be responsible as well, and you saw how well that tended to work.”

What was it about the first series that you think people connected with? And now that there’s a baby do you think there’ll be a new audience?

“Maybe. The baby, as a character, she’s only 3 or 4 weeks old in the series so she’s really just a smiling prop. She doesn’t drive the story other than the fact you’ve got baby things, like in one episode they go to have their first baby photograph and that causes various problems, but it’s not like we’re relying on child as a personality, so if someone’s looking for a show about a cute kid this isn’t that. It’s still Threesome.

“But there’s a sense where they’ve reached an age where they’re trying to be more grown-up and in a year we obviously change in our lives, it’s not massive but it’s there, and they’re quite real really. I think if people responded well to it it’s because I was advised by Jon Plowman, who’s the big comedy god at the BBC – he produced Ab Fab and French & Saunders – and he said to me years ago ‘write what you know’. So because I’d never done comedy before I thought I will write about my friends, my world, the energy my social group has where they can be all quite outrageous but with a lot of love and warmth.

“So I just put what I felt was a little slice of me on the screen. The fact people responded to that, I can now look back and go ‘oh it must’ve been for these reasons’, but at the time all I was trying to do was make something that I felt was good and that I liked and that said something about what I thought about people, and thankfully that worked. But if it did I was just because I was trying to be honest about what I was feeling at the time, and I’m glad the audience responded to it.”

Now that Karen Gillan’s left Doctor Who and has revealed she wants to do more comedy, would you like her to appear in Threesome?

“Karen and I had a good talk about that but she was shooting Doctor Who when we were shooting Threesome. But if we come back for another year…

“Karen’s really funny and she’s so nice and I really do like her a lot and everyone in our crew are friends and that translates on screen, so you want to keep working with people who are funny and charming and smart. It’d be really good to have Karen and I know what part she’d play as well.”

How does writing Threesome compare to writing for a very different beast like Doctor Who?

“Well, you construct the narrative in different ways. With something like Threesome, comedy heightens things: if someone’s stupid in a comedy they’ll be really stupid; if someone’s mean they’ll be really mean. The kind of scrapes that people end up in are the kind of things that don’t really happen in real life, or if they did they might happen to one person once. They wouldn’t happen to the same group of people every week.

“So you’re always trying to go, ‘Is this unrealistic? Is this unbelievable? Is this guy just too stupid? That line’s really funny but does it mean they now live in a cartoon?’ So you’re always aware when the real turns into hyper-real monsters.

“In Doctor Who, there’s none of that. The fridge turns into a robot. They walk out the front door and they’re on Mars. You can just do anything. So creating story is quite easy on Doctor Who, because all the rules of reality are switched off – you’ve got everything to play with.

“The teacher can be a robot, your new husband can be an alien in disguise, and that’s the story. However you’ve got to reign that in and create a proper narrative that has heart, and when Doctor Who is at its absolute best it’s always about the people, and when you watch sci-fi shows – I don’t really watch sci-fi apart from Doctor Who – and it’s so soulless and dull, that’s because they don’t have people in them.

“With Threesome you start with the people and find the drama. With Doctor Who you start with drama and try to find the people. You approach it from two different angles. But if it works well then both of them should be equally satisfying.”

The Girl Who Waited is a good example of that – people really liked how character-driven it was…

“Thank you! I didn’t write anything that was true to me with that story, although somebody did ask me last year ‘Was it a comment on euthanasia?’ Well, if you were put in a hospital where you got to meet your future self and alternate timeline by changing your history and future… It’s so far removed from any situation you could have in the real world.

“You just make stuff up. But the idea of being in love, I suppose, that’s something we can all relate to, and the pain and the choices and the sacrifice. So you want that heart of realness, and then… throw in some robots.”

Are you writing a story for Series 7 of Doctor Who?

“I can’t tell you that. Keep watching and find out.”

Drat! Are you hoping to be involved in the 50th Anniversary of the show next year?

“I think every Doctor Who fan would want to be involved in the 50th. I’m not going to say anymore about future involvement but I know what’s going on and in time so will everyone else. If it doesn’t come from the BBC Press Office you’re not going to get it from me.”

What did you make of Asylum of the Daleks?

“I thought it was great. Nick Hurran (director of Asylum) is obviously my favourite director after he did The Girl Who Waited. And it was fantastic that the twist was kept secret: I didn’t think it would happen but it did. I’d be intrigued to know how fans reacted to it – whether they were looking at it going ‘Hang on, is that… oh that is!’ or whether they got it straight away.”

What do you think of Jenna-Louise Coleman so far?

“I think she’s great. I think she’s a really good alternative to Karen. I think taking on the companion mantle is second-only hardest to taking on the Doctor. But at least with the Doctor you can go ‘Well I’m just going to do him completely differently’, whereas the companions all sort of have to be the same. And yet they have to be different.

“There is a specific role a companion has in the story and that is really to be the audience in the story, asking the questions the audience would ask. So there’s only so many ways you can really do that. But Jenna will really make it really distinct and different from what Karen did, and not pale into comparison, because Karen’s a really hard act to follow.”

You once had an episode in Series 4 of Doctor Who shelved. Is it a script you’d like to use in the current era, or have you abandoned it?

“No, no, that was of it’s time. I was writing something the other day and I took ideas from that script and re-interpreted them into a new one, so nothing ever gets lost completely, but no, I’ve no interest in going back to that.”

Is it different working with Steven Moffat to Russell T Davies?

“It’s been so long since I worked with Russell it’s hard really to compare it now. There’s Caroline Skinner as well now who’s a different person from [former executive producers] Piers Wenger and Beth Willis.

“That’s the show though; it always changes, always stays the same. There’s always a guy who’s a genius who loves Doctor Who who’s running it, and I think the show survives because of the talent and crew and the people behind it. It’s been wonderful to work with all of them.

You’ve written for classic and new villains – is there another classic Doctor Who villain that you’d like to have a go at writing?

“I think The Master, because he or she can be different with each incarnation. I was watching an old one the other day, thinking ‘When they brought back Anthony Ainley as The Master why did they make him look so much like Roger Delgado?’ It’s not as if Tom Baker looked like Jon Pertwee looked like Patrick Troughton… it’s not as if a precedent hadn’t been set that the Time Lords were all completely different. They had the opportunity to completely re-do this guy – he steals someone’s body and he ends up looking the same! He’s got the whole dressed in black and the panto-ness of it.

“And then John Simm comes along and he can just do anything and he’s brilliant. And Derek Jacobi as well. I’d love to do The Master and to figure out what would be the next version of how to make him scary in a new way. I think Russell Tovey would be brilliant as The Master, because he’d be so warm until you actually listened to what he was saying.”

You wrote the script for the Doctor Who theatrical show Crash of the Elysium – do you have any plans to do something similar in the future?

“I would love to. We did two years of Crash and that production may or may not come back – at the minute it’s up in the air, but I think it would be wonderful to do another Punchdrunk Doctor Who show. I know we’re all up for working together again.

“I think it’s probably a good time to maybe look at doing something new, just because isn’t that the point of the show, that you can do new stuff with it. And we invented something with that that hadn’t been done before. It was just extraordinary. It was a show very much aimed at kids, so maybe we could do it a different way – maybe do one that’s aimed at adults ‘cos obviously a lot of adults wanted to see it.

“And as long as you keep serving everyone – you don’t have to do everyone all in one go – but I think we should give everyone their turn, so maybe do something a bit more grown up. They’re very expensive to put on, those shows, and it’s all about getting the funding.

“I think what we created was so wonderful; everyone who saw it who worked on the show completely fell in love with it. I went round with Moffat on one of the shows where Matt came in as the Doctor at the end and Steven was just drifting away with pleasure. It was very funny watching his face.

“So we’re very keen to do something else. There’s nothing planned concrete at the moment but I think we’d all like to have a go at doing something else together. But it’s one thing to have ambition, it’s another thing to do it. So I’m not announcing anything new here, I’m just saying I would jump at the chance and certainly we’ve all been talking about where we could go with it next.”

> Read our previous exclusive interview with Tom.

> Buy Series 1 of Threesome on DVD on Amazon.

Watch the trailer for ‘The Girl Who Waited’…