TV preview: Him & Her

Wilkinson says he’d have enormous sympathy with other sitcoms if the BBC forced this template on them to help meet the corporation’s 20 per cent budget cuts – and then he bursts out laughing.

Copying this twentysomething slackerdom cult hit won’t be that easy because it’s smartly written by Stefan Golaszewski and, in Russell Tovey and Sarah Solemani as Steve and Becky, it has two performers who can deliver funny, sexy, touching performances using little more than an unmade bed, some mouldy bread, a few cans of beer, a stack of DVDs and – drama, drama! – those expeditions to the front door when lonely Dan (Wilkinson) from upstairs rings their bell.

Today I’m talking to Wilkinson and Solemani, who don’t seem to have much in common, but when I ask them independently for their biggest comedy inspirations they nominate their fathers. “Both my parents are hilarious,” says Wilkinson, “although I don’t always think they’re in total control of their humour. Growing up, I thought it was normal for families to be laughing all the time. It was quite a surprise visiting friends’ houses and finding out they weren’t. Mum and Dad are always winding up my brother and me, and each other. The other day Dad came downstairs in a brand new leather jacket and Mum told him: ‘You look like a wallet.’ He was devastated.”

Wilkinson, 35, grew up in Kent and after “plodding” through his twenties came to comedy late. Ask 26-year-old Solemani, who’s been acting since she was 16, where she gets her exotic looks and she quips: “You must mean my facial hair and propensity for gaining weight. Well, my father is Iranian. He’s very funny, can never resist a gag and used to make my mum laugh so much her nostrils would flare and she’d have to hold her tummy. But when I was 16 she died, so for a while the laughter stopped.”

Solemani, who also writes, has just finished scripting her first film, called Live Forever. “It’s about a girl who’s obsessed with Oasis, dreams of seeing them play Knebworth, but then her mum gets cancer – it’s my story, basically.”

In Him & Her, Wilkinson has based bearded weirdy Dan on a member of the audience at one of his stand-up gigs. “I’ve met him a few times since and he’s a lovely, lovely man who lacks self-confidence, so needless to say I’ve never told him I’ve shamelessly ripped him off.” Solemani says she wanted to play Becky as soon as she read the scripts. “So many female characters in sitcoms are only there to feed lines to the men or say things like ‘You’re being so silly, Jeremy’ – Becks isn’t.

“That said, she’s still a woman written by a man so there’s an element of fantasy to her. She’s cool, she loves sex, she doesn’t moan at her man and she’s not in the least bit needy. I recently joined Twitter and all my followers seem to be 17-year-old lads who wish I was their girlfriend. But I’m not like Becks and, sorry guys, I don’t know any women who are.”

The success of Him & Her has earned Wilkinson stints on Have I Got News For You and now he hopes his Radio 2 show Two Episodes Of Mash will transfer to TV, but he’s not madly ambitious. “I’m not thinking: ‘Holywood, here I come.’ If everything was to fizzle out I’d still be proud of Him & Her and I’d have a couple of DVDs to show the kids, or hover-discs as they’d probably be by then.”

Solemani recently auditioned for America’s The Daily Show and is planning another trip to the States, where she’s hoping for a more positive reaction to the Margot And Mez flatshare comedy she wrote with Olivia (The Thick Of It) Poulet than British execs gave it. “One, who I won’t name, said: ‘I know we asked for women but this is a bit too female – a dangerous line to tread.’ Can you believe that?”

She went to Cambridge so she could be in the Footlights; her politics degree was secondary. But she does see the political in most things. For instance, Him & Her isn’t just a comedy about a young couple who like to stay in, it’s “the lie to the line we’re fed more and more right now that people on benefits are loveless, selfish, greedy spongers”.

Solemani reckons that if you’re a woman in her profession, a political perspective is essential. For instance: is it crucial to the plot that I show my breasts? Filming The Borgias in Budapest recently, she decided that everyone would know her character was a prostitute and so it wasn’t.

So could she see herself going into politics? “It’s one of my fantasies,” she says. “When I was in a play at Westminster Abbey and I had to cycle past the Houses of Parliament every night I was absolutely convinced I’d chosen the wrong career and that I should give it up and try and become an MP. But then I remembered all the many times I have been naked on screen and reckoned that would come back to haunt me!” v

The second series of Him & Her begins on Tuesday at 10.30pm, on BBC3