What you need, even if you didn’t know it

When did you know?

It’s like loads of little turning points. Looking back, I was always writing as a kid.

One of my earliest memories is my dad buying a PC — one of those chunky ones you had to squeeze through the living-room window to get into the house.

You’ve said you owe the Edinburgh Fringe everything.

If I pinpoint all the big turning points in my life, they happened at Edinburgh.

Baby Reindeer was born there — that’s what Netflix picked up. But even before that, Monkey See, Monkey Do was when I went full-time. That was 2016, and suddenly I was a full-time creative, which took so much to get to. I’d been working in a bar.

It’s an incredible place to hone your craft. You perform to an audience and get feedback that makes you better, and you almost start to understand on a subconscious level what people want.

And on a practical level, the entire industry congregates in one place for a month, literally seeking out new talent and new voices.

People ask me, should I go to Edinburgh? And I say: go to Edinburgh until you don’t need to go anymore.

I’ve never known anyone go and not have something happen that made their career better. You can have a wretched month where the shows don’t go well and nothing turns out how you wanted. But I guarantee you’ll have met someone, shaken the right hand. And even if it isn’t professional connections, there’ll be personal moments of joy along the way that make it worth it.

How many years did you do?

Ten in a row.

Turning out a show every single year trains the muscle. It’s a lot of pressure to put on yourself — but then you hit production and they say: get the script round next week, cut ten scenes, change that bus stop to a pub, make that night scene a day scene.

So it’s good training for writing under production pressure, too.

Was Baby Reindeer a hard sell?

In a lot of ways the play version had real commercial potential. Me standing on a stage talking about being stalked.

If you pull the themes out from a bird’s-eye view — stalking, complicated interpersonal dynamics, hidden backstory — the play was innately televisual. Then you play it out for real and it becomes far more visceral.

I think the more idiosyncratic the work is, the more freedom you’re sometimes allowed. Writers get commissioned for a tone of voice people haven’t heard before and find interesting, and as a result you can side-step a lot. Sometimes you’re not over-noted, because they want to preserve that.

At the time it was the cheapest drama Netflix had ever made. So I got a lot of freedom. It was an artistic risk — on the artistic end of the spectrum was the phrase that got used a lot.

If I think about the zeitgeist hits of the past few years, they all show you something you didn’t realise you needed to see.

Richard Gadd speaking on stage at State of the Story, BFI Southbank, London

Did you know what it would become?

I never expected it to blow up the way it did.

But I don’t want to sit here going, oh, I didn’t know, I didn’t know. I really believed in it. I thought it was saying and showing things that hadn’t been seen, or hadn’t been seen in a while. I thought it would create a conversation at the very least.

So what actually makes something a hit?

If I think about the zeitgeist hits of the past few years, they all show you something you didn’t realise you needed to see.

A priest and a sex addict falling in love. A mob boss with clinical depression. A chemistry teacher with cancer cooking meth.

None of those sound like commercial ideas. You couldn’t have gone into a room and argued for any of them on paper. But each one boils down to a simple, intriguing sentence that makes you go: oh, f*ck, that’s such a good story. I didn’t realise I needed that.

That’s the thing. Not that the audience was waiting for it — they weren’t. They had no idea it was missing. And then it arrives and it’s obvious.

Look at Adolescence, which followed and captured a huge worldwide audience. It’s about a fifteen-year-old boy killing a schoolmate. None of that screams hit. But when you watch, something cuts through that makes you feel like you’re watching a soul. It’s transcendental and hard to describe.

The only key is overriding authenticity. You can’t reverse-engineer the rest of it.

What do you know now that you wish you’d known?

Always be aware of your motivations behind doing something.

So many things came my way early on, before I got my foot in the door of television. I was on that endless merry-go-round of the treatment stage — you’ve got an idea and it gets optioned. That word, I heard it constantly.

And the number of times I said yes and spent enormous time on things that didn’t speak to me in any way. It doesn’t serve anyone. It’s never going to work for anyone.

A big television producer who was into obscure live performance came to one of my comedy shows and got me in for a meeting. I couldn’t believe it. I got a haircut, a shirt, everything.

And they said: I’ve got this idea, I think you might be good for it.

It couldn’t have been further from me. It was about vlogging. Influencers, early on — people putting on makeup, saying so this is this makeup. And I said, sounds good to me, let’s do it.

I was up all night trying to understand why millions of people were watching someone put on makeup. I was trying to dig deep. And I just couldn’t get there.

It was one of those things that would not die. I was handing in crap in the hope they’d drop it, and it just kept going and going. At one point I thought: this might get made. And I’m f*cked if it does.

Every time I’ve taken something on because I wanted to work with the person, or wanted the money, or hoped there’d be something waiting at the end of it, I’ve only ever had a bitter experience. It’s only ever left me feeling I could have spent that time on something that genuinely spoke to me.

So: always follow your creative intuitions.