A neatly dressed girl is sitting alone in a cafe, wondering aloud about the size of her arsehole. She spent the previous night with a man friend, drunkenly exploring certain sexual possibilities, and now is concerned that she might be unusually accommodating. This is the scene that kickstarts Fleabag, Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s new BBC3 comedy about the pains and perils of the twentysomething experience. As well as creating the show, she plays the title role, a character who, while happy to reveal her most intimate details, never divulges her real name.
Fleabag, as she is known, is a young woman who lives in London, runs a cafe with her only friend, attends feminist lectures with her sister, and has recently split up with her boyfriend. Dead mother, cold father, smiling assassin for a stepmum: she doesn’t sound like she’d be much fun on paper. But under the tightly buttoned trenchcoat and tidily asymmetric hair is a porn-addled, grief-stricken mess seeking some sort of connection. If you spent your 20s sleeping with randoms and not taking care of your heart, you’ll recognise her instantly.
The end credits reveal that most of the supporting cast aren’t afforded proper names either, instead called things like Bus Rodent or Arsehole Guy. “She doesn’t name anybody,” explains Waller-Bridge over a peppermint tea in a different London cafe. It’s one of those Edison-bulbed places with low lights and high benches; her tea is actually a glass stuffed with soggy mint leaves that flop out over the brim. “She doesn’t imbue anyone with anything more than how she sees them,” she adds.
This antihero cares only about herself, lives alone (people in sitcoms can afford to do this in London), masturbates to Obama on the news, and employs duplicity almost constantly to project the image she wants others to have of her. She is full of questions and devoid of answers, much like her creator says she was as she waded through her 20s. “Am I still a feminist if I watch porn, or if I want to change my body to make me feel more sexually attractive?” ponders Waller-Bridge, remembering the confusion of her own early womanhood.
This conflicted character of Fleabag burst out of her one day when a friend asked her to fill a 10-minute slot in her storytelling night. While the idea of standup made her recoil in horror, she told herself: “I’m being a pussy. I’ve got to do it”. Ten minutes quickly snowballed into a one-woman Edinburgh show, critical acclaim and a transfer to London’s Soho Theatre. Waller-Bridge is now 30 and says the character emerged from a mix of feminist anger and wild frustration at the limitations put on young women before they can decide who and what they really are.
“When I meet girls who are like, 23, 24, I just want to hug them now,” she says, before remarking on her own 20s: “I felt very aware of my sexuality and very aware of what that meant in terms of my worth.” She swills the warm water around the leaves. “As long as you were skinny and hot first, then you were allowed to get on with the rest of your life. The injustice of that.” She’s laughing now but says it drove her mad at the time. And this coming from a woman who looks like a 1930s soap advert, every bit as pristine as her on-screen character.
On top of the anger, there was the guilt. Waller-Bridge watched porn for a time in her early 20s and wondered if that made her a “bad feminist” as she read about the numbing effect it seemed to be having on her generation; all that hairless expectation and loveless, colliding flesh. “I just felt like it was really wearing me down a bit,” she says, looking out of the cafe door. She adds “a bit” to a lot of her answers, perhaps not wanting to seem too unequivocal about anything.
What is without doubt is that Waller-Bridge is on the rise. Since graduating from Rada in 2006, she’s gradually become a familiar face on primetime TV. You might last have seen her as Marianne Jean-Baptiste’s legal sidekick in Broadchurch 2 or Lulu in E4’s Crashing, her very modern flatshare comedy set in a disused hospital, which politely pushed the boundaries of taste and zinged with verbal sparklers. Waller-Bridge wrote it and played one of the twentysomething co-dwellers, living, pooing and shagging their way through life with a frankness that bordered on sociopathic.
When Crashing aired, some hailed her as the British Lena Dunham, but her aesthetic is nothing like as deliberately grubby or exposing. While they do have in common a lack of answers, Fleabag would never strip off and talk you through her tattoos the way Hannah does.
“She is so controlled,” says Waller-Bridge. “The clothes that she wears, she’s constantly got this red lipstick on, her hair’s perfect, she looks pristine and clean. The fleabagginess of her is her subtext.” As so many of us do, with our carefully edited social media presence to the fore, she wears it on the inside. Those who saw Waller-Bridge’s stage version of Fleabag in Edinburgh or its London transfer described it as “filthy” and “shocking”, but it’s the verbal power she wields that socks you in the jaw.
Despite echoes of Carrie Bradshaw or Sharon Horgan in Catastrophe, Fleabag’s closest pop-cultural cousins, with her fourth-wall-busting asides to camera, are probably Ferris Bueller or Michael Caine’s Alfie. Waller-Bridge says it was important from the off to invite audience complicity for her hero’s increasingly bad behaviour. In the opening shot, she is just about to open the door to a late-night booty call when she turns to camera and explains the extensive preparation she’s had to engage in to be ready for this seemingly casual encounter.
It could be a moment of pure clunk but instead she grabs us by the lapels and we go with her unquestioningly. Mid-shag she looks at us and tells us that her one-night friend is edging towards her anus but she’s drunk so she might as well let him. The next morning, she tells us she is strangely moved by his gratitude at being allowed to “up the bum” her. These asides act as an effective coping strategy, as well as a hugely watchable dramatic technique. While she’s looking at us, and essentially in her own head, she doesn’t have to deal with the real world in any way.
For a relatively young writer, Waller-Bridge has assembled a supporting cast most comedy veterans would chew their elbows off for. Olivia Colman plays her spiteful, bohemian step mother with a devastating line in insults tucked away behind polite smiles. And Bill Patterson is the chilly, unavailable patriarch who keeps his daughters at arm’s length. Waller-Bridge’s own family sound like a much happier unit – she mentions a brother, sister “the love of my life” and her mum, not an actor, actually appears in episode one. She plays a feminist lecturer with surprisingly on-point comic timing. “I suppose the idea of losing my mum is my biggest fear ever,” she says. When I remind her that she will definitely die one day, she grins nervously, clenching her fists. “She’s not, she’s not. I’m not going to let it happen.”
That callow unwillingness to recognise life’s unpleasant certainties is there for all to see; in Fleabag, a character who (in the words of Britney) is “not a girl, not yet a woman”. But just when you think you’ve sussed out this rather selfish, often wretchedly childish character, a big reveal during a chat with a cab driver changes everything. The first episode ends with a snippet of backstory that is barely hinted at until that moment and, suddenly, you find yourself wanting to hug her, too.
“She has a heart,” says Waller-Bridge protectively. “It’s just broken.”
Fleabag is available on BBC3 from 21 July.
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