Surrounded by an inordinate number of plates of biscuits, Julia Davis is discussing how it feels to be a controversial comic in the age of moral outrage. “I am slightly worried there’s going to be some backlash,” she admits. She considers her improvised agony aunt podcast Dear Joan and Jericha, which is so filthy it makes Derek and Clive look like Countryfile. “I did feel nervous about one of the episodes where we said: ‘At least your son will always fancy you.’ I thought, God, if my boys [she has twin sons] hear that, it’s so horrifically awkward to try to explain these characters and why I’m saying this. But it must hit a nerve, because for some reason people find it funny. It’s got to be saying something truthful in there somewhere.” She pauses. “Not like people think their sons fancy them, but …”

We are in her PR company’s London offices to talk about her new show, Sally4Ever. It’s about a meek woman (the titular Sally, played by Catherine Shepherd) who leaves her boring fiance, David (Alex Macqueen), for the wild, reckless and worryingly possessive Emma, played by Davis. Throughout the series we encounter fuchsia strap-ons, gluten intolerance-related toilet sounds and regurgitated octopus tentacles. The very first episode features a lesbian sex scene involving thumb insertion, tampon extraction and feather dusters; it’s as cartoonishly visceral as anything Davis has done before, which is saying a lot considering her last series, 2016’s Camping, culminated in death, drugs, abuse and frottage, mostly taking place in a dank outdoor toilet.

“There was some press pack thing I was sent once,” she recalls, “and it had all these questions, and one of them was, ‘Why do you come up with these dark ideas?’ I said, ‘Would a man be asked this?’ It’s almost like an accusation. Like, what’s wrong with you?”

Davis is one of Britain’s great contemporary comedy writers, standing alongside the likes of Chris Morris, Armando Iannucci and Steve Coogan. Her name is a byword for shocking, accurate portrayals of humankind’s ugliest elements – her awkward, surreal creations, often described as Pinteresque. She arrived on the scene in the late 1990s, and plunged straight into a hotbed of boundary-pushing comedy. Her first commission was a Radio 4 comedy with Arabella Weir; Weir introduced her to Father Ted creators Arthur Mathews and Graham Linehan; they cast her for the seminal sketch show Big Train. Davis went on to become part of Morris’s Jam ensemble, and appeared in I’m Alan Partridge, Brass Eye and Nathan Barley, not to mention creating series such as Human Remains, Lizzie and Sarah, Nighty Night and Hunderby. Often set in a drab suburbia, her shows are riven with sinister sexual urges, desperate manipulation and loneliness.

Since making Camping, both my parents died of cancer. I saw some horrible things. It's changed me

Given her cult status – something enhanced by the fact she never appears on panel shows – there is a lot of mythologising around Davis’ personality. I expect to meet a shy woman distrustful of the press and suppressing tormented melancholy. In reality she’s warm and wry. She laughs a lot. Even in the face of death.

“Between Camping and now, both my parents died of cancer,” she says. “I saw some pretty horrible things. I don’t know if that added to my extreme ideas. But I’m sure it’s changed me. It’s made me feel orphaned. I know it sounds utterly ridiculous, but I didn’t used to think about death too much,” she lets out a bemused giggle. “But now I’m quite obsessed, after having to see it up close.”

The death of her parents did, naturally, put a hold on Davis’ output. She took some time off after Camping to go back and forth to Bath where they lived. (“With my father it was quite quick, but with my mum it was horrible … a year and a half.”) Her work directing Morning Has Broken, a show about a fictional “queen of daytime TV”, halted completely. It’s unlikely we’ll ever see it.

Uppity women-haters … publicity for the Dear Joan and Jericha podcast

But one thing that did emerge from this period was the Dear Joan and Jericha podcast. It is hosted by Davis and actor Vicki Pepperdine, whose agony aunt personas are like a cross between Fanny Cradock and Katie Hopkins. Between them they have “worked in the fields of life coaching, female sexual health, psycho-genital counselling and sports journalism”.

Each episode, the pair write letters to one another as distressed members of the public, then react to the problems in the style of uppity, women-hating, men-worshipping baby boomers. Its second season is due around the end of the year. Amid an iTunes Top 20 filled with true crime and earnest dissections of culture it is the funniest, dirtiest podcast you’ll ever hear. Their use of language is awe-inspiring. When asked what sort of food might help seduce a man, they list: “dark and stinky meat” including “offal, caecum, pancreas, right to the end of the rectum”. And for pudding, anything “sloppy and creamy and mushy and moist” that will stimulate his “semi-engorged organ”.

“We literally did it as a sort of therapy [after my parents died],” says Davis. “We did it in my kitchen and we both said: it’d be really fun if it cheered people up on their way into work, which is why I really like it when people say they are on the tube listening to it.”

Sad, lonely characters … Julia Davis with Angus Deayton and Rebecca Front in Nighty Night. Photograph: Toby Jacobs/BBC Three

While Joan and Jericha’s temperaments are in essence more unpleasant versions of those appearing in the Daily Mail’s Femail section, Davis’s other leads often have deeper psychological problems. Whether it’s Jill in Nighty Night, Dorothy from Hunderby or Camping’s Fay, these are lonely, sad characters who are abusive to those who love them in suffocating and sometimes sociopathic ways. Does she ever worry that, given the current sensitivity around portrayals of mental illness, she’ll get criticised for weaponising instability?

“Yeah, maybe,” she says. But she also points out that her characters are so exaggerated there’s a sense of detachment when it comes to serious themes. If anything, her podcast is a relief, especially in the #MeToo era, when women are reliving the patriarchal shaming that was inflicted on them growing up. “I think that’s why, for people who like the Joan and Jericha thing, it feels cathartic,” says Davis. “Because it’s so ridiculous and rude and terrible, it’s like a release for some people.”

Davis’s brand of comedy has earned her famous fans, including Lena Dunham – and the Girls creator decided to remake Camping for HBO, starring Jennifer Garner. Anyone who has seen the original will know it hinges on a very British ugliness: bleak seaside towns and knotty class systems. Reviews of Dunham’s show have been poor. Davis says she hasn’t watched it (“They sent me a link that I couldn’t open because it was too technical”), but she’s intrigued to see the end result. She’s an executive producer but didn’t contribute much creatively.

“I literally spent a week out there,” she says. “There was a writers’ room and I was there as part of that, which was kind of fun. They are so vocal, the American [writers], they’re so loud and chatty so they’re all pitching endless ideas and jokes, and occasionally I’d go, ‘Oh, I’ve got an idea,’ and it was normally not at all in the direction I think they wanted.”

The original Camping, which also starred Davis’s podcast partner Vicki Pepperdine, centre. Photograph: Colin Hutton

Davis also cropped up in the Oscar-nominated 2017 film Phantom Thread – briefly playing the part of Lady Baltimore alongside Daniel Day-Lewis. You wonder why she hasn’t had more roles in prominent films and primetime shows considering her ability to navigate such complex characters. Davis hates auditions but sometimes gets offered roles, “mostly horrible people … which is fine by me”, as well as “detective people, hard-nosed”, yet she doesn’t think she should do drama. She doesn’t mind being ghettoised in the “cult comic” category, but says that watching the recent raft of shows written by women about the unvarnished female experience – Fleabag, Girls, Catastrophe – has made her a little jealous.

My mum never really liked my comedy – but she liked Catastrophe. That was painful

“I really like them and slightly envy them,” she says. “I envy how they’re more real. They’re about real, contemporary women, and I think I would find it hard to write that stuff. [My shows are] a bit too weird for some people. My mum never really liked my comedy but she liked Catastrophe. That was quite painful,” she says with a laugh.

And what about Davis’ sons? They’re now 11. And while there is no appropriate age to watch their mum in a sex scene involving tampons and feather dusters, Davis’s comedy is filled with life’s universal horrors. Will she ever be ready to let them in?

“They’ve seen some poo and vomiting …” she says, smiling with the mischievous poise of one of her characters. “And they do quite like that.”

• Sally4Ever starts on 25 October at 10pm on Sky Atlantic and Now TV.



