Jack Rooke

It was never produced with like a team.

It's not a proper play by any stretch.

It is a sort of quite cut and paste, a bit punk at times, me cobbling together stories and little films because I studied sort of documentary making.

So I filmed all of these things with my nan.

who you both loved, my nan Cicely, who was a dinner lady.

And she and me would speak quite a lot about grief because I think it happened, like you said, like I was too young.

I was talking about losing a parent and my nan was 80 and talking about losing a child.

And that was just not the way it should be.

But we really found solace in sort of

slagging everyone off for how awkward and weird they would be with us after he died.

And those sort of things where people kind of put their foot in it or they just don't want to talk about it and pretend like it doesn't exist.

I can remember, like, I think people used to say to my nan quite a lot, like, oh, you should have gone first.

Things like that, where they're just speaking.

But, you know, I think people... Sometimes I remember one of my dad's friends sort of crossing the street to avoid me because... He didn't know what to say.

He didn't know what to say and this is it.

This is why I wanted to write the show.

I think it's something very British.

I think it's something that we have got better at actually since I first started doing that show.

I do think we've had a much bigger, broader mental health conversation in the last 10 years.

I think people are slightly more empathetic.