‘And today’s news is … I’m cancelled’: Hugh Bonneville, Alex Kingston and Steven Moffat on their cancel comedy

When Douglas, a nationally trusted news host, suffers a social media pile-on about a private comment revealed online, he consults his agent, who warns him – with a vagueness that may have pleased ITV’s lawyers – that he risks the fate of fellow broadcasters “whatsisname and the other one”. Many viewers will substitute the names Phillip Schofield and Huw Edwards, whose careers were cancelled after controversies about their conduct.

“They may well do,” admits Steven Moffat, writer of ITV’s four-part Douglas Is Cancelled. “But I wrote the first version of this – as a stage play that didn’t get put on – five years ago, long before the cases you mention. It doesn’t matter which period you put this story in: there will be somebody who fell from grace in TV.”

He mentions Simon Dee, the temperamental chatshow host who went from primetime to penury in 1970; Christopher Trace, let go from Blue Peter in 1967 after getting divorced; and Frank Bough, the news and sports presenter sacked by the BBC in 1987 in a sex and drugs scandal. “I think it always happened, but we didn’t have the word cancelled for it. Originally, the title was the name of one of the main characters. I only wrote cancelled into the title later, like the media tart that I am.”

Surely, though, the fact that Douglas tries to save his career with a Newsnight interview that ruins him is intentionally close to the throne? “No. That was in there five years ago – before Prince Andrew and Emily Maitlis. But yes, we have become so much more informed about what goes into a TV interview, and how you can screw up, than when I first wrote it, so that adds to those scenes.”

Because Hugh Bonneville’s Douglas is a bland, grey-haired anchor with a fondness for navy blue suits, as soon as publicity pictures appeared, some newspapers played a game of Who’s Huw? But Bonneville deflects this: “I wasn’t thinking of him. When I first read it – two-and-a-half years ago – none of that had happened. The weird thing about some scripts is how they suddenly resonate in a way you never anticipated.”

Bonneville chose not to undergo Autocue training or hang around TV newsrooms – “I’ve been around enough TV studios to know how it works” – but made a discovery about the medium in the makeup room. Actors usually use invisible cosmetics but, in scenes where Douglas has just come off-air, we see the thick mask hosts on brightly lit news shows wear. “I think there’s an entire makeup set called ‘Madeley’,” adds Bonneville. “For daytime TV presenters.”

“It’s orange and very thick,” adds Alex Kingston, who plays Douglas’s wife, a middle-market newspaper editor who has to choose between her marriage and exclusive access to tabloid scandal. “Not at all flattering. None of us look good.” Kingston’s research was an unusual example of working from home: “In the village where I live, one of my neighbours reads a particular popular daily newspaper. She was so thrilled I was playing the editor of this newspaper that she dropped six months of back copies on my doorstep. I got through one or two before deciding to leave it to acting.”

Kingston, who worked with Moffat on Doctor Who, had long been interested in Douglas Is Cancelled, and she wasn’t alone. “I was sent all four episodes and I thought, ‘This is phenomenal’,” says Nick Mohammed, who plays Morgan, a TV joke writer. “And very cheekily I asked to audition for what is now Ben Miles’s part as Douglas’s boss. They said he needed to be more Hugh’s age to make the plot work. I asked if I could audition anyway. They were really sweet and said, ‘This is a really fun take but it does have to be older so would you consider doing Morgan?’ And of course I would.”

Mohammed was pleased that the gag-writer’s race is irrelevant: “What I like about the roles I’m being offered now is that they’re called Morgan or Jason. Ten years ago, it was Abdul and Rafiq.”

The fact that Moffat first wrote, and some actors first read, the scripts so long ago reveals the slowness in getting the show on air. While the Edwards, Schofield and Prince Andrew cases didn’t influence the scripts, it seems inevitable that they made the project more attractive to producers. Some in the industry, though, are surprised that, after the scandal at This Morning, ITV were the buyers. Have they expressed any concerns? “No,” says Moffat. “I don’t think they would have been happy if I’d specifically referenced someone. But I never would have. As I say, it wasn’t about them.”

Viewers may also be wrongfooted by the subject matter. What initially seems to be a story of cancel culture shades into #MeToo – from viral tweets to male misbehaviour. It feels like a satire that becomes a moral thriller? “I’ll take that!” says Moffat. “Near the beginning, I said, ‘We can’t call it a comedy drama.’ But in the end, we did because we couldn’t think of anything else.”

Misleading viewers about what they are seeing unites his work, from the sitcom Coupling to Sherlock and Doctor Who, and there are some bravura confusions in Douglas Is Cancelled: “Two episodes end with the same scene – though with one extra line the second time. It works because you suddenly know more of what is going on. Using the same cliffhanger in two different ways is the kind of thing I really like.”

Tonally, the series alternates from dark to farcical, with comedy scenes played at a pace rarely seen on TV. “The speed is interesting,” says Moffat. “Because – I shouldn’t tell you this – the episodes kept coming in short. I wrote the ‘right’ number of pages but they didn’t fill the slot. I had to keep writing extra stuff. The reason it happened is that the actors took it at an incredible lick. The producers kept saying, ‘Jesus, we’ve lost five minutes!’ But I felt this is how my dialogue should be played. In real-life conversations, no one ever pauses because someone else will cut in. Pausing in the middle of sentences or between them is a dramatic convention. So an entirely new character – a cab driver with comedy ambitions – was added to fill more time.”

Douglas Is Cancelled contains deliberate references to jailed Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein, with one key scene recreating him luring young women to hotel bathrooms. Moffat asked his wife Sue Vertue, the producer of Douglas Is Cancelled, and other female colleagues if anything bad had ever happened to them. “And they’d all say no. And then, a couple of days later, ‘Oh, there was that time I was rammed up against a wall.’ It was the sort of thing women just expected. You realise that women have a really tough job dealing with men. Imagine if you and I were transported to a planet where there are creatures who are bigger than us, stronger than us and want to shag us all the time – how would we feel about that?”

“There were occasions in the past,” reveals Kingston, “when I was warned by other actors, ‘Be careful! That one has wandering hands.’ You just expected it and put on a carapace.”

However, the actors say showbiz workplaces have now been transformed. “Absolutely,” says Bonneville. “I have to go on a Respect in the Workplace training video module for a show I’ve been doing for 14 years.” Which one? “I can’t possibly mention. You’d have to guess.” (Bonneville first appeared in Downton Abbey in 2010 and a third spin-off movie is currently filming. You do the maths.)

“And I haven’t been in a theatre rehearsal room for a while,” he goes on. “But I understand that’s changed and I can see why because one can see where the abuses lay. I grew up with theatre directors who practised bullying in all its forms – whether predation or humiliation. And I think that pendulum has swung. But, as with all pendulums, they swing too far beyond common sense and end up in a bonkers world and then come back. And I think we’ve gone slightly beyond the centre point to, ‘Don’t hurt my feelings and how dare you direct me?’”

“I’m currently working in theatre,” says Kingston, “and it’s the second time in a row I’ve been directed by a woman. The atmosphere in the rehearsal room is completely different, interestingly enough, than when you have a man directing. On one of the shows, an intimacy coach – before every single performance – checked that two actors were comfortable with what they were doing with each other. Before every performance! I guess I just found that a bit strange. But clearly the actors had trained and grown up with that as normal.”

“A few years ago,” Bonneville adds, “I was playing a serial killer on TV.” This was Netflix’s I Came By. “And I suggested to the director that in one scene, I should not only burn the victim’s clothes to hide the evidence but also burn my own. Which would involve me stripping off. And the night before shooting, I was phoned by the director and asked if I wanted an intimacy coach. I said not only did I suggest it, but it’s only me in the scene and I’m only taking my shirt off. But – because we’re finding equivalency across the spectrum – I can see why that was on their to-do list.”

“They were protecting the crew from your body, Hugh!” Kingston jokes.

Several plot twists in Douglas Is Cancelled concern the speed and lethal nature of X/Twitter, in which a single comment can be globally weaponised in seconds. “Because of Twitter,” says Moffat, “we can fuck up in public instantly, wherever we are.” Does he worry about past scenes and series of his being retrospectively declared cancellable? “Yeah. Sure. Especially now you’ve mentioned it. People have gone at me endlessly – in my Doctor Who and Sherlock stuff – to prove that I’m a misogynist, homophobe or racist, or whatever is the most damning thing you can say about someone.

“But I still manage to keep working. I don’t think there’s anything vile out there, but there are missteps. There’s a show I did called Press Gang – great little series – but there are 43 episodes without a single gay character. Why? I didn’t sit down and decide not to do it. I just didn’t do it.”

“I’ve always trodden very lightly,” says Mohammed. “I’m on X/Twitter, Instagram. I post stuff to advertise things. But yes, I have friends who have had jokes backfire online. And in Ted Lasso, my character turned quite sour. Some fans were really troubled by that and got in touch and wanted to engage. But I can’t – I mean it’s a fictional story! – so I just have to pretend that stuff doesn’t exist.”

Kingston is even more cautious: “I don’t follow Twitter or any of those things. Because if I don’t see it, I don’t know about it.”

Social media is notorious for taking sides, but Moffat wanted a series that doesn’t. “There are no heroes in it. I wonder how people will react – because they can get angry if morality is not very clearly laid out. And I spent much of my career doing it. Doctor Who’s the good guy and the Daleks are definitely evil! But this is more complicated.”

• Douglas Is Cancelled is on ITV1 on 27 June