Black Ops Interview: Joe Tucker and Lloyd Woolf
How did you both get involved in the show?
Joe: Basically, BBC Studios essentially approached us and said, “We’ve got this idea from the people behind Famalam” and our ears pricked up. I think they just gave us a couple of lines, this idea, and it was good. We could sort of see it, and then I think we went to meet Gbemi and AK to chat about it. We’d made a similar-ish show called Witless, in a similar sort of comedy thriller territory. So yeah, we were fans of Famalam, we thought this was a really good idea, so we signed up.
What was the idea in a nutshell?
Lloyd: Originally, Dom and Kay probably weren’t PCSOs, but it was two young, under qualified officers who for whatever reason, they’ve got no choice but to use these guys as the undercover officers.
Joe: They get into this mission and lose their handler. So, the whole setup was there and we were sort of like, “Yeah, I’d watch that. That’s interesting. That’s funny.”
What was it like working with Gbemi and AK?
Joe: It was great. At the start, when we did the pilot, we met them a few times and chatted about what we might do, then we just kind of got on with writing the pilot. And then when we did the series, the difference was that obviously Gbemi and AK wrote an episode, so we got together as a team first to spit ball ideas and we ran with stuff that people suggested.
Lloyd: I think a huge part of the pleasure of working with them was their ideas being so rooted in their experiences and their worldview. It was really great to get together and share and jumble things up. It was a lot of fun.
So, you had a writers’ room?
Joe: We basically did a kind of writers’ room early on where we were just like, “Let’s just say anything we can think of and get it in the mix.” Do you remember, there was lots of quite mad stuff that we didn’t manage to get in?
Lloyd: There was a lot of focus on visiting the Isle of Wight. None of that made it.
Joe: Yeah, at some point we thought it was going to involve the Isle of Wight and then reality hit. But I think Gbemi and AK were always going to write, sort of subject to Gbemi, who was filming A League of Their Own. So, subject to availability, it was always going to be that she was going to write some of it. And I think they’d already started the second episode, they’d done a draft. After the writers’ room, Lloyd and I took it away and were like, “Okay, this is what we think the loose shape of the series would be.” And then it’s just a case of assigning who who’s going to do what episode.
Was it fun to write?
Joe: We wanted it to be fun, right? I mean, obviously, we want it to be funny, but we wanted it to be a fun ride to go on. A lot of the writing of it was fun, but there’s definitely stuff that’s not fun because there’s a thriller aspect that’s like a complex chess game. You’re sort of like, “Oh, if we do that, then you’ve got to do this.” But once you figure out that stuff, we kind of knew that a lot of the humour would be Dom and Kay squabbling. So, it’s almost like once you know how it’s going to work, then you’ve got the kind of pleasure of just writing.
Lloyd: Yeah, we sort of wanted them to feel like a brother and sister – maybe like a 14 year old sister and a 12 year old brother annoying each other. And that’s always fun.
You’ve got a great cast, haven’t you?
Lloyd: In the first place Gbemi and Hammed are just a great pairing. They’re both brilliant individually but put together on set, you felt like you could just wind them up and let them go. They’re so funny together. And beyond that there’s people like Zoë Wanamaker and Alex Macqueen and Alan Ford who to even just briefly meet these people and have a chat is lovely. Also, Felicity Montagu, there’s so many really fantastic comic actors who were involved and it’s just really exciting.
Joe: There’s a lot of nice cameos in it. We didn’t set out for there to be several, but it’s sort of ended up with all these great actors.
What do you hope that viewers get from this?
Lloyd: Like Joe was saying, we want it to be fun. You know, in quite an old-fashioned way we want people to be looking forward to Friday night, so they can find out what happens next. The show is, hopefully, an explicitly Black British centred show. One thing I sort of hope is that a broad audience can watch it and almost forget that, and it just takes its rightful place at the table – it becomes part of the landscape in a way that it should be. As you’ll notice, neither Joe or I are black, and obviously there was a lot of sensitivity and a lot of conscious effort to make sure that we were always following Gbemi and AK’s lead, especially once it gets into cultural stuff. And for BBC One to be saying, “This is one of our main comedy shows for this year”, that’s a great feeling. And hopefully it doesn’t feel like, “And now the token Black show”, hopefully it feels like, “This is brilliant. 2023, this is what we watch and who we are.”
Joe: I think that’s maybe worth saying as well. The original idea we were given was a really great idea, and that kind of tone felt exactly that, a fairly mainstream – in the best sense – kind of show that could sit on BBC One in 2023 on a Friday night.
Finally, is there enough mileage in these characters for a second series?
Lloyd: 100%. I mean, in some of our early conversations with Gbemi and AK they said the ambition for them was to take it into spy territory. That was always clear from the outset, that the drug dealing on an estate could be a jumping off point. AK kept on coming back to this vision he had in his head of them like dancing in a ballroom with little earpieces on, like in Mission Impossible. And we said, “Okay, that’s a long way to go but we absolutely can get there.” So, I think it’s just a case of putting it on a bigger and bigger stage and expanding it as you go on. I think it could absolutely run and run, and I don’t think we’ve scratched the surface. So, if this is a kind of riff on Line of Duty, then the next series could be a riff on Spooks, and you can riff on James Bond.
Joe: We’ll essentially just work our way through the BBC back catalogue.
Black Ops Premieres on BBC One and BBC iPlayer on Friday 5 May 2023.
