Irish comedian Sharon Horgan has told how her new sitcom is based on her own unplanned pregnancy.
The TV star has based the Channel 4 series around an Irish teacher who discovered she’s expecting a baby – a week after getting together with her new American businessman boyfriend.
And the 44-year-old admitted: “That is what happened to me so it made sense to write about it.”
New role: Sharon in Catastrophe | CHANNEL 4
She had an unplanned pregnancy six months into her relationship with now husband, entrepreneur Jeremy Rainbird. They now have two young girls – Sadhbh, 11, and six-year-old Amer.
And Sharon, who wrote Catastrophe with her US comedian co-star Rob Delaney, admitted: “I couldn’t have written it four years ago.
“I had to get further down the line and realise how brutally hard having children is, then hear Rob talk about it so viscerally in his stand-up.
“We liked the idea of writing about how hard it is to stay in love and in a relationship when you’ve got kids, and how easy it would be to put an end to it.”
Tough: Sharon feels she needed life experience for show
And Sharon said she made sure to cast some Irish actors in the show.
She added: “I had to cast my Irish family in Catastrophe, and the amount of brilliant actors who came in… I thought, ‘Well, I’m going to think of an Irish comedy’.”
It comes as Sharon is also taking off in the US, after writing a new HBO series for Sarah Jessica Parker, called Divorce, her return to TV after Sex And The City in 2004.
She said: “It’s luck and chemistry. She’d been looking for something, so HBO sent her some of my work and set us up on a date. She liked my stuff and we got on well.”
