Kay Mellor, Executive Producer
Kay Mellor, Executive Producer at Rollem, My Left Nut.
Published: 26 February 2020
It’s a very modern coming-of-age comedy - it’s funny and unashamed, but it has got some tenderness to it. Personally, I am very proud of it.
What made you choose My Left Nut and how did the idea for the series come about?
Sian, the producer, headed up a competition with the 大象传媒 Writersroom to find new writers for us to mentor as part of a development initiative we were running. Michael and Oisin submitted My Left Nut the play, and it was one of the scripts Sian shortlisted for me to read.
We’d recently produced 大象传媒 Three’s drama Overshadowed, which dealt with anorexia in an interesting way, so I was eager to find something similar again. My Left Nut tells a very informative story in an unexpected and entertaining way. And I love the title!
Funnily enough, independently my daughter then went up to Edinburgh and mentioned a great play that I should go up to see and it was My Left Nut.
We met up with Fiona Campbell, Controller of 大象传媒 Three, and she instantly loved it. It was a great moment when she said how she trusted me and loved my work. She started talking about how it could be on 大象传媒 One as well and we all got very excited!
I’m really proud of the series because everyone worked very hard to make it happen. We were mentoring first-time writers and talent, and we had some major challenges due to restricted budgets, but everyone was eager to learn and rose to the challenge! My Left Nut is funny, sad and beautiful.
Why did you feel that this story was important to be told to young audiences?
It’s an important story to tell because young men don’t talk about personal subjects or grief properly. This is a story about a young boy who is too afraid to tell anyone about a sensitive issue. It’s also about a boy who lost his father and has never come to terms with it. He never talked to his mother or friends about the death of his father.
It explores how young people can be afraid to talk and not deal with their issues. Mental health is an important topic and there’s a message in this drama. But it’s not a message piece: audiences will laugh about it and think about it later. Hopefully young men will check their testicles too! We’ve been really good with campaigning for women to check their breasts, but we need to educate our boys as well. To also highlight that there’s no shame to be open about it.
Describe your experience working with the talent in My Left Nut?
During the read-through it was amazing to see how Sinéad brought so much gravitas to it. I would work with her again in a heartbeat. I’ve watched her work from afar and knew I would love to work with that woman. She made all the difference. We had a lot of young raw talent on the series - for a lot of them it was their first time - and they said it was awesome watching Sinéad ’s work and learning from her. The whole cast was fantastic.
Have you visited Belfast before?
I love Belfast! And I love Ireland. In fact I’m half Irish, my father is from Dublin. But I’d never worked on anything in Northern Ireland before My Left Nut.
The whole series was filmed on location there and Northern Ireland Screen couldn’t have been more helpful. But it was tough because we have been ambitious with it. It was filmed in a short a space of time, over just three weeks, with actors who haven’t done it before. The director Paul and the team worked their socks off and the final product looks beautiful.
What were the challenges of creating a three-part drama series based on a stage play?
A key challenge was finding three distinct story stages - a beginning, middle and the finale - which is how we tackled it. Michael and Oisín had a fantastic overall story to tell, but in every episode you have to feel like you’ve gone on a journey and told the audience a satisfying story.
We first looked at shaping it into six 15-minute episodes, but the story sat perfectly in three parts, so it became three 30-minute episodes. We did go through a lot of drafts - Oisín and Michael are brand new TV writers and what works on stage doesn’t necessarily work on TV. But it slowly came together.
The 大象传媒 Commissioner Tommy Bulfin had some great thoughts and we brought the mother into the foreground which was Sinéad’s role playing Patricia. The complexity of the mother figure was tricky. She lost her husband and has a full time job while rearing three young kids. Women understand that and Michael hasn’t written her like one of these saints - he has written her with great depth. It is a coming-of-age story that explores Mick’s relationships with his friends and family, and his relationship with his mother is such a key part of his journey in the series.
If there’s an appetite for it, you could follow these three boys, their girlfriends and Patricia into the next stage of their lives. There is no reason why we couldn’t do a sequel.
What should audiences expect from the series?
It’s a very modern coming-of-age comedy - it’s funny and unashamed, but it has got some tenderness to it. The drama is sometimes quite moving. We’ve told a different story - it’s unique and very different to anything I’ve seen on TV.
Michael and Oisín are brand new writers - they didn’t even have an agent when we first found them, Sian had to find them one to represent them - so it was great the 大象传媒 trusted me. It’s a massive break for them and it’s really exciting to see their work on screen for the first time.
