Showrunner Toby Whithouse discusses how episode five of the new series came to feature a new kind of supernatural creature (CONTAINS SPOILERS!)
[caption id="attachment_60249" align="alignnone" width="610" caption="Toby was surprisingly chipper for a man who was trapped inside a fridge."]
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Tonight’s episode of Being Human featured a new addition to the show’s line-up of supernatural creatures – a succubus! A few months back we talked to Toby about the genesis of this storyline. He’s what he had to say.
SFX: So how did you come to write an episode featuring a succubus? The zombie episode last year was very successful. Did you immediately think, ‘Well, we should do that again!”
Toby Whithouse: “Not really. When you try and replicate success it never works! Yes, we were all absolutely thrilled with the zombie episode, because Jamie Mathieson’s script was just terrific, and Alexandra Roach’s performance was so moving. But, to be fair, it’s not that we sat down and said, ‘Okay, this year let’s have a troll’ or whatever!
“It really just comes down to us trying to find the Being Human way of doing something. So with the zombie episode the notion of this very shallow woman who’s obsessed with her looks and very surface, facile things, the notion of making that the person who’s decaying in front of your eyes, that seemed very appropriate and an interesting spin on it.
“With the succubus, as is always the case on Being Human , the thing that came first was the character. We wanted to bring Craig Roberts back and we didn’t know what would be the next chapter of his story. We didn’t want to go back over old territory, so it struck us then that actually a relationship story would be good for him.
“Then we thought, ‘Well, who’s it gonna be?’ Because Adam is physically a 17 year old boy but he’s a 47-year-old man, and we thought it’d be a bit creepy if he was with an 18-year-old girl. So then we decided it would work much better if he’s with an older woman, and we created this character, Yvonne.
“The notion of her being a succubus came after the character - we were originally going to keep her as human. But I always feel that if you want to watch a show about humans you can watch absolutely any other show on TV, and actually this is the one show where you can get away with doing things like that, and it’s silly to miss that opportunity. So then the notion of her being a succubus was thrown into the mix. But again: as has always been the way with this show, the character absolutely came first.”
Ian Berriman twitter.com/ianberriman
Being Human airs at 9pm on BBC Three on Sunday nights.
Read our exclusive interview with Craig Roberts .
Read our Being Human series four reviews .
Read our web-exclusive interviews with Damien Molony (Hal), showrunner Toby Whithouse and Michael Socha (Tom).
