SFX had a chat with Bouch for issue 176 (out on 22 October) about the comedy drama (we refuse to use the phrase dramedy – we’re not Variety) in which a ghost, a vampire and werewolf share a flat. He reveals some major changes for the series, describing the first episode as a reboot rather than a continuation, with some big casting news (we’ll keep you guessing for now) but he also had this to say about the positive Internet reaction to the pilot:
"I'd looked on a couple of sites to see a few of the responses just out of interest, but it was really Toby Whithouse, the writer, who'd really been following that – obviously he had much more time on his hands. He’d seen that there was a big petition that was getting more and more signatures. And, of course, this was all happening immediately after transmission. We had not had a commissioning decision at that point. So it all helped our campaign.
“I was aware of the groundswell of opinion on it. People that I have known – friends of mine, friends of friends – who said that they’d enjoyed it. The sheer volume of appreciation for it on the Internet didn’t really become apparent to me until I talked to Toby and I had a look for myself. It was a bit of a surprise.
“Ultimately it got very good figures on BBC3. In terms of the number of repeats, we were playing to a million viewers by the end of it. And obviously it did very well on iPlayer. To be honest, I think the BBC did acknowledge that it was a good piece of work. But they weren’t entirely sure that it matched what their aspirations were for BBC3. I think it was only after it went out and people responded to it in the way that they did that they felt reassured that it was connecting with the right kind of audience. Because it’s never an exact science and I think the Internet reaction definitely will have helped.”
