If you’ve read Tom Gibbons blog on Dylan Ogden then you’ll know that we met Mat back in 2006 making
that web series. We had loads of fun and vowed to work together again immediately! So
obviously, and with much haste, 16 years later we got around to it.
After the never ending lockdowns, various cancelled or postponed jobs, and many fucking zoom
quizzes of 2020 and 2021, Tom was given an opportunity to put on a play at the studio of Ilkley
Playhouse in October 2021. Whatever he wanted. Free space. Sell tickets. Tell us a story.
Desperate for creative ventures he tentatively and cooly said ‘YES PLEASE! NOW PLEASE!
WHEN IS IT? HOW LONG FOR? YES PLEASE!’. And so we set about rehearsing and staging a
play Tom was a huge fan of. Letter To Buddha by Sarah Nelson.
We had a wicked time creating and playing and being back on stage. We invited loads of mates,
about 6 people from Ilkley came, bless them, and we stuck it all over social media. The play went
really well, we were immensely proud of it. We even managed to get some great reviews but
probably most importantly for this story – Matthew Cooper (Sober Director) Esquire had seen one of my posts
about it. And so, with his wife Ali on the Saturday night, came along and watch.
One standing ovation (hold for applause…) later we are stood in the bar at the theatre and Mat is
cooking up an idea. He has a script he wrote back in the late 90s that got optioned by Universal
but it never got made. If we spent some time rewriting and collaborating on a slightly new angle it
might just work. Mat had loved seeing that, 16 years after the series we’d starred in together,
myself and Tom still had great chemistry and was bowled over that we had stayed good mates for
this long. He thought that if we could capture some of that on screen, that the story of Sober
would work really well. And might be a good platform for the two of us as actors, for Mat as a
writer/director and for the three of us as filmmakers.
So early in 2022 we got together in, of course, Mats van. Drove to, of course, a nature reserve
somewhere just outside Leeds. And, of course, wrote the greatest movie of all time (that has been
written on national trust property). Well we didn’t write all of it. We got ideas down and discussed
character and what kind of story it was going to be. Mat went away and adapted Sober (1998) in
to what would become Sober (2023).
A few drafts back and forth and by the start of 2023 we were ready to start casting and planning the shoot.
A chance meeting that started in an audition room at the West Yorkshire Playhouse in 2006, with
16 year old Tom and I auditioning for a random writer, Mat, had become a production company, a
locked shooting script, a very talented cast (present company absofuckinglutely included) and a
studio and locations booked for April 2023’s shoot.
Ambitious, funny, touching and quintessentially ‘Leeds’. We thought – ‘We might just have
something here’…
