Meet the real couple behind Colin from Accounts: ‘Someone asked if Patrick was my dad’

Harriet Dyer and Patrick Brammall are co-writers, co-stars, and married. They tell Ellie Harrison about the pressures and joys of bringing the second season of their Sydney-set word-of-mouth hit to the screen

Ashley and Gordon, played by Dyer and Brammall, bond over a scruffy pup (BBC)

When the Australian comedy Colin from Accounts landed on the BBC last spring, no one saw it coming. The title hardly inspired huge excitement – and it was kind of misleading; the show’s got nothing to do with a guy who works in a drab office, as you might suspect, but instead is an offbeat romcom about two people who fall in love after injuring a small dog. It had other things stacked against it, too – its leads were complete unknowns in the UK, and it was made and set more than 10,000 miles away, in Sydney.

But within weeks of its quiet arrival, it had become a mega word-of-mouth hit, earning gushing five-star reviews and millions of fans, including members of British romcom royalty Phoebe Waller-Bridge and Richard Curtis. And because it arrived with no publicity campaign, early adopters felt like it was their own special pearl to share with the world. “The show hits in the UK like nowhere else, honestly,” says Patrick Brammall, who co-writes and co-stars with his wife Harriet Dyer. “I think it’s a cultural thing, because the Australians and the Brits have a similar, minor-key sort of comedy.”

It all started with the flash of a boob. In the first episode of season one, trainee doctor Ashley (Dyer) spontaneously bares one of her breasts to microbrewery owner Gordon (Brammall) as she crosses the road. He is so distracted, and delighted, that he runs over a border terrier with his car. The scruffy pup – who survives, later becomes theirs and is christened Colin – brings them together, and the first season was all about their fledgling relationship. Now, as the show returns for round two, Ashley and Gordon live together but are still getting to know each other and asking important questions, from “Does it matter if we’re not able to naturally have children?” (not really) to “How many people have we slept with?” (in Gordon’s case, about 100, but it averages out to 3.84 for each sexually active year, which isn’t too outrageous, he insists).

“Minor-key” is just the right term for the show’s style of humour. The characters deliver their dialogue completely straight, no matter how gross or funny – for example, when Gordon’s brother Heavy (Justin Rosniak) announces he needs to go for a number two, with the preposterous line: “I’ve got an urgent meeting with a slick brown dog.” And a lot of the jokes lean heavily on cringe comedy, with uncomfortable exchanges running on for an agonisingly long time. The show is like the Aussie cousin of Channel 4’s Catastrophe – spiky, awkward, honest – and Dyer and Brammall have previously called that series, about an imperfect couple played by Sharon Horgan and Rob Delaney, their “closest reference point”.

Thanks to the excitement generated by Colin from Accounts season one, Dyer and Brammall were hesitant to put pen to paper again. “There was so much procrastination,” says Dyer. “Well, 50 per cent of us were procrastinating a lot,” cuts in Brammall, looking meaningfully at his partner. The pair, whose fizzing rapport swings between tenderness and piss-taking, are chatting to me over video call from their home in LA. They’ve lived in the US for nearly a decade, but have spent much of the past few years back in Oz making the show. Dyer is, aptly, wearing a shirt covered in drawings of boobs. Brammall’s top, from a women’s charity, says “Dangerous Female”. They are both slightly dusty-headed from drinking cocktails and dancing all night at the Creative Arts Emmys, but surprised they’re not feeling worse. “Maybe we’re still drunk?” says Brammall. “Nooo, we’re professionals!” Dyer scolds.

Luckily, the second run of the show lives up to expectations. In many of the reviews (five stars still abound), there’s palpable relief that it didn’t succumb to “difficult second album syndrome”. And a key to its success is its Australian DNA. For one, it’s full of rhyming slang, a tradition the Aussies share with the Brits. At one point, Ashley’s boss Gene (Glenn Hazeldine) asks Gordon if he fancies an Edna. A what? “Dame Edna. Dame Edna Everage. Beverage. Come on, grab a beverage!” he explains with glee. “Glenn has been trying to get that out there for years,” Brammall says. “It’s his own rhyming slang, which feels like a dying art.”

“One of the most Australian things about the show is the swearing,” adds Dyer. “There are so many Australians who use curse words as punctuation. It is so in our blood. And we didn’t try to internationalise the show in any way, so people feel like they get a little trip to Australia out of it.” She points to the success of Lisa McGee’s Troubles-set comedy Derry Girls as an inspiration – “That is a credit to its specificity.”

Australian television is having its moment in the sun on the global stage. For the past few years, Irish comedies have been the most exciting import to the UK, from Catastrophe to Derry Girls to The Young Offenders. Now, we’re looking down under for our laughs, whether it’s Colin from Accounts or surrealist stand-up and breakout Edinburgh Fringe star Sam Campbell. The shows Fisk and Deadloch are other Aussie comedies that Dyer namechecks as recent hits, and their friend Felicity Ward is about to lead a new Sydney-set reboot of The Office. “I’m excited to see it. It’s such a beloved piece of intellectual property, and, with the original, Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant absolutely changed the fabric of television,” says Dyer. “The British one is like a North Star for us,” says Brammall. “It’s one of the all-time greats.”

Ashley and Gordon in a particularly awkward dinner scene (BBC/CBS Studios/Paramount+ ©2024/Lisa Tomasetti)

The couple met in 2015, on the set of Aussie comedy No Activity. In 2021, they got married after a five-day engagement. There’s 13 years between them – Dyer is 35 and Brammall is 48 – and, not being the kind of people to shy away from thorny subjects, they fully exploit the age gap for laughs in the show (“To not use it would feel weird,” says Dyer). In season one, there’s a scene where Gordon is mistaken for Ashley’s father. This actually happened. “Someone asked if he was my dad,” says Dyer through laughter, “and it was so funny because we’d just got off a flight from LA to Sydney and I had no makeup on, so I looked very young, and Patty looked haggard. We were standing in line at this coffee shop and Patty went to go to the loo and this woman goes to me, ‘I’m so sorry, but is your dad in that show, Glitch?’ I said, ‘Yes and he’s not my dad, he’s my boyfriend.’ And she was like, ‘Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God.’ We all had a good laugh.” Brammall, faux-stoney-faced: “Did we?”

Dyer says that after a fleeting moment of worrying about how they might look as a couple, she decided it didn’t matter. “We’ve been together long enough now, and we’ve got a kid, and we’ve got a life. It’s fine, it’s not that uncommon. It’s something that I noticed a bit at the start, and now I totally forget because, well, I’m really smart,” she deadpans. “I’m like 12 years smarter than I should be biologically. And men are very immature. But yeah, age gap, schmage gap. It sounds cringe, but love is love – we met in the mind and that’s where we like to hang out.”

The show goes to knottier places, too. Episode seven – “WAWAM”, which stands for “Women Against Women Against Men” – is a send-up of the men’s rights movements that have erupted online in response to #MeToo. “One of my favourite things about Colin is we give voices to people that we don’t even agree with,” says Dyer. “Because if everyone was wearing ‘Dangerous Female’ shirts, or everyone was woke, kind, and not racist, then everyone would be the same. You only have to go on Facebook or Reddit to see there’s so many people out there going, ‘Look, what about the men?’ Even in our own families, there’s a bit of that, and I just think I haven’t seen that on TV. So we put it out there in a way that is tongue in cheek.” Brammall agrees. “I think it’s so important to express the humanity of all our characters and also laugh at them at the same time,” he says. “It’s the most comically rich thing to draw from, when people have diametrically opposed views.”

The theme of parenting also pops up in season two. There’s a brief moment where it seems like Gordon might be having an accidental child with a vet he used to date – who is ingeniously named Yvette – and, after Gordon starts to panic, his friend says to him: “Father is a verb, and if you do the verb you become the noun.” This is a tweaked quote from the actor Ellen Burstyn, who said it about motherhood after she adopted her son. It’s close to Brammall’s and Dyer’s hearts as they have an adopted daughter. “I heard it said years ago on a podcast, and it was like a lightning bolt through me,” says Dyer. “It was one of those moments where I remembered exactly where I was when I heard it, and I thought, that is going to be a very powerful tool for me later.” Brammall looks at her tenderly. “And it was.”

They are clearly very loved up – crazy about each other and about working together. They’re currently working on a film screenplay for an undisclosed British project. Dyer says the best thing about writing with Brammall is when they make each other laugh, and the convenience of it. “We can walk from our house to our office and start working and then we can go and watch Traitors UK,” she says. “We know when we’re on a good day and when we just need to drop it, and we don’t have to be polite with each other about that. For example, I can just say I’ve got my period.” Brammall says the best and worst thing is that there’s no off switch. “It is good for our writing because we’ll have these ideas at 10pm at night, or when we’re walking the dog, that we wouldn’t have had if we were 9 to 5 colleagues.”

Both agree it’s important to have independent social lives. “Because if you’re doing everything together, you can never come home to your partner and say, ‘What did you do today?’” says Dyer. “The only thing they didn’t see was your bowel movement, so how was it?”

You’d have to reply carefully – as I’d be willing to bet the answer would end up making its way into the show.

‘Colin from Accounts’ seasons one and two are available on BBC iPlayer

A correction has been made to this article to state that it was Justin Rosniak’s character Heavy who said the ‘slick brown dog’ line, not Brammall’s Gordon