Rain Dogs

Cooper stars in the series alongside actors including Jack Farthing, Ronkẹ Adékoluẹjo and Adrian Edmondson, while Anna Chancellor and Camille Coduri are among ...

Who is Brett? Who is Paul? Who is Selby? For more from the biggest stars in TV, listen to [The Radio Times Podcast](https://www.radiotimes.com/audio/podcasts/). She was also recently cast in the second season of [Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power](https://www.radiotimes.com/tv/fantasy/rings-of-power-hinds-kinnear-moodie-newsupdate/). Pilkington is best-known for his collaborations with Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant, on The Ricky Gervais Podcast and An Idiot Abroad. [BBC iPlayer](https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episodes/p0f9bhkg/rain-dogs) now. [Mrs Harris Goes to Paris](https://www.radiotimes.com/movies/lesley-manville-mrs-harris-sequel-exclusive-newsupdate/). [This Country](https://www.radiotimes.com/tv/comedy/this-country-ashley-mcguire-return-exclusive-newsupdate/), in which she played Kerry Mucklowe. The film comes from author Cash Carraway and is made up of eight half-hour episodes. Who is Iris? Who is Costello?

Rain Dogs writer Cash Carraway talks dark comedy, putting a stop to the middle-class gaze, and (almost) turning down HBO.

“I was really mindful that I don’t want to make a state of the nation address,” continues Carraway. “Almost all of the characters are just awful to each other and everyone they meet – they just do terrible things,” says Carraway. It’s a constant battle for a working-class writer or creator working with a whole room of people who went to boarding school.” “I wanted to make a very dark British comedy in the vein of Nathan Barley and The Royle Family. Chris Morris was always a huge inspiration for me as a teenager, so it seems natural to go to those places. Rain Dogs, which takes its name from Tom Waits’ song of displaced and disenfranchised people seeking shelter, is a feat of imagination set in a recognisable world. Hey presto, within two days of receiving the script, Cooper was on board and all the lights turned green. There are parallels with Carraway’s own story – of leaving home at 16, living in 43 different places in the next 13 years, “hopping from bed to bed, from trauma to trouble”. And it was funny. It was a jaunt through the gutter. “The book wasn’t a commercial success. Subtitled ‘A Memoir of Poverty, Motherhood and Survival’, it created quite a stir, winning praise from Kathy Burke and Ken Loach among many others when it was published in 2019.

Rain Dogs takes a darkly comic look at the struggles of a single parent living in poverty. The no-holds-barred eight-part show, airing on HBO and BBC One, is ...

Rain Dogs airs weekly in the UK on BBC One and BBC iPlayer from Tuesday 4 April at 10.40pm. “Costello is desperately trying to be successful, be a good mum, and pursue a career. But we had this weird toy that she became obsessed with, it was like one of those toys you win at a fair with the eyes pointing in different directions. At the start, she gets evicted and is trying to put a roof over their heads but she runs out of options. It sees This Country and [Am I Being Unreasonable?](https://www.whattowatch.com/features/daisy-may-cooper-on-her-new-comedy-her-marriage-breakdown-and-emmy-dreams) star [Daisy May Cooper](https://www.whattowatch.com/news/daisy-may-cooper-celebrity-gogglebox-628200) play aspiring writer Costello Jones, who lands herself in a range of tricky situations as she struggles to make ends meet for herself and her young daughter Iris (Fleur Tashjian). There was a lot in the script that I resonated with due to my background too.

Playwright Cash Carraway debuts on the small screen with this new BBC/HBO series, starring Daisy May Cooper as a single mother and sex worker in London ​

A virtue-signalling newspaper photographer (Tom Durant-Pritchard) takes Costello’s pictures at the Peep Show for an article she's writing, and requests some shots in her costume. Carraway not only avoids fetishising misery and poverty, but she mocks the common motivations to do so. Maybe the grit and the bleak aren’t the best balms for our current times, but strangely, Rain Dogs is an easy binge. Some of the best scenes are those mixing severity and hilarity together. He’s like a camp thespian without a stage, rich in wealth but deprived of love. She then heads to the Peep Show in central London to dance for men masturbating behind glass.

Fleur Tashjian as Iris and Daisy May Cooper as Costello Jones in Rain Dogs. BBC/Sid Gentle Films/HBO/James Pardon. By.

For more from the biggest stars in TV, listen to [The Radio Times Podcast](https://www.radiotimes.com/audio/podcasts/). [BBC iPlayer](https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0f9bhkg). By this point, we know she can bring the funny, meaning she doesn't need to sell us on every joke – that will come naturally. This makes for a fascinating journey, but it also means the series keeps its viewers somewhat at arm's length. What at first feels like is going to be a series led by its themes and its messages soon becomes a much-more character-led journey, looking at an individual's working-class experience through an almost fairytale lens. For more news, interviews and features, visit our [Drama](https://www.radiotimes.com/tv/drama/) hub, or find something to watch now with our [TV Guide](https://www.radiotimes.com/tv/tv-listings/) and [Streaming Guide](https://www.radiotimes.com/streaming-guide/). Once you are aware of Carraway's background as a novelist it all makes a great deal more sense. [terms and conditions](https://www.immediate.co.uk/terms-and-conditions/) and [privacy policy](https://policies.immediate.co.uk/privacy/). [This Country](https://www.radiotimes.com/movies/this-country-reuniting-see-how-they-run-exclusive-newsupdate/)'s Kerry or the heightened, bombastic comedy of [Am I Being Unreasonable?](https://www.radiotimes.com/tv/comedy/am-i-being-unreasonable-release-date/)'s Nic, Cooper fully commits to a more toned-down, straight-laced performance. [learn more](https://www.radiotimes.com/tv/commercial-links-on-radiotimes-com/)) [Rain Dogs](https://www.radiotimes.com/tv/drama/rain-dogs-release-date/) is an enigma. [Subscribe to Radio Times magazine and get 12 issues for £1](https://www.radiotimes.com/magazine-subscription/?utm_term=evergreen-article)

The actor is magnificent in this bleak, beautiful comedy drama – which skewers the grotesque realities of class and sex inequality like nothing else.

It ends in a punch-up and purgatory for them all: a rehab unit for Selby and for Costello and for Iris, a women’s refuge where “the only rule is we lay low and let the lord guide us”. Eventually – for the revelations come in a slow drip-drip in Rain Dogs – we see why Costello is as she is. Costello, Selby and Iris run away to the country and pretend to be a functional rich family, as if such a thing exists. Of course, she’s screwed over and ends up shagging the photographer, a “poverty voyeur” whom she whispers to in bed, “You feel like Louis Theroux on one of his weird weekends, don’t you?” Carraway’s writing about class is genius. Costello is propositioned by a journalist while dancing at the peep show and urged to tell her story. Finally, they take the last available option, inevitably the most dangerous one, and bed down in the cupboard of a pervert (pervert is a word that comes up a lot in Rain Dogs. Her Costello is defiant, broken, authentic and a master of saying all that can never be said with the tiniest downturn of her mouth. As would Piper and Lucy Prebble, as Rain Dogs shares some of the brutal, surreal horror of their show, He makes Costello put on a pink satin nightie and tells her not to worry because she’s not fat, she’s “just got a food bank body”. It takes a little time to adjust to the high altitude. By the time Gloria is describing “the four whores of the apocalypse” to Iris as “Moll Flanders: official whore. Episode one sees her go on a desperate hunt around London to find them a bed for the night.

Stars Daisy May Cooper and Jack Farthing, director Richard Layton and writer Cash Carraway all deserve awards for this darker-than-dark sort-of-comedy.

Rain Dogs is about people living on the edge of economic and moral viability, with only their unreliable friendships to take the place of our long-broken welfare state. Episode one, “It’s Hard to Be a Saint in the City”, sees her evicted, do a runner from a cabby, narrowly escape being molested by a pervert offering her a free “room” (ie broom cupboard) with unspecified “conditions”, sleep in a car and eventually get rescued by a strange friend, Selby. In between plodding bored and half-naked around a pole in a joint in Soho, Costello spends her time just trying to pay the rent, like anyone else skint in London.

Daisy May Cooper in a leather jacket on the phone as Costello in Rain Dogs. Daisy May Cooper as Costello Jones. (Image credit: BBC/Sid Gentle/HBO).

[Daisy May Cooper](https://www.whattowatch.com/news/daisy-may-cooper-celebrity-gogglebox-628200) who is best known for her role as Kerry in the award-winning BBC sitcom This Country. Lucy joined the WhatToWatch.com team in 2021, where she writes series guides for must-watch programmes, reviews and the latest TV news. Her favourite TV programmes include Inside No 9, American Horror Story, Stranger Things and Black Mirror but she is also partial to a quiz show or a bit of Say Yes to the Dress! She especially loves horror, thriller and anything crime-related. Costello Jones is a single mum who is desperately trying to set a good example and pursue a career, but there are lots of obstacles in her way. Selby is a wealthy gay man who has just been released from prison for a violent assault.