Graham Duff's best work puts one man in one flat and rings the doorbell. The visitors do the rest. In Ideal that was enough to keep us watching for seven series, and it remains the thing to see him by.
Fi1m perspective
The doorbell goes. Moz (Johnny Vegas) is in his chair, somebody wants an eighth, and then they do not leave. That is the whole engine of Ideal (2005), and Graham Duff ran it for seven series without ever leaving the flat. Customers arrive, say what they came to say, and stay to say the thing they did not mean to. Duff has said that "Ideal isn't about drugs, it's about people. The drugs are just a device to get the characters in the same place, at the same time," and the programme bears him out. The dealing is the least interesting thing in the flat.
He came to television sideways, through fringe theatre in Brighton and Manchester, Factory Records' video department and radio. His way in was Dr. Terrible's House of Horrible (2001), a horror pastiche co-written with Steve Coogan and Henry Normal, and the horror has never quite gone away: The Nightmare Worlds of H.G. Wells (2016) adapted Wells for Sky Arts, and Nebulous (2005), his Radio 4 sitcom with Mark Gatiss, played science fiction for laughs. Between them sat Ideal, from 10 January 2005 to 2011, and Hebburn (2012), co-written with Jason Cook. Alongside the writing he has script-edited, including the Partridge film Alpha Papa, and turned up in small parts.
What he does well is the ensemble. In Ideal he and Tony Burgess wrote a houseful of regulars who talk past each other and connect only by accident: Nicola Reynolds's Nicki wanting more than the flat, Ben Crompton's Colin arriving in a new crisis each visit, Tom Goodman-Hill's policeman buying his own supply and talking shop while he rolls it. We laughed at them, and then, somewhere in the middle run, we realised we were watching a man who had arranged his life so that he never had to go outside, and that unsettled us more than anything he was selling. Vegas plays it without asking for pity, and the writing keeps him in the chair.
What he does less well is the long game. A premise with no plot holds until it has to go somewhere, and our review of Ideal said as much. Hebburn drew mixed notices for characters who behaved like sitcom types rather than people, which is the charge Ideal spent seven years answering. As an actor he is a useful face in other people's programmes. In Alan Partridge: Welcome to the Places of My Life (2012) he is one of the locals Alan corners, and like Dolly Wells and the rest he understands that the job is to stand still and let the man dig.
He has taken Ideal to the stage in 2025, which suggests he knows what he is remembered for. Start with the series, and do not expect anyone to leave the flat.
Biography
Graham Duff is an English writer, actor and producer. He created and wrote all 53 episodes of the BBC sitcom Ideal (2005–2011), in which he also appeared as the character Brian.
His other writing credits include co-writing Dr. Terrible's House of Horrible (2001) and Hebburn (2012–2013). As an actor he has appeared in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 1 (2010) and Part 2 (2011) as a Death Eater, as a waiter in the Doctor Who episode "Deep Breath" (2014), and in High-Rise (2015).
Duff was born in Blackburn in 1964 and studied at the University of Brighton.
