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Tom Davis is an actor, writer, comedian and creator of acclaimed TV comedies such as Murder in Successville and King Gary. The first season of his latest project, The Curse, a 1980s-set crime caper comedy, is currently on Britbox.

I was super excited to speak to you, because we have something in common: besides both being writers, we are both what might be called vertically extensive people (Davis is 2.01 metres tall). In comedy, does size matter?

I think it’s how you play with size. I think Mick (Davis’ character in The Curse) is a case in point because he’s so much bigger than anyone else in the show. If you played him as this aggressive alpha, I don’t think you’d find the humour, but if you can make a character that size … almost like a big sister, the sweetest of all of them, there’s something quite amazing out of that. I always try a different way of playing height. When I started out as an actor, the people I was playing were always just like big idiots, or they were just aggressive. There’s quite a few of us now: there’s you, there’s me, there’s Stephen Merchant, Greg Davies.

Tom Davis as Big Mick in The Curse.Credit: Ben Blackall

It’s exciting to get a second season of a show, but is there a certain amount of pressure too, when you realise you’ve got to come up with another series’ worth of material?

There’s pressure, but also what’s really exciting when you do a second one is that you’ve worked out how the characters work, you’ve … seen the bits that work and the bits that haven’t. Also, with something like The Curse, we knew the end goal from the moment we started. From the first episode we knew where this thing ends, so this section in series two really is fun – it’s them in Spain, it’s Costa del Sol, Costa del Crime, in the ’80s, big hair, me in a pair of Speedos … do you call them budgies over there?

Not necessarily me specifically, but my compatriots, yes, that’s the vernacular … so the second season is a predetermined story, but you’ve kicked things up a notch, right?

Yeah, I mean, we’ve leant in to quite a few real stories with this, but also the scale – the first series was very contained, sort of East London, small-time and “wow, we’ve got all this gold”. This is like, OK now we have this wealth, how do we spend it? It felt like we could take the brakes off a little bit, push the idea and the characters and the world as far as we could. I think it’s up there with the best things we’ve made: the reception in England’s been incredible, it’s Channel 4’s most-watched comedy over the last two years, which is massive.

Do you feel like it tapped into something with that audience, maybe striking a chord or filling a niche that had been neglected?

It feels like it locks into a place where maybe it’s representation of working class people that isn’t always seen on television. A lot of my comedy – King Gary, he comes from that world. I think we don’t see a lot of people without a lot of money.

The Curse starts with a title card on screen saying, “Some of this might have happened”. For real?

Yeah, so there’s a few robberies that’ve happened over the years that we’ve sort of, like I say, leant into for storytelling purposes. It’s ambiguous what’s true and what’s not. When we were first talking, it was very much going to be a “this is a true story” kind of thing. But some of it’s stuff that’s true, some of it’s stuff that’s from our own mad minds.

What we see in The Curse – a stylised 1980s crime caper – fits in with a lot of other work you’ve done, in that it seems to show a love of genre, and playing with the conventions of genre.

Yeah, completely. I think [that’s true with] everything we’ve done, me and (co-creator) James De Frond, over the last nearly 10 years now. King Gary was very much a British sitcom and we then decided to come up with a way of doing it a little bit differently, and I think it was completely groundbreaking, it was like nothing else that had ever been on TV. And then Action Team – it’s always, for me and James, how do we take something that’s a trope you’ve seen time and time again, and put a narrative spin on it. That comes from character, that comes from the writing. And it’s the most fun thing to do.

You were so successful with Murder in Successville that they remade it in America (as Murderville). Is that a feather in your cap?

I find it slightly insane that Will Arnett and all the incredible people they’ve got to be in that … I mean, that show was very groundbreaking, it was the thing that put me and James on the map. To this day I’m immensely proud of it … When you make something like that, you get a little bit of confidence with things going forward. You know nothing’s ever going to be as hard as that pitch.

That’s gotta be the toughest thing, just pitching something that different, trying to convey what it’s all about.

We had to film some of it because no one could understand what it was. We did the same with The Curse, filmed 5-10 minutes of it, sent it out to channels. I think it’s a good way of doing things because not only can they see it, but you can see, is this gonna work?

The Curse (season 2) is on Britbox on July 27.

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