When taxi drivers in London started shouting punchlines at him – that’s when Jonathan Watson knew that Two Doors Down, the BBC Scotland sitcom set in a Glasgow suburb, had gone from slow-burn to blazing.
The yelling is appropriate in itself, since Watson’s character, Colin, is congenitally unfiltered. Whether it’s telling his neighbours they needn’t worry about a spate of burglaries because “nobody’ll target your place – they’ll want stuff they can actually sell”, or sharing the secrets of his Tinder success: “You have a chat: ‘How are you? I just put on a wash,’ and the next thing she’s in my bed, well more on top of it with a towel down …”
Created by Gregor Sharp and the late Simon Carlyle, Two Doors Down hops between living rooms on the fictional Latimer Crescent, where a mismatched group of neighbours can’t seem to resist popping in on each other again and again and again. Now, the cast returns for a one-off Christmas special where Beth and Eric cause consternation when they put up their Christmas tree earlier than usual, prompting demands for bespoke mince pies and a heated debate about the song Fairytale of New York.
Having completed seven series, most recently for BBC One, this month’s Christmas special comes just after the announcement that the show will transfer to the stage next year, playing 10 showsat the 12,000-seater Glasgow Hydro. It’s testament to the appeal of a show where, at a cursory glance, very little happens.
The show’s moral centre – even if she doesn’t want to be – is Beth. Along with her husband Eric, their hospitality is most regularly abused by neighbours such as Colin and Cathy – his eye-wateringly competitive, tipple-chasing wife (played by Doon Mackichan) who puts the petty into bourgeois. Or miserabilist Christine, who outstays her welcome while trading sofa-bound micro-aggressions.
Beth is played by Arabella Weir, who can communicate anger, discomfort or desperation in the lift of an eyebrow or twitch of a lip. “Simon and Gregor did something so hard,” she says, “to write comedy that is relatable and real. Writing ordinary people who don’t do weird things – it’s really difficult to make that work.”
Watson agrees: “The characters are so clearly defined that you can be anywhere in the UK and you can identify with them. Everybody knows a Cathy, a Christine, a Colin. And that’s all down to the writing.”
Even though cabbies love to shout out the show’s punchlines, they are just one part of its appeal. With acute observations and finely tuned performances, it’s as far from boom-tish delivery as can be. A classic one-room comedy in the tradition of The Royle Family, the storylines are reassuringly mundane; an entire episode can be based round the purchase of an extra-large box of doughnuts. But the drama is layered through with warmth and recognition. Moments of tenderness sit alongside the outrageous rudeness.
What’s glaringly apparent is that Two Doors down is now comfortably ensconced in the nation’s hearts. But how did it get there?
“Nobody’s more surprised than me,” says Alex Norton, who plays Eric. “It was supposed to be a one-off, but the script was really fresh and unusual and it seemed to go really well. Next thing was the phone call saying: ‘Would you be interested in doing the series?’”
The pilot aired on Hogmanay in 2013 and was commissioned, but the first series only began three years later, on BBC Two. “It began to grow and grow,” Watson recalls, as subsequent series were commissioned.
“And then Covid hit,” he says, “and all of a sudden younger folk discovered it on iPlayer, so our audience really expanded.”
The booming fanbase was clearly recognised by BBC bosses, and the show moved to BBC One for its seventh series in 2023. (Let’s take a second to appreciate how rare it is for a series to be recommissioned six-plus times.)
Both the writing and the filming of the show are rooted in collaboration, explains Sharp: “It’s never felt like overnight success and the process of making the show has remained exactly the same.”
By sticking with many of the same cast and crew since the early days, the team have developed a shorthand for working together: “They understand what the world of the show is and what we’re looking to achieve.”
Speaking to cast members on set in Glasgow for the Christmas special, the sheer heft of comic – and dramatic – experience in the studio is clear. Cast CVs range from the work of Bill Forsyth, Chris Morris and Michael Winterbottom through landmark shows including Naked Video, The Fast Show, Smack the Pony, Rab C Nesbitt, Still Game and Prince Andrew: The Musical. But what’s also evident from the warm greetings and easy chat is how well the ensemble gel. Currently tThey all plan to appear on stage next September. And when Carlyle died in August 2023 at the age of 48, just weeks after filming on the seventh series concluded, it was a tragedy that is still deeply felt.
“When Simon passed away it was such a loss, and emotionally the thought of walking back on that set without him was just awful,” says Elaine C Smith, who plays Christine, always ready with a dire warning or suspect consumer tip (“You know who does a good paracetamol? Morrisons.”) Both this Christmas special and next year’s live show will be “a farewell and a thank you” to Carlyle, she adds.
“As Elaine said, we’re honouring the memory,” says Norton. “I don’t believe in a lot of superstitious nonsense, but I feel his presence [on set]. I think he’d like it because the script is very good and it does honour his legacy.”
“We all feel his absence,” says Sharp, who had to develop an entirely new writing process for the show, having spent years sitting at the same laptop with his writing partner, sharing life stories and “feeling like pulling your brain inside out, trying to solve the puzzles of an episode”.
The challenge of writing alone, and while grieving, must have been immense. “Every idea and every line in the script I would filter it through a sense of ‘Is this true to the show’? And as long as you’re being true to the show, then you’re being true to Simon.”
Two Doors Down isn’t clunkily issue-based, nor does it exist in some sitcom limbo. Instead, it gently navigates the quotidian politics of family, friendships and generations with an unassuming radicalism.
Take the women – the absolute precision of Carlyle and Sharp’s writing combined with the mighty talents of Weir, Mackichan and Smith mean that characters who might in other hands be monstrous are allowed their shadow side, be that Cathy’s inability to have children or Christine’s loneliness.
“Here are three women over 50 who you don’t see on television without them being caricatured, and acting one of them is unbelievably joyful and liberating,” says Weir.
“The women could easily be the doormat, the whinge and the alcoholic,” says Mackichan. “But the writing is brilliant and we just have to constantly find ways to thread in vulnerability and softness.”
She is struck by how many people claim to have a Cathy in their own lives – and see beyond her outrageous behaviour. “There’s one Christmas episode when I’d been drinking way too much, Beth finally mentioned it, and then I got really upset. If she didn’t have that vulnerability, she wouldn’t be as funny. That’s where true humour is: when it’s dark but it’s real.”
Smith recalls the “incredibly detailed notes” the cast were given during the early series, which emphasised the importance of “not pushing it”. Two Doors Down, she says, is not so much a comedy of action as one of reaction.
“They’ve got to be believable. Christine is a monster but she’s not cartoonish. There’s a vulnerability and loneliness: she’s got no one and no life while pretending that she does.” She mentions another festive episode, when Christine is left alone in a coffee shop contemplating an empty Christmas Day. “People were in tears on the set.”
The show applies the same gentle curiosity to queer relationships. Eric and Beth’s son Ian, played by Jamie Quinn, is gay and his long-term boyfriend Gordon is played by standup Kieran Hodgson. “We tend not to have major breakthroughs in the show,” Hodgson says, “but year after year, the members of the street – who might not interact with queer culture that much – are given this little window through Ian and Gordon and are slowly coming to a very robust acceptance of it all.”
While Gordon spends more time than he might like dodging Cathy’s salacious overtures, his partnership with Ian is comfortably humdrum. “I really enjoy their lack of aspirational sexiness,” says Hodgson. “Often gay people are portrayed as being far too exciting, too dramatic in their lives. Ian and Gordon are just people up the road who happen to have that romantic element in their life, but beyond that they’re actually quite dull.” He beams. “That’s the final liberation.”
Two Doors Down Christmas Special is on BBC One on Christmas Eve at 10pm.
• This article was amended on 15 December 2025. A previous version said that Two Doors Down was playing “three nights” at Glasgow’s Hydro arena in 2026. In fact, there are 10 shows scheduled over six days.
