There are some TV shows that just stick with you. For me, who grew up in the 2000s, Friday nights were all about Outnumbered – the British sitcom about a ‘normal’ family living in London, and the minutiae of their everyday existence. The BBC show ran for five seasons from 2007 to 2014, and on the surface, not a lot happened. There were no ‘whodunnits’ or dramas; no scandals or allegations. Instead; the show unpacked the often mundane aspects of domestic life – the school runs, the birthday parties, and the never-ending cycle of parents evenings.
And yet within the four walls of the Brockman household came a place of comfort and of humour. There was Sue, the stressed-out mum who works part-time as a PA, and her often grumpy husband, Pete, who teaches at an inner-city school. And then of course, their three children: sulky teenager Jake, chaotic middle child Ben, and the ever inquisitive Karen.
Created by Andy Hamilton and Guy Jenkin, the series was instantly popular thanks to its accurate portrayal of the humdrum of British family life. But the magic largely unfolded through its use of improvisation, with the child actors actively encouraged to behave as they actually would in reality – producing the most hilarious one-liners in the process.
“It was a really free flowing space that allowed us to just be ourselves and be creative,” Tyger Drew-Honey, who plays Jake, says now. “That’s what really allowed us to give a convincing performance.”
It was an iconic TV show that so many of us grew up watching, and while some of the parents’ jokes may not have stood the test of time, there are many Outnumbered moments that still tickle us when they come up on our FYP (Karen Brockman core forever.)
Thankfully, we don’t have to just rewatch TikTok edits or old episodes on BBC iPlayer to get our Outnumbered fix, as the cast are reuniting, albeit briefly, for a new Christmas special, set to air on Boxing Day. And there’s been some serious developments in the Brockman house. Firstly Jake is now a dad (sorry but we feel so old), and the parents have downsized to a new place. But even with a new address and additional family members, there’s going to be plenty of chaos.
Before we look to the future of Outnumbered, we wanted to take a stroll down memory lane and find out exactly how those early series came to be. What was it actually like filming in a house? And did they ever fight like real siblings? Spoiler alert: Yes.
We caught up with the three child actors, now adults, Tyger Drew-Honey, Daniel Roche and Ramona Marquez to find out how our one of all time favourite comfort shows was made.
Outnumbered first appeared on our screens in 2007 as a six-part series, the first collaboration in eight years between Drop The Dead Donkey creators Andy Hamilton and Guy Jenkin. The series was based on their own experiences of family life, and they needed to find the parents, but also three children who could handle the improvisation they were hoping to get out of the characters.
Ramona (who plays Karen): I was only five when I did the audition and the pilot. One of the directors or writers [Guy Jenkin] had kids that went to my school, and I ended up going to a birthday party. I was chatting lots and so he said to my parents ‘would Ramona want to come for an audition?’ It went from there.
Daniel (who plays Ben): I had already done some bits and bobs, but [Outnumbered] was always unique because of the audition process. It was geared towards the improvisation aspect of the show. Andy [Hamilton] basically said, ‘You have to argue as to why you need to stay up to watch Little Britain.’ I have a general feeling of it [the argument] was inspired by him wanting to stay up and watch Match of The Day, and how unfair it was.
Tyger (who plays Jake): I’d had an agent for a little while doing voiceovers, but this was my first audition for a screen job. There was no preparation of a script for the audition and I was just given a scenario [to improvise]: I’d just come home from my first day of big school and I hadn’t had a very good time because I was getting picked on. I didn’t want to tell my dad that, but he could sense I was upset about something.
As they were all children when cast, their initial memories of those early days are a little hazy, but they do remember their first impressions of each other.
Tyger: I do remember seeing Ramona at the audition.
Ramona: I think I remember that too. Was it like at the top of some stairs?
Daniel: I remember the stairs to the audition very well. They were narrow, even for a seven year old me! God knows how I’d manage now.
Tyger: I thought Ramona was adorable. You [Ramona] could walk very clearly, but you did have that sort of young childlike waddle.
Ramona: I was always like that, a little old lady. And I had quite a frowny face often when I was younger.
Daniel: That’s Karen all over. No wonder you got the job. And Tyger was just a cool teenager. And then Mona, because you’re a year younger than me, it was way more of a peer relationship.
After a 20-minute pilot was filmed at Guy’s house, it was sent into the BBC and commissioned for a six-part series, which was filmed on location at a house in Wandsworth.
Ramona: We basically had two houses. The one where you see the shot [outside the house] was the one we filmed in, and then the one next to it was like a green room. We had our meals there, and at the top [of the house] we had tutoring. There was a little green room where all our mums would hang out. And then we had a little pathway in the garden, so that’s how we’d get between the houses. We loved it, because we were always just hanging out in the tutor room and there was a bed. You [pointing to Daniel] were always asleep.
Daniel: [Filming at the house] takes so much pressure out of it. The other things I’d done had all been on location, which is more chaotic. Whereas we were in that house for two months, and after a week, you get to know it, you know all the crew, you know where everything is. And then it’s just like coming back to it. It’s sad that the parents moved on [in the new Christmas special].
Scripts were written for the series, but only given to the adult cast members. The children would largely improvise, leading to a more realistic portrayal of their characters.
Tyger: While they were setting up the scene, one of the directors would come up and talk us through the objective of the scene and the story we needed to tell.
So we’d have an idea like, ‘The mission is I want to watch Little Britain’ or ‘I want to not tell my dad I’m getting bullied at school’. And then occasionally they’d have a couple of gags that they’d have written down that they would feed to us.
And sometimes these two [gestures to Daniel and Ramona] had come up with random things that were so funny that they would be asked to say them again. It was a really free flowing space that allowed us to just be ourselves and be creative. And that’s what I think really allowed us to give a convincing performance.
But this didn’t always mean it was easy to film…
Ramona: I had scenes that I would do on my own with the toys. Those were not a challenge, but I was always like ‘right, here we go’. I’d have Gordon Ramsey, there’d be the dinosaurs and Simon Cowell, and I’d have to sing a little song. It’s a good thing that it was always such a fun set and I always felt comfortable.
Daniel: You’re right. It was always those ones where you’re playing and they literally just say like ‘play’, and as a kid that’s not a very challenging ask.
One scene I remember being challenging was the farm episode. Ben is running around the playground, and I remember they just let it run, and I just kept running around this playground and going up and down. I was absolutely dead afterwards.
Tyger: There was a point where I started getting sides [the script], but that was later on when I got to 14 or 15. I remember we did one Christmas special when I was about 17, and I was looking through scripts, and I could tell a lot of my lines were actually quite funny and that they’ve been written to be delivered as they were written.
It was the first time I felt, ‘Actually, I’ve got to learn these lines now and learn how to deliver them [with humour], and do it in the right beats…’ There was a shift where I suddenly felt more pressure. I can’t just rock up and be told the scene and the funniness just comes.
Daniel: Part of it is the age, because I remember getting older and being more conscious. It’s arguably the most awkward stage of your life, and you’re not only doing a job, but also doing a job like Outnumbered where there is pressure on you to conjure [lines] and fill the gaps. It was a great set to have a pressure like that, because it was so relaxed, so it didn’t feel that was externally put on you at all. But it’s just again being an awkward teenager, those thoughts are going through your head.
Their improvisation led to some now iconic moments, of which they all have favourite lines of each other’s.
Tyger: I think one of my favourite of Mona’s is when Karen is running away, and mum had said, ‘Just say some random places that you’re going to run away to.’
Daniel: Dorking.
Tyger: Yes, I’m going to Greenland or Dorking.
Ramona: One of my favourites is in the airport and [Tyger] let Ben have loads of coffee, and then the Dad is like ‘What’s happened to Ben?’ And you’re [Daniel] under something and you’re just like ‘zingy zangy zongy’. I just love that. It’s the delivery. It’s just so funny.
Daniel: The one that sticks with me is young you [Ramona] doing the Gordon Ramsay, and it’s the final bit of it. The edit makes it perfect because you do all these really long ones, ‘bleeping, bleeping, bleeping’ and then you just pick up some clown dolls, and it’s like ‘you two, you’re just a pair of clowns’, and immediately the scene cuts.
Playing on-screen siblings meant they essentially grew up together – often leading to them annoying each other like real siblings.
Daniel: I’ve always been down for an argument. Probably around season two or three, I went through a phase where I was just so argumentative. We’d do an interview like this and Tyger would say something and I’d be like ‘actually no!’ I was a pain in those years.
Ramona: When we filmed the final season, I was 12 or 13, and I was really emo. I still am. And you [both] would just torment me, saying ‘screamer’. We would argue all day long about things. But we’ve never fallen out or upset each other.
Tyger: Any bickering we did have was always the sort of bickering that by the end of the day it would be totally cool again.
Daniel: We weren’t actual siblings. It would be an intellectual debate.
Tyger: I would have intellectual debate with Dan who at the time was seven or eight, and I was 11. I’d be losing them.
While they love the majority of the work they did, there are some scenes they now don’t like watching back.
Daniel: The entire Spartacus play. It’s supposed to be cringy, so I look back at that first kiss and cringe. The girl was like two years younger, and I knew her brother. I remember getting rinsed.
Ramona: I’ve seen it now, but the only scene I was like ‘I’m not gonna watch’ was when I’m wearing the swimming cap and my ears are out. I said ‘I’ll do it, I’m just not going to watch it when it comes out’ but I have seen it now.
Tyger: I haven’t seen this in years, but I remember I did cringe at it a lot. I think it’s my second line in the entire show. In series one, I walk into the kitchen and go, ‘can Jake get a note to say he’s late because his family is useless?’ Then Dad says something like, ‘Oh, calm down,’ and I say ‘I’m gonna be late for my first day at big school [raises voice to high pitch]’.
For some reason I went into falsetto. It’s there, and it’s been immortalised in that scene. I’ve got no idea why I chose to do it, or why my body did it, or why they didn’t get me to do it again, but it’s there.
Though a sitcom, the show often expertly balanced humour with difficult topics such as Jake’s bullying storyline.
Tyger: The credit for that should go to the directors and the whole production [team.] We were clearly good at what we did but we were very malleable, and were kept in such conditions that they were able to get the right amount of light and shade out of us.
Ramona: The storyline with the grandad’s dementia, that was very heartwarming, but I don’t think I really quite realised. It’s all about the writers and the editors finding that balance. I personally wasn’t aware of that, or they definitely didn’t say ‘This is a sad moment’.
Years later people are still obsessed with the show, in particular the character of Karen, making edits of her on TikTok, which Ramona is fully aware of.
Ramona: I don’t go on TikTok, but my friends sometimes say they see edits. One of the loveliest things people always say to me is ‘Oh, I was just like Karen’ or ‘Oh, my mum used to say I was like Karen’. She’s an outspoken, really headstrong young girl. I always love that because it’s like you’ve almost got a name for it, but there’s a positive association. Instead of, ‘Oh, you’re very bossy, or you’re very shrill’. It’s spinning it in a different way. There are many iconic lines, like where she says about how women can’t grow a moustache, and that’s really unfair, and she’d rather have a moustache than a baby.
The kids still stay in contact years after the show has ended.
Daniel: There’s an Outnumbered kids group chat.
Ramona: We created it only recently.
Daniel: We clarified recently when we were on set this time that the parents, neither of them, are really on social media at all. And we didn’t know this because you [gesturing to Ramona] and I had received a follow from Claire Skinner a few months ago.
Ramona: And Hugh Dennis.
Daniel: And their behaviour on the app was ‘boomer-ish’ so we just kind of ran with it, thinking it was them. We raised it with them after months of directly interacting.
Ramona: I thought it was Claire and I said to her, ‘Oh you’ve just joined Instagram haven’t you? We’ve been talking’ and she said ‘No we haven’t’. I showed her and she said ‘that’s not me’. I got the account taken down but I think Hugh’s is still up there. I’d been catfished!
Daniel: So if you see them on Instagram, it’s not them.
The show’s final season ended in 2014, before the cast reunited in 2016 and now again for the 2024 Christmas special. Eight years on, they weren’t sure what Jake, Karen and Ben would be up to.
Tyger: Well I didn’t think [Jake] was going to be a dad! I was always playing a very similar age to what Jake was. So Jake at this stage is about 28, which is obviously old enough to have a child, but because that’s just not a reality in my life, I didn’t expect it to have been a reality in Jake’s. So that was a nice surprise.
Ramona: I felt with Karen there’s a lot of directions they could go down. I knew that she wouldn’t be doing anything silly.
Daniel: I had a lot of trust in the writers and directors that whatever Ben was doing, that they’d do him justice, and not make it a caricature of an eight year old in a 25 year old’s body. They did a good job of maturing his essence.
Ben’s character, especially towards the later seasons as he becomes a teenager, you have a very unique character in a fairly bog-standard environment. You have five series of understanding why he’s so infamous in the family but then at the same time, he’s just going through normal school stuff. So I didn’t know whether they would pursue that line further or whether they’d actually be like, post-school Ben has taken one of his intellectual passions and is off doing something ridiculously interesting and niche.
After this year’s special, could this be the last we’ve seen of Outnumbered?
Daniel: Who knows.
Tyger: Yeah, who knows.
Ramona: Well, it’s not the last you’ll see of us [she gestures to the three of them].
The Outnumbered Christmas special airs on BBC1 and iPlayer at 9:40pm on Boxing Day.