With vague hopes of being an actor, she dropped out of art school and moved to London, but spent most of her 20s working in a job centre, in a bong shop, taking a degree and eking out bits of acting and comedy work. ‘The comedy industry is full of extreme dodginess,’ she says. ‘I could tell you a million stories: they are not my stories, but it’s everywhere and it’s rife. People are calling it out now, though: everyone has to watch themselves and I think that’s fine. I was absolutely patronised, but that kind of worked to my benefit in a prove-you-wrong way.’
She now finds herself in a post-MeToo world where ‘it feels like it’s genuinely taken a turn and people [men] have to be really careful, as they should anyway’. As she enters her 50s she’s getting great acting roles, but implies that she takes the ones in American movies (like the Cage film, and 2018’s Game Night) chiefly to enhance her profile as a writer and producer. She has no desire to ‘break’ America as a performer.
‘I mean, I’d have to go there, wouldn’t I? And I want to try and work here because this is where my girls are and my home is.’ Besides, Merman now has offices in LA and New York – the horror-comedy series Shining Vale starring Courteney Cox and Greg Kinnear has just been picked up – and through the company Horgan has a first-look deal with Apple and another deal with the American network eOne. Merman’s mission to make female-led comedy and drama with young talent, has made it a force to be reckoned with. It helps, Horgan says, that women are ‘making some of the best TV out there at the moment’.