Simon Bird gives comic actors room to be unpleasant without making every offence a demand for attention. We like his dry, patient approach, though his preference for small stories can leave too little happening.
Fi1m perspective
In Such Brave Girls (2023), a cruel remark tells us something about the woman making it, rather than simply giving us another offence to count. Bird and fellow director Marco Alessi trust the ensemble to do that work, and the programme is much funnier for it. We laughed at Louise Brealey’s appalling mother; the directors let her be dreadful without making the performance feel like an effort to shock. This is the strongest reason to take Bird seriously as a director: he gives unpleasant characters time to become worth watching.
His move behind the camera followed the role of Will McKenzie in The Inbetweeners (2008–2010). The short Ernestine & Kit (2016) came before his feature debut, Days of the Bagnold Summer (2020). Television work including Pls Like (2021) and Ellie & Natasia (2022) followed. The recurring preference is for understated, character-led comedy, often centred on families, with little plot to hurry the actors along.
On Days of the Bagnold Summer, screenwriter Lisa Owens adapts Joff Winterhart’s graphic novel, and Bird gives the domestic setting formal compositions and the low-key leads room to work. The limitation is the thin story: careful attention to small events does not necessarily give a feature enough to sustain it. That makes Such Brave Girls a useful development, because the characters’ capacity for cruelty supplies plenty for the actors to do.
Kat Sadler writes and stars in the programme, with Edward Tucker responsible for cinematography. Bird’s support for keeping difficult material firmly within comedy suits it: a cruel remark can remain funny without an accompanying explanation of why it matters. The directors do not make the gross-out humour feel like a competition to offend, although the family’s self-absorption can still become tiring. There is enough restraint to let the actors supply the nastiness, and enough faith in their timing to leave them to it. Start with Such Brave Girls, provided an evening with an appalling family sounds like a pleasure.
Biography
Simon Bird is an English actor, comedian, writer and director. He was born on 19 August 1984 in Guildford, Surrey.
Bird is best known for playing Will McKenzie in the E4 series The Inbetweeners (2008–2010) and its two films (2011 and 2014), and Adam Goodman in the Channel 4 series Friday Night Dinner (2011–2020). As a director his credits include the feature Days of the Bagnold Summer (2020) and episodes of the series Such Brave Girls (2023) and Amandaland (2025).
