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Will Stefan Golaszewski ever tire of watching people unload the dishwasher? “Gosh, you never know – it’s possible,” concedes the creator of beloved BBC sitcoms Him & Her and Mum. For now, however, Golaszewski’s brand of intense social realism remains as meticulous as ever. In his latest series, the quotidian acts that make up a lifetime – replacing the hand soap, leaning on the kitchen counter while folding a slice of ham into your mouth and, of course, unloading said dishwasher – are given just as much screen time as some of the most soul-wrenching experiences imaginable.

Babies (he’s sticking with the does-what-it-says-on-the-tin titles) stars Siobhán Cullen and Paapa Essiedu as mid-30s married couple Lisa and Stephen. We meet them en route to a family function, yet when they arrive Lisa can only face Stephen’s relatives for a few seconds before fleeing the pub. Actually, it’s just one relative: his cousin’s new baby. We soon discover the pair have recently suffered their first miscarriage. Unable to share their grief and disappointment with friends and family, they are forced to rely solely on each other – not ideal considering Stephen’s attempts to comfort Lisa include an offer of a Solero and a trip to feed the ducks. The terror and cruelty of baby loss is all here, but Babies’ portrayal of our collective failure to address it is just as unsettling.

For 36-year-old Cullen, making Babies was eye-opening. The Dublin-born actor – hitherto best known for Irish comedy-drama The Dry – is of an age where having a family is “a subject at the forefront of a lot of our minds, whether we want it to be or not.” Before she was cast as Lisa, the reality of miscarriage had been a mystery. “It’s crazy to me that I had come this far without knowing so much. It gave me a massive insight into what so, so many people around me are now going through or have gone through.” Crucially, Babies underlines the “clumsiness we can all have with each other’s feelings – the way we speak to each other without any knowledge of the world of shit people are often living through. One off-the-cuff comment can really hit someone based on what they’ve gone through that day or that year.”

Golaszewski wrote the script years after experiencing baby loss himself. He is keen to stress that the show isn’t autobiographical, “but it’s something that I’ve been through. That experience isn’t something I’d seen reflected [on TV] and it isn’t something that people talk about. And then when you do go through it, suddenly everyone comes out the woodwork and tells you their stories.”

Why does he think the subject is shrouded in silence? “Because it’s death and death is always hard to talk about. But I think it’s even harder to talk about because a lot of people don’t consider it to be death and they medicalise it. There’s a disjoint between the personal experience and the societal reception.” One reason for this, he thinks, is that “it’s generally considered a female-centric situation. Maybe if it had been happening to men’s bodies for the past thousands of years it would have quite a totemic place in our society.”

In Babies, it’s not just Lisa and Stephen’s marriage that is under strain. Another theme is dysfunctional male friendship, which manifests in an extremely depressing storyline involving Stephen and his odious schoolmate Dave (Jack Bannon), whose inability to reckon with his own feelings makes him a horrifyingly lacklustre father to his young son. When Dave enters into a strange situationship with an emotionally distant older woman (Charlotte Riley), it seems to create a rift between him and Stephen. But in truth their connection has been faltering for a while – something the show demonstrates via reams of monumentally witless banter.

To me, Dave and Stephen’s inane back-and-forth seems bleak beyond belief. Did Essiedu – who likens their friendship to old milk (“it’s on the turn”) – recognise this kind of conversation from real life? “Of course I would hope that if you were a fly on the wall with me and my male friends, you wouldn’t see us talking too much like that,” he grins. “But I can’t say that you’d never see us bantering.” Golaszewski has obviously thought deeply about the pair’s badinage. “If you’ve got two men who are uncomfortable showing any kind of vulnerability or emotion – and there are so many men like that in the world – they have to bring down the shutters of banter. It’s a way of appearing to speak but the effect of the words is the same as silence – it is meaningless. Two cats can walk past each other without saying anything, but for two humans it’s very hard.”

When Essiedu first heard about Babies, he was prepared to take the job no matter what. “I grew up watching Him & Her and was obsessed with Mum,” says the Londoner, who found fame thanks to Michaela Coel’s I May Destroy You and has since become one of our most acclaimed actors (next year he’ll play Snape in HBO’s Harry Potter reboot). “When you get a script through from someone you admire, you hope it’s not rubbish because it’s like, ‘Oh maybe I’ll do it anyway.’ I read it and it wasn’t rubbish. It actually was just extraordinary.”

During filming, Essiedu realised Golaszewski’s dedication to recreating real life on screen is actually the result of painstaking planning. “We are literally saying exactly to the comma what Stefan’s written down. Every single ‘um’, every single ‘like’, every single ‘well’. And trust me, if you don’t do it right, you’ll know about it!”

Although his work has always been staunchly naturalistic, Babies is a long way from the crowd-pleasing sitcoms Golaszewski started out with. After establishing himself in the comedy world as part of Footlights-formed sketch troupe Cowards alongside Tim Key, Tom Basden and Lloyd Woolf, he debuted as a screenwriter with 2010’s Him & Her, which starred Sarah Solemani and Russell Tovey as two loved-up dossers in their 20s. It was iconoclastic – breaking new ground with a scene revolving around Solemani’s Becky doing a poo – yet riotously funny. Next came 2016’s Mum, a heart-stealing cringe comedy about a put-upon widow (Lesley Manville). Most recently, Golaszewski moved into drama with Marriage, which chronicled the lives of Nicola Walker’s Emma and Sean Bean’s Ian in what some felt was movingly truthful – and others alienatingly tedious – detail.

For Babies, Golaszewski has changed tack. “Marriage was quite stark observation. The realism of Sean Bean moving his shoes around in a hallway – the choice to make that so naturalistic – was to enhance this idea of observing a relationship and from that to zoom out to the idea of togetherness more generally,” says the 45-year-old. In Babies, the naturalism’s purpose is to “build an emotional connection and bring the audience in. With Marriage I was slightly more keeping the audience out,” he says.

Something else that helps foster emotional connection is Golaszewski’s theme tune: a sweet, disenchantment-steeped Billy Bragg-meets-Kate Nash indie ballad performed by the writer-director himself. Originally Babies was going to be set to “dance music” but by the time he’d changed his mind the production had run out of money, “so I just did it for free”. Golaszewski had originally been “really against any kind of score” because of music’s “directional” (ie manipulative) nature when it comes to the audience’s emotions. I must admit his soundtrack made me cry more than anything else.

Stylistically, there is something about Babies that seeps directly into your mind’s eye: afterwards, it’s hard not to feel you are in one of Golaszewski’s dramas as you wipe down the sink or scroll on your phone in bed (one of Lisa’s main coping mechanisms). More profoundly, it leaves you with the sense that we urgently need a better way to talk about miscarriage. Cullen says filming it made her a “more conscientious and kind” person; Golaszewski hopes Babies will broaden the conversation already happening in the media. “You now see articles where people talk about these things, which feels really healthy,” he says. When you experience baby loss, “you just feel so alone. The more people can be honest about it, hopefully the easier it will get for the next batch of poor souls going through it.”

• Babies is on BBC One and iPlayer on Monday 30 March.