Claes Bang

Sharon Horgan on Bad Sisters, the brutality of sisterhood and series two

It is notoriously cold—James Joyce immortalised the patch of Irish Sea as "scrotumtightening" in Ulysses—and Horgan wasn't a wild swimmer at the time, but she managed to brave a dip.

The creative jolt came, however, when she noticed a group of women somehow holding their weekly catch up in the breathtakingly cold water. "I thought, 'that's where the girls will feel safe enough to talk about their murder plans'."