‘We adopted four kids as a gay couple - and it was the most challenging thing I've been through'
Welsh playwright Daf James is bringing his own experience of adopting as a gay man to drama Lost Boys and Fairies – something he never imagined would happen when applying for a BBC writing programme five years ago.The writer, who began his career putting on Welsh-language plays and performing as his alter ego Sue, was accepted into the BBC Drama Writers Programme in 2019.
He began developing what would become Lost Boys and Fairies after being paired with various production companies. “It was a bit like TV speed-dating, it changed my life,” he says. “I wanted to be an actor first and foremost and a composer.
I wasn’t interested in writing, I didn’t know anyone who wrote, I didn’t know it was a job or an option. I didn’t write for telly until I was 31.
When it came to writing the pilot for Lost Boys and Fairies, I went, ‘This is what I want to say and this is how I want to say it.’” The three-parter stars Slow Horses’ Sion Daniel Young as Gabriel, a “queer artist extraordinaire” who begins the process of adopting with his long-time partner Andy (Les Miserables’ Fra Fee) while dealing with his traumatic upbringing and the strained relationship with his father.The story was inspired by Daf’s own experience of adopting three kids between the ages of two and five with his husband. “Eight years ago, we adopted children for the first time and it was the most incredible, life-changing, life-affirming, challenging thing I’d ever been through,” he admits. “It changed me as a human and an artist, and I needed to write about it. “The characters of Gabriel’s father, Andy and the child – they’re not based on my family or children, they are works of art.
