Big Suze

Big Suze arrives braying and magnificent, all cut-glass vowels and total self-assurance, orbiting Mark's world first as Johnson's girlfriend. She is posh, loud, sexually frank and utterly unembarrassable, sailing through social situations that leave everyone else cringing. She wants fun, attention and someone to match her energy — and barely notices when she doesn't get it.

Sophie Winkleman plays her at a pitch just short of parody — that honking laugh, that unshakeable poise — and the show uses her as a wrecking ball through Mark's careful anxieties. She's funniest because she's never in on the joke; her obliviousness to the chaos she causes is the comedy, not any cruelty in the writing.