Natasia Demetriou is back in Ellie & Natasia, and the timing was shaped by pregnancy as much as by comedy. Ellie White and Demetriou returned with the second series after each had two children, turning the show’s return into a race against the clock.
Three years passed between the first series and the second, largely because of scheduling issues. The gap mattered because the pair were writing again a couple of weeks after finding out, last September, that they were pregnant. White said, “it was now or never,” and added: “We had to write it very quickly and film it very quickly so that we wouldn’t give birth when we were filming.”
2019 and 2022
Their mum characters first appeared in a 2019 sketch show pilot, then returned repeatedly in the first proper series of Ellie & Natasia in 2022. By the time they came back to the material, both performers were mothers of two children each, which changed the pace of the work and the way the scenes had to be staged.
Demetriou said, “I now feel quite a lot of empathy for these women,” while White put it more bluntly: “Well, I always felt empathy – I do with all our characters – but I especially am now like: it is actually quite hard.” That shift is not just a personal aside; it explains why the second series leans into the mothers’ physical reality instead of pretending it was written from outside it.
Behind furniture and tables
Some sketches hid their stomachs behind voluminous clothes or furniture, while one sequence sends the pregnant-again mums into a maternity fashion segment. Another has Internet Nails, the North Circular beauty salon, branching into pregnancy treatments. The writing never ignores the pregnancies, but it does not let them take over the format either.
White said, “We didn’t want it to be ‘the pregnant show’.” Demetriou echoed that with, “We just wanted it to not be a distraction.” In practice, that meant working around their bodies without turning the series into a sketch about being pregnant.
Ellie White halfway through
White went into labour halfway through the edit, which is the kind of production fact that tells you how compressed the schedule became. Demetriou joked about the logistics of filming while pregnant: “I love acting sitting down, so if you can sit me behind a table I’m the happiest I’ve ever been.”
The result is a second series built around speed, accommodation and a clear refusal to flatten the performers into a single topic. That is the useful read here: the show returned after three years because the writing had to fit around life, not the other way around.
