Roisin Conaty was guesting on Would I Lie to You? when she said it in front of the cameras. Lee Mack had introduced her to his wife at some point before the recording, and Conaty brought it up at the table: Tara, she told the panel, is “ridiculously beautiful.” What followed, in Mack’s telling, was this. Conaty’s sister had met Tara and immediately assumed she must have come along after the television work and the recognition. When Mack said they had met at university, years before his first stand-up performance, the sister’s response was: “Oh, did he save your life or something?”
Tara McKillop was not in the building that night. She never is.
Born Tara Savage in May 1969, Tara McKillop is 57 years old and the wife of British comedian and actor Lee Mack, whose legal name is Lee Gordon McKillop. She met Lee at Brunel University in London in 1996, married him in 2005, and has raised three children with him in East Molesey, Surrey. She has never given a formal interview. She holds no Wikipedia page of her own. Most articles written about her repeat the same recycled details, and most of them get her age wrong by more than a decade.
She is also, according to official Companies House records, a former Director and Company Secretary of the production company behind Not Going Out.
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How Lee Mack Met Tara McKillop
Lee Mack began performing open-mic comedy in 1994 while studying Drama at Brunel University in London. The following year, he won So You Think You’re Funny at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. In 1996, still a student at Brunel, he met Tara Savage. They were living in the same flat.
When they met, Mack had one comedy competition to his name and no income from the industry. Tara came into his life before any of the career existed, and Mack has corrected people’s assumptions about this often enough that the correction has become its own story. On a podcast, recounting the Roisin Conaty moment, he said: “We met before I ever was a comedian.”
They stayed together for nine years before marrying. Their eldest son, Arlo, was born in 2004, a year before the wedding.
The Isle of Mull Wedding
In 2005, Lee and Tara married in a private ceremony on the Isle of Mull, off the west coast of Scotland. Lee later told the Express why that island specifically:
“My favourite place in Britain is the Isle of Mull. It’s where Tara and I got married. We go back there on holiday.”
There was no press coverage and no official photographs released. The couple settled in East Molesey, Surrey, near Hampton Court, where they have lived since. Lee spoke to the Guardian about what that home means to him: “Family is everything to me. I’m quite a homey person… I can see why people who haven’t got a grounded home life go a bit mental.”
He writes at a desk there from 7:30am every morning. In the afternoons, he digs in the garden.
The Production Company Behind Not Going Out
On 27 September 2005, weeks after the wedding, a company called Arlo Productions Limited was incorporated and registered with Companies House. Company number 05575399. Stated business activity: motion picture production.
The officers listed on the founding document, all appointed on the same date:
| Name | Role |
|---|---|
| Lee McKillop | Director |
| Tara McKillop | Director |
| Tara McKillop | Company Secretary |
Tara held two formal positions simultaneously. Her date of birth, May 1969, is recorded in the Companies House entry alongside Lee’s, August 1968. They are nine months apart in age, a fact that contradicts years of articles placing her birth in the early 1980s.
From its fifth series onwards, Not Going Out was co-produced by Arlo Productions, as confirmed in the show’s own production records. The company also produced Lee Mack Going Out Live and Lee Mack’s All Star Cast. It was named after Lee and Tara’s eldest son. Accounts were last filed to September 2015, after which Avalon took over full production of the show.
Tara’s name appears on the founding document of the enterprise. It appears nowhere in the credits of anything that enterprise made.
Lee Mack and Tara McKillop’s Children
Arlo McKillop was born in 2004, one year before his parents married. Louie followed in 2006. Millie, the youngest and only daughter, arrived in 2012. All three have made appearances in Not Going Out at separate points across the show’s run:
| Child | Episode | Year |
|---|---|---|
| Arlo McKillop | “House,” Christmas special | 2013 |
| Millie McKillop | “Friend,” Series 12 — as Elsie | 2022 |
| Louie McKillop | “Dragon Castle,” Series 14 | 2025 |
Lee has said consistently that neither he nor Tara has any intention of pushing the children toward performing. Arlo attended drama classes as a child but lives privately. Millie appeared alongside both parents at the 2025 National Television Awards at the O2 Arena in September and at the Stranger Things: The First Shadow gala at the Phoenix Theatre in November 2025.
The production company that filmed those cameos was named after the eldest child who appeared in one of them.
The Show Built on Her Private Life
In 2017, Lee Mack told Radio Times that Not Going Out is drawn from real events at home, not invented ones. “The truth is I just wanted to write a sitcom about what I am in real life, which is a husband and dad of three kids. It allows me to tap into stories that have an element of truth. It also means that when stuff happens to me in real life, I don’t get angry about it, I just write it down and use it.”
The writers’ room rule, which he described the same year on The Nightly Show with Dermot O’Leary, is that every storyline must have actually happened. That rule, he explained, creates friction at home when scenes involving the bedroom enter the script. His account of it: “Your wife’s going: ‘No, you can’t do that.’ And you might be sitting at home watching it with your wife, and she’s saying: ‘I cannot believe that you’re talking about this. On screen.'”
Tara McKillop was a registered Director of the company broadcasting those scenes at the time that friction was happening.
She also, Lee told Radio Times that same year, “doesn’t really watch it.”
Her Instagram account has 130 followers and 53 posts. In over twenty years alongside one of Britain’s most visible comedians, she has attended a small number of public events and given no interviews. The Companies House filing confirms something most coverage of her has missed entirely: Tara McKillop was not simply the wife of the man who made Not Going Out. She was a legal officer of the company that produced it. Her name is on the founding document of the enterprise that turned her domestic life into twenty years of BBC primetime.
It just never appeared in any of the credits.
