Daily Mail - Daily Mail Weekend Magazine
CLASS WAR
The bruising battles of the school run are captured in painfully funny detail in new comedy Motherland.
Why has it taken so long for motherhood, real motherhood, to be featured in a comedy? Not the joke-laden, eyes-rolling sitcom version of being a parent, but the white-knuckle ride that is getting kids safely to school each day on time without losing it with either them or your fellow school-gate parents?
Motherland is a much-needed dose of reality. The pilot episode, which was screened last year, showed its lead character – working mum Julia – forgetting it was half-term and spending the day trying to arrange childcare. It was painfully biting and supremely funny; to ask whether it touched a nerve for middle-class mums everywhere is a bit like asking them if it’s time for Prosecco. Yes and yes again.
Anna Maxwell Martin, the star of dramas including Bleak House, The Bletchley Circle and North & South, is a double BAFTA-winning actress. But she says she doesn’t need to use a smidgeon of her talent to play Julia as she’s basically playing herself. ‘She’s totally the same as me,’ says Anna, who has two daughters, Maggie, eight, and Nancy, five, with her director husband Roger Michell, as well as stepchildren Harry, 25, and Rosie, 21. ‘I am literally not doing any acting at all. My neighbour’s now a bit scared of me because she thinks I’m like Julia. But, actually, I am like her. I even had to leave the filming of the pilot early for this very reason. I had to run up to the director crying, “My childcare’s run out, I have to go.” I missed a scene.’
The pilot was a hit, and the show – which is set in suburban London and filmed in leafy Chiswick – was instantly commissioned for a series. That’s not surprising when you consider the comedy brains behind it – Sharon Horgan, the star and co-writer of bitter- sweet romantic comedy series Catastrophe, Father Ted and The IT Crowd writer Graham Linehan, his wife Helen (whose idea Motherland was) and stand-up comedian Holly Walsh.
Last year’s episode caused mums and dads to stop Anna in the street, fling their arms around her and yell, ‘Thank you.’ ‘So many people come up to me saying, “Oh God, that is just what it’s like,”’ says Anna, 40. ‘And they tell me it makes them feel less alone. That rushing in the car, rushing to get places. Never quite having the time to focus. I’m totally the same and I recognise all the characters from my own school drop-off. The school- gate politics are real.
And I’m living them. Once I was emailing about presents for teachers and then we were filming a scene about presents for teachers.’ In the new series she has to deal with the horror of swimming parties and the nightmare of school fundraisers.
This is parenting as it is for millions of mums and dads around the country, where they are never quite on top of things, never quite doing it as well as they think they should be. ‘I think often in dramas mums are depicted as fussing over their kids and loving them every single second of the day,’ continues Anna. ‘ The reality of parenting is not like that at all.’
In the pilot we saw Julia latch onto single mum Liz, played by Diane Morgan, and stay-at-home dad Kevin ( Paul Ready), and their strange friendship – bonded only by having children of the same age – continues. ‘ I feel like we are a proper little group,’ says Anna. ‘I can’t work out why they’re friends but they are. I totally get them as a group. Of course, they don’t like her.’
She laughs as she points at Lucy Punch, who plays posh Amanda, the queen bee of the school-gate mums and gatekeeper to the table at the café they all go to after drop-off, where a seat is prized as the ultimate sign of social acceptance. Amanda’s secondin-command is Anne (Philippa Dunne), who’s just grateful someone’s talking to her. Kevin would love to be invited onto the table, Liz thinks the whole idea of the table is hysterical, while Julia is briefly invited to join the table, only to be told – in a jibe at her expense – that Amanda loves her children ‘too much’ to be a working mum.
‘Amanda’s terrifying but fun to play,’ says Lucy, who’s now based in the US, where she’s appeared in films such as Into The Woods and TV series New Girl. ‘The LA version of her is even more terrifying. She likes the idea of being exclusive and sort of perfect – she thinks she is perfect.’
Lucy, 39, who has a two-year- old son, says she can certainly empathise Left: trio of friends Liz, Julia and Kevin. Far left: queen bee Amanda with trying to keep up with the judgemental alpha parents. ‘I attended a playgroup with my son, and the shame of bringing out food for your child…’ she laughs. ‘ There’s the mother who’s made the organic thing, while I’ve got something out of a packet and I’m just pretending that it’s something else. And of course I say I never normally give him sugar. It feels like you’re back at school, there are all these cliques. When you’re an adult you think you’ve got past caring what anyone thinks but as a mum I’m always worrying, “I hope they don’t think I’m a bad mother.”’
In this series we see a slightly softer side to Amanda as she’s having marriage troubles and is a lot more vulnerable than she seems. ‘She doesn’t have any real friends so she turns to Kevin,’ says Lucy. ‘She’s not that bad. I think she’s doing her best. The characters are kind of awful but they all love their kids and they’re all doing their version of their best for them. So I think that makes them all likeable and relatable too. They’re not really awful parents. They make the wrong choices but they’re trying.’
Anna, whose character Julia’s difficult home life is also delved into in the series, agrees. ‘Julia desperately doesn’t want to be late for school because it upsets her kids. But she just can’t get on top of being on time. She can’t get on top of her life.’
While there are lots of children in the series, they mainly serve as background noise, creating havoc before going somewhere else to create more havoc. ‘We love working with the kids,’ says Anna with an ironic grin. ‘I love to leave my kids at home to come to work to be with more kids, to wrangle with kids. But seriously, they’re great kids who work hard.’
In this series the really bad behaviour comes from the adults. ‘In the show there’s not much politics about children and child- rearing,’ says Anna. ‘It’s more about the politics between adults, which makes it funny. It’s about hierarchy and rivalries and groups and cliques. They’re the children, really. The only surprising thing is that no one has really tackled this world before; the writers are parents so they know what goes on. Which is why it feels so totally real.’
Motherland starts on Tuesday 7 November on BBC2.
‘It’s about hierarchy, rivalries and cliques’ ANNA MAXWELL MARTIN