Flea cheers! Phoebe’s back ... with bags of bad taste
LOOK who’s grown up. The most dirty-minded, infantile, toxic character on TV is suddenly behaving like an adult... and it only serves to highlight how frightful her family are.
The first series of Fleabag (BBC1) in 2016 scooped a hatful of awards, including a BAFTA for star and writer Phoebe Waller-Bridge, and five other nominations. Despite this, it left audiences divided, with many – definitely me among them – repulsed by the central character’s selfishness.
She was so wrapped up in herself that we never even learned her name. She was just Fleabag, running a guinea pigthemed London cafe with her best friend Boo – suitably childish names for a pair with the emotional maturity of angry 13-year-olds.
Boo killed herself, accidentally, after Fleabag slept with her boyfriend. The six-part sitcom that followed was a whirlwind of recrimination, grief, self-loathing, revenge sex, obsession, guilt, infidelity, sibling rivalry and drinking to oblivion.
It wasn’t unique: Channel Four’s Catastrophe – a bitter-sweet comedy about an American man and an Irishwoman living together in London – was mining much the same material. But Fleabag had something else, something that made lots of viewers willing to forgive anything: a flamboyant, insouciant sense of style.
Last year, Waller-Bridge reinvented that image for Villanelle, the assassin in Killing Eve whose air of psycho-chic turned an unlikely spy drama into a fashion statement. Villanelle slept with whoever she wanted, while wearing clothes like they were her murder weapons.
Fleabag has clearly learned from her. As the show returned, she arrived at a family dinner in a backless black number that was slashed down the front from collar to navel.
She looked like a corpse newly opened up on the autopsy table – an impression heightened by the fact that when we first saw her she was covered in blood. B UT
the old Fleabag would have spent the evening crying, smashing glasses, snogging strangers and stealing anything that wasn’t nailed down. True, she did round off the night by punching her alcoholic brotherin-law in the face – but he was asking for it. Instead of causing scenes, she kept slipping out for a cigarette to gain a moment of composure. Even her asides to the camera were self-controlled and wry, not the explosions of vitriol we’re used to. And she underlined her new sense of maturity by making sure her sister went to hospital after suffering a miscarriage during the dessert course.
If you baulk at black humour about miscarriages, you won’t like Fleabag, no matter how many Baftas it swipes. And that’s a pity, because it means missing Olivia Colman at her phenomenal comic best.
Colman, who won an Oscar last week as Queen Anne in The Favourite, plays Fleabag’s godmother: false, sly and (inevitably, in this programme) sex-crazed. Her put-downs are lethal, all the more cruel for being served with a brilliant smile. When she says ‘lovely’, she means ‘I hate you’, and she really does loathe both Flea and her neurotic older sister, Claire. Godmother has been living with the girls’ father ever since their mother died.
He’s terrified of her, but her hold over him is total. A sequence in which she shuts him up with a series of dirty looks and tiny hand gestures was as toe-curlingly funny as this show gets.
With a cast and a reputation like this, illustrious new co-stars are guaranteed. Andrew Scott, best known as Sherlock’s Moriarty, arrived as a priest, worming his way into Godmother’s affections. So far he’s merely smarmy and manipulative, but no doubt he’ll reveal a nastier side.
Sian Clifford is outstanding as Claire, a portrait of repressed misery kept in check by selfdenial. She’s a middle-class caricature: picking at her food, she mutters, ‘This sauce is disgusting’ – then spots the waitress and yelps, ‘Oh, it’s delicious!’
Claire suffers so much that it’s impossible not to feel sympathy. The same can’t be said for her obnoxious husband (Brett Gelman), who has been trying to drive Flea out of her own family since she rejected his advances.
In this world, everyone is reduced to sexual objects – and when we lose sexual potency our lives cease to matter. ‘Either everyone feels like this and isn’t talking about it,’ she lamented at the end of the last series, ‘or I’m completely alone’.
Thankfully, Fleabag has now achieved enough self-awareness for her emotions to reach beyond her sex drive. That’s good, because dialogue this sharp, with a roster of actors this strong, shouldn’t be turning viewers off.