Amid the rage and despair, being a parent is a laughing matter . . .
ChiLDREN’s birthday parties leave a scar. to take a crowd of nine-year-olds, wind them up to a pitch of hyperactive excitement, then fill them full of coca-cola and artificial food colouring isn’t just inviting trouble — it’s begging for it.
i still get nightmares about trying to control a legion of small boys having a belching competition in a tGi Friday’s diner.
if you were there that day, i’m deeply sorry — and i want you to know they weren’t all my children. Especially not the horrible fat one with the glasses.
Motherland (BBc2) is a comedy that captures those moments of parental misery and magnifies them. A pilot last year proved an instant success, winning shrieks of noisy recognition from viewers.
it isn’t your own children that drive you to gibbering despair. it’s everyone else — the other parents, school, neighbours, random members of the general public . . .
this new series began with stressed-out mum Julia (Anna Maxwell Martin) fielding a call at work from her son’s teacher about a missing pair of swimming trunks. it ended with her smashing the phone to fragments in frustration — only to realise her boss was glowering at her.
it’s not just the exaggerated situations that are easy to recognise. Motherland is stocked with familiar characters who stop short of being stereotypes — emasculated stay-at-home dad Kevin (Paul Ready), manipulative yummy-mummy Amanda (Lucy Punch), and Julia’s bone idle husband, Paul, with a sheaf of excuses for avoiding the messy business of being a father (oliver chris).
But it’s all based on a darker premise. Julia was coping with work and home life, thanks to help from her mother, Marion (Ellie haddington) . . . until mum decided she was fed up of being an unpaid baby-sitter. Without her support, the family starts to fall apart.
Plenty of grandparents will recognise that scenario, though few would deliberately renege on their duties to prove a point. the sense of betrayal gnawing at Julia gives the comedy a raw edge.
it’s also crammed with lines that bring unexpected laughs which are blurted out — many from tipsy single mother Liz (the brilliant Diane Morgan), who gets her childcare help from a bottle. she took one look at Julia’s homemade birthday cake, in the shape of a yellow Minions cartoon character, and sneered: ‘it looks like an angry sweetcorn!’
Where Motherland is a scorching take on the terrors of being an ordinary parent, The A Word (BBc1) is a softer fantasy about the heartbreak of bringing up a child who is ‘different’. Max Vento is superb as seven-yearold Joe hughes, a stubbornly obsessive little boy who is just beginning to realise that people are calling him ‘autistic’. he doesn’t know what it means, but he knows it isn’t good.
Max’s performance is the redemption of this flawed drama by Peter Bowker, who expertly portrays the main traits of childhood autism, but ruins it by giving the family an idyllic lifestyle in compensation.
Alison and Paul (Morven christie and Lee ingleby) live in the Lake District, own a prosperous restaurant and have plenty of time for get-togethers.
the reality is never like that. Autism is all-consuming and exhausting, as hundreds of thousands of parents can testify.
As a result, most families with first-hand experience will watch the A Word, not with a jolt of recognition, but thinking: ‘i wish we could live in the middle of nowhere — with no one to hear the screaming meltdowns!’
Blimey, children... who’d have ’em?