Last night on television Benji Wilson Motherland reaches similar heights to Fawlty Towers
Within the first minute of
Motherland (BBC Two), a new sitcom from Sharon Horgan and Holly Walsh about being a mum and how bloody awful it is, Julia (Anna Maxwell Martin) is beating her mobile phone against a banister in frustration. It was hard not to be reminded of Basil Fawlty beating his car with a tree branch in vein-swelling exasperation. Even if the premise of Motherland could hardly be more different than Fawlty Towers (Julia had just finished a phone call about how her son had forgotten his swimming trunks; Basil was trying to get food to Gourmet Night at the hotel) it shares many of the same interests. And at times, at least so far, Motherland touches similar comic heights.
Motherland first appeared as a test-the-waters pilot last year where it quickly established its ensemble cast and their various foibles. Julia is an exhausted working mother who’s terrible at juggling her many conflicting responsibilites. Instead, she comes to rely almost entirely on whoever’s closest to hand to bail her out, which is usually friends Liz (Diane Morgan) and Kevin (Paul Ready). Kevin is the only parent in the show who appears to actually like parenting; Liz, meanwhile, is the wonderfully blasé single mother who does whatever it takes and refuses to feel shame.
The shame rains down from the alpha-mums, led by a maniacally grinning Amanda (Lucy Punch), whose houses and lives are all immaculate. Put Julia’s awkward squad alongside Amanda’s Queen Bees (with their kids’ school as the forum) and you have a nerds vs jocks style set up that’s so ripe for comedy you wonder why no one’s done it before.
In the first episode of the new series, Julia twigs that hosting a kids’ party for the whole class is one way to get reciprocal free childcare for the rest of the year. But like Basil Fawlty hosting Gourmet Night, that initial great idea sets off a catastrophic helter-skelter, including Julia’s daughter being too ill to attend her own birthday party, the other parents refusing to leave (because they want to gawp at Julia’s substandard house and thus wiping out her free childcare passes) and a racist entertainer called Animal Man whose only animals are cats.
There’s a danger that this kind of thing could easily become a bit of a middle-class snowglobe with jokes for and about a small subset of Londoners whose lives do indeed revolve around kids’ parties and school fundraisers (me, for example). But the comedy in Motherland is so scabrous and unrelenting that nothing about it ever feels cosy. The children are barely shown at all; instead, Motherland hones in on each and every inanity of a social construct built around women who have nothing in common other than that they’ve all given birth around the same time. It’s about keeping up appearances, keeping up with the Joneses and, in Julia’s case, just keeping up. You don’t have to be a mother to recognise the territory.
It’s important, I’d say, not to call Peter Bowker’s The A Word (BBC One) an “Autism drama”. If anything, the first episode of the second series moved further towards being a family drama in which one of the couples that we’re following happens to have a young son who has autism.
Where the first series took in Joe’s (Max Vento) diagnosis and charted how his parents (Morven Christie and Lee Ingleby) and extended family came to terms with it, the first episode of the new series showed Joe starting to ask questions. “I’m autistic, nobody wants that,” his parents overheard him saying, which sparked off a bout of soul-searching about how they should talk to their son about his autism.
It’s interesting that The A Word has returned in the same week that the comedy Motherland has begun, because they both offer a different answer to essentially the same question – parents wringing their hands and wondering what the hell they do now.
In the case of The A Word there is of course a greater seriousness – that’s why, I suspect, this episode opened up with Joe sitting on the edge of the school roof with his headphones on as teachers and parents panicked below. But Bowker’s approach even at this point was to keep things light. It requires writing of great tact and a lot of skill to do so. The makers of the great American sitcom Seinfeld used to boast that they had “no hugging, no learning” in their show. The A Word has plenty of both, but you wouldn’t want it any other way.
Motherland The A Word