What to watch
Mum BBC TWO, 10.00PM; NI, 11.15PM
It’s rare that a show manages to make you laugh even as it quietly breaks your heart but Stefan Golaszewski’s Mum, which returns for a second series, is quite unlike most other sitcoms. On the surface, this story of recently widowed Cathy (Lesley Manville) and her attempts to create a new life for herself is a broad family sitcom filled with comic misunderstandings and supremely silly one-liners, most of which are delivered by Lisa Mcgrillis’s sweet but dim Kelly. Yet underneath the surface is a mournful yearning that both grounds the show and makes it clear that Golaszewski is always laughing with his characters and never at them. This reaches its apogee with the tentative relationship between Cathy and Peter Mullan’s Michael, a relationship which both characters thoroughly deserve and yet which seems doomed to never quite take off.
Tonight’s opening episode is a wonderful case in point as the family gather to celebrate Cathy’s 60th birthday. Both Mullan and Manville deliver a masterclass in beautifully underplayed tension and it’s almost impossible to watch the final minutes without wanting to shout “just tell her how you feel man” at the TV. Sarah Hughes