Primal Screen Mothers know best
Donal O’donoghue welcomes the return of Motherland
Nits. Years on, the word still burns. e shame! e stigma! e cries of ‘unclean!’ in the schoolyard. Okay, maybe it was more ‘lice-head’ than any melodramatic Victorian utterance, but still. At home, we had a special comb that came with a cast-iron guarantee of removing the dreaded critters. It did this by wrenching every last strand of hair from your head. At least, it felt that way as the tool of torture, bone ivory in colour, was scraped through scalps by various sisters queuing up to ‘have a go’.
Nits were in the news (!) again this week with the arrival of season three of the BBC drama, Motherland. With a nit pandemic laying waste to the local school, ngers and (nit combs) are pointed at the hapless Julia (Anna Maxwell Martin) for triggering a second wave. Fearing exclusion from the gang, Julia decides that the only way to restore her place in the status quo is to throw a nit treatment party (don’t ask). How brilliant, I thought – a comic take on the current plague that takes us back to the future to reveal the silver lining in the darkness.
Motherland gets it: or so my wife tells me. e agony, the ecstasy, the daily grind and unexpected comedy of being a mother (and a dad too, with Paul Ready as Kevin, the lone holder of the fort for the XY chromosome). A show produced and co-written by Sharon Horgan (who also nailed motherland with Catastrophe), this is invariably on the money, with even December’s Christmas special having enough steel to counter the schmaltz that such seasonal confections can sometimes get tangled on. Anna Maxwell Martin (seen most recently as the pantomime villain cop in Line of Duty) is peerless as the perennially besieged Julia, her putty face capturing the bewildering emotions that motherhood throws at you every single day (again, this is based on exhaustive research – I asked my wife). But in this land of mothers (and one father), Julia is merely the central cog of a coven (wrong word, or maybe not) of mums (and one dad) including snobby Amanda, gobby Liz, bubbly Meg, dim Anne and clueless Kev. And this season, Joanna Lumley entered the arena as the ab fab mum of Amanda.
is week’s episode, ‘Catchment Area’, mercilessly knuckles another fear of mothers everywhere – how living on the wrong side of the street can destroy your child’s life, maybe forever. It even prompts Julia to consider changing her religion – and that’s just for starters. If you’re visiting Motherland for the rst time, you can catch up on the previous two seasons on Net ix. Or you could just dive in. Like my sisters used to do when the nits were back in town.