Daily Mail

Amid the rage and despair, being a parent is a laughing matter . . .

- CHRISTOPHE­R STEVENS

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

AMBITION OF THE NIGHT: Lively Noah announced, on The Secret Life Of Four-Year-Olds (C4), that he’ll be an artist, a fireman and a builder when he grows up. Why not? There’s no such thing as a job for life these days.

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?

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