Unmissable! Jodie could play a pizza box and I’d believe it...
Help Channel 4, Thursday ★★★★★ Alma’s Not Normal BBC2, Monday ★★★★★
Help is one of those dramas that you are glued to while, at the same time, hating every single minute of it. (Dear God, please make it end soon.) But it was important. And necessary. And if you were already angry at the way the Government allowed Covid to rip through care homes, you will have been off-the-scale incandescent by the finish. You can’t ever say you enjoy a drama like this. But neither can you say you merely endured it, as you cared deeply about the characters (run, Sarah and Tony, run!). I think, probably, the best you can say is that this was powerfully upsetting, yet I did not look away.
Help was written by Jack Thorne (Skins, Shameless, This Is England) and starred two of our finest actors, Jodie Comer and Stephen Graham. Comer played Sarah who, despite a disastrous CV and an equally disastrous interview, is hired as a care worker at Bright Sky Homes. The job is relentlessly unglamorous and demanding, with endless mop-ups down there but, as she tells her mother: ‘I like it, mum. Actually, I’m good at it.’
She connects with the residents, and they connect with her. She forms a special bond with Tony (Graham), who is suffering from early-onset dementia and is OK some days, but on other days he forgets that his mother is dead and wants to escape so he can get home.
Among Graham’s many great gifts is an ability to movingly play vulnerable people without ever patronising them. Meanwhile, I think Comer could play a bedside table or pizza box and I’d believe it.
Then Covid hits and Bright Sky takes in eight new residents dispatched from hospital to free up space. ‘Is it safe, like?’ Sarah asks. ‘It’s the doctors, love,’ says Steve (Ian Hart), who owns and runs the home. ‘This is just us doing our bit. They’re [patients] just blocking up [hospital] beds. We’re being useful.’ ‘Has he been tested?’ she asks the paramedic who delivers the first new resident. ‘Above my pay grade, that,’ he says. And so it begins.
I have made it sound preachy but it isn’t. This works first and foremost as a drama, one that will have you wholly invested in both lead characters (Comer and Graham have terrific chemistry). But there is a nightmarish section midway though when Sarah finds herself alone on a night shift with no PPE, no answer from 111, no available ambulances and only Tony to help.
This is never stylised. As directed by Marc Munden (National Treasure), it is hand-held camera, intimate, fly-on-the-wall real, and this section is like a haunted-house horror movie as sensor lights flicker on and off and the soundtrack pounds and patient Kenny, oh my Lord, poor Kenny. (‘I’m sorry, no one is coming, Kenny. I’m so sorry, Kenny.’) The third act has a twist that you couldn’t have seen coming – this is, in its way, also a love story – while your own outrage builds, builds, builds. And builds. Not to be enjoyed as such, but also, not to be missed.
Good comedies are thin on the ground. I tried Greg Davies’s The Cleaner, found it forced, yet love Davies so much I didn’t want to say that, even though I now have. With Alma’s Not Normal I did begin watching with a heavy heart – I’ve kissed too many frogs – but within a couple of minutes I was punching the air and crying: ‘Quick, everybody,
here’s a comedy that is plainly amazing. Don’t let it get away.’
It is written by comedian Sophie Willan, who has mined her own personal experience, none of which you would think could be comedy gold. (She is the daughter of a heroin addict mother, spent time in care and later turned to sex work.) Last year’s pilot, I’ve since learnt, won a Bafta award, and now there are six episodes and I watched them all, unstoppably. (Although you can watch weekly on Mondays if you prefer.)
Willan plays Alma who, at the outset, has no job, no qualifications, no boyfriend (he’s just dumped her), but does have her best friend Leanne (Jayde Adams) who, as Alma tells us: ‘Has the mannerisms of a truck driver and the rock ’n’ roll sex appeal of Debbie Harry.’ Alma’s mother (Siobhan Finneran) is a recovering addict who has been sectioned (arson), while her grandmother (Lorraine Ashbourne) isn’t the kind to bake bread, although she did buy an unsliced loaf once. ‘How was it?’ Alma asks. ‘Hard work,’ she is told. (You clocked that both Finneran and Ashbourne are in this? Isn’t that the clincher?)
It sounds grim, but this is written and performed with such heart, such tenderness and such an eye for what is true, you’ll be entranced by it. When Alma decides that internet dating isn’t for her and she’ll go back to dating ‘in the old-fashioned way’, it is explained thus: ‘You get hammered, find a man you don’t fancy, sleep with him anyway and see if he grows on you over time…’
This is so true that there is only one thing for it: better to laugh.