Emily Atack is “going places”. Last year, she narrowly missed out on winning I’m a Celebrity … in which the Inbetweeners actor “found some new love and respect for myself”, presumably not while Holly Willoughby was panic-flicking giant cockroaches off her body with a cue card. Since then, her Instagram followers have grown in number from 70,000 to 1.4 million, she has done standup about her roaring 20s, has released a clothing range and is writing a book, which I can only assume is about how Atack found new love and respect for herself in the jungle, the standup tour, the clothing range and the book. You might ask what is left. A preposterously overpaid column in a rightwing newspaper? Leader of the country?
No, the inevitable consequence of all this is Emily Atack: Adulting (W), a reality TV series in which Atack, with the help of family, friends, and that most trusty of agony aunts, social media, sets herself a bunch of “adulting challenges”. These are less about putting on the Fill Your Face helmet in the Bushtucker trials and more like taking her cousin’s stepdaughter to soft play – which many find more terrifying than a kilogram of mealworms heading up their nose holes.
At this point, it is worth issuing a warning that, if you find the concept of “adulting” – which essentially means the completion of such quotidian tasks as working, laundry and taking care of oneself; what the rest of us call living – as infantilising and sexist as I do, you might want to bugger off and do some quiet, unscripted adulting of your own right now.
If, on the other hand, you embrace the toddlerisation of everything from politics to smoothies, this is all “very relatable”, to use the appropriate reality-TV terminology. Off Atack bounces to show us the house that she has somehow managed to find since leaving the jungle, which most adulting adults will never be able to afford. Here is the bed that she chose on account of it having a massive television hidden in the frame, which sounds both cosy and like a Trumpian nightmare. The problem is that it is way too big for the space and didn’t actually come with a telly.
“It’s a disaster!” Atack wails. At which point, I started fantasising about the mirror image of this series, in which a naughty woman over the age of 60, such as Miriam Margolyes, gads about kidulting: playing Twister and throwing enormous tantrums about putting on her shoes. I know, it is never going to happen. But we said that about so many things.
Atack’s problem is that, in spite of her meteoric rise, her life remains “a total shambles”. She is on the precipice of turning 30, which is roughly the age when the need to make a reality-TV series about one’s quarter-life crisis kicks in. She drinks too much, thinks about her weight 80% of the day, and dates “complete dicks”. The glimmers of genuine warmth are there, but, unfortunately, are as rare as female presenters over 60 on TV. Such as when Atack checks out the Instagram accounts of mothers posting about being “mindful” about what they eat and only gaining 30lb during pregnancy. She is not impressed as her colourful dismissal makes clear. A strongly relatable moment for me.
Mostly, instead of considering the issues millennials face – being unable to afford further education, or fending off constant carping about being snowflakes – Atack ponders how she would look with a baby bump and makes a feeble gag about her “hungoveries”. She asks Instagram – that well known moral influence on young women – whether she is ready. (The answer is … cruel.) She goes to visit her mother, the actor Kate Robbins, most famous for doing the female voices on Spitting Image, who recalls Atack’s brother being more than 10lb when he was born. “Was that uncomfortable?” Atack wonders. “Why do you think I haven’t got any boyfriends,” her mother bats back. And they laugh.
Finally, because it is not truly revealing unless you invite the camera behind the curtain to film a scan of your uterus, Atack goes to see a fertility doctor. The good news is that she has average fertility for a 29-year-old, can have children and isn’t going to worry about it any more. The bad news? Adulting proves that, along with the Spice Girls, Tony Blair and a whole host of other pretend-good 90s ephemera, the ladette is back.
