The first series of Mum (BBC Two), Stefan Golaszewski’s Bafta-winning sitcom about a grieving widow, opened with a funeral. Not exactly hilarious, but, in the pantheon of comedy (and life, for that matter), usually ripe for some inappropriate laughs. In a neat move, the second series opens with a birthday. It is Cathy’s 60th – and it is almost as sad. “Seems like only yesterday I was 18,” sighs Cathy (Lesley Manville), who remains the best thing, by a long way, about Mum. “It wasn’t only yesterday, though, was it, Cathy?” trills Kelly, her doofus son’s doofus girlfriend, whose foot remains permanently crammed into her mouth, along with a load of salt and vinegar Walkers crisps. “It was 42 years ago.” And so a birthday banner is unfurled, with a giant 60 and some skulls and crossbones “to capture the passing of time”. The carvery is discussed in minute detail. People go to the loo. And talk about doing so.
It is all very slow and gentle and well-acted. As in the first series, the major events happen off screen (and when I say major events, I mean the carvery), a reminder that real life happens in the everyday, uncaptured moments. The will-they-won’t-they tension between Cathy and her friend Michael (Peter Mullan), who pitches up in a new shirt “straight out of the packet” and with a boot full of presents that will never be presented, continues. Her brother’s partner, Pauline, is still an insufferable snob, dropping that she was supposed to be playing badminton with a woman whose nephew was at primary school with Kate Middleton. “Apparently, Middleton was thick as shit when she was four,” she confides. “Pissed herself on a swing.”
Cathy is the long-suffering mum familiar from generations of British sitcoms, surrounded by fools who don’t appreciate her, for ever biting her tongue and responding to insensitivity with an indomitable smile. Manville suffuses Cathy with warmth and melancholy, but this dated representation of archetypal, unshakeable mum-ness bothers me. There is something reductive about the neatly tied apron, shoes and tights always on in the house, the ability to keep calm and carry on ironing. As a depiction of the maddening reality of being a mum, I prefer the gloriously raging Motherland.
There are some thoroughly unfunny misogynistic moments, such as when Kelly asks: “What age is it when you get the old-lady smell?” While the intention may be a sendup of cruel ageism, when it is spoken by a character who inhabits the dated blond bimbo stereotype, it doesn’t work. My wish for Cathy goes beyond her getting it on with shy, manly Michael. I want her to escape, Reginald Perrin style – to thrown down her apron and run into the sea naked. This being Mum, it would probably happen off screen.
Here and Now (Sky Atlantic) sounds brilliant on the page, but it is quite irritating on the screen. A family saga by Six Feet Under creator Alan Ball, it stars Holly Hunter and Tim Robbins as the liberal parents of an interracial family – or, ouch, “experiment”, as they call it – falling apart in Trump’s US. See? Sounds amazing! Unfortunately, it is one of those overly self-conscious, hyper-woke series in which everyone speaks as though they have swallowed the little book of Lena Dunham, washed down with hashtags.
Audrey (Hunter) is organising her husband’s 60th birthday party (no carvery here) at their beautifully curated home in Portland, Oregon. “I was a therapist for 20 years,” she likes to remind everyone, “so not a lot escapes me.” Except, that is, her husband’s philandering and her children’s drug-taking, shagging and general privileged pain. Greg (Robbins) is a philosophy professor who wrote an ethical defence of Epicureanism, sees a sex worker once a week and weeps in his car on the way home. Three of four of the children were adopted from Vietnam, Liberia and Colombia and have grown up “aware of being advertisements for how progressive and evolved our parents were”. The fourth is trying to make her peace with “being the boring white chick in the family”. By the end of the first episode, Ramon, the Colombian one, who is going out with the tattooed barista from the coffee shop and having weird hallucinations involving the number sequence 11.11, is seeing a psychiatrist. Oh, and the party was a disaster.
The moral of last night’s TV? Don’t go to your 60th.
