So, did it happen? Did Michael (Peter Mullan) and Cathy (Lesley Manville) finally throw caution to the wind in the season finale of Mum, embrace their destiny, tell each other how they felt and set off for a bright new future together? Well, sort of. The great skill of Stefan Golaszewski’s sitcom is the way in which it recognises that big over-the-top declarations, while perfect on TV, aren’t really the stuff of everyday life.
Thus, in an episode that was all about moving on – Pauline (Dorothy Atkinson) from her divorce, Jason (Sam Swainsbury) and Kelly (Lisa McGrillis) to their new home, Michael to Spain to be with his daughters – Cathy, too, finally took the plunge by telling Michael how she felt with a heartfelt speech. “I’d love to look at you and not notice your eyes,” she said. “I’d love to go to bed at night and not think about you. I adore you.” It was exactly the kind of speech that Richard Curtis has built an entire industry on, but after she had finished, the desperately overwhelmed Michael then scuttled into the toilet for a think.
He wasn’t the only one struggling to cope with relationships, in a perfectly pitched final episode of what has been a perfectly pitched second series. “She’ll always love my dad, you know that, don’t you?” Jason remarked to Michael, the naked hurt in his voice transforming him from the slightly dim punchline of previous episodes to what he actually is: a grieving twentysomething, who still wishes every day that the father he adored could come home.
That’s the pleasure of Mum. For every laugh-out-loud moment – Pauline’s ever-lengthening list of the finer things in life (“Radio 4, Classic FM, anything made by an artisan, golf, Wimbledon, jazz, the Tate, wine you can’t buy in a supermarket … Kent”) was a particular joy – there is a downbeat acknowledgement that life can hurt and it can be hard to move on. Or, as the ever-acute Pauline put it: “What these happy people don’t realise is that it will end because everything good always ends. Those fabulous smiles will fall from their faces and they’ll be wading through rivers of shit like the rest of us.”
Of course, if Mum – and Golaszewski – really believed that, then the series would be impossible to watch. Instead, few programmes celebrate humanity, in all its complexity, so clearly. From the little moments such as Cathy’s father-in-law Reg (Karl Johnson) carefully drawing back a strand of his snoozing wife’s hair while Cyndi Lauper’s Girls Just Wanna Have Fun blared in the background, to the empty despair flitting across Pauline’s face as Derek (Ross Boatman) desperately tried to please her, to the big life-changing ones such as Michael’s proposed Spanish exile – this is a comedy that understands that every aspect of life is worth cherishing.
And its life-affirming intentions are never clearer than in its treatment of the central relationship. It takes a certain amount of bravery to step blindly off the cliff and trust that the person you adore adores you back, and all the more so when, like Cathy, you are a widow who was married for decades. That Manville and Mullan manage to show us all of that fear and love and trust and hidden pain, often without saying a word, is a testimony both to their skill and to the completeness of the world that Golaszewski has created. When they finally reached for out for each other, their fingers curling together as Jason’s Bonfire Night fireworks exploded around them, I can’t have been the only person who cried.
