“Remember the family crest,” Louise Brealey’s Deb hisses at her eldest daughter Josie (Kat Sadler) in the opening episode of Such Brave Girls’ new season. “Ignore, repress, forget!”
As far as familial mantras go, it’s arguably not the healthiest or the most uplifting message to pass on to your two grown-up daughters. And over the course of the second season of the Bafta-winning BBC comedy, created by Sadler and co-starring her real-life sister Lizzie Davidson, it will prompt all three women in this dysfunctional family to make some frankly woeful decisions.
That’s bad news for Sadler’s characters, but very good news for us viewers, because much of the show’s appeal lies in watching this mother-daughter trio plumb the lowest emotional depths, while giving voice to the sort of dark thoughts you might file away to stew over at 3am, rather than actually saying out loud. Mental illness, sexual repression, parental estrangement: nothing is off limits here, and it’s all attacked with an almost feral comic energy.
This time around, Deb is bustling around like Mrs Bennet on SSRIs, obsessed with the idea of marrying off her eldest daughter so that Josie can achieve her mother’s dream of becoming a “kept woman”. The only catch? Josie is more interested in women than in the overbearing attentions of her “boyfriend” Seb, a steady charisma vacuum who keeps insisting on playing “Everybody in Love” by JLS whenever they sleep together (which would surely be a passion killer even if Seb wasn’t barking up the wrong tree).
Their dynamic sometimes gets a little repetitive – would an adult man really be so deluded in his affections? But this sense of stasis and inertia also feels true to Josie’s character, and her total inability to confront some aspects of her life while being gruellingly honest about others.
Deb’s deranged mission is, as ever, part of her bigger game plan to lock down the affections of her avoidant, mildly unsettling partner Dev (Paul Bazely) – and acquire the keys to his massive house. “It’s extremely important for him to see us as the sort of women men marry into, instead of avoiding in Morrisons,” she whispers to her daughters.
The strange juxtaposition of her marriage plot with the rollercoaster of all three women’s mental (in)stability sometimes has an almost surreal quality, which is aided and abetted by the fact that Davidson’s Billie spends a lot of time flouncing around in a Cinderella gown (her job involves playing a “princess” at a local kids’ party venue, having been promoted from dressing up as a green-faced witch last time around).
Billie, the bolshiest, most confident of the three, with a knack for spitting out devastatingly cutting one-liners (it’s a youngest child thing, I reckon) is embarking on an affair with Graham (Daniel Ryan). This underwhelming, middle aged (or, in Billie’s parlance, “really f**king old”) man can only meet her in the mornings, otherwise he’s too tired for sex; he also happens to be terrified of his neurologist wife.
Davidson’s character seems more in thrall to the idea of being the “other woman” than she is to the reality of Graham and their Travelodge trysts. “There’s nothing wrong with having an affair, right?” she asks her sister in a brief moment of vulnerability. “I honestly think it might be the most feminist thing you can do,” Josie replies, deadpan.
Watching these two buoy each other up to make terrible life choices is an unhinged delight. Over the past decade or so, TV viewers have been bombarded by various iterations of the so-called “messy” woman, who has a slightly unsettled love life, likes a wine and is drastically underpaid, but somehow also looks like she shops entirely at Cos, Arket and all the other more upmarket H&M spin-off shops.
But Josie, Billie and Deb feel actually, properly messy, rather than adhering to a TV exec’s more palatable version. Such Brave Girls is not a show where it’s “OK not to be OK”. Instead, the characters’ mental health struggles are shown unvarnished, and often greeted with a total lack of empathy by others. It’s bleakly funny, refreshingly realistic and never tries to reduce mental illness into a fridge magnet-style slogan – brave indeed.
