It can be a bit jarring when you catch yourself hooting at Alma’s Not Normal. A woman recalling a grim childhood she describes as being spent like “the baby in Trainspotting, if she’d lived” shouldn’t be funny … right? But creator Sophie Willan, who won a Bafta for the pilot of this show based on her own upbringing, has a razor-sharp wit – one that can find a punchline in any shitstorm. This unabashed sense of humour, along with authentic storytelling, is an invitation to acknowledge life’s lemons and laugh in the face of them. And that is how a series about a thirtysomething woman in Bolton brought up in care unravelled to be one of the most joyous comedy dramas of the year.
When we meet Alma – dressed in a bright faux-fur coat like a pink flamingo – her toxic boyfriend has just left her, she is desperate for work and she is navigating relationships with her addict mum Lin and her Tinder-swiping, Spam-loving grandma Joan (played to absolute perfection by Siobhan Finneran and Lorraine Ashbourne respectively). Luckily, Alma has a brilliant friend by her side: Leanne (Jayde Adams), who has “the mannerisms of a truck driver and the rock’n’roll sex appeal of Debbie Harry”. After they spend a night on the booze with kebabs and karaoke mics, it’s time for Alma to get her act together once and for all.
The six-episode series saw her journey from getting a job as a sandwich artist to being offered a place on a local theatre tour, and making money as a sex worker in between. One week she was drinking champagne with “fabulous” client Phil, the next she was running away from a house with a stolen dog after a group of punters threaten her. And then there’s the heavy breathing client who is “like a pug that’s been on a long walk” during sex. “Why do people always psychoanalyse sex workers and question how empowered they are?” she asks Leanne, perhaps also challenging the viewer. “You don’t go to a telesales office and go: ‘Oh, Sue on the phones – is she empowered or is she loudly selling carpets because she was an only child?’” It’s a brilliant way of comically confronting life’s grey areas from a place of truth.
As Alma works on rebuilding herself, she also examines her foundations, attempting to reconcile with her difficult childhood. This came to a head in the penultimate, and standout, episode in which she is sent a box of administrative records that were kept while she grew up in care. Her devastation over what is detailed in them comes out by shouting at an assistant in a 99p shop over a spatula that costs £1.29: “I’m being fucked, again!” But by the end of the episode, she’d turned it around, using her experience in care to help her bag an acting role. “You’re going to be more than fine; you’re going to be fucking fabulous, love,” she tells the little girl in her records, and yes – that is a tear in your eye.
More serious ground is covered – observations on the welfare system, the reality of living with addiction – and it is mainly Alma’s fragile mum who threaded these issues throughout. After spending the whole series trying her hardest to rehouse Lin and ensure she doesn’t relapse, Alma spends the last episode deliberating whether she should put her stage dreams on hold. “Don’t give up now,” she tells her mother through the letterbox. “Crack and smack are not normal ways of blowing off steam, Mum.”
It was heartbreaking, ugly, funny and real – an appropriately bittersweet finale of a brave series that celebrated the fabulously flawed.
