Amandaland (BBC One, Wednesday) is a spin-off of Motherland, the Sharon Horgan school-gates comedy that wryly chronicled the horrors of getting your kids out the door each morning and the hell of interacting with teachers and other parents. Horgan returns as co-producer of Amandaland, which takes up the story of Motherland’s obliviously posh “alpha mum” Amanda, portrayed once again with expert dizziness by Lucy Punch.
But Motherland Part 2 it isn’t. Amanda was always the most caricatured of Motherland’s crew – a broad-strokes cliche that only worked because of Punch’s gift for comedic flailing about. That cartoonishness endures as we check in with Amanda while she recovers from a divorce and attempts to juggle parenting teenagers and her career as an influencer.
As with Motherland, there is lots of Irishness sprinkled through, with Mayo actor Philippa Dunne reprising her performance as chirpy mammy Anne. She’s a cheery powerhouse – it comes as a surprise to discover Dunne’s specialist topic on Mastermind was Stanley Kubrick’s horror, The Shining.
Amandaland also stars Cork’s Siobhán McSweeney, though she might not thank her agent for setting her up with the role of a grumpy chef and restaurateur. Her character is a black hole of anti-humour who thinks nothing of feeding her 14-year-old booze and is, in the round, sour and unlikeable. McSweeney does her best, but there’s nothing here for her to work with. Her comedy gifts simply cannot overcome the character’s two-dimensional unpleasantness, and it’s hard not to feel that we’ve been cheated out of another memorable performance by the actor.
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One problem with the show from an Irish perspective is that it leans heavily – if not obsessively – into the English fixation with class. Amanda has moved from Chiswick to South Harlesden, and her kids are attending the local school – all of which is presented as cataclysmic comedown.
Perhaps it is: England, after all, is a country where even the supermarkets have a caste system. But the nuances will be lost on anyone who couldn’t tell the difference between a postcode and a Post-it note and doesn’t know Waitrose from WeightWatchers.
Punch’s Amanda is nonetheless hilarious and is in her element when participating in a car-boot sale where she refuses to sell anything to anyone (she’s a hoarder in denial), and later when she takes a job (“a collab”) with a kitchen fitter. However, she has her match in Joanna Lumley, both funny and poignant as her ageing mother, Felicity. A former model whose peers are all dying off, Felicity insists on referring to her live-in carer as her PA and is in denial about the ageing process. Lumley brings pathos to a largely uproarious affair – the bittersweet cherry atop that rare comedy spin-off that stands on its own two feet.
