Motherland: New BBC comedy is a brutally honest depiction of parenthood that has London hooked

Expect terrifying alpha-mums, chaotic childcare and party politics, says Johanna Thomas-Corr
Honest approach: new BBC comedy Motherland chronicles the struggles of busy working parents
BBC/Delightful Industries/Merman/Colin Hutton
Johanna Thomas-Corr9 November 2017

"I really need some childcare!" pants Anna Maxwell Martin’s Julia, mum-of-two and frazzled professional, in the first episode of BBC Two’s Motherland.

Kevin (Paul Ready), a well-meaning stay-at-home dad, has some advice: “You should do what Amanda does.

Monday, her kids go to her mother-in-law after school; Tuesday, she does nanny share with the family from their street; Wednesday, she does a half-day; Thursday, it’s either the nanny share or her or the mother of the other family — they take it in turns — which just leaves one Thursday a month, which they rotate; and Fridays, her mum comes every fourth weekend from Portugal, so that’s covered, and the other Fridays, Johnny works from home or Amanda takes the day off and — I believe — she catches up with everything else on the Saturday.”

There are many moments in Sharon Horgan and Graham Linehan’s new sitcom that will chime with parents. More toxic than Outnumbered and more biting than Big Little Lies, it captures modern London motherhood in all its frenzied, guilt-ridden, logistical, competitive, comatose vainglory.

It could be taken straight out of the script of anyone I know with kids. A girlfriend who is returning to full-time work from maternity leave recently described to me a similarly mind-boggling tapestry of childcare involving nurseries, half-days and worn-down grandparents whose retirement plans have been thwarted. “It’s such a precarious arrangement that if anyone gets ill or is late, the whole thing will collapse!” she said, with the same manic glint in her eye that you’ll spy in Julia as she tears through red lights to get the kids to school, screeching “Baby on board, arsehole!”

Created by Horgan, whose Channel 4 comedy Catastrophe gave an unblinking account of coupledom, and Linehan, the joint mastermind of Father Ted, Motherland holds no aspect of child-rearing as sacred. The series piloted last year, and when all six episodes of the first series dropped on iPlayer on Tuesday night it immediately became cult watching.

Co-creator Sharon Horgan
Charles Sykes/Invision/AP

It depicts that special hell of PTA fundraisers, school-run carpools and mummy WhatsApp groups. It turns Queen’s Park into a scorched landscape of unsatisfactory, fragmentary playdates, wet wipes and cake, crap wine and gallows humour around the kitchen island as the women come to horrible realisations about what has happened to their social lives.

As one friend put it: “In your twenties you went out dancing in clubs; then in your thirties you only ever danced when you got pissed at weddings; and now in your forties, the weddings have dried up so your one chance to dance is the PTA summer party.”

Motherland mines the inherent slapstick of parenting — the shivery outings to public swimming pools, the norovirus, the “cheat’s” Poundland party bags — as well as providing a tick-list of everyday nightmares familiar to parents, from stolen scooters to one-shoed toddlers. These may be first-world problems, but as any parent will know, they slowly chisel away at your sanity.

What all the mothers struggle with, ultimately, is the loss of personhood that comes with having children. I often hear myself referring to my own friends — some of whom I’ve known since I was a child — as “Harry’s mummy” and “Lily’s daddy”, as if their actual names are no longer relevant. Work aside, drinking wine and swearing are what keep us adult, separate beings from our kids. And they are the only mutinous activities we have the energy for.

I suspect Motherland is the programme that NCT instructors will soon be warning prospective mums to avoid like the plague (or an epidural). And yet such brutally honest depictions of chaotic motherhood are having a moment. In the US there’s SMILF, a brazen TV comedy about a single mother navigating work, kids and sex, that has just started airing, as well as The Letdown, a darker look at the life of a constantly exhausted new mum. And lest we forget, the Bad Moms franchise is returning for a Christmas sequel.

The six-part comedy shows the trials and traumas middle-class mums face
BBC/Delightful Industries/Merman/Colin Hutton

In their different ways, these shows dramatise the deranged monologues that women often conduct in their heads. In Julia, all split ends and barely suppressed murderousness, working mums surely have a new heroine. “No pressure but how long will this take?” she says, a line I hear myself utter all the time.

Her idea of dinner is eating a yoghurt while prostrate on the sofa. And she resents socialising with parents who wouldn’t be her friends: “This is my worst nightmare come true. Surrounded by other mums AT NIGHT,” she moans when dragged out to the pub to discuss a carpool. “I can just about handle it on the school drop but THIS!” Amen.

More often than not, Julia is trying to find someone on whom she can palm off her kids. “Did you try calling my husband?” she asks the school when their teacher calls her at work. The running joke is that Julia is never in the same room as her husband since he’s usually tied up go-karting, watching Arsenal or on an unmissable stag. “I will always have your back,” he says, before calling in his equally useless parents as reinforcements.

While he idles over which sandwich to eat for lunch, she is so time-pressed and hungry that she steals crisps from other people’s children and eventually resorts to eating the kids’ leftover spag bol out of a bin at the house of yummy mummy Amanda.

I’ve never quite raided the bin, but I did recently turn up to stay at my friends’ house, spied her kids’ leftover cold mashed potato and ketchup by the sink and asked: “Is that going spare?”

While Maxwell Martin channels her inner Basil Fawlty, Diane Morgan (aka clueless presenter Philomena Cunk) is brilliantly understated single-mother Liz, in a north London uniform of Converse and parka, whose instructions for scraping through motherhood provide some of the show’s best lines. On hosting a kids’ party: “Buy four caterpillar cakes from Asda and put them together to make one big Human Centipede cake, then just let the kids help themselves. Don’t even bother with a knife, just let them dig their creepy little hands in.”

She and Julia find themselves ostracised by the sneering yummy mummies led by the horrifying Amanda (Lucy Punch), whose designer coats and self-satisfied glow belie her status anxiety. Her posse boast blackboard feature walls and drive 4x4s, and show no interest in befriending Liz, who can offer no step up on their career ladder and no supper party invites. These women exist.

Parents have found the new sitcom to watch in Motherland (BBC/Delightful Industries/Merman/Colin Hutton )
BBC/Delightful Industries/Merman/Colin Hutton

But what particularly works about Horgan’s new series is that it skewers any idea of maternal virtue. It exposes the lie of what one friend calls “swan parenting” — that maniacal paddling under the water in order somehow to propel forward in a calm manner— “except that I often look more like a deranged manky pigeon rather than a swan. And I go round in circles. With various stains all over my clothes.”

The same friend recounts snapping at her toddler for trying to get her attention while she was starting the car. Only later did she realise he’d been trying to tell her she’d left the front door wide open.

What’s interesting is that in Motherland the kids don’t really have a voice. At a time when child-centred parenting is fashionable, they’re on the periphery — but this only underlines how so many of the pressures of parenting come from the expectations of adults rather than the children.

In her controversial memoir about becoming a mother, novelist Rachel Cusk revealed how the experience is both debasing and redeeming: “In motherhood, I have experienced myself as both more virtuous and terrible, and more implicated in the world’s virtue and terror than I could from the anonymity of childlessness have thought possible.”

Horgan and Linehan’s new sitcom shows exactly that — motherhood at its most redemptive and its most petty. It screens at 10pm, so it’s lucky that the whole series is available to watch on iPlayer. By 10pm, I suspect, most of its core audience will have fallen asleep on the sofa holding a half-eaten yoghurt.

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