Motherland

I’ve been doing some parenting recently.  Well, I held a friend’s baby for about half an hour while she had a crème brûlée (the mum, not the three-month-old).  Despite not having procreated, I was fairly confident I could keep the young lad content with my impressive jiggling skills, honed over a decade ago when I was a quaternary caregiver to my niece.  A couple of times however, I could sense his bottom lip quiver, his copious cheeky cheeks redden and his little face screw up in unhappiness, prompting me to adopt a new position to distract him from any number of distress sources: hunger, overheating, a soiled gusset, boredom with the view.  When the moment came, I was fairly satisfied to be handing him back over, even if the girls had commented that his 6.5kg of weight had leant my biceps an alluring bulge.  If I factor up the duration of that brief stint of (quite literally) baby sitting to a week, I have to multiply its difficulty by 336, and if we go all the way to the eighteenth birthday at which point I assume you turf your progeny out into the street and cut them off from the family fortune, that’s a total of 314,496 units of parenting.  In short: child-rearing is hard.  And as the owner of a phallus, I’ve got the easy end of the stick, as it were.  Motherhood is hardest of all.  Here, then, is the hilarious truth that forms the comedic backbone to BBC sitcom, Motherland, whose achievements we will be celebrating today.

Too millennial ever to be aware of what’s scheduled on the actual TV, I was only vaguely conscious of Motherland’s two series when they first went out, catching glimpses whenever the real telly came when switching from Netflix to Amazon Prime.  I knew one of its creators was Sharon Horgan, who had co-created Catastrophe, and again, following my nose in working out why people on podcasts like a thing, I finally plumped to dive in after spotting Motherland’s first series appear on Netflix, before eventually tracking down the second on iPlayer.  I was craving the wit and cynicism of British humour after having so many glossy American boxsets in recent rotation: Power, Watchmen and, er, Love Island USA.  The situation is suburban London and the comedy is balancing childcare, a career, a relationship, and, worst of all, other mums, so let’s meet the mothers of this land:

Julia

The master of the fake smile, Julia covers up each episode’s mounting shower of disasters with a suitably correlating uptick in false cheerfulness, effectively using effusive exclamations to paper over cracks in her best-laid plans until she ultimately breaks down in ranting and raving.  We cross our fingers and toes that she will catch a break, but she’s ever thwarted by each element of what should be her support structure: her husband would help but he has to play golf with the lads, her mother would help but she’s entitled to enjoy her retirement, the other mums would help but they’re busy forming a sort of mummy Mean Girls (mean mums?) at the local café, consigning Julia to the table by the toilets.  A career in PR only makes matters worse, as it does most things, but it’s the people Julia meets at that lavatory-adjacent table who finally offer help.

Liz

The queen of laid-back parenting, Liz has had to develop more extreme coping strategies as a single mum.  Her seemingly thick skin places her well to encourage Julia to be less anxious, though Liz does herself later struggle with pushchair extraction when her youngest finally abandons her for nursery.  Life’s too short not to cut corners, and that time saved is better spent having a cheeky drink anyway.

Kevin

Yes, it’s a man, but Kevin is perhaps the mumsiest of all.  Contrasting with Liz’s workaround and make-do methods, Kevin is not happy unless he is out-parenting left, right and centre.  Desperate for the approval of the other mums, he volunteers for every PTA gig going, yet fails to find the acceptance he yearns for.  Mostly seen in a cagoule, his highlights are his throwaway lines about never-seen wife Gill as it’s clear to everyone but him that his approach to parenting makes her skin crawl.  Yes, Kevin is cloying, but his heart’s in the right place, and his very inclusion provides a spirited commentary on gender roles for those that are looking to find one.  Otherwise he’s a silly sausage in a bicycle helmet.

Amanda (not Mandy)

With her expensively coiffured blonde hair and yoga-taught frame, Amanda is the alpha-mummy whose every utterance either allows her to show off (less of the humble, more of the brag) or serves as a backhander to put down the other mums around her.  For some reason, I love her.

Anne

My favourite mum.  She begins as one of many flunkies to Amanda’s act as chief mum, but soon accumulates enough scene-stealing lines to guarantee belly laughs so loud that you can only hope you’re giving your neighbours a taste of their own medicine for all those lockdown reggaeton parties you’ve endured.  She’s a cautious parent, convinced all adults are out to molest or poison her offspring, which makes trick or treating challenging.  Her wardrobe malfunction at a swimming pool party and her poor management of her own IBS during a weekend away in half term both endear her further to me.

The second series also sees the introduction of Meg, a hard-partying, hard-working mum who hasn’t got time for any of your nonsense, unless it involves being abusive on night buses.  I can’t work out what they’ve been trying to do with her beyond address a lack of diversity but it’s great to have her along.  Let’s say she is wonderfully complex.

On the other hand, the kids rarely merit any significant characterisation and this is, again, because they don’t really matter.  The humour is brittle and acidic when it comes to deploring the role of modern working mums, running households, keeping everyone happy, sacrificing their interests and yet still being expected to knock up a harvest festival costume at a moment’s notice.  They’ve been told they can have it all, but yet somehow it feels like having nothing.  The swimming pool party episode illustrates this perfectly when Julia, hair done and posh outfit selected for a career-important work do, is strong-armed into in-pool supervision that leaves her showing up later at her function as drowned as a rat.  We laugh because it’s true, but as I recovered from each chortle, I had to check my childless male privilege lest I feel hopeless about a status quo whose imbalance looms large in daily lives.  Motherland’s comedy comes from its universal truth, but I’m sure we could find something else to laugh about if gender inequality no longer existed.