Such Brave Girls, BBC Three, review: if the Inbetweeners were sisters (and depressed)
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There is a word beloved of TV executives, and that word is “bold”. It is applied to shows that long ago would have been termed “risqué” shows that get right up in your face and dare you to look away, and it applies very much to Such Brave Girls. This is a BBC Three sitcom about two sisters suffering from mental illness, mixing Inbetweeners-style gross-out comedy – inevitably, there are scenes with one of the sisters sitting on the toilet – and dark observations about suicide attempts and antidepressants.
Josie and Billie are played by real-life sisters Kat Sadler and Lizzie Davidson. Sadler is also the writer. She was previously a joke writer for Radio 4’s The News Quiz and The Now Show, but Such Brave Girls is definitely not like those.
It’s no longer shocking in itself to see women behaving badly and tackling taboos on television, which means Such Brave Girls has to go that bit further to get our attention. I’d like to tell you some of the ways in which it does this, but I can’t really repeat them here in case you’re reading before the watershed. Let’s just say that a running joke in episode one involves one of the girls walking in on their mother doing something you will want to unsee, while bent over the toaster.
I hated the first episode because it’s trying far too hard, and the sisters talk about their mental health with the relentlessness of, well, young people these days who talk about their mental health. But over the course of a few episodes it grew on me a bit, because Sadler – who has said the series was inspired by her own breakdown – sends up this self-absorption. Billie regularly threatens to kill herself because she knows her mum will respond by taking her clothes shopping and treating her to lunch at Wagamama. The sisters are mystified when Billie’s ex starts seeing a girl who seems happy: “Where’s all the damage? What the f--- does she even talk about?”
By the end, I found them quite endearing, Davidson in particular. But for those of us beyond Gen Z, there is far more fun to be had with the girls’ mother, Deb (Louise Brealey), plus Paul Bazely as her hapless new boyfriend. Deb is equally selfish and unlikeable, but delivers her lines from the cynical depths of middle age.
