Motherland, episode 4 review: it's become increasingly clear that Julia is not a heroine but an irritant
“We’ve seen first-hand how overwhelmed you are, so we’re going to move nearby. Then we can be right here, all the time.” Not words that anyone wants to hear from annoying in-laws, let alone perma-frazzled protagonist Julia (Anna Maxwell-Martin) in parenting sitcom Motherland (BBC Two).
Her serially absent husband Paul (Oliver Chris) was away on a stag do – canal boat, captain’s cap, Pimm’s, what larks – but patronisingly tried to make up for it by sending his aged parents to help out his harassed wife.
Geoff and Elizabeth (played by the estimable duo of David Calder and Penny Ryder) turned out to be more of a hindrance: demanding to be waited on hand-and-foot, driving Julia to distraction and breaking her loo. Which may have been connected to Geoff’s chronic indigestion.
Luckily, Julia’s school gates friend Kevin (Paul Ready) had a disproportionate fondness for the elderly and offered to assist Julia with her in-law-wrangling. Of course, tragicomic Kev turned out to be less of a “geriatric-whisperer” than she’d hoped. “You said you were like Paul O’Grady with old people,” she hissed at him.
Hair-tossing alpha mum Amanda (Lucy Punch) was having a wardrobe clear-out and reluctantly gave chaotic single mother Liz (Diane Morgan) her old leopard print coat, which had a miraculous effect on its new owner. Liz was suddenly “flirted at” by baristas, handed flowers on the street and sexually irresistible to her ex. Typically for this pleasingly misanthropic character, she soon tired of all the attention and gave the coat away again.
Morgan is the best thing in this show, with her deadpan cynicism and devil-may-care approach to parenting. Here she extolled the virtues of school breakfast club (“Drop him off early, miss the traffic, he has his morning poo in school while I’m back in bed”) and advised Julia to stop asking her little darlings what they’d like to eat: “Just give them cornflakes. They’re not gourmets. My son would eat a bowl of Lego if I put it in front of him.”
Smug lifestyle trappings were present and correct: skinny lattes, enviable kitchens, Farrow & Ball paintwork. There was some broad physical comedy with a soft-closing school door, a finger-nipping deckchair and a “For Sale” sign. A child also mistook his grandfather’s flesh-coloured hearing aid for a home-made biscuit and tried to eat it.
Motherland has attracted gushing reviews and on the whole, deserves them. It’s sharply written, smartly observed and strongly performed. There’s plentiful goodwill for the writing team too, led by Sharon Horgan (Catastrophe, Pulling) and Graham Linehan (Father Ted, Count Arthur Strong).
However, this episode was quite stressful to watch. Maxwell-Martin’s psychotically highly-strung performance was all fake smiles, impatient snapping, shrieking and shouting. After five episodes (including last year’s pilot), her self-centredness is beginning to grate. Rather than a harried heroine, she’s become an irritant. All the over-stretched middle-class mothers scrambling to self-deprecatingly proclaim “That’s me! That’s my life!” might want to pause for a moment before identifying with such an unsympathetic character.
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Bearing in mind the liberal credentials of its creators, Motherland is also strangely conventional. Apart from token house-husband Kevin (so eye-rollingly pathetic, he pees sitting down to avoid “toilet seat politics”), all the fathers are lazily hands-off.
The only non-white faces were a waiter and a nanny with an aggressive boyfriend, which hardly reflects the reality of the sitcom’s north-west London setting. It felt distinctly dated and about as accurately diverse as Richard Curtis’s Notting Hill.
Worst of all, the script whiffed of ageism. The in-laws were deaf, doddery, forgetful, homophobic and prone to falling asleep midway through lunch. Sure, Motherland is all refracted through the prism of Julia’s on-the-verge-of-meltdown brain – family and friends are merely sources of stress – but the elderly were still made the butt of too many jokes.
This episode had acerbically amusing moments but some of its regressive attitudes left a sour aftertaste.
