Sometimes after a hard day’s parenting – or a hard year’s parenting – it’s difficult to know whether a parenting sitcom is really what you want to watch. From Outnumbered to Breeders and, back now for a Christmas special, Motherland (BBC One), they do tend towards bleakness. Are you worried that you won’t ever find a reward in the endless cycle of rushed breakfasts, lost consent forms, botched childcare arrangements, pointless parents’ evenings, compromised marriages and unhelpful grandparents? Sometimes Motherland feels like it’s saying: you never will, so let’s mirthlessly chuckle at how thankless the task is – and always will be.
In the new episode, once the Christmas preamble is out of the way – which in Motherland means acerbically ticking off regular trials and new trends, like the expectation that a term’s worth of primary-school work will be taken home and cherished, or the sudden preponderance of cargo bikes – we settle in for what looks like a typically horrendous 25 December with Julia (Anna Maxwell Martin). As well as continuing her fractious relationship with her own mother (Ellie Haddington), whose gift she has ended up shopping for online on the day itself, she must deal with the inane wanderings of her ludicrously self-absorbed husband (Oliver Chris), who is constructing a plunge pool in the garden, and his parents, who are farting in the lounge.
Friends are either incoming or suffering their own agonies. Kevin (Paul Ready), the male one, is invited because he can cook, and because he would otherwise be eating crisps in a hotel full of other divorced dads. Liz (Diane Morgan), the working-class one, is meant to be going to her feckless ex’s but, well, he’s feckless, so she’ll arrive at Julia’s soon enough. Enviably settled and sorted Meg (Tanya Moodie) – whose cancer treatment storyline last year was a rare example of a proper problem intruding into their million-pound Victorian terraces – Julia’s neighbour on the other side of their nice north London street is chugging Baileys and reconsidering all her life choices, because she’s been hit with the pure indecency of her husband buying her an expensive present she dislikes.
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What of brittle queen bee Amanda (Lucy Punch)? A character that has improved steadily as her world has fractured must now face Christmas with her ex-husband, his new partner and Amanda’s cartoonishly horrible mother, Felicity (Joanna Lumley), whom we met during the similarly fraught Mother’s Day episode. The sort of mum who asks you to get ready to go out when she knows full well you are already wearing a pricey new outfit and full face of makeup. Felicity is the best and worst of Motherland. Often she spits out jaw-dropping lines that boldly push the show’s trademark micro-aggressions into darker territory (on having prevented the young Amanda from taking a horizon-expanding gap year in South America: “You would have got raped, and I stand by that”) but in the main her belittling and bullying of her daughter is both generic – she is a better-written version of the pass-agg mother archetype from countless other comedies – and so relentless it becomes more depressing than amusingly recognisable.
Back at our base, Julia’s house, Christmas is threatening to become another infuriating grind for a woman who embodies how lonely it is when you’re left to do everything for everyone in your house without any acknowledgment, let alone any gratitude. And yet Kevin is there, his nervous energy somehow producing an unorthodox but delicious festive dinner with a Persian twist. Liz is incoming with crisps and wine. Meg is in view, since she’s had enough of her lot and is outside, perched with a bottle on her front wall. It will be OK, ish: beneath all the muttered curses and rolled eyes, Motherland is a paean to the power of a gang of supportive mums (and Kevin) giving one another a lifeline and a space to vent.
And then … this Christmas episode features a special event, which flips the regular Christmas Day tribulations on their head and lets Motherland’s gifts for gleefully inappropriate black humour, biting pathos and unexpected physical comedy run amok: when it’s on form it’s a show that makes you gasp in shock as you laugh. There’s plenty of that here, not to mention crying as you laugh and, on at least one occasion, defiantly punching the air as you laugh, when a payoff that has long been coming finally arrives.
Motherland might flirt with blank despair and be very funny doing it, but it always ends up, just about, as more catharsis than complaint. So let’s join it in raising a glass, to a trying Christmas and a doubtless exhausting new year. Cheers!