26-02-2025
The triumph of Amandaland proves Britain loves a snob
For a decade or more, Britain has been lamenting the demise of the sitcom. What was once a staple of the television schedule – and indeed a testament to the British sense of humour – had become seen as démodé, out of step with a burgeoning industry that was striving instead for cinematic gloss. While several excellent sitcoms have been made over the past year or so – Big Boys, Alma's Not Normal – they don't have the extraordinary reach of something such as Dad's Army, the catchphrases and zingers of which still linger in the public consciousness after half a century.
But the BBC's Amandaland has bucked the trend. The series – a spin-off from the sitcom Motherland – features former queen bee Amanda (Lucy Punch) coping with the tragedy of moving from 'leafy' Chiswick' to 'vibrant' South Harlesden with her teenage children, following the break-up of her marriage. It's that rare thing: a show that's even better than the (very good) original. Viewers clearly agree, with consolidated figures of 4.6 million for the first episode, the best for a new TV comedy series since 2019. A second series, although not yet confirmed by the BBC, seems inevitable.
Amandaland works so well for several reasons. The relatively large ensemble of dysfunctional characters are cleverly delineated, and the cast is uniformly strong (special praise to Ekow Quartey, a name new to me, as the adorable JJ). While Amanda is, on occasion, a monster, she's also recognisably human, with Punch adding a level of psychological understanding that wasn't there in Motherland. Now that she is no longer a wealthy alpha mum due to her divorce, we see Amanda's vulnerability; her desperate attempts to maintain that she's a cut above – her lowly job at a kitchen store becomes, in her words a 'co-lab' – are funny, but also heartbreaking. The oddballs who inhabit her manic life (from her regal, icy mother, played by Joanna Lumley, to her adoring, dowdy friend Anne, played by Phillippa Dunne) want to protect her, and the viewer does too.
I think some of the show's success is owed to its humanity – but I wager that there's a bigger, more basic reason. We all love a snob, particularly a snob such as Amanda, who has fallen on hard times or has delusions of grandeur. The acme of the latter trait was Hyacinth Bucket in Keeping Up Appearances, always fearful that her down-market relatives would turn up at her pristine chalet bungalow. Such behaviour was generally, in fact, the meat of sitcoms for several decades, whether it was the aspirations of Harold Steptoe (Harry H Corbett), constantly thwarted by his grubby father Albert (Wilfrid Brambell), or the insecurities of Captain Mainwaring (Arthur Lowe) in Dad's Army, who dampened his feelings of social inferiority by marshalling the ageing troops of the Walmington-on-Sea Home Guard.
Penelope Keith arguably made an entire career out of playing snobs, a niche that rewarded the viewer most richly in The Good Life as golf widow Margo Leadbetter peeked forlornly through her leaded-light windows to witness the rackety attempts of her neighbours Tom and Barbara Good (Richard Briers and Felicity Kendal) to become self-sufficient.
We Britons love a snob because we're obsessed with social class. It pervades our daily life, be it the assumptions we make every time somebody opens their mouth, or the subtleties of our language – 'granny' versus 'nan', 'pudding' versus 'sweet' – which must blow foreign visitors' minds. Yet despite our preoccupations, British TV has sometimes tried to pretend that social striations don't exist, or are at least irrecoverably blurred – a hangover, perhaps, from John Major's promise to create a classless society upon becoming prime minister in 1990.
I remember, for instance, a period of socially non-specific TV drama in the early 2000s during which someone such as Kevin Whately, sporting a strong regional accent and a Christian name like 'Finn', would come home from a hard day working in some vaguely manual job to his RP-speaking wife (perhaps Emma Fielding) and open a brutal Merlot, thus creating a social situation which was rather hard to define. But often in recent years, the middle-classes haven't been deemed interesting, and thus television drama tends to focus on the 'gritty' (almost always urban working-class) or what I suppose I have to call 'posh'.
In fact, posh people behaving badly has in recent years become a subgenre in itself. Up and down the land, middle-aged marketing managers are lapping up Rivals (based on the Jilly Cooper novel) as well as a lot of American series, of which The White Lotus, a series drooled over by media types who really should know better, is the best known. We love posh people, and we particularly love posh people when they screw up.
Those of you who have seen Amandaland will know that, in part, it's about posh people screwing up. But it's also far more interesting than that, far better observed than any glossy US import, and that's because the series is galvanised by the hang-ups and paradoxes of the British class system, snobbery most of all. The writers – Holly Walsh, Helen Serafinowicz, Barunka O'Shaughnessy and Laurence Rickard – know that to be British is to gingerly plot a route across various social minefields every day, and it shows in the scripts.
I predict that the success of Amandaland will spawn a host of imitators, and that comedy executives will realise that the middle classes matter and want to see themselves – or a hyped-up version of themselves – on TV. Yes, successful drama is sometimes about class: think of Peter Flannery's Our Friends in the North. But in general, comedy mines its absurdities far more effectively. All those old sitcoms make us realise our own insecurities. Sometimes we're ridiculous – and we need to be reminded of that.
