Andrew Chaplin

Watch ten minutes of Alma's Not Normal (2020) and try to say what the director did. It is not easy, and that is the point. Andrew Chaplin shoots Bolton in flat daylight on real streets, lets a long conversation run without cutting away, and puts no music under the sad bits to tell us they are sad. The colour is in the rooms and the clothes rather than the light, and it is bright on purpose, because a comedy about a woman with no job, no qualifications and a mother on a psychiatric ward would otherwise sink. He has said as much: "we wanted it to feel really bright and optimistic - and that was to match Alma's optimistic mindset."

He came to directing in the mid-2010s after production and VT jobs, and his first long runs were on other people's shows: three series of Witless (2016), two of Roisin Conaty's GameFace (2017). The shape was set early. Single-camera sitcoms built around a writer-performer, often set in the North of England, with casts that mix working professionals and local people who have never acted before. Mister Winner (2020) was physical comedy; The Full Monty (2023) gave him four episodes of the television follow-up to the film, with Robert Carlyle and Mark Addy; The Power of Parker (2023) and Smoggie Queens (2024) came after. We have reviewed only Alma, and it is where his reputation sits.

He keeps the same people around him, which explains a good deal. Nathaniel Hill has photographed eleven of his projects, Charlie Fawcett has cut thirteen, Gill Isles has produced the whole of Alma. The editor matters most, because Chaplin treats the cut as the last draft of the script and shoots to leave Fawcett room. The result on screen is that scenes end a beat later than most sitcoms would allow. We laughed at Alma's Not Normal and then, in the scenes with Alma's mother, we stopped laughing, and we could not find the moment where we had been told to. Nothing nudged us. That is the direction.

The reservation is a mild one. A few episodes of Alma tie up too neatly, and a director this willing to let a conversation stay loose could have let an ending or two stay loose as well. The wider point, that everything he has made sits inside familiar British comedy-drama, is true and not yet a problem, because the shows have been good enough to make the familiarity feel like a choice.

Leonard and Hungry Paul (2025) is next. We would like, once, to see him handed a script that does not want to be liked, to find out what the plainness does when it has nothing warm to protect.