Stefan Golaszewski’s sitcom about a widow’s first year, and the family who will not let her have it, is small, slow and extremely good. Its people are drawn thick and the first episode does not sell it, but Lesley Manville and Peter Mullan reward patience.
Stefan Golaszewski’s Mum begins on the day of a funeral and, for its first two series, hardly leaves the house. Cathy (Lesley Manville) has just buried her husband, and her family have come back to eat sandwiches and not talk about it. Golaszewski wrote all eighteen episodes and directed alongside Richard Laxton; his last sitcom, Him & Her, barely left a bedsit, and this one barely leaves a semi. It is quietly excellent, and the first episode does not make that obvious. The people around Cathy are drawn with a thick pen, and half an hour with them can feel like being stuck at somebody else’s wake.
Each episode is one day, a month or more after the last, and named for the month, so the first series is the year after a death told in six visits. The camera stays put: the hall with its coats, the kitchen, the strip of garden, the landing where people stop to say things they should not. Shots are wide and held, and nobody is cut to for a reaction. There is no studio audience, no laughter track and almost no music beyond Cat Stevens’ Wild World over the titles.
Manville plays a woman whose whole method of grieving is to be useful. She finds people’s coats, refills the kettle and takes each small insult with a nod. The joke is how much she is absorbing; the sadness is the same thing seen from a step back. Peter Mullan is Michael, her husband’s oldest friend, who turns up with a carrier bag, fixes whatever needs fixing and stands in the hallway wanting to say something. Mullan has spent a career playing hard men and plays a soft one here, and the two of them make a scene about a bus timetable carry more than most dramas manage with a deathbed.
The rest of the house is louder. Jason (Sam Swainsbury), her son, eats standing at the fridge and cannot see his mother. Kelly (Lisa McGrillis), his girlfriend, is the only person who actually talks to Cathy rather than past her, and she never stops. Derek (Ross Boatman), Cathy’s brother, wants everyone to get on and gets no one to; Pauline (Dorothy Atkinson), his new girlfriend, is a snob and the show’s villain in a good coat. Karl Johnson and Marlene Sidaway are Reg and Maureen, the dead man’s parents, whose arguments about the car park are the best-written nonsense in the series.
We laughed at Kelly in the first episode. Then, a few episodes on, McGrillis lets you see that Kelly knows exactly what everyone in that house thinks of her, and we stopped laughing and felt like Pauline. Turning a broad comic character into a person for ten seconds, then letting them go back, is Golaszewski’s best trick, and he plays it on nearly everyone. Not on Pauline, who stays dreadful, and whom Atkinson plays with such conviction that we came to look forward to her arrivals.
The flaws come with the method. The first episode leans on the types too hard: Jason’s gormlessness, Pauline’s face at the crisps. Several reviews of that opening half-hour found it soothing rather than sharp, and we can see why; the sharpness is in what accumulates. The repetition is deliberate, but it is still repetition, and there are half-hours in the second series where waiting for Cathy and Michael to finish a sentence feels like being kept in a queue. Against Him & Her, it is less rude and less often funny.
The Royle Family is the obvious ancestor, but Golaszewski has a story to tell, and by the third series, which moves the family somewhere we will not describe, it has become a love story that was under our noses from the first sausage roll. The last minutes of the first series, which we will not describe either, moved us more than a PG comedy has any right to. It was Manville’s face, one line and a door.
Watch it two or three episodes at a time, not six; this family are best in small doses, which is roughly what Cathy would say if anyone asked her. It first went out on BBC Two on 13 May 2016, and it has not dated by a day.
