10 hours ago
8
There’s a scene early on in the first series of Such Brave Girls that sums the whole thing up nicely. Josie – a millennial not long out of a mental health crisis, now just in a general, all-encompassing life crisis – has helped her sister to bleach her hair. Unfortunately, she has neglected to tell Billie that the plastic bag she put over her head has left a massive, Shrek-green Asda logo on the dye job. Billie – who alternates between sweetly naive and absolutely petrifying, with little warning – lunges at Josie and smothers her new dress in ketchup, before threatening to kill herself. The girls’ mother will later attempt to return said dress to the shop – stains and all – feigning tears as she tells the shop assistant how much debt she’s in.
Suffice to say, Such Brave Girls isn’t a wholesome coming-of-age affair. It is, however, a brilliant, startlingly feral comedy, one which scooped the scripted comedy Bafta last year (previous winners include Derry Girls, This Country and Peep Show). The subject matter – suicide, abortion, financial ruin, deep-seated abandonment issues – sounds like the stuff of sadcoms. But what makes it stand out in a post-Waller-Bridge world is that it is an unashamed sitcom, with a regular cast and recurring gags. Think The Inbetweeners, if it had it been written by Julia Davis.
It is, in fact, from the twisted mind of Kat Sadler, who plays Josie alongside her real-life sister Lizzie Davidson as Billie; the show, in particular the mental health and debt parts, are loosely based on their own lives. (There is an Inbetweeners connection, though: Simon Bird, AKA Will, is the director.) Along with Sadler and Davidson, Louise Brealey completes the troubled triad as their mum, Deb, who is just as – if not more – self-absorbed and unstable than her daughters (staunchly anti-therapy, at one point she declares that it is only “for celebrities”). Broke thanks to a runaway husband and cosplaying as a widow, Deb pins all her hopes on rich boyfriend Dev (Paul Bazely), “our Willy Wonka ticket out of fucking hell” and an actual widower. Billie, meanwhile, is both impressively nonchalant – she pitches up at an abortion clinic in the witch’s outfit from her job at Kidz Cauldron – and dangerously obsessed with on-off boyfriend Nicky (Sam Buchanan).
If Billie often feels like Blanche DuBois for the TikTok generation, Josie is a more muted presence. Controlled by her sister, mother and a boyfriend she can’t stand (because she’s secretly queer), she is often afforded only a supporting role in her own life story.
Series two arrives with only a smattering of preview episodes and a spoiler list that makes writing about it feel like navigating a hallway blocked by lasers. What I can say, though, is that it’s excellent, and that Josie is still completely overpowered: episode one begins with Deb and Billie forcibly removing her from an art school lecture and sticking a bag over her head to get her to comply with their latest scheme. Still repulsed by the idea of having any sort of sexual contact with Seb (Freddie Meredith), Josie becomes fixated on a fellow student, a girl named Charlie. What unfolds takes us to even darker places than series one.
Sadler’s performance during Josie’s long-awaited NHS mental health assessment, in particular, is at once terrifyingly unpredictable and a complete hoot. Billie says of her sister’s unconvincing display of sanity: “Your mouth’s doing the right thing, but your eyes are trying to call the Samaritans.” Not that she is doing much better, having embarked on an inadvisable affair with an older man named Graham (he told her he wasn’t married, she told him she was 15), launching herself at him at every opportunity then rebranding herself as a sugar baby when he pays her to leave him alone.
Deb’s mental state is disintegrating, too, along with her finances, and we see her careening to the supermarket on a scooter, card declined at the till. The rest of the cast remain just as compellingly pathetic, and the decision to make Seb and Dev co-workers at a banal, Wernham Hogg-esque office is a neat trick to guarantee enough screen time for both.
Such Brave Girls won’t be to everyone’s tastes. In fact, there are plenty of people I can imagine not rolling about at lines like “I heard she gets a smear test every week just so someone has to look at her vagina”, or revelling in the sheer lack of empathy that every single character here has for one another. But if you like your comedy scary, lairy and perfectly portioned, it is a total knockout. Josie is pretty brave, but Sadler is even braver.
