Juliet Stevenson

Bend It Like Beckham: the film that ignited a love for football in so many women and girls

When this unassuming comedy came out in 2002, women's football wasn't even a professional sport in the UK or Australia. It's worth revisiting as the Women's World Cup approaches.

Where are the Bend It Like Beckham cast now?

They kick-started some impressive careers playing football-mad teens on Bend It Like Beckham, alongside a string of well-established stars.

But while some of the cast have scored some major work goals since, others have battled personal issues including a highly-publicised drink problem and mental health struggles.

I was mystified by the new Sara Pascoe thing, Out Of Her Mind, and can only conclude that I am of the wrong gender or cultural sensibility to review it. Relentlessly, scattily modernist, with tricks such as meta-references to its own sitcom-ness, the breaking of the fourth wall, the "real" Sara Pascoe commenting on the "fictional" Sara's disaster of a life, it also felt very dated, just not in a good way.

Fictional Sara, who couldn't seem to decide whether she was bitterly life-cynical about being dumped 15 years ago or childishly, naively, irritatingly self-obsessed and rude, had to cope with the twin outrages of her sister becoming engaged and her best friend being pregnant, apparently events on some manner of end-of-days scale. Cue some stock catty rudeness about rings, dresses, weight, pinkness. The real Sara, meanwhile, got on with making some decent points, albeit while rollerskating in a pink leotard, about, say, how advertising makes women feel inferior in order to sell them stuff or how fairytales offer girls false stereotypes, yet both points agreed on, surely, in the last decades of the last century?

The show is almost saved by Juliet Stevenson as the mother, utterly lacking in self-awareness: indeed, the entire supporting cast are strong, though I could have done with more Cash Holland. Yet such things have been done better, in the last couple of years alone, by This Way Up, Catastrophe, I May Destroy You, even Motherland... hence my mystification, because so often Pascoe, a wise author in her own right, is the wittiest thing going on any panel show.

Review: Out Of Her Mind

There's a nasty sexist streak throughout: all the women except Sara just guzzle white wine between their Zumba classes. And what Juliet Stevenson is doing in this sitcom sludge is hard to imagine, unless she wanted to prove she can do an Essex accent.

TV review: Out Of Her Mind Series 1 Episode 1

The whole series is available to watch on iPlayer too and given how fantastic this opening episode is I imagine I'll have binged it all within an exceedingly short time, as Pascoe has created something truly special here.

TV: Out Of Her Mind, BBC Two

Sara Pascoe's self-penned new comedy is not backwards in coming forwards. As she says at the start. "I am going to destroy your faith in love." Mrs Brown's Boys this ain't then. But it might just be my new all-time favourite sitcom.

Out Of Her Mind review

Continuing the recent surge of strong, female-led series, this six-parter highlights the distressing side of long-term singledom, via sharp, fourth wall-shattering observations.

Out of Her Mind, BBC2, review

Sara Pascoe's series is a bitty mix of jokes, science and skating.

Guilty Feminists to perform Four Yorkshirewomen sketch

It has not yet been revealed who will be appearing in the sketch at the Royal Albert Hall, but the latest line-up for the major event has just been confirmed.