Motherland

Why 2016 has been a great year for women in comedy

From Fleabag and Catastrophe to My Dad Wrote a Porno, women have been having the last laugh, says Ellie Harrison.

Diane Morgan: 'Playing an idiot is easy'

Diane Morgan on Philomena Cunk, Motherland and being miserable.

Top 40 TV Shows of 2016: #17 Motherland

Is this a sign 2016 wasn't a great year for comedy? The second highest-ranking sitcom in our list - if you even count Fleabag as a sitcom - was only a one-off pilot episode.

Bruce Dessau's top TV comedy for 2016

It's been a bad year in all sorts of ways, but not in terms of TV comedy. I sat down today to come up with a top ten of the year and had difficulty narrowing it down to ten. Of course there were disappointments and programmes that didn't quite live up to expectations, such as Sky's Andrew Lawrence documentary, but there was still plenty to laugh at here. And if you are quick some of them are still available on various catch-up services. And in case you are wondering, I decided not to include Black Mirror - it was brilliant but just too painfully real to be funny.

BBC Sitcom Season: review of the pilots

Some of comedy's hottest names have been busy working on new sitcom pilots for BBC iPlayer, airing in September, with the hope of these creative projects later being picked up for a television series.

Undoubted comedy of the week was Motherland, a terribly truthful exposition of what it means to battle between being the "good" mother - a flawlessly moneyed, pretty, organised and quietly angry Lucy Punch - and the hopeless, exemplified here by Diane Morgan, who lives off frozen food, only gives a forlorn what-the-bugger-now sigh when she severs her finger, and is quietly happy.

Caught in the middle, as I suspect an entire 90% of British mothers are and always have been, is the phenomenal Anna Maxwell Martin as Julia, who makes the one mistake - one! - of lying, once. When asked, by the impossibly kind school to which she ferries with difficulties her two children, whether she had forgotten it was half-term, she opts for a proudly cheerful "No. No?" and so mires herself in a day of tense phone calls, criminal driving, accidental and deliberate snobbery, blood, wine and insane hunger while trying to hold down a job in event management. She's due later in her hellish week to have Peter Mandelson introduce the Women in Construction awards, which deserves an award of its own. As does the terse "I don't have to come to the office for a whole day to watch Elaine print out a press release."

"What time is it now?" she begs Liz (Morgan) as they struggle with their many kids, with prayers for it to be about 4.30pm, or if possible midnight. "Just after midday." "Fucking HELL." It's written by, among others, Sharon Horgan and Graham Linehan, features the most fascinating annoying dad yet written, and is a sure triumph.

I loved Motherland, a pilot sitcom about the maddening stresses of being a working mother. Julia (played by Anna Maxwell-Martin) is trying to get her brats to school, but everyone seems to be working against her: the smooth and blonde yummy mummies at the coffee shop who don't need to work; her exhausted mother who refuses any more babysitting, and her patronising husband who leaves it all to her so he can spend more time choosing pastries in Costa.

The comedy lies in her not being a suffering, saintly mother but in her being bloody fed up with it all, and not being afraid to show her frustration. Her annoying children aren't even granted names. They're just irritants and obstacles in prim little school uniforms.

Motherland review

Sharon Horgan and Graham Linehan's slapstick sitcom shows the fullblown apocalypse of child-rearing.

Motherland, BBC Two, review

Promising pilot of comedy about middle-class parenting.