Amandaland remains the BBC’s best sitcom by a country mile
Lucy Punch and Joanna Lumley take hilarious shots at everyone, from online influencers to the Labour Government
“So you post a picture of yourself eating cake and that’s a job?” asked a baffled Joanna Lumley in the new series of Amandaland (BBC One), neatly summing up the absurdity of being a social media influencer. Luckily for us, it’s a job with endless comic potential, and this second series overflows with jokes about Amanda (Lucy Punch) trying and failing to become a luxury content creator. It remains the BBC’s best sitcom by a country mile.
We reunite with Amanda as she secures financing for her lifestyle brand, Senuous, from “some major Chinese investors, a banking operation based out of Hong Kong Shanghai”. Translation: a £3,000 personal loan from her local branch of HSBC. She inveigles her way into the school’s Careers Week programme to teach the pupils how to become influencers, and is keen to assert her company’s charitable status: “Senuous is a not-for-profit organisation. We have literally never made a profit.”
And so she goes on through the series, mostly delusional but with just enough self-awareness to be mortifyingly embarrassed around once per episode.
All the main cast are present and correct, although I do miss Peter Serafinowicz as the ridiculous South African property developer who wooed Amanda in series one. Della the chef (Siobhán McSweeney) is away at the beginning of this run, having taken a corporate gig in Hawaii, but returns later to her chaotic domestic bliss with the hopeless Fi (Rochenda Sandall).
The new character this time is Abs, downstairs-neighbour Mal’s straight-talking ex, played by Big Boys actress Harriet Webb. There is also a cameo in a later episode by Pam Ferris as an elderly neighbour who lives in a property that Amanda covets. “Senuous operates at the aspirational end of the lifestyle space,” Amanda informs a bank employee, “so it’s vital that I, as CEO, look like someone who lives in a large house”.
At the Royal Television Society Awards in March, Punch was beaten to the best female comedy performance prize by Philippa Dunne, who plays Anne. Dunne is great, but it doesn’t seem right that Punch hasn’t been garlanded for this role. Perhaps they’ll put that right at the TV Baftas this Sunday.
Nodding to its roots as a Motherland spin-off, Amanda and co-tackle various aspects of parenting teens – from awkward sex-education talks to preparations for the end-of-year prom. Meanwhile, Amanda worries about ageing and her mother, and Felicity (Lumley) deals with late-life loneliness. The script gives Lumley the most delicious lines. “Most of my friends have sadly left us,” she tells someone. “They didn’t die – they just moved to the Cayman Islands when Labour got in.”
Meanwhile, neighbour Mal (Samuel Anderson), has started using coasters and folding the end of his loo roll into a point. Amanda is an influencer, after all.
[Source: Daily Telegraph]
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