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I love watching real-life siblings on-screen. They bring a knotted history to every interaction, the way they look at one another, or don’t. They may love each other; they’re definitely stuck with each other. Daisy May and Charlie Cooper were the last to bottle such contradiction; I’m delighted we now have Such Brave Girls (BBC One, Wednesday 2 July, 11.40pm), returning for a second series, in which creator Kat Sadler stars alongside her sister Lizzie Davidson. Cattier than Longleat, it features some of the most savage writing on TV, and makes me yowl with pleasure.
It’s about traumatised women making terrible choices. Bear with. The ever-excellent Louise Brealey plays Deb, whose husband abandoned his family 10 years ago after popping to the shop for teabags. In financial trouble, she spends her time trying to lock down relations with drippy, slippery widower Dev, played by Paul Bazely, explicitly for his big house. Single-mindedness has made her grim, grasping and less maternal than a stressed hamster. Bad news for daughters Josie and Billie, who give off the stench of joint captivity, and have split into twin coping strategies: one depressed and passive, the other overconfident, bullish and equally lost.
There are many jokes about sex, all three women wildly pursuing or running away from ludicrous men. But its most adult theme is desperation, which every character is thinly masking. One of the funniest running jokes is the way Deb and Billie dismiss the “haunting presence” of Josie. Deb has no time for her depressed daughter’s big feelings, interest in art or grapples with lesbianism. Life is about finding a man and moving in with him. She urges her to “Remember the family crest! Ignore, repress, forget.”
Scowling harder than Kanye West, Davidson gets to spit the most deliciously vicious lines. “She only shaves one leg,” she hisses of an unmarried aunt, “so when she sleeps on her side she can pretend a man is spooning her.” She’s no fan of Josie’s rare smile, either. “Your mouth’s doing the right thing, but your eyes are calling Samaritans.” Having turned her obsessive attention away from drug-dealing Nicky, she’s now chasing a much older, married man. (They meet in the mornings, as he’s too tired to get an erection at night.) “There’s nothing wrong with having an affair, right?’ she asks, a shade of self-awareness crossing her face. “I honestly think it might be the most feminist thing you can do,” responds Josie.
The first series announced Sadler as a brilliant voice. Her writing pitilessly skewers the discourse around pop-feminism, queerness, sexuality and mental health. Pitiless does not mean unempathetic – the show was born of personal experience. During lockdown, Sadler revealed to Davidson that she’d spent time on a psych ward after twice trying to kill herself, and her sister admitted she was £20,000 in debt. They found themselves laughing. If you’re in a raw place, the fun they have with self-harm, workplace shooting, dissociation and the self-delusion required to live a lie until you die, may be too much. For most of us, it’s the medicine.
Directed by Simon Bird of The Inbetweeners, and co-produced by A24, there’s big underwriting, too. The first series saw a few mannered performances from the supporting cast, but these have settled in now. Its female trinity remain a scream, as the story tacks farcical in ways I won’t spoil here. Let’s just say they’re riding that family crest like a surfboard into disaster.
Dark comedy is a phrase overused, and perhaps meaningless. Granted, you have to be the kind of person who finds a mother warning her daughter, “Try not to poison this family with your personality” funny to get Such Brave Girls. I’d argue that is the central brain-stem of the British psyche. There are strains of Peep Show, Julia Davies, Sharon Horgan and Fleabag. Like them, the show has no message other than that life is absurd, pain inevitable and people ridiculous. That makes it more clear-sighted and honest than any show telling us what to think. And you get sisters tearing strips off each other. Truly, there is eloquence in blood.
