She’s back and she’s just as brilliant as ever.
Sophie Willan’s second series of Alma’s Not Normal once again mines her real life for laughs – with a tremendous supporting cast.
We are back in Bolton with aspiring comic Sophie, her leopard-skin wearing gran and her mentally ill mother. Best friend Leanne, played by Jayde Adams, is now running a trendy pop-up bar next to the Town Hall, there’s a comedy agent based in the back of a fish and chip shop, a runaway dad and an extended family traumatised by poverty and cruelty.
What is so wonderful about Sophie Willan’s world is how she finds the comedy, the glory and the joy in this mass of messy humanity. By contrast the official world – of hospital wards, law courts and political officials is cold, mechanical and harsh.
There are so many beautiful moments in this six-part series. Alma pushing her sick grandma in a leopard skin covered wheelchair with speakers blasting out Edith Piaf. Childhood make believe stories about her absent father, delivered in black and white with the style, dialogue and clipped delivery of an Ealing comedy.
Scenes in grandma’s home are soft and warm, with fluffy pastel cushions and a sense of safety and refuge. It’s this place of acceptance and love that gives Alma the strength to be who she is – determined, ambitious, unconventional – striding through the streets in her brightly coloured, oversized cartoonish outfits.
Lorraine Ashbourne is fabulous as Grandma Joan and Siobhan Finneran somehow manages to make mother Lin both ridiculous and endearing, with a range of uncontrollable twitches and tics and flashing, terrified eyes. Nick Mohammed pops up as a kind but hopeless solicitor and Amy Gledhill is spellbinding as shy downtrodden Lesley
Willan, who writes and stars, has taken us to some of the worst and most difficult times of her life, but she has infused her whole creation with vitality and life. The final episode is astonishing. Alma realises how the policy of austerity has ravaged her mother’s life and care and she resolves to fight back through her own creative power.
Alma’s Not Normal is the result – a glorious celebration of working-class life – shot through with piercing satirical swipes at the lack of empathy that makes life for vulnerable members of society much more difficult than it needs to be. At the end we see Alma, aka Sophie Willan, in black and white, waving the Bafta she received for Series One.
It makes your heart jump for joy.
