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Sophie Willan with Nicolas Ashbury, Siobhan Finneran and Lorraine Ashbourne in Alma’s Not Normal
Out of the ordinary: Sophie Willan (in pink) with Nicolas Ashbury, Siobhan Finneran and Lorraine Ashbourne in Alma’s Not Normal. Photograph: Matt Squire/BBC/Expectation
Out of the ordinary: Sophie Willan (in pink) with Nicolas Ashbury, Siobhan Finneran and Lorraine Ashbourne in Alma’s Not Normal. Photograph: Matt Squire/BBC/Expectation

Alma's Not Normal review – this bleak, brilliant comedy is far from ordinary

This article is more than 3 years old

The comedian Sophie Willan has turned her award-winning stage hit into a new TV show, via childhood trauma, sex work and ornamental pixies

Alma’s mother rings her. “Mum,” says the name flashing up on her phone. “Not An Emergency Contact.”

Alma’s Not Normal (BBC Two) is written by and stars the comedian Sophie Willan. It’s based on her award-winning 2017 Edinburgh show, Branded, which drew on her chaotic childhood (some of it spent in care) as the daughter of a heroin addict and her experiences in later life as a sex worker. What was a primarily a laughter-seeking standup set has now been bulked out with a fine cast, an array of swiftly and surely drawn characters and an emotional undertow that – when the time is right – suddenly surfaces to punch you in the solar plexus and leave you breathless with sorrow.

Alma (Willan) is a 30-ish woman who has just broken up with Anthony, the boyfriend she has had since she was 15. This is not to her detriment (we may side with Alma’s grandma’s succinct take on the man – “He’s a fuck”) but she can’t quite see that yet. Anthony left her for the younger, hotter, soon impregnated Melanie, and with the rent to pay. Pink fur coat on, Alma cycles determinedly to the job centre to find that “sandwich artist at SubnGo” is the only option available for someone who was a latchkey kid from five (“Think Mowgli with a mullet,” she suggests) and didn’t go to school until she was seven. “I was never much of an academic,” says Alma, delicately, to her interrogator, over flashbacks of Mowgli stepping over unconscious adults to get to the cornflakes in a squalid kitchen. She is given an expression of interest form to take home and fill out.

Grandma Joan, all mouth and leopardskin trousers, alongside an enduring love for fried Spam, is played by the mighty Lorraine Ashbourne. Joan took Alma in after social services took the child away from her mother, Lin, and placed her in foster care. Their roughly loving bond, formed and maintained in adversity, is one of the highlights of the half hour.

Siobhan Finneran plays Alma’s broken mother (once a punk, “the Iggy Pop of the psych ward”), who is still confined to the Bury psychiatric hospital due to her tendency to set fire to houses whenever she is in the grip of her post-addiction psychosis. Lin has taken up painting, although Alma notes that she always liked ornamental pixies, too. “If she’d discovered them before heroin, we could have had a very different life.” Finneran, Ashbourne and Willan form a powerful central trio, able to pivot deftly and naturally between comedy and tragedy, hitting viewers with the hilarious or desperate truth of any moment as required.

They are ably supported by fellow standup (and singer) Jayde Adams as Alma’s best friend, Leanne, who, despite her unglamorous work as a butcher’s assistant, is never short of a beau in Bury thanks to her exotic accent (she’s from Bristol). It is Leanne who learns – from Winky Anne, although she’s had that eye fixed now – that there is money to be made in escort work: “£7.50 an hour, I’m on,” she notes surlily to Alma over a pint. “And I’ve got to wear that hat.” When she gets home, Alma screws up her expression of interest form and puts in a call to Winky Anne’s employer instead. “Yes,” she says firmly before we leave her. “I’m aware it’s sex.”

Alma’s Not Normal has much in common with Daisy Haggard’s Back to Life and Aisling Bea’s This Way Up. In line with the journalistic law that three of anything constitutes an official trend, I can now delightedly pronounce the birth of a new one – single-authored-by-a-female-comedian-dramas-that-capture-the-messy-imperfections-of-life-and-in-particular-the-ramifications-on-mental-health-of-previous-often-childhood-experience-and-are-brilliant-at-entwining-grief-and-laughter-and-folding-micropscopic-detail-in-with-macroscopic-coverage-of-this-crazy-thing-we-call-life.

Some trends pass, of course. But some – especially when they are established by pioneers producing high-quality work – represent the beginning of a new way of doing or thinking about things. I would like to think that Alma is another sign that female-led shows are becoming a less fearful proposition for commissioners and audiences. That the weight of drama a half hour comedy can bear (or vice versa) is no longer carved in stone but can be left up to the creator and his or her talents to divine. That stories untold in the mainstream – about mental health, bad childhoods, prison sentences or any of a million other things – are beginning to be viewed as a rich seam to be uncovered, not an elephant trap for ratings. Here’s hoping for more not normal.

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