Bleakly funny but realistic

The second season of Bafta-winning 'Such Brave Girls' sees the mother and daughters radiate a refreshingly crude comic energy and plumb emotional depths, says Katie Rosseinsky

- Katie Rosseinsky

“Remember the family crest,” Louise Brealey’s Deb hisses at her eldest daughter Josie (Kat Sadler) in the opening episode of Such Brave Girls’ new season. “Ignore, repress, forget!”

As far as familial mantras go, it’s arguably not the healthiest or the most uplifting message to pass on to your two grownup daughters. And over the course of the second season of the Bafta-winning BBC comedy, created by Sadler and costarring her real-life sister Lizzie Davidson, it will prompt all three women in this dysfunctional family to make some frankly woeful decisions.

That’s bad news for Sadler’s characters, but very good news for us viewers, because much of the show’s appeal lies in watching this mother-daughter trio plumb the lowest emotional depths, while giving voice to the sort of dark thoughts you might file away to stew over at 3am, rather than actually saying out loud. Mental illness, sexual repression, parental estrangement: nothing is off limits here, and it’s all attacked with an almost feral comic energy.