CHRISTOPHER STEVENS reviews Amandaland on BBC1: Dame Joanna sweeps up laughs like an aristocratic shoplifter on a spree
Amandaland (BBC1)
Call the TV police. Joanna Lumley has made a career out of stealing shows. She can be great in a starring role, but when she's the support act, she's Absolutely Fabulous.
From the moment she stumbles through the front door in Amandaland, Dame Joanna gathers up the laughs and sweeps them into her handbag like an aristocratic shoplifter on a spree.
'Oh darling,' she gasps as her daughter Amanda answers the doorbell in her tatty terraced house, 'let me in before I get mugged.'
She makes the line not merely funny but deadly. In this spin-off from BBC2's Motherland, social climber Amanda (Lucy Punch) has lost her grip and, in the wake of a divorce, finds herself living in a very un-glam backwater — South Harlesden.
Her neighbours are the inmates at Wormwood Scrubs. Calling it 'SoHa' doesn't make the area any more desirable.
When La Lumley, as Amanda's alcoholic mother, Felicity, behaves as though the streets are a warzone, that's just rubbing salt in the wound (posh sea salt crystals from Waitrose, probably).
Felicity's cruel neediness is not only the clue that helps us understand Amanda, but the key to forgiving her, and even liking her.
Amanda's an awful woman, of course, a backstabbing snob who treats her children as accessories and turns every encounter with her 'mum chums' at the school gates into a blood sport.
From the moment she stumbles through the front door in Amandaland, Dame Joanna gathers up the laughs and sweeps them into her handbag like an aristocratic shoplifter on a spree
Lucy Punch (left) and Dame Joanna Lumley attend a BBC screening and Q&A for Amandaland, at the Garden Cinema in London
Giving her teenage son and daughter a pep talk, before their first day at a new secondary school, she tells them, 'When I changed school at 13, I didn't know a single person. Within half a term, I was voted the most popular girl ever.'
She's desperate to be accepted by Della, a local celebrity chef (played with menace by Siobhan McSweeney from Derry Girls)... so desperate that she can't see Della despises her.
Amanda's craving for approval and popularity is rooted in Felicity's parental contempt... a contempt that Dame Joanna makes viciously obvious.
'I love how you've made your little house so swishy,' she says, gazing around as though there might be arsenic in the wallpaper.
Then she hands over 'a little tuck parcel' containing gojo berries and Earl Grey chocolates, 'now that you've only got a Tesco Metro'. Refusing to leave, she climbs into her daughter's bed and drinks herself unconscious.
Though it's impossible not to feel sorry for her, we do want to see Amanda suffer for her pretensions and her snootiness. She's incapable of showing basic decency, let alone any sort of consideration for others. Blocking in other cars on the street, she insists it's unavoidable because hers is electric and has to be charged: 'I'm sorry if my saving the planet annoys you.'
Invited out for a drink, she acts as if she's making a celebrity appearance: 'I'll be in and out, it's just a drive-by dazzle.'
Then she falls over in the mud, and we cringe with laughter. Yes, it's cruel — but when Joanna Lumley joins in the joke, cruelty is funny.
