Amandaland skewers parenting with uncanny accuracy – it should come with a trigger warning

I went to my final parents’ evening last week. School is almost out forever! No more getting lost in the lower corridor trying to find Room 5B and almost missing my 4.17pm appointment. No more emails and texts and forms and parent portals that require 15 levels of password authentication. No more ironing grey/white school shirts with crusty armpits! Whooop!

Well, I should have felt relieved, but I had to go alone, which brought all the wounded inner child feelings to the surface. Even if I’m with someone, though, every year it’s a socially awkward emotional roller coaster. It starts at about 9am with a vague sense of dread and ends with me legging it down the corridor to the nearest pub, afraid I’ll bump into someone who bullied me in 1987.

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I really should be over this by now, but I can’t help it. I blame that universal school smell: a heady mixture of feet, disinfectant, foosty cupboards and custard. In fact, it’s so triggering that I think schools should set up a sensory chill-out tent where parents can get aromatherapy and speak to a mental health first aider. They have them for festivals, why not parents’ evenings? It’s too late for me, but if you have a child just starting secondary school, suggest it to the PTA. Honestly, do it. Do it now. 

It feels strange that Motherland used to trigger me in the same way. When the show first started, it felt far too close to reality: tedious pick-ups and drop-offs, circumstantial relationships, coffee and more coffee, screaming ‘PUT YOUR SHOES ON’, trying and failing to earn a living, desperately scraping together a costume for World Book Day.

It wasn’t exactly a documentary – my school gates were definitely not as posh, especially not the woman who used to wear a hoodie that read ‘It’s Not A Hangover, It’s Wine Flu’ – but it was uncomfortably on the nose all the same.

However, by the time series three came along, I was all in, and it’s been my favourite comfort watch ever since. Now I’ve been through those years and survived, I love those characters more than Kevin loves his cycling helmet.  

One certainty about parenting, though, is that everything will change, often when you least expect it. In the spin-off series Amandaland, Amanda, the pampered alpha mum of the show, has fallen on ever-so slightly lower-middle-class times. Post-divorce, she has traded Chiswick for unfashionable South Harlesden, which she re-christens So-Har.

Life is frantic, dealing with two teenagers, her blasé mother (Joanna Lumley, doing what she does best: being snooty, drunk and perpetually horny), a rough-around-the-edges neighbour and a bumpy ‘career’ as an Instagram content creator. 

The cast has changed too, apart from loyal Ann, who still allows Amanda to treat her like crap and wipe her snot on her sleeve. Do I miss Julia, Liz, Kevin, Meg, Julia’s mum and even Mrs Lamb in the school office? Of course I do. But now we have Siobhan McSweeney as Stella Fry, an arrogant chef who runs a meat-based restaurant, Shin (plus a new branch in Kilburn, called Double Shin). Whenever she’s on screen, I clap like a happy seal. 

What has stayed the same, though, is the quality of the writing, which not only skewers modern parenting with uncanny accuracy but genuinely makes you root for the characters. Amandaland could only have been created by people who have done their time in the parenting trenches, standing around in soggy playing fields and navigating those intensely intimate, yet also mercilessly transactional friendships. 

And personally speaking, I must have made some progress, because although it’s about teenagers, it didn’t trigger me too much. Apart from the love bite scene. And the party vomit scene. And the parents’ evening scene. Still, my kid is going to be 18 soon, so I can laugh about it now. Can’t I? 

Amandaland is on BBC iPlayer. Lucy Sweet is a freelance journalist.

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