Modern TV is dominated by global juggernauts, but within that ecosystem smaller British comedies have still found ways to flourish. While the world waits for more Ted Lasso, Britain has produced Everyone Else Burns, two series of We Are Lady Parts, Greg Davies’ likeable The Cleaner and the brilliant, stupendously rude, Such Brave Girls. These are all nonconformist, vignette comedies that, it’s safe to say, would not have got through the mouli of a Netflix focus group. Yet TV comedy and indeed TV more broadly is undoubtedly the richer for them.
Alma’s Not Normal (BBC Two), Sophie Willan’s semi-autobiographical story about the eponymous Alma, trying to find glitter within a glum life in Bolton, is another perfect example. Admittedly, it has taken nearly five years to produce only 12 half-hour episodes and the gap between series one and series two stands at 36 months – an ice age in TV time. But whatever the vicissitudes of trying to get a small, homespun, northern-and-proud of it comedy made in 2024, we should be glad that it has been made at all.
To recap: series one was a kitchen-sink Fleabag that saw Alma (Willan) trying to escape from a disastrous childhood, foster care, dodgy boyfriends, work in the sex trade, and a family of boundless love and bottomless chaos. This being a returning comedy, Alma did not and cannot escape any of these things – at the beginning of the second series she is back in Bolton having achieved very little other than buying herself a pink moped.
Coming back – Alma reminds us in a monologue designed to lift her own spirits more than anything else – “doesn’t mean I’m going backwards”. But she doesn’t really go forwards either – perhaps the primary theme of Alma’s Not Normal is that going forwards is nigh-on impossible when you’re born with your boots in cement. Mum a heroin addict, money non-existent, chances of achieving the “fabulousness” that Alma aspires to, all minimal. That is both the comedy and the tragedy.
The brilliance of Alma’s Not Normal is that this thin seam of social commentary is sugared throughout by some superb writing. Willan has both an ear for dialogue and an eye for a zinger. In the ensemble cast of her mother Lin (Siobhan Finneran), her Grandma Joan (the sensational Lorraine Ashbourne) and Alma’s best friend Leanne (Jayde Adams) Alma’s Not Normal has assembled the best all-female cast on television.
For series two, setting up Alma as an aspiring actress with a newfound agent at the back of the local chippy is also inspired. Alma’s desperate job search now leads her to the most fertile comic set-ups. Scenes playing a mummy in the local ghost house; or helping out at Leanne’s new bar on belly-dancing night are outright hilarious. Yet in Willan’s hands, they dovetail effortlessly with scenes on a secure ward (“This isn’t a place to get better. This is a place to get worse,”) or in an oncology clinic.
This is first and foremost a triumph of writing and performance, but credit should also be given to the commissioners and executives who must have had to push to get this kind of thing made at all. I can’t think there’s much of a pressing commercial case for a series about “a Bolton girl with the energy of Helen Mirren” as Alma styles herself, but you only have to watch an episode of Alma’s Not Normal to realise that it is very much not normal: in a time when nerdish fantasies and ghoulish crime dramas predominate, it’s one to cherish.
Series two of Alma’s Not Normal begins on BBC Two at 10pm on Monday 7 October; all episodes are available on BBC iPlayer now