Mandy review – I am fully converted to Diane Morgan's genius

The Guardian

21-07-2025

The title sequence for Mandy, the short-form sitcom from Diane Morgan (Motherland, Philomena Cunk), tells you everything and nothing about the programme you are about to watch. Clad in a stonewashed denim biker jacket and diamante earrings, a voluminous hairpiece plonked (perhaps backwards) on top of her head, our titular protagonist stands on some kind of spinning platform, soundtracked by the maudlin strains of Barry Manilow's Mandy. Her face is contorted into a sideways pout; she looks worried, but vacant.
Now in its fourth series, the show is in some senses a character study of the eponymous Mandy Carter, a single, chronically jobless woman with a remarkable knee-led walk whose attempts to secure employment are continually scuppered by a combination of bad luck and bad attitude; she is a work-shy chancer for whom a cigarette break is always the number one priority. But Mandy is more of a tone piece than a serious examination of a mind: we stay firmly on the surface of our hero's world and, beyond the basic emotions (fear, indignation, excitement at the prospect of a quick buck), there doesn't seem to be a huge amount going on in her head.
In fact, Mandy's main characteristic is apathy – even in the face of death. In one episode, she steals an unbelievably long ladder and starts earning a few bob by helping the local vicar maintain his steeple. When her best friend, Lola (Michelle Greenidge), expresses concern about the risk involved – Mandy ascends in her trademark high-heeled boots, fag in mouth – she insists safety equipment is for snowflakes: 'If I slip and die, I slip and die! We've all gotta go some time.' On another occasion, she is buried alive in a coffin, largely because she can't be bothered to get out of it.
Mandy is an exercise in human vibe – you may have crossed paths with someone vaguely like her before – but also a certain kind of comic architecture. Episodes usually start with her getting a new job, before something goes awry, and general destruction ensues. It is not supposed to be realistic: with a brilliant rep theatre-style rotating cast (Michael Spicer, Mark Silcox, Yuriko Kotani, Alistair Green) and a random assortment of celebrity guests (Deborah Meaden, Iain Lee, Graham Norton), the show has a hallucinatory quality, while Mandy's bizarre crescendos often involve deliberately bad CGI and a wholesale rejection of logic. The comedy can be uneven, but the show is admirable in its pursuit of end-weighted belly laughs. The sight of Morgan clomping along the wing of a plane in magnetic callipers (after having a leg-lengthening operation to qualify as cabin crew) to boot a bomb into the night sky – a sacrifice that is immediately forgotten by practically everyone on the plane – is the moment I am fully converted to Mandy's genius.
That said, series four – the first Morgan has co-written with her partner, producer Ben Caudell – has far fewer of these ludicrous climaxes. In one episode, Mandy takes a rat on a bus and, after an unfortunate chain of events, is forced to fly the vehicle over a large gap in a bridge, but that moment of satisfyingly stupid farce is an outlier. The opening episode – which involves a back-to-work training scheme helmed by her beige employment officer (a recurring role for Tom Basden), Mandy administering old Botox to a school bully, a snooty shop assistant and a cameo from Martin Lewis – has a few titter-worthy moments, but never finds true hilarity. Elsewhere, the set pieces feel disconcertingly violent: Mandy accidentally inflicting head trauma on a man in a wheelchair or dunking a chip shop worker's face in boiling oil.
Mandy subjects herself to brutality, too, undergoing buttock enhancement – carried out below an Istanbul kebab shop, naturally – after finally discovering the beauty standards long peddled by the Kardashians. Another storyline revolves around an artwork by Banksy – or Banky, as a confused Mandy calls him. Clearly, both plots are supposed to illustrate how blissfully out of touch Mandy is, but it also means we must endure comic riffs on topics that are, at this point, mind-numbingly cliched.
When comedy as boldly slapstick and overtly ridiculous as this hits its stride, it can feel like sorcery. Sadly, much like Mandy's approach to every task under the sun, the construction of this new series seems a bit half-hearted. It is still a pleasingly idiosyncratic proposition – something you can say about vanishingly few TV shows these days – but Mandy seems to have lost something of its former magic.
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Mandy aired on BBC Two and is on BBC iPlayer now.