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The Guardian
18 hours ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Such Brave Girls: TV so hilariously savage it will make you yowl with pleasure
I love watching real-life siblings on-screen. They bring a knotted history to every interaction, the way they look at one another, or don't. They may love each other; they're definitely stuck with each other. Daisy May and Charlie Cooper were the last to bottle such contradiction; I'm delighted we now have Such Brave Girls (BBC One, Wednesday 2 July, 11.40pm), returning for a second series, in which creator Kat Sadler stars alongside her sister Lizzie Davidson. Cattier than Longleat, it features some of the most savage writing on TV, and makes me yowl with pleasure. It's about traumatised women making terrible choices. Bear with. The ever-excellent Louise Brealey plays Deb, whose husband abandoned his family 10 years ago after popping to the shop for teabags. In financial trouble, she spends her time trying to lock down relations with drippy, slippery widower Dev, played by Paul Bazely, explicitly for his big house. Single-mindedness has made her grim, grasping and less maternal than a stressed hamster. Bad news for daughters Josie and Billie, who give off the stench of joint captivity, and have split into twin coping strategies: one depressed and passive, the other overconfident, bullish and equally lost. There are many jokes about sex, all three women wildly pursuing or running away from ludicrous men. But its most adult theme is desperation, which every character is thinly masking. One of the funniest running jokes is the way Deb and Billie dismiss the 'haunting presence' of Josie. Deb has no time for her depressed daughter's big feelings, interest in art or grapples with lesbianism. Life is about finding a man and moving in with him. She urges her to 'Remember the family crest! Ignore, repress, forget.' Scowling harder than Kanye West, Davidson gets to spit the most deliciously vicious lines. 'She only shaves one leg,' she hisses of an unmarried aunt, 'so when she sleeps on her side she can pretend a man is spooning her.' She's no fan of Josie's rare smile, either. 'Your mouth's doing the right thing, but your eyes are calling Samaritans.' Having turned her obsessive attention away from drug-dealing Nicky, she's now chasing a much older, married man. (They meet in the mornings, as he's too tired to get an erection at night.) 'There's nothing wrong with having an affair, right?' she asks, a shade of self-awareness crossing her face. 'I honestly think it might be the most feminist thing you can do,' responds Josie. The first series announced Sadler as a brilliant voice. Her writing pitilessly skewers the discourse around pop-feminism, queerness, sexuality and mental health. Pitiless does not mean unempathetic – the show was born of personal experience. During lockdown, Sadler revealed to Davidson that she'd spent time on a psych ward after twice trying to kill herself, and her sister admitted she was £20,000 in debt. They found themselves laughing. If you're in a raw place, the fun they have with self-harm, workplace shooting, dissociation and the self-delusion required to live a lie until you die, may be too much. For most of us, it's the medicine. Directed by Simon Bird of The Inbetweeners, and co-produced by A24, there's big underwriting, too. The first series saw a few mannered performances from the supporting cast, but these have settled in now. Its female trinity remain a scream, as the story tacks farcical in ways I won't spoil here. Let's just say they're riding that family crest like a surfboard into disaster. Dark comedy is a phrase overused, and perhaps meaningless. Granted, you have to be the kind of person who finds a mother warning her daughter, 'Try not to poison this family with your personality' funny to get Such Brave Girls. I'd argue that is the central brain-stem of the British psyche. There are strains of Peep Show, Julia Davies, Sharon Horgan and Fleabag. Like them, the show has no message other than that life is absurd, pain inevitable and people ridiculous. That makes it more clear-sighted and honest than any show telling us what to think. And you get sisters tearing strips off each other. Truly, there is eloquence in blood.
The Guardian
02-06-2025
- General
- The Guardian
As the first born, am I the smartest? Maybe – but siblings shape us in far more interesting ways
A new book about sibling relationships, The Family Dynamic by Susan Dominus, examines how things like birth order and the specific achievements of your siblings affect a person's life trajectory. As such, some of my favourite research is back in the public eye: the studies that suggest that I, as the eldest of three children, am the cleverest. I'm kidding. I don't actually think this is true in my own sibling group, but sure, I'll take it, and say so in the national press: I'm smarter than you guys, science confirms. I am very interested in siblings and their influences, though. So much so that I wrote my first novel about a brother-sister relationship. Siblings shape you in ways that are less deliberate than parents, which means their influence is less discussed, though just as important. That said, birth order has remained a public fascination, with parents agonising over whether a middle child is overlooked or eldest is overburdened. I definitely have classic 'eldest daughter syndrome': the tendency for the oldest girl in a family to take on roles of responsibility. Planning of family matters has generally fallen to me in the past, and I remain a planner. I like control to the freakish degree that I eat the same breakfast and lunch every single weekday and run my to-do list with the iron fist of a navy Seal commander. Still, I have often thought that some of the well-worn sibling birth order archetypes – the type-A eldest daughter, the laid-back middle sibling, the rebellious youngest child – must be too simple. They sat in my mind alongside things like star signs: fun but ultimately baseless ways to parse the eternal puzzle of why people are the way that they are. But it seems, as Dominus found, that the studies do bear this stuff out. Eldest children apparently outstrip their younger counterparts in cognitive tests by as early as their first birthday, probably due to the increased parental attention they receive during the however-brief period they are an only child. And sibling influence can be incredibly powerful. Dominus interviews families in which each child went on to achieve success in very different fields, and were spurred to do so specifically by what their siblings were doing. My brother was a quiet little boy, either naturally or because I did all his talking for him. We were very close as children – I would get my hair cut short like his, and enjoyed it if people mistook us for twins. But we grew into quite different people, and that is probably no accident. For instance, he went on to pursue Stem subjects, and I pursued the humanities: the boy whose sister spoke for him went for numbers and concepts, and I went for words. Age gaps between siblings can also complicate the effect of birth order. My sister is nearly 10 years younger than me, whereas my brother is only 18 months my junior. She told me: 'I feel like being the youngest, with two siblings quite a bit older than me, meant that I sculpted my perception of what is 'cool' on a pretty much even mix of your respective interests.' She's very into music (my brother) and also video games (me). I think she's also more emotionally robust than I am. We both wonder whether this is partly the result of getting a front-row seat to all of mine and our brother's chaotic decisions and teenage crises, and being able to take notes. By now, my siblings and I are, roughly, who we're going to be. We're all adults. Perhaps it is less that we are now honing ourselves consciously or subconsciously to resemble or differ from one another, but that we act as vivid mirrors for each other to really see ourselves in. Sometimes, in the company of my brother and sister, I have an ambient sense of something similar to not liking myself very much. Partly, it's that near-universal experience of regression in the family home: we start to occupy childish roles to befit the dynamics first built in childhood. But it's also that these are people who have seen every side of me. And they have not been afraid to challenge my less lovable attributes. That feeling of not liking myself is maybe more accurately a feeling of being truly, wholly known for my best and worst traits. My irritability, my belief that I know better than others, my melodrama. I see their flaws too, and they know that I see them. Not unexpectedly, some of these flaws are shared. I asked my brother about this, and he said: 'Seeing characteristics of yourself in people you love is quite helpful. Like, oh maybe I'm not that bad: I don't hate them for the way they are, but the opposite.' And for all that we bicker, it's a beautiful thing to be loved by people who, unlike your parents, are not hard-wired to love you unconditionally, but who know you just as well as your parents do, and for almost as long. Imogen West-Knights is a writer and journalist
