“My mum's just run off with her and my dad's savings, my sister’s on remand and my flatmate just moved out, so my life's a mess right now.” Ten minutes into the first episode of Daddy Issues, a new six-part BBC comedy, and 24-year-old Gemma’s ( Aimee Lou Wood , Sex Education) situation is far from ideal. When we meet her, she is in the midst of a perpetual, messy, Brat girl summer – regularly turning up to her job at a Stockport beauty salon hungover – and often straight from a stranger’s house.
But it has all been a bit of harmless fun and games until, on her way back from a holiday in Portugal, Gemma joins the mile high club with Ben, a man who she meets on the plane and whose name she discovers after they’ve had sex. Neither has a condom, but they decide to bravely soldier on anyway (their solution involves the aeroplane toilet sink). It doesn't take Nostradamus to see where this is going – two months later, after a few more drunken hookups, Gemma realises she is pregnant.
Not only that, but her flatmate has decided to move out and she can’t afford to pay the rent by herself, nor can she find a new roommate who isn’t either an ex-convict or a conspiracy theorist. Potentially on the brink of homelessness, desperation forces her to resort to the unthinkable: she asks her professionally hopeless dad ( David Morrissey ) if she can move in with him. Since her mother cheated on him and ran away to Paris with all of their savings, he has been living in squal.