“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 squalor with fellow divorcee and bonafide misogynistic creep Derek (David Fynn).
A caricature of newly-divorced incompetence, he possesses almost zero life skills – he dries his underwear in the microwave, thinks that jacket potatoes are special potatoes covered in leather, doesn’t take the bins out and shares one toilet with five other men in the building. Safe to say, it is not the kind of environment one dreams of raising a newborn in. But, with her older sister (Sharon Rooney) in prison for hiring a hitman to murder her ex-boyfriend for his money (“how can it still be a crime if you fail?”) and her mother Eat Pray Love-ing her way around various exotic countries with her new boyfriend, Gemma reluctantly moves into her dad’s not-so-bachelor pad.
Daddy Issues is the latest in a long line of classic, very-British, comedies. Written by Danielle Ward (Brassic, In The Long Run), the one-liners are brilliantly acerbic, sometimes verging on the Fleabag-esque in their observational sarcasm – when Gemma finally meets a guy who might want to be in a relationship with her despite her being pregnant, only to discover he’s in a Whatsapp group dedicated to uncovering government conspiracy theories about chemtrails, you half expect her to do a Phoebe Waller-Bridge look to camera as he leaves. Wood has already proved her comedic credentials in her breakout Sex Education role, but her star shines even brighter in Daddy Issues.
Featuring in almost every scene, she adopts an effortless chemistry with Morrissey – their blossoming relationship is believable and heartwarming. Sometimes the show’s charming quirkiness does leave the storyline a little disjointed – a rather randomly-inserted one-episode subplot about Gemma’s high school acquaintance who stalked her ex-boyfriend and carries a pink glue gun to use on her enemies is neither funny nor relevant, and could have been left in the writers’ room. For the most part though, Daddy Issues is a sharp, sweet and incessantly witty take on parenthood, female friendships and mid-life crises.
And, a timely reminder to use protection this Brat girl summer. Daddy Issues airs on BBC Three from August 15, with the whole series available on BBC iPlayer.
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