BBC’s Amandaland is a Well-Observed Indictment of Our Downwardly Social Mobile Society

The BBC’s flagship comedy series Amandaland – series 2 out now – deserves a watch particularly for its well-observed insights into the downward social mobility of a once prosperous and aspirational nation. Amandaland is in the tradition of The Good Life, To the Manor Born and Only Fools and Horses in its ability to capture a period of social transition. Whether moving to the suburbs, the arrival of the nouveau riche, the spiv or the yuppy, good comedy spots a universal trend and exaggerates it. The co-creators Holly Walsh and Sharon Horgan have perfectly captured the social slippage and fractured family structure that now grips the Yookay.

Amandaland is a spin-off from Motherland, a comedy series that accurately conveys the pettiness, joys and miseries (mostly miseries) of parenting life on the touchlines of school life. All the archetypes are there: the monstrous school receptionist, the granny who refused to help look after the children, the wet-wipe stay-at-home Dad, Anna Maxwell-Martin juggling parenting with working as a lobbyist for “women in the building trade”. As one who has parented intensively for 19 years and counting, these people are my people. Hat-tip to the creators and writers for making school mums funny!

Starring Lucy Punch as divorced wannabe Alpha Mum Amanda, Amandaland charts her hapless attempts to be an influencer for her own ignored social media brand Senuous while raising two children, keeping an eye on her fun mum Joanna Lumley, and working in a kitchen shop. She is the perfect realisation of the Bridget Jones generation where all that was expected of women was to be pretty and vacuous and hope to marry a rich Mark Darcy character. Whether or not the creators intended to shine a light on social downward mobility, they have succeeded. Amanda is representative of the 24% of 30-59 year old women who are downwardly socially mobile today. 42% of marriages end in divorce with divorced women experiencing significant economic hardship.

Since her divorce, Amanda has had to move from leafy Chiswick to a flat in South Harlesden, which she tries to rebrand into cool SoHa. Though privately educated Amanda is forced to send her children to the local state school. Her mother Joanna Lumley hoards property wealth. In this, Amandaland perfectly captures the downward social declinism that has been happening since 2000. Where once private education was available to the prosperous middle class, it’s now only in reach for the top 2% of earners. The Resolution Foundation shows how 60% of Baby Boomers like Joanna Lumley’s character owned their own homes by 30, a figure that has now plummeted to 33%. Amandaland will be examined by future sociologists as evidence of how and why Britain became poorer than Mississippi. Amanda can’t afford the coffee in SoHa’s new sourdough-selling café.

As with all successful comedies, Amandaland features a bunch of misfit friends who implausibly join together in an uplifting spirit of friendship and support. A lot of the group action takes place on the touchlines of the local children’s football club. Again, this is accurately observed, whereby community sports clubs – run generally by volunteer men – have entirely replaced the church as the dominant vehicle of weekend social activity and cohesion.

All of the characters are accurately reflective of a nation on the slide emotionally as well as financially. Only one family is married with a mum and dad: Irish Anne, mother of unknown numbers of children, her husband always off screen presumably working. There’s a single dad who lives in a garden flat beneath Amanda, a pair of lesbian parents who live apart and seem to separate at the end of the series, and the mum and step-dad of the son who lives in the garden flat. Their jobs are variously: a celebrity chef on a cruise, a hedge cutter, a dog walker. Aptly, one character works in a food bank. Gone are the middle class, if ridiculous, jobs of Motherland. Obviously it’s great, in that Peter’s Friends manner, that characters find friends to support each other when their families don’t, but still, the statistics overwhelmingly and always show how fractured families harm children. Amandaland has successfully captured the current bleak figures: 3.3 million children living in a single-parent family with 43% of children in single-parent families living in poverty compared to 26% in couple families.

Perhaps this poorer more egalitarian society is preferable to the petty snobberies and narrow paranoias of say Hyacinth Bucket or Richard Wilson in One Foot in the Grave. But the world of well-ordered – husband, wife and children – aspirational society is non-existent. All people in Amandaland and the wider UK can now hope for is enough spare income to hire a make-up artist and limo for their children’s prom. Funny, but also sad.

Joanna Gray is a writer and confidence coach.