PITY the poor woman screenwriter pitching her stuff in the age of Fleabag. Since Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s comedy drama vacuumed up almost every prize from here to Bafta, commissioners have been after “the next Fleabag”.
It’s the curse of the creative industries: if something is a hit once the betting is that it will be so again. So the word goes out, “more of this please”, only for very few to live up to the standard of the original. The law of diminishing returns and all that.
Yet there were many women writing for television long before Waller-Bridge rocked up, including Jennifer Saunders, Carla Lane, Meera Syal, Tracey Ullman, and of course Victoria Wood. Then there are Waller-Bridge’s contemporaries, led by the brilliant Michaela Coel and Sharon Horgan. Fleabag did not invent women-led comedy.
With all that in mind I am definitely not going to describe Ladybaby (BBC Scotland, Friday, 10.30pm) as the next Fleabag. Kirstie Swain’s delightfully spiky Edinburgh-set comedy drama deserves the spotlight all to itself.
Amy Manson stars as the central character Suzie, who had a daughter, Kate, at 15 and gave her up for adoption. The event lies buried in her past until the night Kate (Mirren Mack, The Nest), now a 21-year-old medical student, tracks down her birth mother.
READ MORE: Susan Swarbrick meets screenwriter Kirstie Swain
In the best comedy traditions, the two women are opposites. Suzie is a hot steaming mess, definitely not the kind of woman who always has a packet of tissues in her bag (one of her measures of a sorted life). Prim, organised Kate buys her tissues in multi-packs.
Suzie is not immediately likeable, but Swain has form in making unconventional characters work. Her debut original series for Channel 4, Pure, was about a woman with severe OCD. In Ladybaby, she makes Suzie just intriguing enough for the viewer to want to stick around and get to know her better.
You could say the same for Ladybaby as a whole. While not perfect (some lines jar and I could have done without the vomiting), there is obvious talent at work here, whether it is Swain’s writing or the performances of Mack and Manson. As another sign of quality, Phyllis Logan and Ford Kiernan turn up as Suzie’s parents (and Kate’s grandparents).
One of the podcasting hits of lockdown was Louis Theroux’s Grounded, a series of long form interviews with people who interested him (and us).
Among his guests was Ruby Wax, “the” celebrity interviewer before Theroux came along and took the crown. Wax, it turned out, resented comparisons with the younger filmmaker so much she could not bear to watch his work.
Nor could Wax, who had left television to become a writer and researcher in mental health, stand to look at her own back catalogue. Theroux suggested she do just that, and the fascinating result is When Ruby Wax Met (BBC2, Sunday, 9pm).
Wax’s reign on television lasted a couple of decades, and there can barely be a big name of the time she did not interview. From Donald Trump and Tom Hanks to Goldie Hawn and Imelda Marcos, she’d been there, done that, and rifled through as many drawers and closets as she could before a producer caught her. She seemed fearless, an anything for a laugh interviewer.
The reality, as we see here, was different. One of the first encounters she picks through was with Donald Trump. This was back in the day when The Donald was just another brash New York property developer with delusions of one day being President (how we laughed!).
Wax considers the Trump interview the worst she ever did. She remembers “shaking in her shoes” and desperately trying to get him on her side. The more she tries to ingratiate herself by cracking jokes the more of a bully he becomes. “Do you hate me?” she asks as he gets up to leave. It is watch through the fingers stuff.
There were more rewarding encounters to come, notably with Carrie Fisher –they became the best of pals – Goldie Hawn and Tom Hanks. It’s great to see Wax looking back and laughing.
There is more disturbing material in her encounter with post-acquittal OJ. “I’ve met psychopaths before and they are always charming,” she says.
Pay a visit to certain parts of Swansea and you are as likely to see a horse trotting down the road as a dog or cat. At one point, as we learn from Our Lives: The City of Horses (BBC1, Tuesday, 7pm), there were some 600 horses in the community.
Today, with the practice of tethering horses frowned upon by the council on animal welfare grounds, the number of horses has declined but not their owners’ evident devotion to them. A quiet charmer of a film.
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