The real housewife of SoHa is back. After proving that she could stand on her own two Kurt Geiger-clad feet as the centre of a Motherland spin-off, Lucy Punch’s immaculately coiffed, endearingly self-centered mum-slash-influencer Amanda has returned for a well-deserved second season.
Still reeling at the perceived step down of shifting from Chiswick to South Harlesden, our heroine has money on her mind. And so, with typical delusions of grandeur, the opening scenes see Amanda stride into a high street bank and regale a baffled adviser with a pitch better suited to an episode of Dragon’s Den. She’s seeking investment in Senuous, her perma-floundering social media brand pitched at “the aspirational end of the lifestyle content space”.
Ideally, she wants the bank (or her Hong Kong-based investor, as she will later spin it to her long-suffering best pal Anne, played by Philippa Dunne) to stump up enough cash so that she can upgrade her flat in SoHa for something leafier and more sprawling, as it would be better for business: “It is vital that I look like someone who lives in a large house.” In the end, she settles for £3,000 to buy some fancy lights for content creation (“illuminate to accumulate!”).
It’s classic Amanda stuff – being obsessed with how things appear on social media, while simultaneously making an absolute idiot of herself in real life. Each deliciously silly half-hour episode sees her facing a different low-stakes situation. Attempting to get away with some genteel fly-tipping, for example, or dealing with her mum’s forays into online hook-ups. Elsewhere, she attempts to finagle her way onto the line-up at the school careers evening, to inspire “a whole generation of online creators”.
It’s relatively straightforward comic fodder, but the jokes are sharp and sometimes unexpectedly dark enough to puncture the cosiness (“Have you been DBS checked?” Amanda’s colleague at her “co-lab” asks her, before she promptly spits back: “Women can’t be paedophiles, Daniel!”). And Punch, with her huge smile and doe eyes, manages to make even Amanda’s absurdities and insecurities endearing.
As ever, Amanda is a woman fixated on status – and anyone who can help her achieve it. Last season, she set her sights on chef-of-the-moment Della (Siobhan McSweeney) and her trendy restaurant; this time around, she sparks up a one-sided feud with Abs (Harriet Webb), the ex-wife of her handsome will-they-won’t-they neighbour Mal, played by Samuel Anderson. Upon learning that Abs works at a food bank, not a bank bank, Amanda’s desperate scramble towards virtue-signalling hyperbole is hysterical: “Senuous is a not for profit organisation – we’ve literally never made a profit.”
Dunne is wonderful as the forever put-upon Anne, who ends up cultivating a one-sided friendship with ChatGPT, while Joanna Lumley manages to steal scenes (no mean feat here) as Amanda’s glamorous mother, now the last OAP standing in her social circle (“They didn’t die, they just moved to the Cayman Islands when Labour got in”). McSweeney is slightly short on screen time here, with Della dispatched to cook on a luxury cruise after closing her restaurant last season, but Rochenda Sandall’s Fi remains an enjoyably offbeat presence.
It’s a rare supporting character that can survive the step up to headline act, but season two only underlines the fact that Amanda was far too good to keep on the margins. She’s well on her way to achieving BBC comedy icon status. Only don’t tell her that – it’ll just inflate that already super-sized ego.
