Following the sudden death of family patriarch Colin (Simon Greenall), the Walcott family are soon in for another rude shock. For, it soon emerges that in addition to his union with the now bereaved wife, Tess (Rebecca Front) and their grown-up daughter Cathy (Ellie White), Colin was conducting a secret affair. He has thus also left behind a chain-smoking mistress, Marilyn (Siobhan Finneran) and another daughter, also called Catherine (Lauren Socha), known as ‘Cat.’ Cat is almost exactly the same age as her twenty-something half-sister.
Understandably furious, middle-class Tess embarks on a series of ill-considered relationships with men, often played by actors from Drop the Dead Donkey. The already highly-strung Cathy, meanwhile, continues with her career and her unpromising engagement to the nice but fatally weak-willed Marcus (Amit Shah). Much to her mother’s horror, she soon also develops a close friendship with her more confident, wrong-side-of-the-tracks half-sister.
It is this essentially good-natured heart to Holly Walsh and Pippa Brown’s series, (which picks up from where the pilot first aired in 2017 left off), which really elevates it to the level of one of the best new British sitcoms of recent years. The cast, particularly Ellie White, are all brilliant and there are a number of excellent supporting characters, notably Stephen Tomkinson’s sinister climate change denying ex-Geography teacher and Caroline Quentin’s barmy but eternally optimistic auntie. Quentin’s character indeed, would warrant a spin-off series on her own.
And despite all the jokes about class, Marcus’s disastrous ‘dick pics’ disaster and the essential betrayal at the heart of the Walcott’s marriage, there’s a real sweetness to the developing relationship between the two Catherines which makes this a joy to watch.
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