Holly Walsh

A school gate, a working parent and a weekly humiliation: that is where a Holly Walsh sitcom starts. Motherland (2017), which she wrote with Sharon Horgan, Helen Serafinowicz and Graham Linehan, is fast, sour and truthful about the weekly humiliations of raising children while holding down a job. It has no heart to speak of, and it is better for it. Nobody learns anything, and nobody is let off.

Walsh came to this by way of stand-up, radio and panel shows, and the writing has kept a stand-up's impatience: get to the humiliation, then the next one. Horgan is the recurring partner. They wrote Dead Boss (2012), a sitcom set in a women's prison, before the Motherland pilot in 2016, and the school-gate programme that followed ran for three series. Alongside it Walsh created The Other One (2017–2022), about two half-sisters who learn of each other after their father's death, and directed episodes herself. We have not reviewed it, so we will only note that it is the one she made most nearly alone.

Amandaland (2025) is where the method is easiest to see and to test. Walsh, Barunka O'Shaughnessy, Serafinowicz and Laurence Rickard take Lucy Punch's Amanda, the snob from Motherland, and give her a whole programme in which to remain impressive. The influencer material could have been anyone's, but tied to this particular hunger for status it earns its place, and Joanna Lumley supplies the cruellest laughs. Walsh has said of Amanda, "We broadened her out and warmed her up." That is exactly what happened, for better and worse. We laughed at Amanda filming herself for an audience that does not exist, and then felt for her, which after three series of hoping she would trip on her own heels we had not expected. But the teenage-parenting scenes are ordinary in a way the lead is not, and the new ensemble takes a while to feel like one. The warmth cost some of the bite.

Walsh writes in rooms and says so, and the credits make it hard to say which line is hers. What can be said is that the programmes with her name on them share a view: middle-class English life as a competition nobody admits to entering, in which the funniest person is the one losing most visibly. Start with Motherland, then try the same woman with the edges sanded. We took to her, slightly against our will.