If God really does love a trier, he’d absolutely adore Amandaland’s Amanda Hughes. The former owner of west London boutique Hygge Tygge may be in her idea of the gutter – she’s a single mum recently relocated from a spacious house in Chiswick to a Harlesden maisonette (which she has to clean herself) and currently working in sales for a high-street kitchen company – but she’s fixated on those stars. Don’t be fooled by the outrageous laziness and negligence she brings to her actual job; when it comes to her true calling of becoming a successful influencer in order to promote her bland lifestyle brand Senuous, she’s really putting the hours in.
In this sense, Amanda slots neatly into a lineage of British comedy icons; file her next to the delusional, narcissistic, indefatigable likes of Alan Partridge and David Brent. Yet Lucy Punch’s character – who initially appeared in the modern-classic sitcom Motherland before landing her own spin-off – gets an easier ride than her peers. At first she was Motherland’s resident antagonist: a smug, slinky blonde securely installed at the top of the school mum food chain who spent her time exploiting her primary acolyte Anne (Philippa Dunne) and patronising permanently harried protagonist Julia (Anna Maxwell Martin). Later, we witnessed her divorce and dysfunctional relationship with her judgmental mother (Joanna Lumley). As the mask fell, her likability ballooned. By the end we were encouraged to think of Amanda as more of a flawed striver than a boo-hiss baddie.
