“She’s like a shire horse with better boobs,” says Monica of her boss. You may know a Rosie Molloy. Heavens, you may be a Rosie Molloy. She is a woman with the constitution of an ox and an improbably resilient septum, who wafts into the office trailing the fragrance of whisky, nods saucily at the suit who is, in effect, her boss with benefits, then settles down to a hard morning’s online searching for designer bags.
And yet, we are to suppose, this captivating car crash of an anti-role model is good at her job and immune to HR disciplinarians, even if taking coke at work to stop her alcoholic slurring is essentially a sackable offence. “But look at my cute little face,” Rosie tells her co-workers. “They don’t fire people with lovely little faces. Plus I accidentally ticked the gender fluid box. Untouchable.” That may not be true, but you have to admire her toxic moxie. She has just been promoted as a client manager. I don’t really know what that means, but hopefully nothing important like being a brain surgeon or chancellor of the exchequer.
Sheridan Smith plays Rosie Molloy as Penelope Keith would play an entitled toff, as if to the manner born, in a performance that may well channel Kaley Cuoco as the eponymous Flight Attendant, with alcoholism played for laughs, but could readily turn into a homage to Meryl Streep’s red-eyed rummy from Ironweed.
There’s a scene in a bar in which a smug twig of a yoga teacher orders a decaf turmeric soya latte. If you are a smug twig of a yoga teacher, you may find this representation offensive. And if you are Stevie Martin who plays Mel the yoga teacher, no offence, you’re just very good at playing a namaste-ing yoga teacher. Mel invites Rosie to join her yoga class. Rosie replies by necking a whole bottle of white wine, in real time, to a soundtrack of snarling guitars. “I’m good, thanks,” she croaks.
But she isn’t. She is a mess who doesn’t realise it – in part because she has surrounded herself with enablers. Monica, who is enchanted when Rosie squeezes her breasts like old-time car horns, is clearly in love with her boss, and is the kind of underling whose proudest moment would be being told to hold her beloved’s hair while she befouled the back of a taxi.
And then there’s her bisexual stereotype of a flatmate, Nico. “You’re beautiful and tragic, like killing a swan with a pedalo,” he tells Rosie, while prancing around the apartment in a too-short dressing gown, offering her gin and Haribo.
Despite their positive reinforcements, Rosie must change. She is in a shame spiral after ruining her brother Joey’s wedding, which was supposed to be dry on the orders of the bride’s mother Constance, a recovering alcoholic, but which culminated with our heroine snorting coke from a tombstone.
Not that Rosie and Joey’s parents understand the concept of a dry wedding. “What the feck is that when it’s home?” asks Pauline McLynn as Win Molloy. “How will people fight?” Good point: have you ever been to a good wedding without a mass brawl? Exactly. “They’ll be banning smoking and shagging in church next,” says Ardal O’Hanlon’s Conall Molloy.
While I find Rosie Molloy Gives Up Everything (Sky Comedy) very funny indeed, with a joke-to-airtime ratio well above the seasonal norm, there’s one thing I find absolutely intolerable. While it’s a treat to see Father Ted veterans McLynn and O’Hanlon – she was Mrs Doyle, he Father Dougal – the casting of O’Hanlon is very hard to take. He was the dim poppet of a man-baby priest in an Opel-sponsored Ireland shirt, but here has become a near-death experience with a heart problem brought on by booze and fags. It’s as if Father Dougal has grown up into Father Jack, the most dissolute lush on Craggy Island. Never such innocence again.
Rosie Molloy Gives Up Everything may turn out to be an endorsement of dry January’s cheerlessly fascistic lifestyle, broadcast by ironic schedulers in the middle of gorging season, making it quite possibly the most off-message show you will watch this winterval. The moral interest of the succeeding episodes no doubt will be: if Rosie gives up everything, will her life be worth living? My money says it won’t. Can’t wait to find out.
