When I first became a parent, a friend cut through all the cooing and celebration and asked a clever question: what was the scariest thing about it? It took me a minute to find the answer: you can’t undo it. You can never undo it. Mortgages and marriages and other things that seem permanent are, in fact, easily dismantled, but once you are a kid’s parent, that’s it. It’s a life sentence.
Most parents don’t want to be freed, because they love their child so completely that returning to a world without them feels absurd. There She Goes, however, is a comedy about people who have longed for a reset button. Emily (Jessica Hynes) and Simon (David Tennant) have a learning-disabled daughter, Rosie (Miley Locke), who is non-verbal and exhibits extremely challenging behaviour due to a chromosomal disorder. Every day is a nightmare of torn books, smashed possessions, smeared food and scratched skin, to a soundtrack of grinding screeches where the girl’s words should be. With the regular joys of parenting out of reach, the show and its characters have had to fight to find their own.
