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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Entertainment
Rachael Sigee

TV has never been so nerve-jangling: 10 years of the agonising Motherland

Paul Ready, Lucy Punch and Anna Maxwell Martin standing among other parents and children in a garden, with the children wearing costumes
‘The most frazzled woman on television’ …Anna Maxwell Martin, centre, with Paul Ready, Lucy Punch and other cast members in Motherland. Photograph: Everett Collection Inc/Alamy

If Uncut Gems was about the school run instead of gambling debts, it would look like Motherland. It is now 10 years since the BBC sitcom jangled the already frayed nerves of all parents watching and turned Anna Maxwell Martin into the most frazzled woman on television in the name of skewering middle-class motherhood.

Whether she was marching her children to buy school shoes the night before term started (“Don’t be closed. Pleeeeeaaaaase don’t be closed”) or having a meltdown at temporary traffic lights en route to a school drop-off that proved redundant because she’d forgotten it was half-term, Maxwell Martin’s Julia would undoubtedly have a more chilled-out time in the kitchen of The Bear than raising her kids.

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