Daddy Issues series two review – Amy Lou Wood and David Morrissey’s parenting comedy is a real beauty | television

‘hAre you downstairs?” West End Curls manager Rita (Sarah Hadland) bellows at the ball, exhausted from postpartum exhaustion, by Gemma (Amy Lou Wood). “I had a caesarean, Rita,” Gemma sighs from deep within her (deep) leather jacket. “to remember?”

“Oh,” her boss answers, frustrated. “Upstairs then?” The upstairs, unfortunately, is stuffed. Nurx Gemma is “in agony”, her breastfeeding problems exacerbated by sleep deprivation and the fact that her mother’s inconsolable screams currently fill the spare room with elegant pillows and endless, unsolicited musings over her butcher boyfriend’s cleaver. “It’s been three months now,” Gemma says, fixing Rita with a long look. “It’s hell.”

There’s plenty of that sort of thing in Daniel Ward’s Daddy Cases, which arrives in its second series amid a heavenly air of jubilation and assurance that everything will be okay… recently. (Hopefully). However, at the moment, not everything is trendy in Stockport. Gemma must now add to the joys of single motherhood her mother Davina (formerly Susan Lynch and now played, without a trace of delight, by Jill Halfpenny), who has invited her now-husband, the “sausage man”, to her daughter’s flat. (“He came with a huge collection of pieces, Gemma. I wouldn’t have said no.”)

Davina operates within a mushroom cloud of delusion. Each utterance is delivered with an upturned nose and glistening chest pointed toward the ceiling, in the manner of Jane MacDonald sharing an anecdote about her tights with a Channel 5 film crew. Davina’s contributions to the family include complaining about baby Sadie’s diapers and making passive-aggressive comments about Gemma’s weight. “My cousin was eight stone just one month after giving birth,” she told Gemma sweetly. “Mum,” Gemma answers with unfathomable patience. “She was in a coma.”

Although the first series of Daddy Issues was brilliantly acerbic, you sensed that she never felt completely at ease in herself. It was too wide in some places and loose in others. And at times the baby giraffe had such a new comic gait that she struggled to find her knees, let alone her feet. But the second stringer not only found his feet, he seriously heated up his knees and – if we can throw another tortured language into the ball pit – hit the ground running at speed. Much of this is down to David Morrissey as Malcolm, Gemma’s father, a perpetually deflated travel mattress of a man, eternally panicked when another hole appears while still struggling to apply plasters to the previous seven. After being kicked out of Gemma’s flat at the end of series one, Malcolm returns to the dilapidated bed of his divorced friend (and “idiot emotional support”) Derek. Motivated by his new responsibilities as a grandfather, he made himself useful by installing a cover in the closed front door of the bed. “It’s like a cat flap,” he explains. “But for the guys.”

Here, amid the wonderful one-liners, is a comedy of enormous affection for its characters. For all their clownishness, these are complex, believable souls. Not that its softer parts are annoying at all. Nor is there any sense at all that its more complex themes (fractured families, young motherhood) have been incorporated into Generate Debate® or #make_u_think. Instead, they are lumped together: love, regret, fear, foolishness, joy, boredom, urinary tract infections and any number of other daily messes, because that is what life is all about. And so, when the ever-eager Malcolm brings Gemma a toast to bed and promises to help her “forever” with Sadie, we’re left with a shot of Gemma’s childish face oscillating, as it often does, between gratitude, guilt, and the knowledge that there’s no easy way out of the situation she’s in now.

Likewise, when Derek (a character whose extremist beliefs for women might have been toned down in lesser comedies) threatens in the second episode to embark on a redemption arc, any actual progress is quickly snuffed out with a wet tea towel. In “Daddy Issues,” the irredeemable remain incorrigible, their desperation allowing the marginally less desperate to band together and reassure themselves of their moral superiority. Before calling the guilty party a fool, obviously.

“I might as well come back,” Gemma tells Malcolm, guiding him, and us, into a future full of love, doubt and cat-flutters for our comrades. Join it? Really, you’d be a fool not to.