2 days ago
19
Ten-year-old Tanika (Kaydrah Walker-Wilkie) is encouraging her depressed older brother Tionne (Akins Subair) to get out of bed after their mother’s disappearance, lest social services notice something is wrong with the family and put them into care. “I’ll get adopted, because I’m young and pretty,” she says gently. “They’ll keep you in a home because you look like you’ve got problems.” Baby sisters – always keeping it real.
The BBC’s new six-part comedy drama Just Act Normal is the creation of Janice Okoh, based on her 2011 play Three Birds. With their mother gone, the children are trying to fly under the radar of the authorities until the oldest, Tiana (Chenée Taylor), turns 18 and can officially look after them all. So far, the optimism and energy of youth has seen them – or at least the girls – through, and they are keeping Tionne braced between them. While Tanika gives pep talks, Tiana and her best friend, Shanice (Kelise Gordon-Harrison), are out stealing him the live chicken he apparently needs for an experiment.
Once her poultry duties are discharged, Tiana must deal with the daily grind of meeting all the other domestic responsibilities that an eldest female sibling is heir to: breakfast; bills; barricading the door against her mother’s drug dealer, Dr Feelgood (Sam Buchanan), who is owed £200; and so on. Plus, she has to go to college, tout for business as a mobile manicurist, do her job as a cleaner (where she is stiffed on minimum wage because she needs to work cash-in-hand), cope with Shanice’s excesses (“I feel like I’ve been manifesting for two lately,” complains her friend) and perhaps also embark on a new romance with Jamie (Adam Little), whose potential has Shanice – and indeed us all – squealing in approval.
But from the off – despite the comedy that runs from chicken-based slapstick to Tanika’s mordant wit, via Tiana’s teenage ability to find a laugh or snark in everything – there is the sense of tragedy pulsing at the heart of the children’s story. There is a creeping dread, once we know the truth of their mother’s absence, working its way through every scene as the net starts to close around them and their misery becomes more palpable. When Tionne’s mood briefly lifts after he gets a girlfriend (he has the chicken to thank for this, too), you want to stand up and cheer – and also sacrifice the bird if it would ensure a permanent happy ending for all the siblings.
But danger lurks on every side. Not least from Tanika’s needy, overeager and overfond teacher, Miss Jenkins (Romola Garai), whose emotional maturity is several degrees lower than her charge’s but who nevertheless fills something of the maternal void in Tanika’s life in a way that is quite heartbreaking to watch. Indicative of the show’s endless subtleties and layered complexities, at one point the headteacher, Mrs Kitley (Penelope Freeman), tells Miss Jenkins that the phrase “inappropriate relationship” is not solely the preserve of “paedophiles and gym knickers”. Just Act Normal is very good at suddenly twisting the viewfinder.
At home, Dr Feelgood moves in after his own mum throws him out. The sweetness of his and Tanika’s growing attachment to one another – while Tionne’s resentment of the man he blames for their situation festers away – is equally pulverising to the viewer, who by this point is prepared to storm the barricades to make sure these kids are not torn asunder by the state.
The publicity material accompanying Just Act Normal describes it as “a celebration” of Black, working-class Birmingham life. Which would be true if the word didn’t carry a suggestion of artificial cheer and selection when what it feels most like is an authentic and unapologetic representation of the family’s life in the round. It incorporates racial differences (from Miss Jenkins’ stumbling over the children’s names, to Shanice’s joke about kissing white boy Jamie), mental health issues, class inequities (from Tiana’s careful tracking of every pound earned and spent, to Shanice – child of a rich and generous dad – not understanding what it is to live on an economic knife-edge, to the children sitting on a park bench and dreaming of living in one of the very ordinary houses on the edge of their estate). It rejects the notion that any person is just one thing and never another – Dr Feelgood is a refuge for Tanika; the children’s absent father is not evil or abusive, just “shit” and rueful – and much more.
It is also, within each episode and over the entire series, beautifully structured and holds its many strands in perfect tension. Okoh’s work is done full justice by three extraordinary young actors – we are surely watching stars being born – and just as strong a supporting cast. It is altogether a wonderful thing.
