Youth (HBO Max)
Rating: Five stars
Sharon Horgan is feeling her age.
She has co-written and starred in some of the funniest, most painfully honest shows of the past decade, including Motherland and Catastrophe.
But at 56, she’s terrified she might be over the hill.
Every scene in her semi-autobiographical drama-comedy Youth is stark with fear, screaming, ‘Have I lost my looks? What do you think of my body? Am I too old to be doing this?’
The individual scenes are hilariously funny, full of savage wit. But watch the first two half-hour episodes, now streaming on HBO Max, and the overall effect is brutal.
Sharon Horgan is feeling her age. Every scene in her semi-autobiographical drama-comedy Youth is stark with fear
Her character, Alex, is suffering a breakdown from sheer loss of self-confidence. It feels, Horgan says in a note sent to reviewers, ‘extra personal’.
Alex is working for her best friend as a literary agent, after her bookshop went bust.
Her clients are drunks, bullies, insufferable show-offs or borderline senile.
Her job is to take the flak, do the dirty work and mentor the office interns who are incapable of even making coffee. And that’s the fun part of her day.
At home, she’s a slave to her ungrateful son, Ruari (Aran Murphy). All 18-year-old boys can be obnoxious at times, but Ruari works especially hard at it.
In public, he behaves like a bonobo on amphetamines, baring his backside at the school graduation and eating with his bare hands at a family celebration dinner.
In private, he just lies in bed.
When Ruari heads off to university, divorcee Alex hopes to rekindle her love life.
That leads to a blind date with a white-haired chap (Tim McInnerny) who looks so much older than Alex feels.
The individual scenes are hilariously funny, full of savage wit. But watch the first two half-hour episodes, now streaming on HBO Max, and the overall effect is brutal
Her first blurted question is, ‘Do you still work? You’ve been keeping yourself busy?’
It turns out said chap is a friend of her boss, who assumes he’ll be doing Alex a favour by having fumbly sex with her.
‘Is this a pity date?’ she gasps. ‘I wouldn’t say that,’ he leers, though clearly that’s exactly how he regards it.
Anne Reid has a glorious cameo as a romantic novelist who is turning to hardcore porn in her dotage and cannot understand why anyone would be offended by her graphic fantasy about a randy pioneer and a love-starved Native American girl — working title Wagon Burner, though the author now thinks she prefers The Squaw Squawked.
Harriet Walter is her bitter daughter Livonia, who believes Mummy should be a national treasure and expects Alex to make this happen.
Homeland’s Damian Lewis sends himself up as an impossibly conceited actor with literary pretensions.
And another Homeland star, Rupert Friend, plays her on-off boyfriend Patrick, who floats through life without the encumbrance of teenage children, elderly parents, money worries or any of the other stuff that comprises Alex’s entire life.
She resents his lack of angst.
‘I want a relationship with a grown adult man,’ she wails.
‘Me too,’ he grins. ‘After this.’
Low bar of the night: Taking over as the host of Tempting Fortune (Ch4), gurning comic Rob Beckett was offering contestants ‘luxuries beyond their wildest dreams’… including takeaways from Greggs, Harry Ramsden’s and KFC. Rob’s dreams must be thrilling.
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