There She Goes review – sensitive parenting comedy with a spiky edge

There She Goes crept out on BBC Four in 2018, but this second series is getting a BBC Two boost, and deservedly so. Created and written by Shaun Pye and Sarah Crawford, and based on their experience of having a child with a chromosomal disorder, it is a gentle comedy with a disarming frankness. David Tennant and Jessica Hynes play Simon and Emily, the parents of Ben and Rosie, who is, according to the doctor who diagnoses her as a young child, “severely learning-disabled”. As with the first series, the story cuts between two timelines, which gives it a certain briskness. This time, we go back and forth between Rosie as an 11-year-old, as she prepares for the sports day at her special school, and Rosie as a toddler, about to be diagnosed with something, although the specifics continue to elude her doctors.

There are plenty of new series that emphasise the unglamorous reality of being a parent, and they find their sweet spot in the parental grind. But the humour here is more convincing than most. As an 11-year-old, Rosie is learning to communicate. On a trip to the library, where boisterousness is not always welcome, Rosie says “mama” for the first time. (Simon’s aggrieved insistence that “dada” must be harder is one of many very funny lines.) At home, she shakes her head for the first time, and then keeps doing it, and keeps doing it. “It’s like she thinks everything you’re suggesting is shit,” says Simon, drily.

Neither are looking forward to the sports day. Simon is aware that he moans too much, but he explains that he finds the other parents a bit too intense, and their insistence that having a child with a disability is the best thing that’s ever happened to them a bit disingenuous. Often, the jokes are easy-going, until they’re not, and that’s when the show really bares its teeth. “We’re at a school where the half-term newsletter sometimes has an obits section,” he says. Emily, as always, gets to the root of his self-pity: at a school like Rosie’s, Simon isn’t special for having a disabled daughter. Having talked it over, they go to the sports day, and their parental competitiveness cuts across any setting.

There are many comedy dramas, and many of them struggle to find the sweet spot between the two genres. Inevitably, either the serious or the humorous side begins to dominate. Despite the gallows humour here, there is both a deliberate lack of sensitivity, as Simon cracks uncomfortable jokes to break the frequent tension, and a full understanding of how sensitive it needs to be and when it needs to be so. The flashbacks lean more towards the drama, as we see the initial stages of Rosie’s diagnosis and the effects it has on the family. But, again, there is not much room for sentimentality. The clinical settings are just that. Emily is a scientist, and she evaluates the facts in front of her with reason and sadness, while Simon copes with quips.

In the early days, their difficulties are laid bare. Emily starts taking antidepressants, while Simon withdraws to the pub, and then to his estranged father’s house. He doubts his ability to cope with being a father, so he asks his own father, played by Gregor Fisher in a Pixies T-shirt, what it was like to leave his family. It is easy to imagine a scene like that being overwrought, but it is quiet and beautifully done. So, too, is a scene late in the episode, but in the earlier time period, when young Ben asks if his sister will ever be normal. “She’ll be Rosie-normal,” says Emily, as if realising it for the first time.

It does not balk at making jokes about situations that many would run from. But it is sweet, too, and it is funny; when Rosie is in “one of her Robert Smith moods”, as Emily puts it, Simon wonders if it is possible that his daughter is being sarcastic in Makaton (a type of sign language). Ultimately, this is a parable about communication. Everyone, not just Rosie, is learning how to identify what they want and need. If that makes it sound dry, it is far from it. Switching between the two timelines can be a little jarring for a half-hour comedy, but this is wonderful writing backed up by excellent performances, and its spiky compassion is a treat.