The comic’s painfully funny, semi-autobiographial sitcom returns for a second series, balancing crass banter with intelligent insights into emotional inadequacy
Teenage boys don’t know what they are doing. They let their friends down and their romantic relationships are a mess, because they are frightened by the stuff going on inside their own heads that they can’t understand. Then those boys grow up to become men, whereupon all those problems … get worse.
At least, that’s the case in Ladhood, a smart comedy that’s back for a second series on BBC One/BBC Three and as an iPlayer box set. Standup comedian Liam Williams plays a version of himself, a thirtysomething man who is unhappy in his apparently normal, middle-class London existence. Why is he unhappy? Perhaps the reasons are to be found in his youth. And so we flash back to see formative moments in the life of teenage Liam (Oscar Kennedy) and his mates, with the elder Liam appearing in the background as a sort of spirit narrator. Sometimes he explains why the younger lads behaved so mortifyingly; sometimes he is shocked by what he remembers. When we flip back to the present, Liam has learned nothing.
Although Liam attracts the attentions of a different woman in almost every episode – Williams also writes the show – he is, even by the standards of British sitcom protagonists, deeply flawed. He is selfish, complacent, inept and manipulative, and has a temper that can suddenly flare, whether that is screaming in anger or smashing stuff up. This jars with his quick humour and his fretful, earnest liberalism, the latter coming out in the form of agonised musings about everything from air pollution to gender inclusivity.