2.5 Nana’s Party Following a harried paramedic to the door of house number 9, before flitting back to the start of the tale with an ‘Earlier that day…’, the episode introduces a pretty standard (and recognisably well-observed) middle-class, white, formula-family. There’s the obsessively clean and uptight mother Angela (Clare Skinner) organising the party; father Jim (Pemberton), who’s desperate to get one up on his sister-in-law’s practical joke-playing husband; and their teenage daughter Katie (Eve Gordon). Joining them for some forced family time are some working-class relatives – irritatingly repetitive Nana Maggie (Elsie Kelly), bitter alcoholic and casually racist Auntie Carol (Lorraine Ashbourne), and her annoying husband Pat (Shearsmith). The genre we’re in for this episode appears, at first, to be farce, with events revolving around Jim’s attempt at a joke on Pat: hiding under a fake birthday cake on the nibbles table. The tension of knowing something is going to go wrong with that cake, with an ambulance due to be called at some point, is cranked up fantastically – will Nana get a nasty shock, or will Jim go up in flames when the candles are lit? It advances from farce to a slow-building nail-biter more frustratingly tense than even the most passive-aggressive of family meetings – that’s how well this episode is put together. Bitchy comments from your Nan about your mum’s interior decorating – nothing on this. The repeated “Forget about the past, you can’t change it. Forget about the future, you can’t predict it” from Nana Maggie’s card, read out again at the end of the episode, gives Angela and Katie’s quiet departure from the family home – and Jim – even deeper impact. Surface level – we had a comedic episode about families and their squabbles, with a bit of mystery and lots of tension thrown in. In reality, Nana’s Party turned out to be a sharply observed study of the nature of close families. No one can hurt quite like the ones who love you. Also: nothing can break tension like a slow strip to the Casualty theme. Read Phoebe-Jane’s review of the previous episode, Cold Comfort, here.
