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| | Grown-up gross-out comedy is thriving – and Such Brave Girls is leading the way Kat Sadler’s brilliantly biliousBBC sitcom doesn’t disgust and offend for the sake of it, but follows the likes of Always Sunny in making a deeper point through its off-colour gags |
| | | | The best binge-watches should make you feel a little bit sick while you gorge on them, and Kat Sadler’s sitcom Such Brave Girls, which just returned for a second season on BBC Three and iPlayer, certainly fits that description. I found myself burning through episodes, the enjoyment of them tempered with the slightest top note of nausea. That isn’t a criticism of the series, which follows the chaotically bleak existence of adult sisters Josie (Sadler) and Billie (Lizzie Davidson), still living at home with their wild-eyed mother, Deb (Louise Brealey). In fact it’s the intended reaction. From its logo (the title of the show made out in strands of wet hair slithering across bathroom tiles) onwards, Such Brave Girls is built to shock, unsettle and gross out, but above all be laughed at. “Feral, filthy awfulness”, is how the New York Times describes it, which, again, was intended as a compliment. Season two somehow manages to find an even higher pitch of horribleness than the show’s Bafta-winning first season. Jokes about abortion, suicide, coercive control and the deepest corners of depression abound. The sisters and their mum routinely go at each other with the viciousness of honey badgers. Blood and other body fluids fly. A recurring theme is Josie’s attempts to get sectioned. (“How many pills did you take?” asks the nurse assessing Josie’s dubious claim that she has overdosed. “A lady never tells,” Josie replies while forcing a cup of activated charcoal down her throat.) The farcical nastiness of Julia Davis is a clear touchstone, but the show’s bracing comedy is entirely of the moment. Such Brave Girls has a healthy disdain for trends, fads and buzzwords (“wet for trauma” is how Josie describes the family). Above all, the show seems to be on a mission to elicit the kind of deep-snort laugh that only comes when hearing something breathtakingly off-colour. Such Brave Girls’s second outing comes at a curious time for comedy. After a period that, depending on your broader outlook, either felt overly censorious or like a necessary course correction, the past few years have witnessed something of a backlash. On both sides of the Atlantic, a consensus calcified around the idea that the twin evils of wokeness and cancel culture were killing comedy, stifling the form by inserting red lines around things that could not be joked about. | | The veracity of this claim was immaterial, really: the mere perception of censorship was enough to usher in a counter-movement, focused on comedic free speech at all costs. That movement reached its apex last October when Tony Hinchcliffe, the dominant roast comic of the anti-woke era, performed a set at Donald Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally in New York where, among other smirking provocations, he declared Puerto Rico to be a “floating island of garbage”. Despite widespread outrage about the joke, predictions that Hinchcliffe’s set would doom Trump’s presidential campaign turned out to be just a shade off the mark. Instead, Hinchcliffe cemented his position as one of the manosphere’s main players, and was rewarded by Netflix with a three-show deal for his roast battle series Kill Tony. Meanwhile, his movement’s outlook seems to have spread far beyond comedy. A piece this week suggests that the Trump administration used wilfully offensive memes and jokes as trials for its most extreme policies – a style of “irony poisoning” that seems to be seeping into discourse on this side of the Atlantic too, as George Monbiot and others have pointed out. Knowingly or unknowingly, Such Brave Girls is taking back the “offence humour” territory ceded to the rightwing mob. While the show can go toe-to-toe with anyone from the manosphere for shock comedy, the offence always has a deeper point, rather than simply serving as nihilistic punching down. Many of its darkest storylines are drawn from tough, real-world experiences – Sadler herself had been sectioned after trying to end her life . And it often feels as if the show’s entirely unexpurgated take on issues most would tiptoe around is intended as a form of cathartic unburdening: better out than in. Such Brave Girls isn’t alone in this by any stretch. In UK standup, there seems to be a rising set of comics who are electrified and fascinated by the transgressions of shock comedy while being entirely uninterested in the rightwing politicking that seems to have blighted the subgenre. There are the likes of Fin Taylor, and Mike Rice and Vittorio Angelone of the very funny podcast Mike and Vittorio’s Guide to Parenting, which is not a guide to parenting at all, but two childless Irish, London-based comedians shooting the shit in the most unfiltered way possible. And, of course, in the US there is the grandaddy of all shock comedies: It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia (pictured above), which is still gleefully ploughing new furrows of offence, 20 years after it first started airing. (Season 17 is now airing in the US and should hopefully be on Netflix in the UK soon.) Always Sunny is an interesting test case: its early episodes, in retrospect, feel a little too nihilistic in their eagerness to show how noxious its characters were (the N-word made an outing in the show’s first season). But as the show has progressed, there has been a recognition of the limits of saying the unsayable and a subtle recalibration, without dulling its intensity. Two decades on, Always Sunny still has the capacity to wind you with the force of an off-colour joke, a power it shares with Such Brave Girls. That’s why we keep gorging on these episodes, even though we feel a bit queasy doing so. |
| | | Take Five | Each week we run down the five essential pieces of pop culture we’re watching, reading and listening to | | 1 | FILM – Superman The first truly massive blockbuster of the summer is here. Our Peter Bradshaw didn’t think much of James Gunn’s reboot, though it does seem to have gone down better across the pond. I personally found it one of the better superhero efforts of recent times (a low bar, I know), with minimal Marvel-style backstory to wade through and a bright, zany old-comic-book tone that felt refreshing after so many glowering, dark, trauma-filled epics. OK, it does descend into the usual CGI soup in its final minutes. But before that, it’s plenty entertaining. Want more? Is it a doc? Is it a biopic? Stephen Malkmus and the gang get given a very meta music movie treatment in new film Pavements. For more, here are seven films to catch at home this week.
| 2 | PODCAST – Comfort Eating with Grace Dent In the time it would take most people to polish off a tube of Pringles, Grace Dent’s moreish interview podcast has already reached its 10th series. To celebrate there’s a pretty stellar lineup this time around: the Glasto-conquering CMAT, Irvine Welsh, Nicola Sturgeon and Lulu will all be sharing their guilty food pleasures in the coming weeks. First up is south London soul star Joy Crookes (pictured above) who, as well as talking about her musical upbringing and mental health struggles, brings with her 10 foil takeaway containers of her mum’s Bangladeshi home cooking for her and an audibly drooling Grace to sample. New episodes on Tuesdays. Want more? New York Times podcast The Retrievals, on how the health industry minimises women’s pain, returns with a season investigating issues with the C-section. Plus, here are the best podcasts of the week.
| 3 | BOOK – Wolf Moon by Arifa Akbar Guardian theatre critic Arifa Akbar delves into the night hours in her new book, Wolf Moon. A long-term sufferer of insomnia, Akbar looks at the factors – and particularly the fears – that drive sleeplessness, as well as the possibilities for creativity and celebration unveiled by the night. “This imaginative and empathetic book will probably not guide you to better sleep, but it will be a fine companion for the wakeful hours”, writes Alex Clark in a Guardian review. You can also read an extract of the book here. Want more? Sudanese author Leila Aboulela won the PEN Pinter prize this week, awarded to writers who, in the words of the late British playwright Harold Pinter, cast an “unflinching, unswerving” gaze on the world. Aboulela’s most recent book, River Spirit, published in 2023, is a powerful coming-of-age story set during the Mahdist war of the late 19th century in Sudan. For more of the best paperbacks out this month, click here.
| 4 | TV – Too Much Eight years on from the end of Girls, and following a succession of projects that suggested she was trying to run away from her landmark series, Lena Dunham returns to the well. Well, sort of. Too Much revisits much of the same messy millennial relationship territory of Girls, but with three major differences: it’s set in London; has a gooey Richard Curtis-y centre; and doesn’t star Dunham. She’s found a great avatar though in Hacks’ show-stealer Megan Stalter, who swaps New York and heartbreak for a north London council estate and dizzying new relationship with Will Sharpe. Available in full on Netflix now.
Want more? The Trouble With Mr Doodle looks at the travails of artist Sam Cox, whose passion for line drawing unravelled into psychosis. Available on Channel 4 now – and you can read a Guardian interview with Cox here. Plus, here are the seven best shows to stream this week.
| 5 | ALBUM – Clipse: Let God Sort Em Out A Superman-level event for the rap world, this. Brothers Pusha T and Malice spat their last bars as Clipse in 2009, when Malice decided their cinematic tales of “‘caine and guns” weren’t consistent with his increasingly Christian outlook. Sixteen years later, he has reconsidered and the pair have reunited for another collection of lyrically dense and dextrous tracks in the form of Let God Sort Em Out. Thrillingly, they’ve coaxed old collaborator Pharrell Williams away from Lego brick biopics to produce, in the process getting him to recapture some of his Neptunes-era sizzle on the likes of single So Be It. Want more? Endearingly goofy Chicago rapper Open Mike Eagle’s new album Neighborhood Gods Unlimited is stocked full of skits and self-reference. For the rest of our music reviews, click here. |
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| | | Read On | | Book controversies don’t get bigger than the one around The Salt Path. The Guardian’s Lucy Knight looks at a “true story” that may be anything but. | For the Ringer, Brian Phillips writes about what he’s calling “ghost shows”, formerly massive, agenda-setting series that return for later seasons seemingly without anyone caring. | Art fakery is a big concern at the moment. Nell Stevens, who has written a novel about forgery, considers what it means to find out a painting you love may not be authentic. | A strange trend has emerged in 2025: every band on the planet seems to be sacking their drummer. Stereogum is calling it the drumpocalypse, and their journalist Christopher Weingarten went on NPR’s Weekend Edition last week to explain the cull of cymbal-bashers. |
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| | | You be the Guide | Last week, to coincide with Oasis’s long-awaited return, we asked for your dream band re-formations. Here are a few of your picks, including some very unlikely ones, plus one that is about to become a reality: “For me, it has to be The Sundays. I’d only just managed to see them live for the first (and only) time at the Union Chapel [north London] at what was supposed to be a primer for a proper UK tour for their third and final album, Static and Silence, in 1997. And then they disappeared without doing that tour, never to be seen again. The first time I became aware of them was their single Can’t Be Sure (still my favourite song of all time), which I’d finally tracked down as a 7in single in an indie record store in Croydon in 1989. Perhaps playing it 15 plus times on the bounce didn’t improve the humour of my soon-to-be ex! Harriet’s voice just tickles my ecstasy bone, and I love their songs. I would really sell a kidney to see them play again (and some new music!)” – Dave Morgan[One of quite a few shouts for The Sundays, a great band who are rumoured to have continued recording all these years since their apparent breakup – GM] “I would love to see Talking Heads or Led Zeppelin re-form but it is never going to happen. They both were magnificent bands, though their genres of music were so different. At least both groups left a great legacy. Perhaps David Byrne could link up with Jimmy Page and create some new music – now that’s a interesting thought.” – Liam Healy “My darling granddaughter Bella (14) and I (79) adore the same band, My Chemical Romance. They broke up about 10 years ago and we knew we’d never get to see them live. Suddenly, last November, we heard that the band was reforming for a 10-city tour. Unfortunately for us, our city of Vancouver BC was not on the itinerary, but Seattle was. We are now preparing for our (very expensive) trip to the US for our much-anticipated and unexpected chance to see MCR in concert next weekend. Although this trip is costing me thousands of dollars (that I don’t have), including the 40% currency exchange rate, I don’t care. We will have this experience that I hope will give Bella a lifelong memory of a very special time with her granny.” – Kate O’Hara |
| | | | Summer reads | 2 for £15 at the Guardian Bookshop |
| Enjoy 2 for £15 on selected paperbacks – from the hottest new releases to Guardian Bookshop bestsellers. Stock up your shelves and support the Guardian with every order. |
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| Get involved | Hang the bunting and cut some jam sandwiches into little triangles: next week is the 200th Guide newsletter. To celebrate we’ll be sharing our favourite culture of the century so far, and we’re also asking you to recommend yours across film,TV, music and literature. It can be anything from the biggest blockbuster to the most niche novel. Share your favourites from the past 25 years by replying to this email or contacting me on gwilym.mumford@theguardian.com.
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| | | THE CHAMPAGNE IS ON ICE AT LONDON'S NEWEST CULTURAL HOT SPOT | | A refreshing take on Private Membership Clubs. Attracting the creative, the contemporary, the corporate and the casual is London’s newest cultural hotspot to socialise, dine, and wind. Hidden behind a private door on London’s iconic Trafalgar Square, you’ll find Supporters House, the first private Membership Space from the National Gallery. Described as ‘classy and cool, exclusive but accessible’ this is not your average Membership space. Access is available via House Membership and includes daily access, unlimited visits to all exhibitions, a programme of House events, and much more. From just £135 per year there is nothing else in London like it.
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| | Comfort Eating is back on the menu |
| Grace Dent is back and breaking bread with celebrity guests to discover what meals mean the most to them. In new episodes, get ready for the likes of Irvine WelshLulu, Joy Crookes and others to bust open the pantry and chat about life through food. |
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