Alma’s (Not) Normal: Normalising Working-Class Women in/on BBC TV Comedy

Abstract

This article examines the BBC sitcom Alma’s Not Normal and its representation of white working-class femininities in/on British TV comedy. After The Royle Family creator Caroline Aherne’s death in July 2017, the BBC created a bursary in memory of the comedy star, awarding £5,000 to the successful applicant to develop a pilot comedy script. Though open to people of all backgrounds and genders, the three winners so far have been working-class women – Sophie Willan, Amy Gledhill and Kiri Pritchard-McLean – an important shift from the recent success of female-fronted and female-authored middle-class comedies on the BBC such as Miranda and Fleabag. This article examines the award’s first winner: Boltonian Sophie Willan and her series Alma’s Not Normal. While Phil Wickham argues that contemporary working-class sitcoms in Britain display the ‘hidden injuries of class’, something that is felt but no longer acknowledged, I contend that Willan exposes class wounds by explicitly referencing and drawing attention to social issues in her TV series. More specifically, I argue that, as a working-class woman in the North West, Willan uses comedy to interrogate the intersections of class and gender. This textual analysis will then be used as a framework to conceptualise the labour of working-class women in British television comedy, mainly because class has been overlooked as a social category in contemporary scholarship on feminism and humour.