Amanda was the most obvious character to get her own series after Motherland – because she’s easy to mock in a way that’s always ‘punching up’.
That’s what the writers of Amandaland told the BBC Comedy Festival in Liverpool yesterday, as the hit sitcom was renewed for a third series.
‘People like seeing posh, beautiful people suffer,’ Holly Walsh said. ‘Our whole show’s punching up.
‘You can make so many more jokes about someone who thinks she’s better than you and there’s something about that Instagram "nonfluencer" that’s so fun [to parody].’
However co-creator Laurence Rickard said the character played by Lucy Punch had been made slightly warmer for her own series.
‘She is a woman who cares about her friends and family, and is also just immensely shallow and awful. So we needed both of those things,’ he said. ‘You get the best comedy out of her when she is terrible but behind the veneer is a genuinely nice human being.’
He added that the spin-off was a ‘poisoned chalice’ adding: ‘A lot of people were folding their arms saying, "this will be a slightly less good version [of Motherland]" which is why people put in maximum effort to make sure that didn’t happen.’
Fellow writer Helen Serafinowicz admitted: ‘It was tricky because we had to create new characters around an established pair [Amanda and Anne].’
But while Walsh agreed they had to ‘dig deep’ to make sure they weren’t overlapping with traits from Motherland characters, they were able to build a ‘squad’ of opposites to play against Amanda. ‘If you’ve got someone who’s up themselves you need someone else who hates themselves,’ she said.
Rickard said: ‘In some ways, there's a tradition of that when you think about a lead where you've got brilliant character parts around someone and the person who has to carry a lot of the narrative ends up being the straightman because they've got more jobs to do.’
But Walsh said that wasn’t often the case in practice, as viewers want flawed central characters, saying the only instance she could remember of a comedy revolving around a pure straightman was Arrested Development.
Walsh also said that Jennifer Saunders’ appearance in Amandaland. Christmas special was not originally planned as a reunion with her Ab Fab co-star Joanna Lumley.
‘We didn’t write that for Jennifer,’ she said. ‘We knew exactly what that character was, which is why we felt secure [in casting her] – we weren’t trying to get Edina and Patsy back together again.’
Rikard agreed: ‘You are inviting a comparison when you’re only going to come out second best – but the moment [Saunders] opened the door she was obviously such a different character [from Edina].’
