You probably don’t need me to tell you much about Raised By Wolves. Unless you’ve had your broadband connection cut off recently you will know it’s the new sitcom written by Caitlin Moran and her sister Caroline recreating their unconventional childhood on a Wolverhampton council estate.
And, of course, you can probably guess without reading this review that it is very funny. Germaine (Helen Monks) is oversexed, Aretha (Alexa Davies) is severe. Both are home-educated but budding intellectuals. The lounge is crammed with books as well as junk. In the first episode following the pilot in 2013 mum Della (Rebekah Staton) takes the kids into the country for day of foraging for food, but things go off-kilter when a horse takes an unnatural interest in sister Yoko.
I’ve got a bit of a vested interest in this as my partner is from Wolverhampton. Her family thought The Grimleys was a fly-on-the-wall documentary and I guess they might think the same about this. It’s unashamedly West Midlands/Black Country, an area that, apart from Frank Skinner, doesn’t get a lot of exposure on TV now that Slade have split up. “We’re Midlands twats” they declare defiantly.
As you would expect the script is feisty and filthy, mixing sitcom smut with nods to pop culture. There’s a Pixies reference before the credits have even started and the closing music in tonight's episode is the magnificent Show Me The Way by Peter Frampton. There’s also a whiff of the Young Ones when Germaine is explaining to sister Yoko (Molly Risker) about how to use a tampon: “I put it in my lady mouse hole”. Grampy is played by Phillip Jackson, who I loved in Mike Leigh’s High Hopes – there’s a bit of Leigh’s earthy comic naturalism from the old days here as well.
There is one little niggle, but it’s probably just me. Because it is based on Moran’s childhood I keep assuming it is set in the early 1990s. The fact that all the knackered cars seem old and you see lots of books but rarely a computer adds to that impression, but then every now and again someone pulls out a smartphone and you realise it is a contemporary comedy, albeit clearly a timeless one.
The title, of course, is a reference to Wolverhampton. Though as the writers are so literate I wonder if it is also a nod to Peter Cook saying he was “raised by goats” - in his case meaning nannies.
Raised By Wolves, 10pm, C4, Mondays from March 16.
