May Contain Nuts (2009)

Based upon the novel by John O'Farrell, May Contain Nuts is a light but effective satire upon the middle-class obsession with education.

When it becomes clear that their eldest daughter Molly will never pass the entrance exam to their private school of choice, Alice and David Chaplin resort to extreme measures - Alice will disguise herself as an 11 year old and take the exam for her.

"Nobody notices ugly children," reasons David and Alice is dressed down accordingly, complete with lank hair, thick-framed glasses and stick-on spots. Crucially, for the drama, Shirley Henderson as Alice is actually pretty convincing in the disguise.

Anyway, from its terrible casting (an exception is made for Elizabeth Berrington's fabulously cartoon-vile uber-mum, Ffion) to its uncomfortable script (in one how-could-this-ever-have-made-the-edit? scene, Boyd's David watches Alice dress up as an 11-year-old and admits he's "really turned on") to its total dislocation from any audience demographic I can think of, May Contain Nuts was fairly disastrous on every conceivable level.

May Contain Nuts was the best of the crop of new comedies on TV this week: a strong, almost brilliant cast of comedy actors, rather than comedians; a subject that, while having been done before, was given a pleasantly contemporary makeover. It's the story of the adult who goes back to school, as in Vice Versa or Never Been Kissed. In this case, however, it has been tagged onto that subject for mockery, the middle-class obsession with getting their children into private schools. Though have you noticed that nobody ever makes a drama about how awful state education is? I suspect this is because all scriptwriters used to be teachers. Shirley Henderson is the mother who, because she's teeny-weeny and looks like a woodland creature, decides to take her daugh­ter's entrance exam to get into Chelsea Girls' School. The neighbours are an awful crowd of pushy women and tit-wit husbands. There is one funny scene at a sports day where the mothers attach reins to their children and drag them over the finishing line. Overall, though, it isn't very amusing, or as amusing as it ought to be, and that's not the fault of the plotting, the timing or the acting. It's down to the emphasis, its mission statement; it dithers between satire and comedy.

These are not the same thing, and they don't sit together. Satire is a posh spoof and has a short attention span. This series needed to commit to the humour. It's a shame, because you could tell everyone was gagging to go on and make this really hilarious, but it was stopped by the hand-wringing of its own liberal concerns - and that's one of the reasons there's not one sitcom worth a grin on television. The Tristrams are too frightened, too right-on, too even-handed to laugh at much. Laughter itself is suspicious; people might do it for the wrong reasons, might laugh at the wrong things. Laughter is so raucous, aggressive, judgmental. Isn't it much nicer, more acceptable, to smile and clap?

Satirising the middle classes on telly also has its inherent difficulties. To a large extent, your target and your audience are one and the same; who else would be interested? There's always a danger of resorting to wide-of-the-mark caricature, but if you're too subtle you run the risk of being insufficiently savage. And aren't traditional middle-class preoccupations simply too dreary to warrant a full-scale comic assault? Good schools, lamb shanks, house prices - who cares?

May Contain Nuts (ITV1) neatly bypasses these worries by dragging us into a dark, claustrophobic world: a gated community in London ruled by pushy mother Ffion, who is a sort of Lord Voldemort of middle-class aspiration. Fresh arrivals David and Alice Chapin are initially bewildered by their new social circle, where ghastly parents deploy their children as proxies for their own ambitions; but, rather than becoming channels for our disapproval, the Chapins plunge right in.

No such one-upmanship in May Contain Nuts, ITV's two-part adaptation of the John O'Farrell novel and the final mainstream comedy offering of the night. Oh, who am I kidding? It's Clapham for goodness sake, of course it's competitive. What else do you expect from life in London's most bourgeois suburb? This is Keeping Up Appearances ("don't say what darling, say pardon, we're speaking French") for the New Labour generation. Or should that be New Tory? I've lost track. Talking of Tories, this was pretty funny: one of the families had a "scare-chav" (something to do with a scarecrow; it isn't important) whose face, according to Mum, "looked like a startled child". Cue Dad: "Yes, we modelled it on Cameron." Not Dave, though, their son, Cameron. Ba-boom-chh. Mm. Perhaps you had to be there?

Anyway, in Clapham, it's very important indeed that your child goes to Clapham School for Girls, even if it means dressing up as your daughter to do the exam. Under no circumstances do you want them to end up at Clapham Comprehensive, with all its underage sex, and drugs and, you know, equality otherwise - who knows? - they might end up working street corners in exchange for heroin, or something like that.

And so proceeds ITV's version of what might loosely be termed satire (I'm sure that's what the writers think it is anyway). Except that it's not really satire, is it? There are plenty of wink-wink-nudge-nudge-look-how-silly-modern-parents-are moments but it's all a bit hammy and ornate; there's no bite to speak of. And isn't the whole laughing-at-the-middle-classes-with-their-organic-lollypops-and-vegetarianism a bit predictable now? It's been done. And done, and done...

At any rate, these particular organic lollypop-eaters were far too annoying to warrant their own show, especially Alice (it's not in the name, honest), with all her bubble-wrap popping and wide-eyed whinging, though the other mums were just as bad. My vote goes to Alice's cross-dressing son. At least he's got character. But aside from Dave's fleeting cameo, there wasn't a joke to speak of. Just lots and lots of overacting.

Based on John O'Farrell's novel, May Contain Nuts took an easy target - the desperation of middle-class parents to ensure their little darlings get into their school de choix - and bludgeoned it with the proverbial sledgehammer. The idea was that mum Alice could only ensure mildly dim daughter Molly would get into the snooty college she'd set her heart on if she took the entrance exam herself - cue tiny actress Shirley Henderson disguising herself as a spotty 11-year-old girl and somewhat queasily arousing husband David (a wasted Darren Boyd) in the process. The major problem being it was hard to give two lacrosse sticks whether the daft mare pulled it off or not.

Some major issues of the day were touched on - such as the difficulty of locating running spikes for five-year-olds - but this bunch of self-obsessed boors should have come with an allergy warning.

There is a new monster on television. Her name is Ffion and she is glorious. Elizabeth Berrington plays the ultimate in pushy mothers in May Contain Nuts. She will terminate anyone who stands in the way of her daughter's extra tutoring and son's sports day dash (in which she picked him up and pushed him over the line). When another mum objected, a teacher desperately offered "Why don't we say you're all winners?" to the maternal Valkyries.

If anyone cares to run a "most irritating TV character of the year" competition I guarantee that Alice Chaplin will be near the top, if not the outright winner. Alice (a twitchy Shirley Henderson) is a middle-class mum who passes herself off as her own 11-year-old daughter to sit a posh public school's entrance exam. We are meant to feel a bit sorry for Alice, I think, because she's goaded to going to such ridiculous lengths by the other insufferably pushy and smug mums on her gated housing estate. But, blimey, she's annoying. And the bit where she dresses as a teenage girl in front of her very interested husband is just a wee bit creepy. Still, if you like jokes about the poorness of comprehensive schools and organic lollies and you enjoy seeing middle-class parents behaving like idiots, this adaptation of John O'Farrell's novel will be right up your suburban street.

This two-part comedy, based on John O'Farell's novel about affluent parents in South London trying to get their children into the best local school, comes from the same gene pool as Outnumbered. But there are crucial differences. Here the comedy, particularly the treatment of pushy parents, veers towards broad caricature. ("What terrible parents we've been," says the mother. "Alfie's four and he's never heard of Prokofiev.") It also lacks the improvised genius that made the kids' performances in Outnumbered so outstanding. On the plus side, it isn't accompanied by a vile laughter track; it boasts two engaging performances from Shirley Henderson and Darren Boyd as the beseiged parents, and it skewers the aggressive competitiveness of middle-class mores. But for all its qualities, it wields a satirical sledgehammer.

This quirky comedy-drama follows parents who will stop at nothing to get their kids into top schools. Mum Alice (Harry Potter's Shirley Henderson) wants to send her daughter to exclusive Chelsea College but the entrance exam might be too hard. So Alice slips into a school uniform, paints on spots and prepares to sit the test herself.

This quirky two-part comedy-drama makes light of one of modern-day parenting's most common neuroses - namely, getting your kids into a decent school. Adapted from a novel by John O'Farrell, it stars Shirley Henderson and Darren Boyd as anxious parents Alice and David, rapidly caught up in this madness after moving with their three children into a leafy London suburb.

The situation becomes so crazy (extra tutoring, brain-food diets etc.) that when their 11-year-old daughter Molly looks as if she's blown her chances, Alice decides to take the most drastic step of all - by posing as the child and taking the entrance exam on her behalf.

Shirley Henderson stars in this two-part comedy drama about a woman keen to send her daughter to a good school. None of us want to send our kids to a disaster prone comp such as Waterloo Road, but would you consider dressing up as your sprog and taking the 11-plus in order to get them into a posher school? That's one of the zany plots concocted by the pushy parents in this far-fetched two-part comedy drama, which stars Harry Potter ghost Shirley Henderson and Phil Mitchell's mad missus Sophie Thompson. Nutty, indeed.

Pushy, paranoid parents have long been an easy target for send ups. And this two-part adaptation of John O'Farrell's bestselling novel - quite rightly - doesn't cut them any slack. When Alice (played by Shirley Henderson, 44 - and, yes, her age is relevant) and hubby David move to a leafy enclave of South West London, they're quickly informed by a domineering uber-mummy neighbour that the local state school would confine their kids to the intellectual scrap heap and them to social wilderness. Cue Alice pulling on a school uniform (she's no Britney) to sit her daughter's grammar school entrance exams. Un-hilarious, but might raise a wry smile out of parents in similar predicaments.

This two-part comedy drama is adapted by scriptwriter Mark Burton, of Chicken Run and Wallace and Gromit fame, and it stands at the school gates to watch the desperate shenanigans of ambitious parents. Shirley Henderson and Darren Boyd play Alice and David, newly moved to the area and keen to fit in with their affluent gated community - that means getting in the right school. And won't the whole process be so much easier if Alice sits the entrance exam rather than daughter Molly?

John O'Farrell's novel, on which this is based, is a funny, endearing comedy about social pressures in the suburban middle classes. The television version is a highly irritating comedy drama about people that it's hard to like. Middle class mother Alice (Shirley Henderson) goes to the ludicrous lengths of dressing up as her 11 year-old daughter to sit an entrance exam for a school to make sure she gets into it. It doesn't help that Henderson has a habit of playing irritating characters in the first place, but really, this is one that should have been left as a novel where it was much more palatable.