Raised by Wolves

The setting is a council house in Wolverhampton full of offspring, exhausted looking mothers and a truly formidable lawn. It probably wouldn’t be something I’d make a point of watching if it hadn’t been a pilot written by Caitlin Moran and her sister Caroline. I will confess a pretty serious crush on Ms Moran, and, having read both her autobiography and the collection of articles she brought out this year, I’ve always really enjoyed the way she writes about her childhood and her family. Finding out that she and her sister had written a comedy based on those experiences therefore got my attention immediately. So it’s probably fair to say I went into this with some pretty high hopes.

The story centres on a group of siblings (I never did get round to counting exactly how many), their free spirit mother and degenerate grandfather. The girls all seem to be named after notable female pop culture figures from the last fifty years (the ones I picked up were Germaine, Aretha and Yoko).  The kids are being home schooled so have relatively little chance to interact with wider society. This may explain their charming eccentricities, or it could be genetic. Their mother is a chain-smoking, idealist who wanted her children to grow up without the corrupting influences of ‘The Man’ (so they are home schooled) and the grandfather climbs through the window then takes the kids back to his house to retrieve his weed stash. It’s the sort of chaos that can easily be played for laughs and the sheer absurdity of the situations alone should raise a chortle.

Much of the pilot focussed on the relationship between oldest sister Germaine (probably based on Caitlin) and second oldest Aretha (probably based on Caroline). Germaine is a lovelorn teenager unable to keep her internal monologue to herself with wild Wuthering Heights hair and dreams of an impassioned life of love affairs and swooning. Aretha is more practical, scathingly misanthropic and really wants a tenner for a new history book. Aretha is probably the character I most related to, but I’ve met my share of Germaines.
 

However the other siblings and the mother felt a bit one dimensional. Sometimes comedies can get away with using people as talking props if they’re funny enough, but, to be brutally honest, this one wasn’t (sorry Caitlin). There were some genuinely funny moments and good one liners, but other jokes just felt contrived. I expected it to be side splitting, but it was only watchable.

The cast was also too large. Some of the siblings appeared to be there just to fill up space (including ones who had actual lines). I was never sure how many children there were. I think the writers were probably trying to give an accurate reflection of their childhood, but I couldn’t help feeling the script wouldn’t have suffered from just being Germaine spouting romantic nonsense which was then expertly punctured by Aretha for half an hour.

But I did enjoy it and if it gets made into a series I will certainly be back to see how the dysfunctional pseudo-Morans are getting along. There is a lot of room for character development here. Germaine and Aretha are pretty well put together and the have a wonderful sisterly relationship. You can tell they love each other, but that will not stop them throwing lawn mowers at each other or locking each other in spider infested garden sheds. I think most people with siblings close in age to them can relate to that.

Raised by Wolves on Channel 4.