It’s just the usual teenage girl japes: smoking, drinking, teaming up with your best friend to steal a chicken from an irate local farmer. But the motive behind 17-year-old Tiana’s decision to pinch some poultry is about as far from ordinary as you can possibly get. I’m not sure what a normal reason for stealing a chicken might be, but trust me: this is most definitely not it.
We get slightly more clarity on the situation once Tiana brings the chicken home: it’s for her younger brother Tionne, who is prone on the sofa with a duvet over his head. The pair’s nine-year-old sister Tanika wants him to get up and “act normal”, otherwise he’ll end up in a home and she will get adopted, because she’s “young and pretty”. The trio’s mum is missing and Tionne needs the chicken for an experiment he wants to conduct. Soon, we learn that these two things are related in an unimaginably awful way.
At this stage, we’re all familiar with the mores of contemporary comedy drama. The past decade has produced a slew of programming about trauma, mental health, grief, injustice and oppression that lighten their heavy loads by throwing in a gag every few minutes. These shows are not designed to keep you constantly tickled, but they generally remain possessed by the ghost of sitcom grammar. If the comic element is neglected, they can be dull, depressing and self-indulgent – but when they get the balance right, they can shake your brain like a snowglobe. Just Act Normal is one of those shows. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a series that combines consistent silliness with such a chillingly dark conceit. Balancing extremes of comedy and tragedy is a fine art; the fact this series pulls it off is a triumph in itself.
Just Act Normal (BBC Three, 16 April, 9pm) is written by Janice Okoh, and based on her own Bruntwood prize-winning play Three Birds (the setting has been changed from south London to Birmingham). The stars of the original 2013 production – Michaela Coel and Susan Wokoma – went on to great things; the youngsters who lead this adaptation are talented enough to do the same. Chenée Taylor is excellent as the uber-capable Tiana, juggling her makeup artist dreams with the enormous financial and emotional burden of being the new family matriarch – and keeping their actual mother’s disappearance a secret to avoid social services involvement. Kaydrah Walker-Wilkie is naturally funny as the sassy, spirited Tanika, while Akins Subair gives Tionne a thousand-yard stare that occasionally gives way to profound disappointment – or, more heartbreakingly, a brief glimmer of hope (both tend to be related to the trio’s father, a man with a closed heart and a slightly ajar wallet).
Credit too to director Nathaniel Martello-White, who manages to provide a steady stream of guffaw-inducing moments without ever trivialising the siblings’ trauma. The former is mostly the remit of the supporting characters, including Tiana’s motormouth bestie Shanice (Kelise Gordon-Harrison), who delivers great lines with relish (“I love a man that’s so melanated the whites of his eyes is yellow”) and Jamelia as another proxy mother. The masterful Romola Garai piles on the ambiguity as Tanika’s teacher Ms Jenkins, who is deeply worried about the welfare of her favourite pupil. On one hand, she has shades of Matilda’s Miss Honey: kind, pretty, softly spoken and the source of adoption fantasies. On the other, she’s delusional, wounded and quite creepy – not least because she gets so much validation from a vulnerable child’s compliments.
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Last but by no means least, we have the shell-suited Dr Feelgood, an incompetent heroin dealer who is determined to collect the £200 owed to him by the siblings’ mother – until he discovers she’s missing. And since he’s been chucked out of his own mum’s house for being crap at selling smack, he’s willing to cut them a deal. Played by Sam Buchanan, Feelgood is as morally compromised as any drug dealer, but he’s also goofy, golden-hearted (a quality communicated at one point via a nanosecond of hilariously intense emoting) and far from a stereotypical baddie. In fact, there’s nothing remotely predictable or run-of-the-mill about Just Act Normal, a series about three abandoned, desperate, frightened kids that somehow still manages to leave you with a spring in your step.