At one point Greig’s Bo is physically wrenched from her mother screaming “I will never, ever, ever LEAVE YOUUUUUUUU!” The ending, where she eulogises Beth, is a piece of mawkishness that feels like it will never end.
But when she calls Beth “Mummy”, an epithet she hated, Imrie is instantly up and off the bed and into the first of a series of vignettes going back 14, 20, 30 and 40-plus years that show Beth to be pretty much a monster.
Tamsin Greig is her long-suffering daughter Bo, flashing back over decades of enraging, exasperating neediness, while also struggling to parent an extremely challenging adopted daughter, repeatedly seen screaming on scratchy video upstage.
A hippyish creator of “woven sculptures” and a great beauty who only attracted pathetic men keen to get inside her Aga-warmed cottage, Beth snipes at Bo’s dowdiness and her weight from childhood on.
Perhaps I should declare an interest: my father and mother-in-law died with dementia, and it’s as if all their symptoms, and every other extreme potential facet of the disease – malapropisms, sexual disinhibition, fearful rages – have been squashed into Imrie’s straggle-haired but girlishly chirping form.
