You don’t need to be an Anglophile nor a lover of the culture and fashion of the 1960s nor anyone interested in the behind-the-scenes push and pull of a network TV show to enjoy the series Funny Woman. This bubbly, period-savvy mix of comedy, drama, show-biz aspiration, and gender politics is a charmer, charged by the versatile British actor Gemma Arterton as the funny woman.
Funny Woman, produced by the U.K.’s Sky Max channel, is adapted from author Nick Hornby’s best-selling novel Funny Girl. That should not be confused with the musical about Fanny Brice with the same name, which probably explains the series being rebranded as Funny Woman. Spawned from Hornby’s book, the show recounts the adventures of Barbara Parker (Arterton), a beauty queen and candy factory employee from the unpretentious Northern England seaside town of Blackpool. Unfulfilled by the attention she gets as a pageant winner, she wants more out of life than that fleeting honor or her menial job.
Despite protests from her fiancé who is committed to his job as a local butcher, Barbara decides to give up her position as Miss Blackpool Belle 1964 and head to swingin’ London, where she intends to pursue a career as a television comedian. Years of watching I Love Lucy reruns and listening to British comedy programs on the radio with her father (David Threlfall) have inspired Barbara to realize her dreams of broadcast stardom. And when she finally gets a break, it turns out that she has the chops.
A beauty queen winner and candy factory employee wants more out of life.
Initially, she can only score a job selling hats in a department store, where she befriends plucky, sarcastic fellow saleswoman Marj (Alexa Davies) who becomes her roommate. Although Barbara infuriates her prim boss by being brutally honest to customers, a date with a predatory aristocratic type she meets at the store leads to an encounter with blowhard, old-school talent agent Brian Debenham. Played with apparent glee by the veteran, high-toned actor Rupert Everett, Debenham is appropriately bloated and dissolute. Regardless of his stature, Barbara realizes he is a possible means to the end she seeks.
Making her own break
After Barbara invades Debenham’s office and pleads for representation, the agent gives her the more glamorous stage moniker “Sophie Straw,” then puts her in a position to finagle an audition for a sitcom. Barbara’s sheer chutzpah and comedic gifts earn her a costarring spot in the show opposite the handsome, already famous male lead Clive Richardson (Tom Bateman). Things may look promising for her, but the path to success can’t be smooth in a story like this.
Ted Sergeant (Alistair Petrie) — an incredibly uptight executive at the conservative, government-controlled TVC (a slightly fictionalized version of the BBC) — barely tolerates Barbara/Sophie and torments the sitcom’s clever, forward-thinking and closeted two-man writing team (Matthew Beard and Leo Bill). Richardson is an arrogant womanizer who tempts her despite her better judgment. Plus, she has a yen for Dennis Mahindra (Arsher Ali), the earnest producer of the sitcom, and he fancies her, but he’s stuck in a loveless marriage. Numerous since outmoded expectations of how women should behave on screen and in society are also roadblocks that our heroine needs to surmount, so we see Marj enlist her in a protofeminist protest to achieve better working conditions and decent pay for saleswomen.
Thanks to the fully-realized lead performance by Arterton as Barbara/Sophie, complete with blue-collar Blackpool accent, you’re rooting for her to succeed as she navigates those choppy waters. Arterton’s film career has included playing a Bond girl in the middling Daniel Craig 007 movie Quantum of Solace; a winsome, wayward wife in the dramedy Gemma Bovary; a World War I spy in the outlandish action movie The King’s Man; and the title character in Tamara Drewe, based on a graphic novel that’s a wry modernization of Thomas Hardy’s classic novel of English country life Far from the Madding Crowd.
An artful Arterton
In Funny Woman, Arterton is as lovely as a Carnaby Street fashion model, while getting to showcase her range as an actress alongside an excellent ensemble. She sells the jokes and shtick, unafraid to be goofy, and also conveys the angst of trying to make it in the entertainment industry. In a subtler way, Arterton brings out the pain of the personal issues that Barbara needs to confront, such as the longtime absence of her mother (Olivia Williams) and the truth of her family background. All of this is orchestrated by director Oliver Parker over the course of the six-episode first season of the show and the four-episode second season that expands on Barbara/Sophie’s tussle with the ups and downs of fame, her romantic entanglements, and the changing place of women in the modern world — accompanied by a soundtrack of ear friendly era-specific hits and deep cuts.
Hornby has written a collection of well-regarded and thoroughly exuberant novels, including High Fidelity, About a Boy and Fever Pitch, which were each effectively adapted for the big screen. He also wrote the screenplay for An Education, the absolutely invigorating, 1960s-set coming-of-age movie that gave eventual three-time Oscar nominee Carey Mulligan her first lead in a feature film. When it came time to bring Funny Woman to live action, he let someone else run the show — in fact, a woman for a woman-centric project: the respected English comic actress and writer Morwenna Banks. The results were gratifying, even if the predictable machinations of the second season are not quite up to the delights of the first.
Banks — part of the writing team on the superb espionage series Slow Horses and a voice talent on the popular animated kids’ show Peppa Pig — not only developed Funny Woman from Hornby’s book, she wrote the majority of the episodes. Additionally, Banks, whose only American credit to date was a brief four-episode stint as a cast member during the 1994–95 season of Saturday Night Live, plays the wife and assistant to Barbara/Sophie’s agent Brian Debenham. She is slyly amusing in the part, as one might hope in a program called Funny Woman.
The second season of Funny Woman premieres Feb. 2 on PBS.
