This Way Up, review: Aisling Bea and Sharon Horgan team up in this brilliant, sharp-tongued show

New comedy-drama is elevated by fine writing and versatile performances

(Channel 4)

This Way Up, Channel 4’s new comedy-drama about a woman recovering from a nervous breakdown, is a tantalising prospect. Teaming Aisling Bea with Sharon Horgan, it’s basically Watch The Throne for fans of brilliant sharp-tongued Irishwomen.

Creator and writer Bea plays Aine, an English-as-a-foreign-language teacher trying to get things back to normal. Catastrophe’s Horgan is her protective older sister, Shona, who has to juggle her own life with keeping an eye out for her sister. As the first episode begins, she has come to check Aine out of the rehab centre. The two sisters banter with the registrar, offering “feedback”. The brochure showed a picture of a jacuzzi, Aine explains, but instead there was just a pond. And a Kit-Kat would have been nice.

It sets the tone for the series, where humour is used to deflect and evade and dissemble. Despite the jokes, the immediate cause of Aine’s breakdown remains unclear. We know there is an ex, Freddie (Chris Geere), who turns up on one of Shona’s nights out, but not much more than that. She tries to sleep with a friend from rehab, Tom (Ricky Grover), just “to feel something for five minutes”.

It’s the comedian’s curse never to be more than a line away from escaping a tricky conversation, but this can be isolating, too. London is a lonely place, where flatmates flit in and out without really noticing you. Shona watches Aine with her smartphone’s “find my friends” function, the first time I can remember seeing it used on TV for non-dystopian purposes. She admonishes her sister for going on long walks alone at night, but also worries when she stays put.

The writing is sharp and well observed, probing the fault lines between small talk and real problems. Earlier this year, Back to Life explored similar territory: how a woman in her thirties can try to begin again, with no momentum behind her. In that series, Daisy Haggard’s Miri, released from prison after a murder, had to shoulder almost all the emotional burden. Here Horgan and Bea share responsibilities and the programme feels more balanced as a result, anchored by two big-hearted and versatile performances.

Horgan’s character overlaps with her role in Catastrophe, and both have a keen sense of the absurd underpinned by a maturity. Shona seems to know what is required of adults, but is wary of looking line a hypocrite when her own life is far from perfect, and so struggles to articulate it to her rudderless sister. At one point Tom notices that Aine is still drinking. Her problem wasn’t booze, she explains, but being “too much of a f***ing leggggeeenddd.” We’re no clearer to understanding what’s going on. Perhaps she isn’t, either.