Please Help, a new BBC comedy pilot written by and starring Lucy Pearman, opens with an old woman (Anna Calder-Marshall) sitting on the toilet. Beside her is her granddaughter Milly in a dressing gown, yawning, waiting for her to finish so that she can lift her from the seat. Carers do a lot of yawning – it is tiring work – and Milly is approaching the limits of her energy reserves when she suddenly starts developing magical powers (invisibility, super-strength, flight) that lead her to believe she is going mad. Perhaps, her doctor says, she just needs a night off – she is, after all, her grandmother’s sole carer. Despite not wanting a boyfriend because she’s “always tired”, she agrees to go on a date, but stipulates: “I have to be back by nine in case my nan rolls out of bed.”
Having been a young carer myself – my brother is severely autistic – I was happy to see caring portrayed in comedy, and not only because representation is important. I have often felt that the humour inherent to much day-to-day care work and the singular relationship of the person being looked after and the person doing the work gets lost somewhere in the gulf between lived experience and the screen, and for a long time it was rare to see it depicted at all.
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