Mother and Son was a sitcom about care, and nobody called it that

Mother and Son is the kind of show Australians describe as a national treasure, which is usually what people say when they have not watched it recently. I watched it again properly this month and I want to report, hand on heart, that it is much stranger and much sadder than its reputation, and also still funny, which is the whole trick.

Geoffrey Atherden created and wrote the series for the ABC, and it ran from 1984 into the early 1990s. Ruth Cracknell played Maggie Beare, an elderly woman living in a house she refuses to leave. Garry McDonald, better known at the time as the comic creation Norman Gunston, played her younger son Arthur, who lives with her, looks after her and is not, on the evidence of the first series, ever going to get out. Henri Szeps played Arthur’s brother Robert, who turns up from time to time, charming and blameless.

The house is the show

The set is a house, and the house is the show. Almost every scene takes place in the Beare kitchen, lounge room or hallway, and the series is written the way a stage play is written: two or three people in a room, one wanting something and the other unable to say no. Nothing is cushioned. The jokes land in a silence that is occasionally uncomfortable, and the audience is left to decide whether they are laughing at Maggie, at Arthur or at themselves.

That quiet is the thing a modern viewer notices first. The show is paced like a conversation. It lets an exchange run longer than a sitcom’s usual rhythm would, because the point of the exchange is the pressure that builds as it goes.

A comedy about not leaving

The way the show is remembered, as a comedy about a cantankerous mother, misses where the weight falls. Maggie is the show’s great comic engine, and Cracknell plays her as a woman who deploys confusion, manipulation and vulnerability as tools, sometimes all in one sentence. The show’s real subject is Arthur, and the thing that Arthur cannot do: he cannot leave, and he cannot be honest about wanting to.

McDonald is extraordinary in the role, and extraordinary mostly because he does so little. Arthur’s face is a record of small defeats, each one absorbed without comment. The comedy of the series comes from watching a man who has decided that his own life is something he will get to later. Atherden is careful never to make Arthur a martyr. He is, at times, as evasive and self-serving as his mother. They are, quite precisely, two people who need each other and resent it.

Robert, in this arrangement, is a figure of pure comic injustice. He visits, he is charming, he brings an air of the world outside the house, and Maggie adores him. The show’s cruellest running joke is that the son who does nothing is loved as a treat and the son who does everything is treated as furniture. Szeps plays Robert with enough warmth that you cannot simply hate him, which is what makes it work. The unfairness is not villainy. It is how families allocate affection, and the show watches it happen without comment.

The thing it was early about

What the show was early about, and what has made it age better than its contemporaries, is the territory of care. Maggie’s confusion is played for comedy, but the confusion is not entirely a game, and as the series goes on the question of what is real and what is performance becomes harder to answer. Atherden never states it, and never resolves it. A viewer who watches the later episodes now, in a country that has had a long public conversation about ageing and cognitive decline, will see things the original audience was not invited to look at.

I do not want to claim that the show was clinical. It was a sitcom, and it was written to be funny, and it is. But it was funny in a particular register: the register of a family in which everyone is trying to be kind and no one can afford to be. That is a rarer comic territory than it looks, and it is the one Kath & Kim inherited, in a louder key.

What it did to the sitcom

Look at what the form usually did with its older characters in the mid-eighties: it made them a punchline, or a grandmother who appeared at Christmas. Atherden put her in the middle of the frame, gave her the best lines and the worst behaviour, and trusted the audience to stay with her through both.

To its credit, the series did something local television was slow to do: it let a woman in her seventies be the centre of a comedy, and it let her be difficult, funny, manipulative and wounded all in the same scene. Cracknell, who died in 2002, gave a performance that is still the standard for the form, and McDonald matched her by never competing with her.

If you have not watched it since your parents did, it is worth another look. It is good television in the way a tidy back yard is a good back yard: nothing about it is flashy, everything in it has been placed with care, and you do not notice how much work has gone into it until you try to make one yourself.