We Are Lady Parts, Channel 4, series 2, review: TV’s raucous Muslim girl band have lost their spark
The challenges facing the fictional punk band, Lady Parts, in the second season of the Channel 4 comedy We Are Lady Parts are very much the same ones facing the show itself. You’ve put something new and different together and people like it: what next? Do you give the punters more of the same, take those same chords and play them a few times in a different order, or do you go off in another direction? Do you tilt for commercial supremacy, or do you stick to your artistic principles, rock hard and stick it to the Man?
Because there’s no doubt that the first series of We Are Lady Parts was a bit of a Sgt Pepper/Kid A/To Pimp a Butterfly moment, at least in television. A comedy about an all-female, all-Muslim punk band, it was funny, brazen and buccaneering. Not too heavy, not too light; just right.
At its centre it had a breakthrough performance by Anjana Vasan as Amina, a wide-eyed, straight-A student who stumbled into the band as part of a bid to find a suitable husband. With that set up, We Are Lady Parts was able to go almost anywhere, from some great musical numbers to some interesting, intergenerational religious territory; from feminism to identity politics to romance.
For its second outing, however, We Are Lady Parts is hobbled by its premise. Now that we have a functioning, capable rock band, they set about making an album and getting signed. But like any will-they-won’t they in drama, writer Nida Manzoor has to delay, delay, delay, because once the band has made it, the story (and the hometown roots that made it interesting in the first place) is over. Either that, or the band doesn’t make it, in which case we’re stuck in series one.
This, I think, is why these second six half-hours feel a little directionless: we get more on each of the band members, Saira (Sarah Kameela Impey), Bisma (Faith Omole), Ayesha (Juliette Motamed) and manager Momtaz (Luice Hsorthouse).
Amina, now self-assured and operating with a swagger she terms her “Villian Era” is jimmied into a love triangle. Malala puts in a cameo appearance, in that way US sitcoms used to do just because they could. And Lady Parts perform at a wedding and then a fashion shoot in a totalizer bid to earn the cash to record their first album.
But it never quite catches light like series one. I think it’s because We Are Lady Parts was always Amina’s story, whereas now everyone gets a solo (and denizens of late-night jazz clubs know what that means). The result is a series that’s about so much – diversity, identity, ageing, friendship – that it’s no longer sure what it’s really about.
In any case, much as the screw-you-all energy of a great first album is hard to rekindle, We Are Lady Parts series two will go down as that difficult second album. The difference is that in television that means you probably won’t get a third.
