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Meis a North London TV studio, there’s a sense of uncertainty in the air. The excitement of young musicians has begun; there is a dog wandering around; and – down the hall in the canteen – Joanna Lumley he has paused our conversation to politely ask the waitress not to take his tangerine. “Honey, I’m crying thankfully but I don’t want a box this time, it can go by itself,” she said. He’s as laid-back as you’d imagine – even if he looks ready to hit the slopes, wrapped up in a large mustard jacket against the December chill. “Sorry, I went off on a tangent.”
We’re talking about Amandaland, the funniest and biggest drama on British TV. Trained by a crack team of Sharon Horgan, Barunka O’Shaughnessy, Helen Serafinowicz, Laurence Rickard and Holly Walsh, this exit from the Bafta-winning Motherland has shifted its focus from the ever-pressing Julia (Anna Maxwell Martin) to the arrogant side of Amanda (Lucy Punch) and her mother played by Lucy Feleymlicity. The show has been very entertaining, with the Christmas special – a wonderful meeting set at Aunt Joan’s (Jennifer Saunders) – the most watched comedy of the 2025 festivities, with 7.4 million viewers.
“I was talking about Lucy and her beauty,” continues Lumley. Amandaland’s love affair has spanned more than 20 years. With her abundant blonde hair and talent for playing icy divas, she first portrayed the wicked stepmother and one of her daughters in the 2004 Cinderella drama, Ella Enchanted. Punch, says Lumley, showed him to be “brilliant and good and devoted. He’s like a train – you can throw coal in it!” As for Lumley, Punch describes him as the “special sauce” of the show, adding: “Alex (Shaw) and Miley (Locke), who play my children, have a very good relationship with him. They have 6-7 jokes? I don’t know what they’re talking about.
For Punch, it’s the relationship between him and Lumley’s people that makes the show. “I think seeing how he lives with his mother, and why he’s the way he is, brings a lot of sympathy to someone he’s not going to love,” she says. “But I always say, when I talk to writers, that I don’t want to give up his ugly behavior.”
So the first series Amanda moved from Chiswick to south Harlesden saw her try to rename it “SoHa”. Or trying to unload a lot of his stuff, ending up fighting a woman in a shoe truck on a big iron horse. Not to mention how she tried to say that her gig selling out the bathroom was a “contract” that fit her desire to be a pro-lifer.
“For him, the things that bother him are big even in the smallest things – he’s a very sad person,” says Punch, who, away from the set, is Amanda’s bohemian twin, hair coming out of his hair-dried voice and false nails removed. (“I usually have a head full of dry shampoo, and I haven’t used a brush in three days,” she says.)
Naturally, Punch – who lives in the US with his partner, artist Dinos Chapman, and their two children – is used to being called Amanda. moreespecially when they live in the UK.
While at a hotel in Manchester, he accidentally jumped the queue for a key card, “and the girl went: ‘Therefore Amanda’s move.’ I would hate for anyone to think that I am. ” Going through the IMDb site which captures films and TV – everything from Cameron Diaz’s 2011 drama, Bad Teacher, to British TV favorites like Doc Martin and the new US tech drama, The Audacity – Punch hasn’t acted in a long time. He’s also played nonsense. Has he ever worried about having a typewriter? “Well, I’m not worried because it keeps me working,” he says. “I’ve played a lot of nasty types of stepchildren with Amanda … and I enjoy it. From youth, people say they love it – it’s fun. “
One change this time around is that the scenes shot at the antiheroine Amanda’s house are no longer being shot on location. Series two moves him home to a TV studio, which is a little bigger, so that the crew can gather, without the noise of the cars outside. Lumley said: “I would love for the owners to come and see it. “They would be jealous I think … or it could be dangerous.”
Today’s shoot is about a group of girls preparing for their GCSE party, in an Urban Outfitters bedroom. It’s chaos: The girls try to save a makeup artist’s job while Amanda tries (and fails) to lift everyone’s spirits with a tray of mocktails.
Amanda’s children were in middle school what seems like five minutes ago, but here their youth is grounded, through tests, faulty condoms and an American export: the high school prom. Punch said: “It’s about what it means to be a parent to young people and all these problems. It’s the fuel for funny, great stories.”
The two-part series not only changes for Amanda’s children, Manus and Georgie, but also for Amanda. After the end of her short-term relationship with businessman Johannes in the last series, she called herself a “v-cel” (committed marriage). Things have also changed for Felicity, who is more clingy than ever. He joins a dating program, and often entertains himself at Amanda’s SoHa bar, and attacks the children’s soccer game in the black closet.
“When everyone gets older, obviously your parents get older and less affected, and you worry about them a lot, and that’s what Amanda is dealing with now,” said Punch. “This beautiful, independent woman is now very confident in herself, both morally and emotionally.”
Does Lumley think it’s important to show an older woman in a relationship? “Yes,” he says, smiling at the builders’ tea between events. “I think the main thing is: try to be lonely in life. Loneliness is dangerous, it’s sad. Being alone is not lonely, but loneliness is dangerous. Even if you don’t want to have a boyfriend, join a reading group or an art class.
Felicity, says Lumley, is “despicable and despicable” – but she’s also very fond of him. She said: “You have to love the people you play with, because everyone believes they’re telling the truth about everything, and that they’re wonderful. In the first series, Felicity wasn’t particularly feminist (in regards to the rape, she said: “We were calling it flirting”). “She seems to have stopped acting this time,” says Lumley. “She was very Catherine Deneuve in all of that. Well, for my generation, because #MeToo didn’t exist, you just learned to dodge the gropey hands and approach the sweat and run.”
As an actor, he moved to “the beautiful place of grandmother and mother now, which is very good, because you can leave the edge of the world. I mean, many (actors) say, well, it’s been great, I’ve had a good time doing it.
The second series finds more for all its members to do, and when they face the same problem – in particular, when Amanda finds an unknown condom behind her sofa and has to find out who left it there. (Children? Mother?) Kwa Punch, whose eldest son was born in 2015, gave an overview of the problems faced by young people today. “It used to be, when you weren’t invited to a party when you were 14, you were at home watching telly with your dog; now, you’re like, ‘Everybody’s having fun without me.
One reason Amandaland has been such a hit is that – like Motherland before it – it shows the struggles of parenthood, even when it’s pushed to its extreme and terrifying end. But, as Punch says, this vision of a nightmare, a mad woman is a bit of a fantasy. As one mother of the children who was present said: ‘Everyone knows Amanda.’
