Alma Matters:Alma's Not Normal.

"Can I bum you tonight" - Anthony

"You'll have to be quick. Strictly's on" - Alma

"Well come on. Put the biscuits down" - Anthony

The first series of Alma's Not Normal (BBC2/iPlayer, directed by Andrew Chaplin and written by Sophie Willan who plays Alma) is, as you'll have gathered from the exchange above, not shy of a crude and salty joke. Some of them are amusing. More often they're simply wry. Occasionally, not least when the jokes seem to be about anal rape, they're plain coarse.

Alma's Not Normal suffers from not being quite as funny as it thinks it is and though it's eminently watchable you sometimes find yourself wishing that the situations in this situation comedy would provide a bit more laughter than they do. Where it does work, eventually, is on the drama front. I found myself feeling sad for Alma when things didn't go well for and happy when they did.

Not that much did go right for her. Flame haired Alma lives alone in Bolton. She's got no job, no qualifications, and she's just split from her boyfriend, that old romantic featured above:- Anthony (James Baxter). She didn't go to school for the first seven years of her life, her mum - Lin (Siobhan Finneran) - is a heroin addict who's in a psychiatric unit and her grandmother Joan (Lorraine Ashbourne) loves vodka, fags, Aldi own brand spam, and telling her neighbours to fuck off.

She's rarely seen in anything but fake leopard skin. What Alma does have, though, is attitude to spare. With her best friend Leanne (Jayde Adams) they sings Spice Girls and Andrea Bocelli (!) shitfaced at karaoke and Alma belives she should be playing the marimba in the Nicaraguan mountains rather than shagging a load of soft twats in Bolton.

She wants to be an actress and takes lessons with Ian (a rather good Dave Spikey) but as Alma claims her main skill is that she can hold a three litre bottle of cider under her left tit without using her hands she has to try and find gainful employment elsewhere. Selling sandwiches with Bill (Dave Johns of I, Daniel Blake fame) doesn't work for her but life as an 'escort' seems like easy money so she gives that a go. 

Her clients include an undisclosed Man Utd player, a property developer who wants her to pretend to be his mum, a nice man who insists on wearing a bunny rabbit mask for sex, and lots of men who simply want her to cuddle them while they bawl their eyes out. In her ordinary dating life she's equally unlucky. Dates and one night stands include a guy who looks like her cousin and a passionate taxidermist who has taken about two decades off his age on his Tinder profile.

The story is basically about what happens to, and what will happen to, Alma and her family and though it's often quite dark it zips along in a pretty nifty fashion and there's always a rude joke to puncture any pretensions to earnestness. There's lots of dildos, there's lots of bread, there's a pointed message about the government cutting mental health services and the lack of affordable housing, and there's a pretty decent soundtrack too.

The Velvet Underground, La Roux, Blur, A Guy Called Gerald, Gina G, The Ting-Tings, and Billy Ocean featured in the first episode alone and later on we're treated to blasts of Basement Jaxx, The Primitives, Gwen Guthrie, Finley Quaye, Manfred Mann, and The Adventures Of Stevie V. Martha Wainwright's 'Bloody Mother Fucking Asshole' is put to particularly good use.

I giggled (a bit) when Joan called Anthony a "fuck-lump", I enjoyed Lemn Sissay's brief cameo and Maizie Wickson did a good job as Young Alma (as did Nicholas Asbury as Lin's clumsy, toothless boyfriend Jim). When the story got darker it became more compelling and when, on hearing of Leanne's new relationship, Alma complained "they've started talking in wes rather than Is" it was a nice, well observed, touch.

But slapstick fish fights in chips shops didn't really cut muster and when Joan remarks that Lin destroyed both her life and her vagina it's more grim than funny. Which was the main problem with Alma's Not Normal. It just wasn't quite funny enough to justify some of the more risque jokes. And, in case you're wondering, she never did put those biscuits down. Of course she didn't.