Youth review – Sharon Horgan is back … and she’s better than ever

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There’s a moment in Sharon Horgan’s new show, Youth, when – as protagonist Alex (Horgan) is seeing her son off to university – she inadvertently begins to run after the car that’s taking him away. And then she catches herself, and slows. And then she starts up again. It was such a tender, vicious glimpse into the future that I found myself sobbing into the sofa and cursing her name.

All of which is to say: Sharon Horgan is back and she’s better than ever. Youth is the representation every woman who has ever slapped on an oestrogen patch after a divorce, looked around and thought “What the hell now?” has been waiting for. Horgan herself has described it in interviews as forming the third part of a loose trilogy that began with Pulling. Co-written with Dennis Kelly, Pulling was about three thirtysomething antitheses to Bridget Jones, whose dark chaos apparently scared the BBC so much they unexpectedly cancelled it just as it was truly getting into its stride. That was followed by Catastrophe, written by and starring Horgan, with Rob Delaney, as a couple who have a fling, find that she’s pregnant and end up making a brutal, hilarious go of things.

Youth is Horgan’s even more brutal, even more hilarious take on life’s third act. Alex is a fiftysomething literary agent and divorcee. She has ageing parents (losing toes to diabetes and faculties to early dementia) to the left of her, and a troubled child and useless ex-husband to the right. But hope springs eternal even in the most wearied breast and she is hoping to start dating again, and maybe even improve her standing at work, too, now that son Ruari (Aran Murphy) at least is off her hands for 10-week terms at a time.

At her workplace, she explains her timetable to Sam (Sharlene Whyte), her friend and boss – or boss and friend (the fluctuating proportions and concomitant stresses and strains in their relationship is one of the many thickening agents Horgan has stirred into her rich stew). “I’ve got 10 years left as a sexual person, tops. I need someone to fall in love with me now so there’s a bit of time left with this me before the old me is like ‘I’m here now’.” All she has to do is muster some “new dick energy” from somewhere, recover from a dislocating jaw (“Just an age thing!” her young doctor tells her), and stop crying as she clears up the smelly mess in Ruari’s room. Can she resist giving in to booty calls to and from her never-quite-boyfriend Patrick (Rupert Friend, perfectly written as a charming borderline cad), and stop finding older men’s wattle and sagging balls a turn-off?

The wattle belongs to Michael (Tim McInnerney). The balls too, in fact, though it turns out they are still defying gravity at least as much as you can ever hope for testicles. This is discovered during a sex scene that should be entered into the pantheon of greats. Move over Basic Instinct, Wild Things, 9½ Weeks and whatever else counts as your formative memory, and make way for tears. “I just don’t know if there’s anything left to my life that I like any more!” wails Alex, as she negotiates cunnilingus instead. “I can’t return the favour. But I don’t know you well enough yet to be selfish in bed,” she notes, before deciding that a hand job will do.

It is the mark of Horgan’s genius that Michael does not contribute to this decision. It’s absolutely not about him. And it’s a mark of how beautifully she writes all her characters and how well they are always cast that we know that Michael is not the kind to mind. He just waits cheerfully for his next instruction. And we know we want to see more of Michael (not literally – I’ll take his word for it about the balls) and that she should, too. But we do see the attraction of Rupert Friend – I mean, Patrick.

At work, there is the deeply disgruntled former client Malcolm (Douglas Hodge), who has written a dreadful romantasy book (The Goblin Seed) that duly takes TikTok by storm and makes him an asset they need to reacquire. Then there’s a bestselling elderly author (Anne Reid) whose books have taken a porno-racist turn that may prove beyond her editors’ powers to save. Lastly, we meet a talented foreign writer, whom Alex is trying to bring on to her list without Sam finding out.

And then Ruari comes home, under a cloud and soon permanently under a duvet, while Alex tries frantically to find out what is wrong.

All of human life is here – all its heart, all its humour. That is Horgan’s beat. Not just the female bit, not just the perimenopausal bit (though there is no one more acute or funny on either). Her men, her children, her colleagues – they are as real, as rounded, as ridiculous (and at times heartbreaking) as we all are in reality. Not that Horgan’s talent for grotesques has deserted her – the publishing types satirised here are mesmerisingly perfect and awful – but she dwells in the truth always, and there is nothing more bitterly funny or compelling than that.