Alma's Not Normal

Willan wrote the first draft around 2014 on the back of the austerity measures of the Cameron Government, that Willan says "felt really negative for welfare recipients, mental health [care] and social services recipients – people like my mother, people who’ve had difficulties."[1] As Laura Minor argues, "Alma's Not Normal provides commentary on the gendered and classed impacts of austerity in the North."[3]

Willan won the BBC's Caroline Aherne Bursary in 2017 which awarded her £5000 to develop her ideas along with mentorship from the BBC's Comedy Commissioning Editor, Kate Daughton, to develop a script.[4] The script was performed as a rehearsed reading in front of an invited audience including Controller of BBC Two, Patrick Holland. Willan was given a commission for a pilot on the spot.[5] Wilan wrote the script for the first series of the show during the COVID-19 pandemic.[1]

• Sophie Willan as Alma Nuthall – Alma is a working-class aspiring actress in her thirties who has recently been through a break-up. She spent some of her childhood in care and works as an escort, having left school without qualifications.
• Jayde Adams as Leanne, Alma's confident and sexually promiscuous best friend and main confidant of the series. Alma describes Leanne as having the “raw sex appeal of Debbie Harry but the mannerisms of a truck driver.”
• Siobhan Finneran as Lin Nuthall – Alma's mother Lin struggles with mental health issues and a heroin addiction that meant she was unable to look after Alma during childhood, and she has a troubled relationship with Alma in adulthood.
• Lorraine Ashbourne as Joan Nuthall – Joan is Lin's mother and Alma's grandmother. She raised Alma as a child when Lin was unable to. Alma regularly visits Joan as an adult.
• James Baxter as Anthony, Alma's ex-boyfriend.
• Maizie Wickson as Young Alma
• Nicholas Asbury as Jim
• Dave Johns as Bill
• Katie Redford as Jane
• Dave Spikey as Ian, a drama teacher
• Sue Vincent as Trish

In her four star review of the pilot episode broadcast in 2020, Lucy Mangan in The Guardian praised the fine cast and the "swiftly and surely drawn characters" and commented on the episode's "emotional undertow, that, with perfect timing, surfaces to punch the viewer in the stomach and leave them breathless with sorrow". The episode was summed up as a bleak, brilliant comedy that was far from ordinary.[8] Writing in Chortle, Steve Bennett praised the episode for the way that it introduced "a cast of intriguing, sympathetic characters we’d like to hear more from" praising them for being "complex, authentic people portrayed in a way we don’t usually see on television". He praised the "universally strong performances" of the cast and the humanity of the characters bringing lightness to what could have been a bleak set of subject matter.[9]

The Daily Mirror's Ian Hyland called it ‘Phoenix Nights meets Fleabag, guided by the spirit of Victoria Wood’ adding that the pilot convinced him "that BBC2 has a massive gem on its hands".[10]

Ben Dowell of The Times said, ‘Willan's writing is skilled and clearly very personal...uplifting and strangely enchanting’.[11]

• Alma's Not Normal at BBC Online
• Alma's Not Normal at IMDb
• Alma's Not Normal at British Comedy Guide