When the going gets tough, the mums get tougher!
MAY CONTAIN NUTS is a two-part comedy drama for ITV1 starring Shirley Henderson, Darren Boyd, Elizabeth Berrington, and Sophie Thompson. This adaptation of John O’Farrell’s best-selling novel is created by multi-award winning Mark Burton (Wallace & Gromit in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, Madagascar, Chicken Run).
School can be tough these days; bullying, back-stabbing, competing and cheating… and that’s just the parents. Meet the Chaplin family. Alice (Shirley Henderson – Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason, Dirty Filthy Love) and David (Darren Boyd – The Jane Show, Green Wing, Smack The Pony) have moved with their three young children to a safe, leafy, gated community in South West London.
Within minutes of meeting their new neighbours – uber yummy mummy Ffion (Elizabeth Berrington – Drop Dead Gorgeous, Vera Drake, My Wonderful Life) and her acerbic but emasculated husband Philip (Tony Gardner – Lead Balloon, My Parents are Aliens) – they’re catapulted into a world where parental anxiety about their children’s education has reached fever pitch and where parents will stop at nothing to ensure their child gets a place at a ‘the best’ school. Even if this means getting a job as the school secretary, as fellow neurotic mum Sarah (Sophie Thompson – EastEnders, A Room with a View, Fat Slags) secretly does, when she realises her daughter has no hope of passing the entrance exam to prestigious Chelsea College for Girls.
In a desperate effort to ensure their kids don’t get left behind, Alice and David panic and start their children on a regime of intensive tutoring, healthy eating and a relentless schedule of extracurricular activities. But when their daughter Molly fails the mock exam, Alice resorts to extreme measures – namely dressing up as her own 11-year-old daughter and taking the entrance exam in her place.
Exec producer: Sophie Clarke-Jervoise and Geoffrey Perkins
Producer: Lucy Robinson
Director: John Henderson
Writers: Book by John O’Farrell, adapted by Mark Burton.
Transmission channel: ITV
Production date: 20, August 2007
Transmission date: 11, June 2009
Episodes: 2
Episode length: 60
Series: 1
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