In a north London TV studio, there’s a sense of unpredictability in the air. A gaggle of singing teenagers are on set; there’s a dog traipsing around; and – just down the hall in the canteen – Joanna Lumley has paused our interview to very politely ask a catering lady not to pack up her tangerine for her. “Darling, I literally cry with gratitude but I don’t need it in a box this time, it can travel on its own,” she purrs. She’s as poised as you might imagine – even if she looks ready for an arctic expedition, wrapped in a big mustard puffer jacket against the December cold. “Sorry, I’ve gone off on a tangent.”

We’re talking about Amandaland, the funniest and biggest comedy on British TV. Masterminded by the crack team of Sharon Horgan, Barunka O’Shaughnessy, Helen Serafinowicz, Laurence Rickard and Holly Walsh, this spin-off of the Bafta-winning Motherland has shifted the focus from perma-stressed Julia (Anna Maxwell Martin) to pretentious side character Amanda (Lucy Punch) and her mother, Felicity, played by Lumley. The show has been an undeniable hit, with the Christmas special – an Absolutely Fabulous reunion set at Aunt Joan’s (Jennifer Saunders) decrepit country pile – the most-watched comedy over 2025’s festive season, with 7.4 million viewers.

“I was talking about Lucy and her gorgeousness,” continues Lumley. The love-in with her Amandaland co-star has been more than 20 years in the making. With their masses of blond hair and talent for playing icy divas, they first portrayed the wicked stepmother and one of her daughters in 2004’s Cinderella satire, Ella Enchanted. Punch, says Lumley, struck her as “smart and good and committed. She’s like an express train – you could shovel coal into her!” As for Lumley, Punch describes her as the “special sauce” of the show, adding that: “Alex [Shaw] and Miley [Locke], who play my kids, have the most wonderful relationship with her. They have some in-joke about 6-7? I’ve no idea what they’re talking about.”

For Punch, it’s the relationship between her and Lumley’s characters that really makes the show. “I think seeing the dynamic with her mother, and why she is how she is, generates sympathy for an unlikable character,” she says. “But I always said, when talking to the writers, that I didn’t want to pull back on any of her obnoxious behaviour.”

Hence the series one plotline in which Amanda’s move from Chiswick to south Harlesden saw her try to rebrand it “SoHa”. Or her attempt to offload most of her possessions, ending with her fighting with a woman at a car boot sale over a giant metal horse. Not to mention the way she attempts to claim that her sales gig at a bathroom showroom was a “collaboration” that fits into her ambition to become a lifestyle influencer.

“For her, the stakes are so high on even the most petty things – she’s a rather tragic figure really,” says Punch, who, away from set, is Amanda’s more bohemian twin, hair out of its blowdried cast and fake nails removed. (“I’ve usually got a head full of dry shampoo, and haven’t used a brush for about three days,” she says.)

Naturally, Punch – who lives in the US with her partner, the artist Dinos Chapman, and their two children – has had to get used to being called Amanda a lot, especially when she’s in the UK.

At a hotel in Manchester, she accidentally jumped the queue for a key card, “and the girl went: ‘Such an Amanda move.’ I would hate for anyone to think I was like that.” Across an IMDb page that takes in film and TV – everything from the 2011 Cameron Diaz comedy, Bad Teacher, to British TV staples such as Doc Martin and new US tech bro drama, The Audacity – Punch has never played a character for so long. She’s also played a lot of meanies. Has she ever worried about being typecast? “Well, I haven’t worried about it because it’s kept me working,” she says. “I’ve played so many ugly stepsister types and Amandas … and I enjoy it. From teenagers up, people say they love it – it’s a joy.”

One change this time round is that the scenes filmed at antiheroine Amanda’s flat are no longer shot on location. Series two moves her home to a TV studio, which is slightly bigger, so the crew can all pile in, with no traffic sounds outside. “I’d love the people who owned the house to come and see it,” says Lumley. “They’d be jealous I think … or it might be creepy.”

The scene they’re filming today involves a group of girls getting ready for their post-GCSE party, in an Urban Outfitters-coded bedroom. It’s chaos: the girls try to salvage the work of an incompetent makeup artist while Amanda tries (and fails) to raise everyone’s spirits with a tray of mocktails.

Amanda’s kids were in primary school what seems like five minutes ago, but here their adolescence is firmly cemented, via exams, errant condoms and that very American of exports: the high-school prom. “It’s about what it means to be a parent of teenagers and all of those challenges,” says Punch. “It’s fuel for funnier, bigger stories.”

Series two marks not only a shift for Amanda’s kids, Manus and Georgie, but for Amanda, too. After the end of her short-lived romance with businessman Johannes in the last series, she has declared herself a “v-cel” (voluntary celibate). Things have also changed for Felicity, who is more clingy than before. She joins a dating app, and frequently ingratiates herself with Amanda’s SoHa circle, invading the kids’ football pitch in a black cab.

“As everyone ages, your parents are obviously ageing and getting more vulnerable, too. You worry about them more, and that’s what Amanda is dealing with now,” says Punch. “This very fabulous, independent woman is now becoming more dependent on her, socially and emotionally.”

Does Lumley think it’s important to show an older woman dating? “Yes,” she says, sipping a builder’s tea between scenes. “I think the main thing is: try not to be lonely in life. Loneliness is horrible, it’s sad. Being on your own isn’t lonely, but loneliness is horrid. Even if you don’t want to date, join a reading circle or an art class. One of my friends couldn’t draw a stick man and now she’s fabulous [at it].”

Felicity, says Lumley, is “obnoxious and snobbish” – but she has a lot of love for her, too. “You’ve got to love the characters you play, because every person believes that they’re right about everything, and that they are marvellous,” she says. In series one, Felicity wasn’t particularly feminist (on the subject of sexual harassment, she said: “We used to call it flirting”). “She seems to have laid off that a bit this time,” says Lumley. “She was very Catherine Deneuve about all that. Well, for my generation, also, because #MeToo didn’t exist, you just learned how to dodge the gropey hands and the sweaty approaches and get away from it.”

As an actor, she has moved into “a lovely realm of mostly grannies and mothers now, which is very nice, because you can drop off the edge of the world. I mean, lots of [actors] just say, right, that’s been fabulous, I’ve had a great time doing it. But if you’re still there and the phone still rings, it’s so nice to be offered interesting, well-written parts.”

Series two ably finds more for all its cast members to do, and moments where they become embroiled in the same mischief – chiefly, when Amanda finds a mystery condom down the back of her sofa and has to work out who left it there. (Kids? Mum?) For Punch, whose eldest son was born in 2015, it gave a preview of the issues today’s teens are facing. “It used to be that, when you didn’t get invited to a party when you were 14, you were at home watching telly with your dog; now, you’re like, ‘Everyone’s having fun without me’. As soon as you get a phone, you’re exposed to absolutely everything. It’s nonstop and relentless – it must be scary and exhausting.”

One reason Amandaland has been such a huge hit is that – like Motherland before it – it shows the harsh realities of parenthood, albeit pushed to its most surreal and hysterical ends. But, as Punch says, this vision of a nightmarish, snobby mum is only partly fictional. “As one of the mothers of the kids on set said: ‘Everyone knows an Amanda.’”