The standup used to joke about not having kids, but then she had IVF and found herself an ‘eroded’ mother of two. Now she’s back with a show about motherhood in her 40s – but don’t expect any cute parenting stories

My favourite Sara Pascoe joke is her imaginary riposte to people asking if she’s going to have kids. They mean well, these prying parents – they just don’t want her to miss out on a life-enhancing experience. The thing is, the comedian has had some life-enhancing experiences of her own. “But I have never, ever said to anybody: ‘Oh, have you been on QI? Ahhh, you should go on QI!’” she insists, settling into her archly patronising pep talk. “No I didn’t think I wanted to be on QI until I was on QI, and then it was like I looked back and my entire life had been leading up to me being on QI. Yes it’s very tiring being on QI, but it’s so worth it. I just wouldn’t want you to leave it too late and they’ll have stopped making it!”

As a skewering of smug, insensitive acquaintances foisting their own ideas of fulfilment on a child-free woman in her 30s, it’s a gratifyingly clever joke. In reality, however, Pascoe wasn’t laughing. During the period she was doing that routine on stage, she was actually “quite sad about not being able to have children”, she says over coffee in a north London cafe near her home. She’d long suspected she had fertility issues after unsuccessfully trying for a baby with an ex-boyfriend.

Where other teen shows ramp up the sex, drugs and scandal, this Leeds-set saga about rivalries in a dance school keeps it real – so real it almost refuses to be entertaining

The implausibility of the teen drama may well be the genre’s defining feature. In the 00s, we were subjected to untold glamour and relentless wisecracking by US imports such as The OC and Gossip Girl. The UK equivalent was Skins, in which a group of Bristolian party animals managed to make practically every personal problem known to man look intimidatingly cool. More recently, we’ve had mind-blowing levels of debauchery from Euphoria, mind-blowing levels of sexual literacy and candour from Sex Education and mind-blowing levels of heartwarming niceness from Heartstopper. All of it is ludicrous in its own way.

Dreamers is different. It is realistic – jarringly so. That’s both a pro and a con for this Channel 4 drama about a group of teenage dancers living in Leeds. The series – written by Lisa Holdsworth (Waterloo Road) and Gem Copping (EastEnders), and directed by Sara Dunlop – is filmed in a meticulously naturalistic way. The camera tends to linger, documentary-style, on characters, whether they are doing something interesting or not: chatting aimlessly, walking to work, getting a glass of water. It’s very kitchen sink, not least in the sense that there are multiple shots of actual kitchen sinks. (The show’s original title was Dance School, which captures the no-frills, matter-of-fact mode far better than Dreamers.) The dialogue is sparse, underwrought and unusually true to life; the teen banter is believably awkward and sometimes people respond to questions with “I don’t know” and the conversation just sort of ends. Combined with the deluge of dancing footage – which looks brilliant and beautiful for the most part – the Dreamers aesthetic is strong and soothing: dynamic movement punctuated by shots of shabby normalcy, like a Martin Parr photograph brought to life.