The second part of The Family last night was affirmation that it’s definitely must-see viewing so if you missed it, you can catch up on Channel 4’s website. It also confirmed for me that the Hughes women are manufactured in the same factory that brought us The Corrs. They are the living image of each other and I for one struggled to tell them apart at times.

The family were at loggerheads again last night as both Emily and Charlotte chose to keep secrets from their mum and dad, Simon and Jane. Charlotte wanted to leave school and so was secretly bunking off and Emily had taken a job selling shots in a club, which she wasn’t overly keen to tell her dad about.

Poor old Simon – who tries hard to be a convincingly domineering parent – had little chance of having much impact on either of the girls, especially as Jane supported their decisions. When Simon was lecturing Charlotte about her decision to bunk off school – and Jane for allowing it – he sounded more like a head teacher or the humourless regional manager of some sales group than a dad. I don’t know if it’s because he’s aware of the cameras or whether he really talks like that but either way, you can see that he’s trying hard to play the role of strict dad but he just doesn’t have the authority to carry it off. Charlotte soon got around him by employing that age-old tactic of turning on the waterworks, but Emily wasn’t going to escape so lightly.

Last week, Simon was berating her for her dirty-stop-out ways and in a sarcastic jibe that’s now backfired on him, he suggested she may as well work in a club so that at least she’d be earning money somewhere. Well, she took his advice and did just that, which Jane couldn’t resist pointing out when he was giving Emily a hard time about her new ‘career’. It’s abundantly clear that Jane can run verbal rings around Simon and that if she wants his opinion, she’ll tell him what it is.

Anyway, it transpired that Emily has to wear a t-shirt and shorts for her job and Simon doesn’t like the sound of that at all. He’s worried that the club owners are using her as sexy-bait in order to sell their booze – a fact which Jane took on the chin and agreed with Emily was to be expected – and despite assuring him that shots were the only thing she was selling, Simon remained less than impressed with Emily.

She seems to get the blame for a lot in the Hughes household and is constantly held up by her father as an example of how not to do a thing to her younger siblings. He’s exasperated that Emily lives what he considers to be a carefree and irresponsible existence and he worries that Charlotte and Tom will follow in her footsteps. Jane pointed out to Simon how unfair he was being in his attitude to Emily because she’d tried to talk Charlotte into going back to school, but Simon wasn’t about to relinquish the moral high ground that easily.

Simon seems to think that he’s good at sarcasm and he just isn’t. In a series of digs at his children, he tried hard to use sarcasm to point out how little they do around the house and how hard he works to pay the bills and so on. It’s a timeless rant of course; parents everywhere bemoan how easy their kids’ lives are and all of us complain about their reckless disregard for the utility bills, but he just sounds like a bit of a tool when he does it.

Another example of his preferred method of sarcastic badgering came when a clearly hung over Emily was sitting having breakfast with Simon and Tom – her younger brother – and Simon’s relentless quick fire questions about where she’d been, who with, what happened, how did she get there and so on became incredibly irritating after a few minutes. That was of course his intention; he doesn’t want to make life easy on Emily in any respect and if relentless yapping is going to bug her, then he’s the man for the job.

During his tirade of questions over breakfast, he launched the family cat off the table and then on hearing the thud and a timorous miaow – as well as a shocked, “DAD!” from Tom – said, ‘Oops she fell’. Yeah, things are wont to do that when you shove them off a table Simon.

However, despite his pretty much non-stop whinging, last night’s episode showed what a very close and loving family the Hughes’s are, but I got the feeling that even in terms of the closeness of the family unit, again, Simon’s very much the odd man out and only permitted access to the inner sanctum of affection when Jane says he can or the girls want something. Nonetheless, Charlotte decided to return to school, which cheered him up no end, and Emily’s looking for other, more respectable work.

Roll on next week’s episode!