May 1997 – David Moore

Tuesday, May 27, 1997

You live with or near a pile of friends in a big city, you’re in your twenties, your problems revolve around relationships and your career, and you spend lots of time in bars, cafes or pubs.

The description applies both to Friends, the ubiquitous US sit-com, and to This Life, the rather more low-profile BBC2 drama-cum-soap. Throw in the tension of a couple of the protagonists going through an on-again off-again relationship, and you might be wondering if there are any differences at all.

You live with or near a pile of friends in a big city, you’re in your twenties, your problems revolve around relationships and your career, and you spend lots of time in bars, cafes or pubs.

Unless you’d actually seen the two shows. Friends is bright, comfortable and safe, for all its lesbian couples and ‘commando style’ suggestiveness. They live in nice apartments, look gorgeous, are funny and almost always sort things out by the end of the episode.

Most of the Friends are likeable – except Monica, who’s hateful, one-dimensional and sour (or is that just Courteney Cox?). Ross is affable in a whimsical kind of way, Joey foolishly dishy, Rachel gutsy, Phoebe ditsy and Chandler vulnerable and inimitably pithy.

In contrast, everyone in This Life is horrible. There’s the arrogantly snobby careerist Miles, the earnestly well-meaning control freak Milly, Anna, the vampish sex-bomb past her sell-by-date, and Egg the ineffectual blokish bloke who’s too wimpy even to be a New Man. The new member of the house, Ferdy, might be alright, but he never says anything and it’s hard to judge his true worth by watching him step out of the shower.

The atmosphere surrounding This Life is suitably grimy and unpleasant. The rooms are all small, it’s never sunny and London’s dirt seeps into every shot. The editing and NYPD Blue-style camera work jar and each episode is full of drinking and swearing. It feels like real life.

Friends on the other hand, feels like a sit-com – but a very well-written one. The pacing of the episode is perfect, and the comic threads are skilfully interwoven. You get the right combination of main plot, subplot, observational humour and one-liners, but it never feels like it’s reality.

So which works better? The full-on gory details approach of This Life, which confirms your expectations about how unbearable it would be to live in a house full of unpleasant lawyers, or the soft-pedal warmth and comfort of Friends’ neverland, in which a waitress and a short-order chef can live in a New York apartment that size?

Friends is sharp without being pointed, while This Life is accurate without being honest. With its journalistic style, This Life appears to be more realistic, but in going for the details they’ve missed the universal verities that Friends confirms every week. When it comes to describing life, a good piece of fiction often tells more truth than a hundred documentaries, or a thousand would-be documentary-style soaps.

Wednesday, April 30, 1997

Your modest proposer, normally content only within the sound of Christchurch’s bells, currently finds himself in California. But when the sun glints off the Pacific, one’s thoughts turn to picturesque Celtic villages.

Ballykissangel and Hamish Macbeth both trade on their scenery and their whimsy. The characters have a twinkle in their eyes, a quaint turn of phrase, and spend all day in the pub. Both villages have a plentiful lack of problems – policemen Hamish and Ambrose have so little to do that they can take a full part in the many community activities that revolve around beating the next village in obscure contests.

This lack of drama is perfect for dramas shown after the Antiques Roadshow on a Sunday evening, when suburban England wants to feel that life is a bit more colourful elsewhere in these islands. When Mrs Thatcher said there was no such thing as community, she had reckoned without Lochdubh and BallyK, but it’s because so many people feel isolated and rootless that these advertisements for a thriving rural idyll do so well.

In both shows, unrequited love also plays a part, as black-clad young figures of authority from outside the village enjoy smouldering relations with dark-eyed locals. On the one hand this is a time-honoured ploy to build some tension into the pedestrian goings-on (as Gareth Sellors from London points out, it’s Moonlighting meets All Creatures Great and Small), but the different treatments of this theme point up the shows’ deeper contrasts.

In Ballykissangel, there’s no way Father Clifford will give up the priesthood to be with Assumpta; the show plays with the possibility, but if this were truly the passion it’s supposed to be, we’d have had wrecked lives by now, rather than meaningful stares and some embarrassed silences. For all Assumpta’s pouting, her part is underwritten and Stephen Tompkinson’s baleful stare is beginning to grate. If it weren’t for Dervla Kirwan’s attractiveness and the off-screen romance that blossomed between the stars, I wonder would we still be watching.

Hamish Macbeth, on the other hand, is much more menacing in its treatment of relationships. We’ve already seen one of Hamish’s partners die a dramatic death, and Robert Carlyle broods so well that you can only guess at his future with Isabel.

Rachel Chalmers from Australia is unimpressed by the power of either show, arguing that for Celtic whimsy and unrequited love, Father Ted is a clear winner. This sheds a new light on the relationship between Mrs Doyle and Ted (or is it Ted and Dougal?), but the show’s too hat stand to qualify as mere whimsy.

Back with the battle for Sunday evening, the romantic storylines show the differences that exist beyond the eye-candy similarities of the shows. The values and morals of Hamish Macbeth are much harder to pin down than those of the WYSIWYG BallyK, and Lochdubh’s characters are true eccentrics (TV John is masterful), while BallyK’s are by-the-yard Oirish. The Scottish plots are also more wilful and knowing, the air of mystery that hangs over Lochdubh recalling Northern Exposure at its most esoteric, while BallyK reminds you more of the cliches wheeled out to introduce the contestants in the Eurovision Song Contest.

In the end, it might come down to the water. While the Kissangel river sparkles brightly, it’s essentially shallow; Loch Dubh has similar picturesque qualities, but a much greater depth.