Television - Andrew Billen gets cold feet about a new BBC drama that verges on comedy
There was a terrific gag on a recent episode of Friends (Thursdays, 9pm, Sky One) that struck a self-inflicted wound. The six pals were in Monica's flat, and the doorbell rang. Joey looked to Chandler who looked to Rachel who looked to . . . but they were all there. Who else was there to come knocking on the door?
A similar insularity defines the geography of BBC1's new Sunday-night drama, the medicinal-sounding Hearts and Bones (9.20pm). Here, as in the American sitcom, a group of friends has coalesced round a strong sibling relationship - in this case, between Richard Rose (Hugo Speer) and his brother Mark (Damian Lewis). The first episode opened with their friends posing Mark a bizarre loyalty test. If he came home to find Richard having sex with his long-term girlfriend and mother of his child, what would he do? "Make him a cup of tea and move his bum up and down," Mark replied, passing.
Unfortunately, there was nothing that the girlfriend in question, Dervla Kirwan's simpering Emma, would have liked better than to be humped by Richard, who may be a humble butcher but has a nicer laugh than Mark and isn't a redhead. To compound this Huis Clos of unrequited passion, there is Sinead, the daffy and least liked member of the group (played by Rose Keegan, another redhead - this shorthand, see also the recent npower poster campaign, is being overdone). Sinead is secretly in love with Mark, and is heart- broken when he and Emma decide, despite everything, to marry.
After the charm of the two Assumptas she played in Ballykissangel and Father Ted, I would never blame Kirwan for allowing this show to drag. The tremulous sexual tension between her and Mark was finely done indeed. But there is something very wrong in the way the writer, Stewart Harcourt, has drawn her character. As Emma wandered down Balham High Street mooning, as she had for the past 20 minutes, about Richard, I was just about ready to climb into the telly and shake some sense into her, when a posse of muggers did it for me.
This intervention, improbable as it sounds, not only persuaded her to confess to Richard her feelings for him, but skidded the whole vehicle towards comedy. Soon we found out that Emma was a telephone saleswoman for Toilet Jet, "the detergent that reaches right round the bend". Next, a chocolate dildo made a cameo appearance at her hen night, only to be eaten for breakfast by her son. Rejected by Richard (possibly out of brotherly forbearance), Emma treated herself to a quickie with her boss, receiving a lovebite which, with sitcom inevitability, was discovered on her wedding day by Mark.
This very uneven episode was called "I need a love song", and it certainly did. One of the pleasures of Cold Feet, the all too obvious inspiration for this series, was that each episode served you Classic Gold hits as incidental music. Hearts and Bones just gives us "A Whiter Shade of Pale". But it was not only its musical taste that differentiated it from Mike Bullen's masterpiece. The characters were all too much like one another or, in the case of Marianne, the chocolate penis giver, too much like Amy from Cold Feet. There was too much repetition, too many dreary, interior monologue voice-overs, and the mood was too pressure cooker.
In pursuit of its own Cold Feet doppelganger, ITV granted us two episodes of Metropolis (Monday and Tuesday, 10pm). The premise of this new drama at least avoided the claustrophobia of its BBC rival by focusing on a group of college housemates whose friendship was in disrepair. We realised that they had become less good friends than they had been primarily because they had got individually less likeable in the five years since they had left Leeds University.
Sophia, who promised to be a socialist for ever, is working for Central Office. Frank, who swore never to wear a suit, is a conscience-struck insurance claims assessor. Alistair, the group's scapegoat/Sinead figure, has not become, as he predicted, rich and famous, and is sleeping on the floor of the long-standing couple, Matthew and Charlotte. Matthew (played by Matthew Rhys as a cross between David Thewlis in Naked and Liam Gallagher) has allowed his studenty unworldliness to sour and is now a cynical and resentful lover to Charlotte. She, in pursuit of her career as a financial journalist, sleeps with a powerful and dangerously alluring contact, played by James Fox.
There are good jokes here - some dark, some sunny. But what gives the piece air is that this community does live a life outside itself, albeit a life that may destroy it. In Friends terms, there are two dark strangers at the door. The first is Fox, who warns Louise Lombard's greedy-to-know Charlotte that she'll never learn anything from her "too easy" friends.
The second is Nathan (James Purefoy), a handsome but deranged stalker who has interpolated himself into the life of the romantically challenged Tanya (Emily Bruni) while she recovers in hospital after a car accident. The skies are darkening. Will the writer, Peter Morgan, and his imaginative director, Glenn Wilhide, succeed in turning their Cold Feet wannabe into a thriller and, thus, something original of their own? At least, let it be noted, I want to find out.
Andrew Billen is a staff writer on the London Evening Standard
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