Television - Andrew Billen sizes up two drama series about life's great losers
It's a peculiar tragedy to get a television programme to yourself, only for it to be named after your ex-wife and her lover. It's an even greater tragedy if you regard this state of affairs as perfectly equitable. But this is the mindset of Keith Barratt on Marion and Geoff (Tuesdays, 9.50pm, BBC2), pushed to the sidelines of his own life by his wife Marion's adultery. It is not in his nature to complain, but it should be.
Keith is the most completely lost soul on television, a devoted husband minus a wife, a father whose children rarely see him, a minicab driver who has lost radio contact with the office. Being also the sweetest bloke in the world, with a gift for "really liking" the men who steal his women, Keith fails to appreciate the depths of his despair. The only really funny thing about these near-perfect, ten-minute tragicomic monologues is that we do.
Keith's history emerges in Video Diary-style soliloquies, which he delivers from the driving seat of his minicab. At times, his anecdotes are tightly written narratives. At others, the programme is a montage of short observations, as if Rob Brydon (Keith) had been ad-libbing for hours behind the wheel. Both modes produce beautiful, unexaggerated performances by the dull-eyed, angular-faced Brydon, who manages to conceals how much he must revel in the colourless Welsh idiolect and hinterland that he and his co-writer Hugo Blick have invented for Keith.
We are only up to episode three of ten, but it is already clear that Marion and Keith have nothing in common. Marion, voluptuous and aggressive, greedily occupies the fast lane of life. With her partner Geoff, she wins all the sales prizes at the pharmaceutical company they work for. Marion and Geoff are the jagged teeth of the Celtic tiger economy. Keith, on the other hand, has only ever held one proper job, and that was for a Japanese electronics company "so advanced it was able to do away with manpower".
Making his underpowered journey through life, Keith, being Keith, does not realise how far behind he is falling. On motorways, he tootles along in the middle lane and, when he sees a convoy building up behind him, assumes that other motorists "must see the sense in it", too. In fact, he is in the slow lane of life - if not on its hard shoulder - and it is not long before Geoff has scooped Marion up and whisked her away.
Keith's report of how he and his father-in-law catch Marion and Geoff in flagrante veers (perhaps unwisely) towards sexual farce, but the real bereavement for Keith is the loss of his two sons, Alun and Rhys (the programme could easily have been named after them), who have joined Marion and their "special uncle" in Wales. The subtext tells us that they have not adapted well.
For me, the saddest lines we have had on television in a while were Keith's in episode one: "The kids aren't all that far away, when you think about it. It's motorway all the way . . . " But Keith has a ruthlessly optimistic take on his lot. He thinks of his sexual loss in terms of "another man keeping watch on Marion's breasts for me". He consoles himself that he, too, has moved on: "I have a remarkable degree of independence." Eventually a priest has to warn him that he does not need the church but "a bloody good solicitor".
Having been privileged to see the whole 100 minutes, I cannot resist reporting that the programme just gets better and better. The monologues produce real narrative momentum. By the second half of the series, a secondary theme of mortality has emerged, and you wonder if Keith will prove to be as fatally lacking in self-knowledge as the photocopier secretary in Alan Bennett's A Woman of No Importance, dying in blissful ignorance. The parabola of decline described by the plot permits, however, two enormous and dramatically fulfilling surprises at the end. It is a work of art.
Kay Mellor's Fat Friends (Thursdays, 9pm, ITV) is not in the same league, but has made a promising start. Based half in the Simpson family's fish and chip shop in Leeds and half in the slimming club they visit, this is a romance in which the quest is not for a man, but a size 12 body. Alison Steadman as Betty, a regional finalist in Super Slimmer 2000, and Ruth Jones as Kelly, her daughter, with just six weeks left to get into her wedding dress, are a fine double act, mum suffering from low self-esteem on her tubby daughter's behalf.
Mercifully, Mellor does not make men the enemies of the piece. Betty's husband, Douglas, actually fears he will lose her if she sheds any more weight, while Kelly's fiance, Kevin, is so fat that he gets trapped down manholes. Unlike a sub-genre of women's fiction that presents thinness as a goal in itself, this intelligent, if sentimental, comedy gently asks who or what women lose weight for.
Dealing neither with aberrant high-achievers (as, for example, in Billy Elliot) nor with no-hopers such as Keith Barratt, Fat Friends risks lavishing care on the kind of likable, middle-of-the-road lives that you rarely see outside of soaps and sitcoms. It is surprisingly satisfying fare.
Andrew Billen is a staff writer on the London Evening Standard
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