This Life returns to television sets this evening ten years after it was first aired on British TV. The alcoholic bunch of social climbers have now turned into thirty-somethings. Zoe Williams of the Guardian says of the original show:
It was like your best friend from primary school, who is straight and not an exhibitionist, and not, let’s be honest, the most amusing person in the world, but whom it would never occur to you to drop, since you know them back to front, and above all, know the authenticity of them. This Life was oddly true in a way that most young-professional, aspirational, look-at-my-cool-career-oh-darn-now-I-need-IVF yawn I-wonder-who-my-husband’s-texting, oh-of-course-it’s his-mistress archetypal, Cold Feet British telly is not true.
I don’t, of course, mean that everyone is a lawyer with a tidy figure taking coke at lunchtime. I have no idea what drugs lawyers take. Rather, it overturned the rules of telly, viz, that in order for us to care about characters, they must have “real” and serious problems. They must have disabled children, or alcoholism, or alcoholic children, or gambling debts. Twentysomethings whose biggest problems are whether or not to shag that very good-looking person who handily lives just across the corridor: they can be comedy but they ain’t drama. Just by ignoring this first principle, the show sidestepped almost all televisual cliche, almost by accident.
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This Life, Revisited
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