ITV1’s new starry rom-com featured some decent enough coves - and jokes so lame that it might be redefined as a rom-dram
Love Life
ITV1
Rom-coms traditionally end in an airport, the flight not taken and our hero and heroine embarking, after all, upon the marital road more travelled. In contrarian fashion, Love Life — whose jokes, despite the presence of Alexander Armstrong and Gregor Fisher, were so lame that it would be safer to define it a rom-dram — instead began in an airport. Joe was back from a year’s trekking to Everest. You could see why he went: the giddiest height he would ascend back in Manchester was the scaffolding of his brother’s building business and, when an average Joe is played by Downton Abbey’s handsome Rob James-Collier, that average Joe is destined for higher things.
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In romance, however, there is no higher thing than monogamous, happy-ever-afterness (it is, surely, no coincidence that the scaffolding we first see Joe climb is attached to a church perfect for weddings). All we viewers have to do is wait the two weeks for Joe to realise it. His “destiny”, as the Tao master he met on his travels would put it, is his former girlfriend Lucy, played by Andrea Lowe, a very blonde, very ITV face. The catch is that, tired of waiting for him, she has been impregnated by her unhappily married boss.
Armstrong’s Dominic, a randy tile-shop owner, is a decent enough cove. But then so is almost everyone else in Bill Gallagher’s story, including Lucy, who has selflessly chosen not to tell Dominic that the baby is his, an omission Joe soon corrects. In real life we’d see Lucy as spoilt and manipulative. Instead Gallagher, in what may be the show’s biggest flaw, makes Dominic’s wife the nutcase, her infertility having driven her to Tarot cards, OCD bulb potting and, mark my words, bunny boiling. Episode one contained too many flashbacks, too many mercy dashes to the maternity ward, a clumsy “memory pillow” metaphor, and just the one memorable line — Wife to Dominic: “Do you have to breathe like that?” The only reason Joe won’t end up with Lucy will be if ITV decides to stretch this thing out into a second series, but it won’t.
White Heat
BBC Two
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Paula Milne’s continuing White Heat is This Life with a date stamp. We have reached, via flashback, 1967-68, which makes it time for the flatmates variously to get trampled over at the Grosvenor Square riot, have a backstreet abortion, and settle down for a night in watching Enoch Powell’s Rivers of Blood speech. Charlotte’s mother, a droopy-drawers played by poor Tamsin Greig, has been deserted by her husband and left only with arms bearing the burn marks of Aga incidents and chip-pan accidents. “Battle scars,” I wrote in my notes. “Battle scars,” said Charlotte. The phrase for writing this explicit is “on the nose”. But Milne went one better. Jack, our sexist commie male, ended the episode with a sticker on his forehead saying, “This Man Degrades Women”. Like Love Life, White Heat gets three stars because, against some odds, the actors make it watchable.
andrew.billen@thetimes.co.uk