"ONLY the old can afford to be young," said Anna, the leggiest legal eagle in London, it was a telling moment, irritatingly preachy perhaps, when sullen resignation might have won more sympathy for this sentiment. But it did summarise the generational gall which 1990s twentysomethings feel for the 1960s generation: the old fogeys have all the best jobs and are very slow to do the decent, bloody thing - like retire or, better still die.
Anna, Miles, Warren, Milly and Egg are five young lawyers who share a house, careers and resentments against the middle aged in BBC 2's new 11 part drama series, This Life. (Surely, there should be a law against having more than, two lawyers in any house that can't be locked from the outside only. But that's the law for you.) Anyway, Warren is gay and in therapy. He seems emotionally anaemic but is nonetheless preferable to the others, who are obsessed by two things: their careers and "shagging".
To be fair, Egg (scriptwriter Amy Jenins, a 29 year old former lawyer, certainly knows how to take a liberty, doesn't she?) is obsessed, not by his career and "shagging" but by football and shagging?. Egg the laddish lawyer - how revolting can you get? Mind you, Milly and Anna are lads too, or ladettes, or whatever ambitious, resentful, 1990s twentysomething females call themselves. Miles is a prat.
All of which causes the central problem with This Life. The premise that these, eh, "bright young things", are being blocked by the middle aged, is fair enough. They are and their resentment is understandable. But these characters are objectionable. In principle, their gripes deserve a hearing and probably, some sympathy. But, on the evidence of the first episode, they are already just as obnoxious as the Porsche driving, law firm boss who embodies, for them, all the bloated awfulness of middle aged pomposity.
Put another way, it's impossible to imagine that these young lawyers will be any less obnoxious to the generation which follows them. Some of it has to do with their confidence, a necessary quality, of course, but one which is repulsive when it expresses itself as an assumed right to inherit the Earth. Even on the matter of sex (and sex soaks into This Life like ink on blotting paper) they all seem like Thatcherised consumers. Oh, the lust is fine; it's the smugness that grates.
Publicity for the series suggested that it was a sort of British Friends. In ways, it is, but it is grittier indeed, it has an interesting and rare white collar grittiness - than the US sitcom which has none of the nudity, bad language and rumpo. In one scene, happy couple Egg n Milly (vile, isn't it?), take a shower together. Well, that's fine. It's nice to see clean young people on television. But the long, full frontal shot was very cheap. It looked foolish, ironically like the sort of nonsense that 1960s film directors thought was brave and liberating.
Similarly, when Milly decides to offer oral relief to Egg (yes, yes, the advice about not telling granny suggested, itself), the camera lingers on his explosively foolish face. There's loads more sex too and, of course, it's designed to capture the television resistant twenty somethings. May be it will, but This Life's characters would, by definition, consider their audience to be a crowd of "sads". Watching TV in your 20s? When there's all that sex and career fun to be had? It's sad alright.
This first set up episode was clever in splicing opening scenes of therapy and job interviews. A lot of necessary biography was introduced in that way. But too often the dialogue was a thinly disguised polemic. In fact, this quintet could be the adults that Enid Blyton's Famous Five might become. OK, they've got a gay bloke instead of a dog. But otherwise, we're into some very serious middle England here and, quite simply, it's very difficult to feel much interest in these new yuppies.
IF This Life is intended to be a sort of "Our Friends in the South", Mersey TV's new eight parter, And The Beat Goes On, might be seen as "Our Friends in the North West". From the makers of Brookside and set in, Liverpool in the mythical/despised 1960s, it is tougher stuff than This Life: white collar grittiness, after all, can't seriously be expected to be quite as flinty as its blue collar cousin.
The action centres on two stereotyped scouser families: the warm and wild working class O'Rourkes and the cold and uptight middle class Spencers. As at the beginning of Our Friends in the North, a wrecker's ball attacks a terrace of back to back red brick houses. This image, along with mini skirts, Beatles haircuts and tie dye vests, is becoming television drama's official symbol of the period.
Not that there was just one 60s in the 60s. And The Beat Goes On opens in 1960, a year, like the two which followed it which 60s, while being chronologically in the 60s, was not really in the 60s in the spiritual sense. Perhaps in America the 60s really did begin in 1960, with JFK's election win. But in Britain, they began with The Beatles takeover of popular music in 1963. (In Ireland, the 1960s began in or around 1972).
To make the point that 1960 was no swinging time in Liverpool, the first episode featured 17 year old Cathy's horrific attempt at a DIY abortion with knitting needles. Failing to induce an abortion, Cathy's friend, then persuades her to try to fool her boyfriend, Ritchie O Rourke, into believing the baby is his. This is grim stuff and like a potboiler's chapter ending, it sets up even grimmer problems to come.
Mind you, life is pretty grim for the Spencers too. Christine is the university undergraduate daughter of a neurotic mother and a cold, prospective Tory MP father. Christine, like Cathy (like Milly, Egg, Miles and Anna) has embarked on a vigorous sex life too and you sense, that it could all end in tears. At present, middle class Christine is sleeping with . . . wait for this . . . a working class Geordie poet. Is that 60s or what? And three years or more before it became obligatory. Groovy, no doubt.
There's a gay bloke in the series too. Unlike 90s Warren, who's therapied and sorted, the middle class homosexual in 60s Liverpool, - remembering, Brian Epstein - is depicted as a pathetic creature. He goes "cottaging" and the guilt and seediness of it all almost seep through the screen. Indeed, if the series has a glaring fault, it is that, so far, the class, gender and period stereotypes are as loud as soap opera characters.
In that sense, this is Brookside set in 1960. Not that that is necessarily all bad - Brookside is better than much TV drama that would consider itself a cut above soap. But, it is repetitious and there's only so much Scouser soap that anybody can take.
Still, there were a few hilarious scenes in And The Beat Goes On's opening episode.
Second funniest was a scene in a university lecture theatre where a discussion of Herbert's poem Vertue degenerated into a cutesy lecture on changing sexual mores. But funniest of all was one of the O'Rourkes ordering a round of drinks: "So, that's two bitters, one brown mild, two brown bitters, three martinis and lemon, two rum and peps, a snowball, a brandy and a Babycham. Oh, and one for yourself." Does anybody order such rounds from hell anymore? Maybe This Life's Famous Five are some sort of progress, after all.
ON the face of it, a programme about Albert Einstein's love life has nothing more to recommend it than, say, one on Marilyn Monroe's theories about cosmology, the Big Bang and all of that. However, Horizon's Einstein - The Miracle Year and Einstein - Fame were the highlights of the week.
It's not that Einstein's love life was any greater or less than, say, Egg's (these things are relative, after all). But the mix of dramatised interviews, readings from recently released letters, splendid location filming and animated explanations of the physics worked very well.
First though, you had to overcome Andrew Sachs's wild wig and moustache. These looked like they came from the same Planet Of The Apes job lot used to kit out the lads in Our Friends From The North. But that and an understandable, if arguably distorting, reverence aside, this was good stuff. Quantum theory and deliberations on the size of atoms do not usually feature alongside tales of the hero's rebellious youth, his abandoned baby and his two failed marriages.
Perhaps inevitably, Einstein's wives became physics widows. When a person's role in life is to be the genius of the age, some niceties become neglected. Horizon was very understanding of this which, no doubt, pleased and flattered its regular science buff audience no end. Certainly, if the average bloke did an Einstein on family responsibilities, he could not expect such soft focus reverence. Then again, Einstein, at least in his work, had strong claims to be considered different from the average bloke.
Best of all though, was the programme's use of animation to explain complex ideas. Watching science done this way, it was possible to understand how gravity bends light, how acceleration and gravity are the same and even how time is a relative and not an absolute measure. Indeed, it was possible too to understand Einstein's late life philandering, during breaks from his futile search for the ironically named grand unified theory: he was just conducting grand unified experiments.
ELSEWHERE this week, the good, the bad and the ugly. To begin with the ugly, Patrick - His Life, His Legend was a bizarre, Canadian documentary. In fairness: it was lively, but this was St Patrick on acid, fighting naked, painted Celtic warriors who carried around the heads of their slain enemies like sets of pre Christian furry dice. There was talk too of a sexual indiscretion, which might have been intended to humanise our patron saint. Personally, I'd rather the image of the mitred asp kicker, than one which makes Padraig Naofa seem like a fifth century Egg.
The bad was provided by Janet Street Porter who just ranted against the Internet. The net, she claimed, was just "a socially useful way of keeping the sads off the street". Yes, yes, there is a lot of rubbish on the Internet, just as there is a lot of rubbish on television which has had a half century headstart. But, it's not just that. Ms Porter, quite simply didn't know what, she was talking about and, there are no nice words for this, gave a very, very stupid performance marked more by bigotry than argument.
Finally, the good: Modern Times: Tracy And Joe. This was one of most awful stories told by a TV documentary in years. If recounted how 31 year old Tracy Ann Mertons was abducted, doused in petrol and burnt to death in a Cheshire churchyard two Christmases ago. The police believe that her partner, Joey, knows more than he told them. Joey is a junkie and still in charge of the couple's two children Daniel (13) and Kelly (12). This real life horror story was more moving than any of the week's new dramas. Calmly and carefully done, it was hard not to feel like screaming at the mulish Joey, who seemed utterly dead emotionally.