Soap with no flannel

IF anything sheds new light on how incredibly twee the pucino favoured angst of those half humans, half dolls is in the hit US sitcom Friends, it is the cult BBC 2 sitcom This Life. Now in its second series, the distinctly low fi series, which has been billed as "the thinking person's soap" has steadily built up a loyal following and now boasts an average of four million viewers for each programme. What it has in common with Friends is that it too details the living, loving and laughing of a group of twentysomethings who live in close quarters, but what makes it an "antiFriends" for our time is just about everything else. Just consider the different soundtracks: on Friends they listen to AOR like Bryan Adams, on This Life they listen to Portishead.

Set in a terraced house in Southwark, south London, This Life features four core characters as authentic as their American counterparts are vacuous. There's Milly, a lawyer and a control freak who has the ability to wreak emotional havoc wherever she goes; her boyfriend Egg (yes, Egg) is a slacker who gave up his law career to work in a cafe; Miles is an expublic schoolboy who has yet to grow out of his emotionally bereft upbringing and Ferdy is a bike courier of indeterminate sexual preference. Other characters, skillfully created and realised, drift in and out of the action as required by the narrative. Everyone drinks too much, there's loads of casual sex going on and drug use is not uncommon: in the workplace, there's neurosis, tension, jealousy and angst. Nobody ever reads a newspaper, there's a lot of parties, people take baths together, the women lend each other tampons and everyone is pissed off on a regular basis.

The series was dreamed up by Michael Jackson, who was then controller of BBC 2 but is now in charge of Channel 4. At the time, he was on a mission to deliver an under 35 viewing audience to BBC 2 and, impressed by a documentary about law students, he drew up the first draft of This Life. Crucially, he enlisted the services of Tony Garnett as executive producer - Garnett is the man behind such "kitchen sink" classics as Cathy Come Home, Up The Junction and Kess and his brand of social realism would anchor the programme.

In a similar vein the producer, Jane Fallon, used to work on Eastenders and knew how to merge social issues with massive rating popularity.

The programme's scriptwriter, Amy Jenkins, who had worked as a lawyer for a year (handily enough), describes the show's appeal: "We wanted to reflect that this generation is the first generation who can't expect to do better than their parents, who find it hard to get a job, who are not threatened by casual drug use. It's also about how the roles of men and women are changing and there's a new cynicism, or reality about relation ships. I wouldn't say This Life deals with these as `issues', but they are there in the background".

THE show's style is a curious lack of embellishement in these hightech days where all sort of effects can promote style over content.

The camera swivels like you might swivel your head - the aim being that you feel more a house guest, less a voyeur. Also, the lighting makes for a vaguely amateur, camcorderish feel.

"We work in low light on long lenses, says Tony Garnett, and the actors are forbidden from being put on marks (the place where they should stand) and as a result the actors aren't subservient to the camera; they tend to just wander around."

Andrew Lincoln, who plays Egg, finds the show's verisimilitude astonishing: "It always amazes me how many people come up to me and talk about the series. It happened when I was visiting some mates in Liverpool. We were in the pub and this bloke came over and said `You're Egg, aren't you? I'm going through exactly what you've been through, mate.' It seems to touch a lot of people like that".