This Life? What Life? That Life? No Life!

Remember the heady, drug-fuelled days of the mid-nineties?

No, probably not if they were drug-fuelled. But they probably weren't.

You may recall that I have been watching This Life. Some of it is re-watching, but most of it is just watching for the first time. This culminated this weekend with the final episode 'This Life +10' - where the characters get together after the said 10 year absense.

At the time This Life first came out it was surrounded in controversy; apparently showing indiscrete (nay, indecent) twenty-something lawyers living together, getting drunk, smoking, drinking and taking drugs. Probably the reason for the controversy is that it was on the BBC rather than Channel 4. But it was BBC 2. What surprises me is the lack of basis for the controversy. Yes each of the main characters has a nude scene, but just one. It is hardly wall-to-wall hedonism. And there is drug taking, but over the two main series there could only have been three, perhaps four scenes containing it. In fact, what struck me was how uncontroversial it was.

I realise that since then we have had more programmes that push the boundaries - shortly after This Life was Queer as Folk with considerably more nudity and drug-taking for example; so perhaps at the time it was one of the first programmes to start widening people's eyes.

But yes, quite uncontroversial. So uncontroversial in fact that it seems positively boring these days. I remember it back in the day as quite a fast-paced, multi-layered story. But then I was only 15. It wasn't fast-paced; it was actually quite slow and boring. Over the course of a forty minute episode very little happens. And all of the characters are very flat and single-sided. Egg, for example, is just the lawyer who doesn't want to be a lawyer. Miles is bigotted. And that is it. The only character with any depth seemed to be Millie, but even then her depth was not really believeable. She was this very meticulous, precise character who ends up abandonning all her principles and her boyfriend by sleeping with her boss to prevent her trainee getting any closer. It even finishes with a very soap-operaesque bust-up at a wedding.

What it is, is a time-capsule. The soundtrack really is the epitome of the years. Any decent band from around that time had a song on in the background. And even the accidental, ancilliary aspects put the show firmly in its age. From the entire absense of mobile phones to smoking in pubs still being commonplace, it really has set itself where it was. And it reminds us of the pace of change over just 15 years. They were still using LPs and cassettes (although there is a CD player) and even the answermachine still took cassettes. What it didn't do, though, was try to be political.

And that is where This Life +10 fails further. Again it does very little more than try to time-lock the music; but it tries to time-lock social and political aspects as well. So now Warren is very much into his complementary therapies and life-coaching. Miles is a victim of the dot-com bubble; whilst Egg has become a literary sensation with a book basically just retelling the original series in a haze of 'New Labour' optimism.

And, for some reason, they try to jump on the reality tv bandwagon by following people round with a camera. To this extent it actually detracts from the original premise and loses the few decent elements which it had - that of being a fly on the wall documentary-style story-telling. It really does become some flimsy premise of trying to chronicle end-of-New-Labour era hope. What it doesn't do is add anything to the story or to the characters, aside from a very very brief update of 'now Egg is an author, Miles a failure and Anna still an alcoholic'. All it merely seeks to do - and it really doesn't try to hide this - is cash-in on the ten-year anniversary of what had been seen as a ground-breaking series with a one-off special to get people to go out an buy the box-set again.

Presumably on DVD rather than video this time.