14 May 2009
Posted by Bonnie on 14 May 2009 at
12:00
ITV1's comedy drama Boy Meets Girl has got me hooked after two episodes. At first I thought it was worth checking out since The Office's Martin Freeman is in it, but it turns out the real star of the show is actually the female lead, played by Rachael Stirling.
The programme follows Danny Reed – a bog-standard northern bloke who tells it like it is and is obsessed with conspiracy theories. After a freak storm, he and a stranger are struck by lightning and mysteriously swap bodies. Danny is now in the body of Veronica Burton, a fashion journalist who loves hair and make-up and has annoyingly superficial friends — quite a contrast! Thus, the comedy ensues, with Danny having to learn how to walk in heels, muddle through writing fashion articles and is constantly curbing the sexual advances from Veronica's boyfriend. So far the focus has been mostly on Danny trapped in Veronica's body. I'm not complaining. Rachael Stirling (of Tipping the Velvet fame) puts on an impressive performance — blundering around in high heels and mastering typically blokey idiosyncrasies. Her acting manages to be comedic rather than slapstick. After two episodes, she has completely overshadowed Martin Freeman, who is essentially just acting camp.
If you haven't tuned into this programme yet, there are still two more episodes to go and the first two are on the ITV Player. It's well worth watching. From the preview for the next instalment, I'm guessing there's a lesbian storyline coming up between Stirling (not again!) and Angela Griffin. Plus, both Danny and Veronica seem to end up in a mental institution! If that hasn't sold it to you, I don't know what will!
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Posted by Bonnie on 14 May 2009 at
12:00
Wow, as Jonathan Ross would say. The cast of The Office haven't half done some rubbish since they left Wernham Hogg.
We've endured: Mackenzie "Gareth" Crook wearing a prosthetic nose in ITV1's Demons. Finchy's advert for Skybet.com. Lucy "Dawn" Davis in Sex Lives Of The Potato Men. And Patrick Baladi's stint playing Dodi Fayed's chest wig on Channel 5's Diana: Last Days Of A Princess.
But, I think, we may have topped the lot, even Ricky Gervais's episode of The Simpsons and Ghost Town, with this latest bum-dinger.
Martin "Tim" Freeman stars in ITV1's Boy Meets Girl. A four-part "comedy drama", we're led to believe, that — unlike Last Days Of A Princess — doesn't have the decency to be "so bad it's good".
Boy Meets Girl is just plain old-fashioned bad, and it pretty much set the tone for the rest of the Bank Holiday telly. Though the show did, at least, have a funny message from the sponsors, Sainsbury's.
"Love your leftovers." A slogan the writer, David Allison, has really taken on board. It's TV bubble & squeak. He's mixed together random bits of Freaky Friday, Switch, All Of Me, What Women Want and even, Lord forgive him, Some Like It Hot.
The biggest flavouring, however, was probably Life On Mars.
Martin Freeman is hit by a lightning bolt and wakes up to discover he's turned into a woman called Veronica.
Rachael Stirling has to do the opposite, and become a man. A slightly easier journey, possibly.
But the resulting character, Danny, is equally unlikable and both transformations, I'm afraid to say, require some "acting".
Rachael Stirling's man is Hi-de-Hi's Su Pollard meets Mel B's Bo' Selecta! puppet. Martin Freeman's woman, Les Dennis meets Mavis Riley.
Both deserve your cards and sympathy. There's nothing much they could've done with this Cretin Meets Typewriter script, much of which is meant to involve reading Danny and Veronica's minds. Most of it, though, actually sounds like Martin Freeman and Rachael Stirling preparing to sack their agents.
"It's like a bad dream." "I must be hallucinating." "What have they done to me?" "This is not happening to me."
"And what if it's all just a bunch of pointless, tedious crap?"
What indeed.
Another of those laugh-or-cry TV dilemmas.
You could weep for ITV, the home of Prime Suspect and Cracker, which no longer seems able to produce great contemporary drama.
It has just about enough gumption to hire a bunch of people from hit shows, yet no idea what to do with them. The chortling irony, however, is that ITV has finally produced an Ashes To Ashes knock-off series just at the exact moment the BBC1's show has become a dud. A disgrace to the name of Life On Mars.
The result is a series that also makes a mockery of Michael Grade's claim, made in 2007, that ITV wouldn't make copycat shows because they were "creatively bankrupt".
Grade has just stepped down, of course, as ITV chairman, but I'm guessing he had a hand in the network's splendidly inappropriate new slogan.
ITV is "The brighter side".
But not in a clever way.
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13 May 2009
Posted by Bonnie on 13 May 2009 at
12:00
Danny (Martin Freeman) is a northern bloke working in a DIY store who owes some money to some dodgy people. To appease his debtors, Danny agrees to steal some copper piping. Whilst doing so one night, he bumps into fashion journalist Veronica (Rachel Stirling). The reasons for her being out there on this dark stormy evening aren't clear, but the upshot is that both of them are standing on the same metal grid when lightning strikes — and they are both knocked unconscious.
When Danny wakes up, he's in hospital, surrounded by worried friends and family he doesn't recognise… because he's in the body of Veronica. Which means that somewhere out there, Veronica is in the body of Danny. It's that old cinema staple, the body swap.
As Danny (in female form) is taken home to Veronica's flash pad by concerned husband Jay (Paterson Joseph), he tries desperately to fend off Jay's attempts to re-connect as a couple ("You're not connecting with me, you pervert!") whilst he tracks down Veronica. Meanwhile, Veronica (in Danny's body) has amnesia, and is wandering the streets saying that she doesn't know who she is, but she's pretty sure she used to be a woman.
Billed as a comedy, Boy Meets Girl is more light-hearted drama, a sort of Vice Versa meets Tootsie, complete with its own 'Oops I'm in the wrong body' background jingle and all the other predictable angles you wish such a programme would avoid but know it probably won't. High heels as instruments of torture? Check. Angry reaction to sexual harassment and chauvinism? Check. Bloke's inexplicable inability to put on a bra? Check.
But if the gender gap details aren't exactly original, the class divide angle is more interesting. Danny is a working class lad, an idealistic, activist type who lives in a crummy flat, so it is interesting to see him supplanted into this new sophisticated world, as a paid up member of the tribe, and see how vacuous he finds it.
Again, though, this isn't exactly subtle — Jay and Veronica's friends are pretentious arseholes and the overstated glamour of their lives is ridiculous. I have less problem believing that two people can swap bodies than I do that Veronica can live that life on a regional beauty journalist's salary. But the set up does provide a good opportunity to showcase the differences between, not only their lives, but their perceptions of each other's lives, and indeed their own. It might make for insightful social commentary if handled well.
The hardest task is Stirling's — she is, after all, pretending to be a woman who is pretending to be a man who is pretending to be a woman. She does a great job. Her hunched posture, awkward gait and defensive body language are spot on and she entirely convinces as she drinks pop, slurps cereal and rails against the shallow nature of her glamorous life.
So far, so mildly entertaining, but there haven't been a great deal of chuckles in the series to warrant its comedy tag.
My bet is that the humour will come from Freeman, who hasn't appeared much so far. At the beginning of the series it was a shock to see Freeman as a swaggering Manc bloke but I rather liked the contrast to all his bewildered boy next door roles. Alas, lightning stuck and now we only get this blokey Freeman in voiceover. From here on in, he's playing a woman trapped in a man's body. Just as Stirling has a boyish quality which lends itself to her role, so Freeman is in touch with his feminine side, so no doubt he'll make a great job of the alternate scenario. But we need to see more of him next episode, please. His Simon Schama comment last episode provided me with the only laugh out loud of the series so far.
It will be interesting to see whether the series improves from here. Despite the clichés, it does have potential. At the end of the last episode Danny had teamed up with two of his DIY store colleagues (as Veronica) to help track down the ‘missing' Danny. But Danny has a crush on colleague Fiona (Angela Griffin) who seems to be developing a thing for Danny — but whilst he's in the body of Veronica. Plus, at the end of episode two, Danny decided he had no choice but to sleep with Jay. Some twisted romantic entanglements are sure to follow.
As far as the gender gap is concerned, there's nothing here we don't already know.
"Women are so complicated. Men are just horrible leering idiots," Danny-in-Veronica's-body says at one point to Veronica's best friend (whose husband, incidentally, Veronica was sleeping with.)
"But women are… I don't know and I am one!" Proof that, even if we swapped bodies, things couldn't be any more complicated between the sexes than they already are.
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4 May 2009
Posted by Bonnie on 4 May 2009 at
12:00
In Boy Meets Girl, Rachael Stirling plays a man magically transported into the body of a female fashion journalist. Her character maintains the mannerisms of a man — and Stirling captures these well. Generally, male body language movements are bigger, more emphatic. She sits with her legs apart or stretches herself out, whereas most women put their arms across their body. She has also twigged that most men protrude their jaw when they're annoyed. And you notice that she always keeps a certain distance from her partner: as a man inside, she knows exactly what he is after.
It reminded me of my work with transsexuals and transgender people. In their mind, they might be a woman, but they've got a man's body and are forcing it to act in a feminine way. What's going on in the head doesn't transfer to the body until they start watching themselves, as Stirling does in the show.
Martin Freeman, the other half of the swap, seems to have perfected female body language. His movements are much smaller, he sits with his hands sandwiched between his legs, indicating insecurity. However, I wondered whether such an extrovert, forthright fashion journalist would really react like that in the body of a man who works in a DIY store. That could be the shock of finding yourself in a male body. I imagine the first reaction would be panic.
How would I deal with a bodyswap? I'm more aware of how people are expected to behave, but that doesn't mean my body would do what I wanted it to. I would probably have the body language of a drag queen — a combination of feminine signals and male bravado.
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Posted by Bonnie on 4 May 2009 at
12:00
There are some great mysteries about great British manhood. Why they believe, deep down, that it's "gay" to pull a wheeled suitcase. Why they believe, deep down, it's effeminate to look nice in summer clothes. And why, then, given the slightest opportunity and half a pint, they will dress up as women.
Some people say that it's a public school thing, this repressed urge to put on a girlfriend's tights. A quick flight to Faliraki and 200 fake boobs and wigs later, you'll quickly be disabused. After all, William Shakespeare didn't go to public school, and after a goblet or two of mead he thought it bloomin' hilarious to dress his male actors up in a bodice.
This is how I thought Boy Meets Girl would go — a good old gender-bending romp. In this kind of thing the man normally has to pass as a woman in drag. Boy Meets Girl goes one better: the man actually gets to wear a woman's body. Danny (played by Martin Freeman) gets transported into the body of a woman, Veronica (Rachael Stirling), in that classic bodyswap device — a lightning storm.
Every piece of advance publicity talked about this as a "hilarious" comedy. True to form, there was the "hilarious" moment when Danny, in Rachael's body, has to learn to walk in high heels, and the "hilarious" bit where he has to put on a bra. After a starring role in the lesbian historical drama Tipping the Velvet, Stirling has become the gay girl's pin-up. This role has answered this fan-base's Christmas prayers. But suddenly, I found myself completely floored. This show is only hilarious if you're tickled giddy by one of the most disturbing and dark depictions of mental illness on television this year.
Stirling is the daughter of Diana Rigg, only, boy — or girl — can she act. The opening show wisely concentrates on her, rather than Freeman, who, since playing Tim in The Office has not gone much deeper than goofy. Stirling goes deeper. I could watch an entire series of her ugly disintegration. She stares at the television: puffy-eyed, sullen, drinking, stinking, and, effectively insane.
She hates her boyfriend as much as she hates herself: "What if Veronica just woke up to find her life was a bunch of vacuous crap?", she tells him. She assaults him. He finds a picture she has drawn of him, hanging by a noose.
Whoah there! Admittedly, this is what passes for feminine behaviour in my household. But it's not comedy. Just because you throw in a few pratfalls with a vibrator, it wouldn't make it so. I hope ITV1 doesn't realise quite how unexpectedly weird this territory has become, or it will panic and hurriedly return to trannies in panto-land.
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