Boy Meets Girl
The set-up behind this British comedy is far from new: a freak lightning strike results in conspiracy theorist and slacker Danny Reed (Martin Freeman, the long-suffering Tim from The Office), switching lives with a glamour-puss journalist Veronica Burton (Rachael Stirling).
The details may have been made more contemporary but the device is as old as storytelling itself. Yet despite the odds, this manages to breathe some life into what could have been a tired pastiche.
When we meet Danny, he's ear-bashing an unfortunate supermarket customer about the environmental damage she is likely to trigger by buying a particular product. He lives in a shabby bedsit and, apart from one co-worker, has few friends prepared to put up with his incessant raves against the military industrial complex.
The "switcheroo" is functional rather than dramatic and introduces Veronica emerging from a coma in hospital and realising some significant differences in her physical make-up.
Wisely, writer David Allison sidesteps some of the more predictable gags about Veronica behaving like a slovenly, belching man, the challenges of walking in heels and the new-found thrill of feeling herself up, focusing instead on how the rejuvenated Veronica negotiates the trials of a woman's world.
With the help of the new voice inside her head, she begins to see things differently. She realises her doting boyfriend, Jay (Paterson Joseph), seems even more solicitous when she's compliant and vulnerable than when she's lashing out or not behaving according to his expectations. While some gags don't know where they're going — the scene where Veronica finds her vibrator, for example — it manages to hit the occasional observational bull's-eye.
When Veronica turns up at work with lofty expectations of her job — her byline is at least as large as the headlines of the articles she writes — she discovers that her round consists of writing horoscopes and reviews of lipstick.
Freeman and Stirling (she's the daughter of actress Diana Rigg) are comfortable in their credibility-stretched roles. The ending suggests that the remaining three episodes may indeed blossom into an unlikely love story.
Twitter
Facebook
Tumblr
MySpace
del.icio.us
Google Bookmarks
Google Buzz
StumbleUpon
Reddit
Digg
RSS
Loading ...
