This Life was as dead as a dodo
It's been ten years, but it seems like only yesterday that Amy Jenkins's quintet of two-dimensional, self-absorbed whiners were misting up TV screens with their endless self-commentary.
This Life + 10 (BBC2) last night updated the zeitgeist now the five would-be legal eagles are in the middle of their fourth decade.
Egg has written a successful novel, evidently based on the two earlier series, making a quick buck out of his friends' antics.
The five characters are reunited over a weekend and have the results videotaped, so we are watching a film of them being filmed, which is so leadenly post-modern it hurts. The setting is Miles's revolting modern country pile.
The action began at Ferdy's funeral, the departed having been Warren's boyfriend, and this rather desultory affair set the pace for what followed. Courtroom scourge Anna desperately wanted a baby: "I want some sperm - no strings attached," she sobbed. Milly had had a baby with Egg, but was underwhelmed with her life. Egg had writer's block, Warren was miserable, and Miles was about to go bust. Nothing boring about this modern life, then.
The concerns of this drama are as old as the hills. It doesn't matter how loud the iPod is, the only sound that is clearly heard is the deafening tick of the biological clock. All the ideological euphoria of New Labour is exhausted, the only thing that matters is the self. As Warren puts it: " Arguing about the war is so last season."
This Life featured one tiny crisis after another, just so that some bits of the interminable march of time could be differentiated from any other. Milly fell off a horse, Warren took one health pill too many and went to sleep, Egg accidentally went swimming in the lake, some lines of coke were snorted, presumably as a nod to the good old days. If there was a sense of déjà vu that would be because we've seen it all before.
Eventually, a sort of resolution was reached. Miles, evidently a hippy all along, said he was leaving for Timbuktu. I suspect that he meant Kathmandu, but that's Miles for you. Anna used Warren's sperm to try for a baby - no strings there, then. Egg gave up writing so that he and Milly could live in perfect poverty.
In a final act of rebellion, Egg sent all the videotape to the bottom of the lake so that virtual posterity would have no knowledge of these events.
Us real-life people were not so lucky.
