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Why I Love...Love Soup

Sheridan Smith, Tamsin Greig and Montserrat Lombard in Love Soup
  • Posted at 2:19pm
  • 20 March 2008
  • by JackSeale-RT

Saturday night on BBC1. Graham Norton flaps his way through another busload of inept warblers. Duncan from Blue, coathanger in mouth, "releases the balls" to confirm that, although it could be you, it never is. Episode 482,571 of Casualty. Football. A sophisticated comedy about how the massive unlikelihood of finding true love dooms intelligent people to live alone in a mad, vulgar world.

Hang on, what was that last one? That's Love Soup, lurking on the worst TV night of the week, but still the pinnacle of David Renwick's already Himalayan writing career.

One Foot in the Grave saw Renwick master visual set pieces and cruel comic karma. Jonathan Creek showcased his clever plotting. Love Soup has all this, but on top of that, it's got soul. This time, it's personal: the long search for love by Alice (Tamsin Greig) and, in series one, Gil (Michael Landes) is based on Renwick's own life. He married in middle age, having thought he could never find someone so perfect for him. But being the morose beast that most comedy writers are, he doesn't let this lightning strike in Love Soup.

In series one Alice and Gil were buffeted by bad relationships, painfully unaware that it was each other they needed to meet. Would they? Michael Landes more or less settled that by refusing to appear in the current, second run. What many saw as a fatal blow has, in Renwick's hands, proved to be a blessing.

Now, instead of straddling two separate stories, we focus on Alice - and what a satisfying anti-heroine she is. She's beset by the bad luck Renwick skilfully engineers for her, her cow eyes looking in horror at the modern world's buffoons and boors. She's timid, self-loathing and repressed. She's slightly annoying, but only in the way that our own neuroses are. We desperately hope to see her happy but suspect we won't – especially since Renwick ended our dreams of finding Gil by killing him. Gil's demise was reported without fanfare in episode three, as banal and unjust as a real death. This astute twist gives Love Soup's pessimism almost unbearable depth.

But scratch a cynic and you'll reveal the romantic underneath. To an old-school ragtime soundtrack, Renwick lightens Love Soup with romance in its most magical, cinematic forms. Characters fall in love with shadows, with old friends, with the next guy in line at the cash machine. Love is always in sight but never in reach, and not tasting the fruit makes it all the sweeter.

And this is still, above all, a comedy. It's peppered with the sort of ideas that, when they occur, have writers sprinting for their notebooks: the film buff who plays scary Bernard Herrmann scores during dates; the boyfriend who writes critiques of last night's sex ("Her foreplay is marred by clumsy fingerwork"); a robber who hijacks a learner driver's car and has to instruct her himself in order to escape.

Watching Love Soup, we smile, though our hearts are aching. Ideally it'll be recommissioned eternally, prolonging Alice's – and our – delicious torment for ever.

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