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Pulling

Tanya Franks, Rebekah Staton and Sharon Horgan in Pulling
  • Posted at 12:56pm
  • 03 April 2008
  • by AlisonGraham-RT
  • 1 comment

There's a moment involving the demise of an ailing cat in Sunday's Pulling (6 April, 9:30pm, BBC3) that is so outrageously funny - and just so, so wrong - that you will laugh till your hair falls out. But then, you will look guiltily behind you, just to make sure no-one is waiting to trap you in a butterfly net and entomb you in a coal cellar for being recklessly amused by something that will have cat-lovers everywhere reaching for the self-righteous moggy-shaped indignation they keep in a box above the fridge.

I'm the first to admit it's an appalling scene, but then Pulling's speciality is the appalling, done in a completely delicious, should-be-forbidden way. Just think of Peep Show, but with girls instead of boys, and you'll get a little bit of an idea of the depths of its bleak, black madness. Throw in a touch of Curb Your Enthusiasm and the picture is complete.

Pulling specialises in being gleefully inappropriate and playing dirty games with a fairly timeless sitcom format: the dating perils faced by a clutch of single women - three flatmates - trying to find love (actually, let's be honest here, trying to find sex, in the big city. No, it bears no relation whatsoever to the grim, self-satisfied and thoroughly bloody awful Sex and the City. And Pulling's characters are better dressed).

In a recent episode ever-hopeful Louise (Rebekah Staton) dated a reformed flasher who went into a meltdown of self-righteous justification at a painfully embarrassing dinner party hosted by Donna (Sharon Horgan, Pulling's co-writer with her friend Dennis Kelly). This was after he'd been goaded by the monumentally ghastly, yet strangely lovable, Karen (Tanya Franks), a promiscuous, binge-drinking primary school teacher. None of the exchange or the excruciating attempt at Rationalisation is repeatable here, but it's apocalyptically filthy.

Of course, there's nothing dirty about dear Doctor Who, which returns on Saturday (5 April, 6:20pm, BBC1) with a jokey opening episode penned by the mighty Russell T Davies. It's cute, funny family entertainment, a neat counterpoint to next week's much darker territory, when the Doctor and his new assistant Donna (David Tennant and Catherine Tate) land in Pompeii on the eve of the Vesuvius eruption. Tate is a good fit. Mercifully, there are no ham-fisted attempts at boiling up any sexual tension between the pair - they are friends and equals.

**

Alison Graham is TV editor of Radio Times.

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  • Posted on 06 April 2008
  • at 9:28pm
  • by planetmarshalluk

If Pulling is anything like Peep Show it is a pale imitation at best. Comparing the two as if they differ only by the gender of their main characters is to say that the First Wives Club and Reservoir Dogs are basically the same film.

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