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This Life (1996 TV series)

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TV

Country of origin
  
United Kingdom

No. of series
  
2

Final episode date
  
7 August 1997

Networks
  
BBC, BBC Two

8.6/10
IMDb

Created by
  
Amy Jenkins

Original language(s)
  
English

No. of episodes
  
33 (list of episodes)

Program creator
  
Amy Jenkins

This Life (1996 TV series) wwwgstaticcomtvthumbtvbanners184580p184580

Starring
  
Amita Dhiri, Jack Davenport, Jason Hughes, Andrew Lincoln, Daniela Nardini, Ramon Tikaram, Luisa Bradshaw-White, Steve John Shepherd, Natasha Little, David Mallinson, Juliet Cowan, Sacha Craise, Cyril Nri

Cast
  
Andrew Lincoln, Jack Davenport, Daniela Nardini, Amita Dhiri, Jason Hughes

This Life is a BBC television drama that was produced by World Productions and screened on BBC Two. Two series were broadcast in 1996 and 1997 and a reunion special in 2007. The series centres on the life of five twentysomething law graduates embarking upon their careers while sharing a house in south London.

Contents

This Life (1996 TV series) This Life TV Series 19961997 IMDb

Broadcast during the height of "Cool Britannia", the series set in London is notable for its Britpop soundtrack and for its depiction of casual sex and drug-taking. The show became a hugely popular word-of-mouth hit and was included on BFI's list of the 100 greatest British television programmes of all time.

This Life (1996 TV series) THIS LIFE A TELEVISION HEAVEN REVIEW

This life s1e2 part one


Production

The series was created by, and some episodes written by, Amy Jenkins. Other writers contributed scripts, including Joe Ahearne (who also directed some episodes—the only person to do both on the series), Ian Iqbal Rashid, Amelia Bullmore and Matthew Graham. Tony Garnett was the executive producer and Jane Fallon worked as a producer on both series.

When the first series was screened it was a modest critical success, rather than being a ratings hit. Nevertheless, the original production agreement secured a second series. In the lead-up to the broadcast of the second series, the entire first series was repeated, helping to generate a critical buzz around the programme, to the point that millions of viewers were waiting to discover the ultimate resolutions to the various plot-lines and generating front-page newspaper coverage.

Cast and characters

Guest cast
  • The Office and Sherlock star Martin Freeman appeared early in the second series, pictured stealing money from Milly and Egg's bedroom after a party, and accidentally drinking Egg's urine from a can, believing it to be beer.
  • Ralph Ineson, also from The Office, featured in an early episode as a client of Milly.
  • EastEnders actor Nitin Ganatra (credited as Nitin Chandra Ganatra) appeared in an episode of the second series playing a prospective housemate who manages to upset Milly.
  • Another later well-known actor appearing early in the second series is Martin Hancock, who went on to star in Coronation Street as Spider, followed by Holby City as Reg Lund.
  • Clare Clifford played lesbian lawyer Sarah Newly who propositions Anna, in five episodes.
  • Stuart Organ, best known as Mr Robson in Grange Hill, appeared as a flasher in the first series.

    • Series one (1996)

    This Life is based around life in a London law firm and barristers' chambers of a group of about twenty trainee solicitors and pupil barristers, but essentially it is a character-driven drama.

    Egg (Andrew Lincoln) and Milly (Amita Dhiri) have been dating since they were at university together but their career choices create tension between them. Conscientious Milly is ambitious, spending a lot of time working with her older boss Mr O'Donnell. Egg suffers a crisis of dissatisfaction with a career in law, and soon resigns from the firm.

    Anna (Daniela Nardini) and Miles (Jack Davenport) had a brief fling at university and Anna is fixated on the indifferent Miles. Their love–hate relationship makes their work and home life frequently tense.

    The other house-mate, Warren (Jason Hughes), is a gay man. He spends some time dealing with issues around his sexuality, especially in relation to "coming out" to friends and family. In an unusual (at the time) plot device he is frequently seen discussing his feelings with a therapist (Gillian McCutcheon) who is heard and only rarely seen by the viewer.

    Miles appears, at times, to dislike Warren, and subjects him to occasional homophobic abuse when angered. Miles's manipulative girlfriend, the drug addicted and bulimic Delilah (Charlotte Bicknell), moves in with him. This results in conflict in the house. When Miles, who has not been practising safe sex with Delilah, discovers that she is still sleeping with her heroin addict ex, Truelove, he has an HIV scare. Milly clashes with Egg over his perceived lack of ambition, and becomes attracted to O'Donnell.

    Series two (1997)

    During the second series, storylines were expanded to include other connected characters. These included Ferdy (Ramon Tikaram) - Warren's boyfriend briefly, Rachel (Natasha Little) - new junior trainee at Milly's law firm and Francesca - Miles's girlfriend/fiancee - whilst previously secondary-characters Jo (Steve John Shepherd) and Warren's cousin, Kira (Luisa Bradshaw-White) feature more heavily as they embarked upon a relationship. Moore, Spencer, Wright Receptionist Kelly (Sacha Craise) also became much more prominent and a close ally of Kira. Ferdy was a largely improvised, complex (and sometimes unwilling) bisexual character and was seen as a replacement for Warren when Jason Hughes decided to leave the show (he did return for the final scene). Finding a relationship with Anna impossible, Miles began a relationship with Francesca, a woman nearly a decade older than he was. Miles proposed to Francesca, but still harboured feelings for Anna.

    Rachel had a long-running passive-aggressive feud with Milly, although on the surface the pair were able to work together without mention of their mutual dislike. Milly's dislike of Rachel was very strong, viewing her as a threat to her relationship with O'Donnell, and disliking her apparently perfect demeanour. Milly confided in Anna that she found Rachel almost suffocatingly "nice". The tension between the two went unresolved throughout the second series, culminating in the final scene, in the episode "Apocalypse Wow!". At Miles and Francesca's wedding reception, after Milly learns that Rachel has told Egg of her affair with O'Donnell, Milly punches Rachel in the face.

    Legacy

    The second series ended with a close-up of an advert for the house, and the original intention was to re-cast with new characters. The controversial stage writer Mark Ravenhill was involved in drafting storylines and early scripts for a third series, but the plans were aborted, and the decision was taken to end the programme "on a high". Series one and two are available on DVD from BBC Worldwide, as a box set and as two individual series volumes.

    In 2001, NBC Television broadcast a loosely adapted U.S. remake titled First Years. It attracted scathing reviews and low ratings, and vanished soon after.

    The young production team behind This Life went on to further success:

  • Jane Fallon went on to become Executive Producer on the Channel 4 series Teachers which also starred Andrew Lincoln.
  • Joe Ahearne later went on to write and direct the cult Channel 4 series Ultraviolet (1998) which also starred Jack Davenport. He also directed episodes of the first series of the revived Doctor Who, starring Christopher Eccleston, in 2005.
  • Matthew Graham co-created the BBC One series Life on Mars (2006) and has written episodes of Hustle, Spooks and an episode of Doctor Who in 2006
  • Ian Iqbal Rashid went on to write and direct the feature films Touch of Pink (Sony Picture Classics, 2004) and How She Move (Paramount Vantage, 2008).

    • This Life + 10

    In 2006, the BBC reconvened the original cast for a special one-off 80-minute special, looking at what had happened to the lead characters in the intervening ten years. The episode begins with the original five housemates reuniting for Ferdy's funeral. Milly and Egg are together, though not married, and have had a young son but Miles is divorced from Francesca and has a new Vietnamese wife, Me Linh. The circumstances of both Ferdy's death and Miles' divorce are not revealed.

    This new episode was entitled + 10 onscreen, and kept the original title sequence and programme title This Life. It was screened on 2 January 2007, and was a co-production between BBC Wales and the original producers World Productions. This Life + 10 was written by Jenkins, directed by Ahearne and produced by Garnett. It gained 3.5 million viewers, with a 14% audience share.

    Broadcasts

    The original run of the first series in 1996 was neither a critical nor a ratings success. It was only with the commencement of a repeat run of the first series, beginning 2 January 1997, and then every Wednesday evening from 3 January in a post-Newsnight slot that the show really began to attract serious, but still relatively moderate, viewer attention. This rerun ran smoothly into the start of the new second series, from Monday 17 March 1997, restored to its peak-time slot, by which time the series was attracting praise as a cult hit. By the time the second series ended, the show was attracting strong audience figures for a BBC Two show of around four million, and the show became a national talking point, regularly making headlines in both tabloid and broadsheet newspapers for a show had been on the air every week from the beginning of January to mid-August 1997. Both of the two series were then repeated late-night from 12 June to 2 August 2000 (each episode was shown twice during the first run). The lack of repeats was mainly due to the high VHS sales during the late 1990s. Another screening of the first series only was shown on Sunday evenings between 30 March and 13 July 2003. As a run in to the reunion the BBC repeated every episode, two a night, Monday to Thursday, starting 6 November 2006, on BBC Two.

    As of March 2013, the entire series including This Life +10 and That Life (A short documentary about the reunion special) has been made available via Virgin On Demand.

    Locations

  • The opening scenes show the house as being on Benjamin Street, which is in EC1 in Clerkenwell. However, the building is actually Anchor Terrace, a terraced house on Southwark Bridge Road. As the characters are often seen commuting from South London it is unclear why the Benjamin Street sign was filmed. The house has since been converted into luxury flats.
  • The law firm's offices were filmed on High Holborn near the junction with Chancery Lane. The waiting room in which Egg's first interview takes place is in Norwich Street at the City law firm Macfarlanes. The location for external shots of Moore Spencer Wright are at the bottom end of Borough High Street, now the FTC Kaplan offices.
  • The barrister's chambers external shots were filmed outside Verulam Buildings on Gray's Inn Road, part of Gray's Inn; the interior scenes were filmed in the Anchor Terrace house (see above).
  • The café that Egg works in, and later runs, is on Victoria Road in North Acton next to the Tube station.
  • The café where the characters are often seen having lunch was actually just further down Southwark Bridge Road from the Anchor Terrace house (on the same side). It was called the Island Cafe.
  • The job centre Egg visits is on Borough High Street, Southwark, London.
  • Miles' country house in the 2007 reunion (Whithurst Park in Sussex) is the same location used in Lewis Series 1 episode 1 "To Whom the Gods Would Destroy".

    • Music

    A then largely unknown Ricky Gervais, partner of producer Jane Fallon, was credited as "Music Advisor" for the series, and it was he who commissioned the theme tune, written by The Way Out. In 2000 BBC Music issued a compilation CD featuring the theme tune and songs from the 1990s by bands including: Blur, The Charlatans, The Lightning Seeds, Pulp, Jamiroquai, Manic Street Preachers, Suede, Oasis, The Divine Comedy, Everything but the Girl, New Order, Skunk Anansie, The Clash, Happy Mondays, The Prodigy and Supergrass.

    References

    This Life (1996 TV series) Wikipedia
    (Text) CC BY-SA


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