I Saw You ITV1
Cutting It BBC1
The Cry ITV1
The Secret BBC1
Lost Girls C4
At this rate, the lovable Fay Ripley, late of Cold Feet and those terribly ill-advised though happily short-lived advertisements for the Times, currently doing another Jenny Feet -ish turn as the likeably feisty single-mum-cum-jazz singer-cum-(Your-Name-Here)-Everywoman heroine of I Saw You, will end up as the British, cut-price, brunette, small-screen Meg Ryan. All she really lacks so far is her own Tom Hanks.
And she definitely hasn't found him in Paul Rhys, her sort-of co-star in I Saw You, a three-parter which picks up the action 18 months on from a pilot in which (you may or may not recall, and to cut a shortish story back to the very bone) Grace (Ripley) met Ben (Rhys) and they fell in love. (No, really, that's all you need to know.) Anyway, having bypassed the cosy-coupledom phase that is normally a precursor to smug marriage, we return to meet Grace and Ben just as they enter the itchy-scratchy stage of their relationship, the point where a couple might split because they can't think of a particularly good reason not to, and will then spend months mooning around regretting it truly, madly (etc, etc, you know the plot).
The thing is, I'm pretty sure we viewers are expected to want and need the lovely Ripley and (the, frankly, mostly Welsh) Rhys to get back together, even if it means buying into the sort of starry-eyed idealism that would need to be deployed were an Arab-Israeli peace agreement ever to be brokered by Relate ('Now just stop it, the both of you' - that sort of thing), however Ripley is such a force of nature that I spent the whole time Rhys was on screen thinking: 'Oh no, love, you can do so much better than that.' I wasn't meant to think this, I know I wasn't, but the feeling was compounded when Grace was doggedly pursued by the charming Lord Peter (the exceptionally likeable Alexander Armstrong), who, it turned out, was possessed of not only a very nice Stately with a lot of chandeliers but a fabulous sense of humour, too (Grace: 'You're gay?' Peter: 'No. Well, not since school anyway...') and was, therefore, exactly the kind of Mills & Boonish 'better' I'd hoped she could 'do'.
By the end of the first episode, Peter had already proposed to Ripley, who was still mooning after Rhys (imagine a Welsh Hugh Grant, but without the charisma, self-deprecating charm or the good lines. I know, I know...). While there was nothing so predictable as Grace not knowing which fork to use when staying over at Lordy Towers, Peter's family are the typically patronising, upper-class simpletonian horse-faced Yahs beloved of middle-class drama since roughly 1066, so Grace is necessarily hung up on the Class Issue even as she begrudgingly admits that Peter's 'all right for a posh bloke'.
From where I was sitting, Peter looked fabulous and Ben was a boring loser, but aside from this fundamental plot flaw I Saw You is a peachy treat of a romantic comedy, from the writing and production partnership who recently brought us (the so-so) Rescue Me and hitherto collaborated on series three of Cold Feet. Indeed, David Nicholls writes so brilliantly and instinctively for Fay Ripley that he might just be the nearest thing, professionally at least, to her very own Tom Hanks.
In the oestrogen-soaked supergirly schedules that are, currently, Tuesday nights (menfolk beware: get thee down t'pub, take dog and arrows with you, and don't bother t'come back until early June or whenever it is that the pro-celebrity international bladder-kicking finals begin), I Saw You is right up against BBC1's Cutting It, which could quite easily have starred Fay Ripley as the tough-as-old-boots-I-don't-think so (it's just feisty by any other name) Mancunian brunette hairdresser heroine, Allie, whose nemesis comes in the form of a (necessarily less feisty) sophisticated southern blonde bitch hairdresser, played by Amanda Holden.
Instead of Ripley, however, the part went to Sarah Parish, who has model looks (just a touch of Chardonnay from Footballers' Wives. And how did we feel on hearing that Wives has finally been recommissioned? Over the moon!) and is very good at combining the kind of Coronation Street campery that always defines yer northern working classes (at least on the telly) with an awful lot of wistful pacing up and down, dreaming of what might have been.
Yes, Cutting It is another romantic comedy, well written (by Debbie Horsfield) and delectably acted (Annette Badland's fleeting cameo as Allie's terrifying Waynetta Slob of a mother was to be treasured) but, for my money, it's not quite as engaging as I Saw You. Last week, I read that Chris Tarrant never watches Coronation Street because, in effect, it's about a bunch of miserable northern gits, though he will watch EastEnders because even if the characters are just as miserable and gitty as their Corrie cousins, they're southern miserable gits, and Tarrant's a southerner.
I thought Tarrant's confession was admirably honest, if not entirely accurate - the truth, in fact, is that while EastEnders is indeed made up of wildly miserable southerners of supreme gittishness, Corrie is stuffed full of ridiculous Andy and Anthea Capp-type caricatures of miserable gittishness. I tried struggling through just some of Maxine and Ashley's marital trials-and-tribs in Corrie last week (pitched against Little Mo's real trial in EastEnders ) before giving up.
If I want close-up ham-campery I'll watch Graham Norton, thanks. And of course Cutting It, proudly parochial as it so clearly is, can't quite escape the same ooh-you-are-awful eye-rolling self-consciousness that its scheduling rival (set in Bristol) manages to avoid. Or perhaps it's just that it lacks Fay Ripley. (Oh and spare me the Angry of Manchester letters. So I'm a stupid southerner? You already knew that, surely?)
In the second part of ITV1's The Cry, Sarah Lancashire (one of the very few big-time crossover Corrie graduates, incidentally) gave us, as predicted last week, two more hours of high- octane emotion as she admirably fought her way through a soundtrack that threatened indiscriminately to smother everyone's performances. Ultimately, though, The Cry hadn't needed those four, very slow, hours to tell the story. By the end, just to speed things along a bit, I was ready to help some police with any of their unsolved inquiries. In contrast, in just two hours and over two consecutive nights, Haydn Gwynne and Stella Gonet played Emma and Nadia, a couple of reformed and long-since released, if unresolved, child-killers (the Thompson and Venables of their day, we were led to believe) who subsequently catapulted themselves at warp-speed through a lifetime of guilt, loss, pain, revenge and tragedy for our viewing pleasure (like I said, chaps, off t'pub wit'lot of you - this is women's work) in BBC1's The Secret.
'Hang on a minute, she's only just met him,' you found yourself muttering at the screen while the patently bunny-boiling Gonet made off with Haydn's soggy husband (Robert Bathurst from Cold Feet, who should beware disappearing into a sap-playing trap). Meanwhile, all Haydn had to do was wait, while wearing an expression worthy of Amanda Burton at her most emotionally disengaged. In the end, Haydn fessed up to her husband about her murderous past and he came straight home and nuzzled her on the sofa (obviously, there's nothing like discovering the little woman's a killer to add some much-needed spice to a dull old marriage, eh?) while, unbeknownst to either of them, Gonet got to live in a council towerblock where she could sing suitably spooky child-killer-type lullabies to her new born - Bathurst's baby.
I was just beginning to think that The Secret and The Cry were as absurdly implausible as each other when, in the same week, Angela Cannings was given two life sentences for murdering two of her babies, while Mary Bell, the former child-killer (there is no more delicate way to put it) requested lifetime anonymity for both her and her daughter. But, of course, even as dead babies, matricide and female child-killers were all over the news, both programmes, replete with simplistic morals and neat endings, looked even shallower and sillier.
And then I watched the second part of Channel 4's excellent and admirably restrained Lost Girls, the story of the victims of Fred and Rosemary West, and was reminded that, however implausible a fictional drama might be, unpalatably horrific fact can sometimes feel even more so. But I guess that's why most of us manage to sleep easy at night.
