This Life (1996 TV series)
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, with a later reunion special in 2007. It centres on the life of twentysomething law graduates embarking upon their careers while sharing a house in south London. Unusually for a show about lawyers, there are no courtroom scenes in either the first or second series, and only one brief scene in the TV sequel.
Broadcast during the height of "Cool Britannia", the series is set in London and is notable for its Britpop soundtrack and for its depiction of casual sex and drug-taking. It became a popular word-of-mouth hit and was included on BFI's list of the 100 greatest British television programmes of all time.
Production
The series was created by Amy Jenkins who was also its principal writer. Other writers contributed scripts, including Joe Ahearne, 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. 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.
Broadcasts
The original run of the first series in 1996 was neither a critical nor a ratings success. It was only its repeat run, from 2 January 1997, that really began to attract serious viewer attention. This ran smoothly into the start of the second series, from Monday, 17 March 1997, restored to its peak-time slot, by which time it was attracting praise as a cult hit. By the time the second series ended, the show was attracting strong audience figures of around four million, and became a national talking point, making headlines in both tabloid and broadsheet newspapers.Both of the series were then repeated late-night from 12 June to 2 August 2000. Another screening of the first series 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 each night Monday to Thursday, starting 6 November 2006, on BBC Two.
From 3 February 2020, series one of This Life was repeated on BBC4, carrying a dedication to its executive producer Tony Garnett who had died aged 83 during the previous month.
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 is at the bottom end of Borough High Street, now the FTC Kaplan offices.
- The barristers’ 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.
- The cafe that Egg works in, and later runs, is on Victoria Road in North Acton next to the Tube station.
- The cafe where the characters are often seen having lunch was just further down Southwark Bridge Road from the Anchor Terrace house. It was called the Island Cafe.
- The job centre Egg visits is on Borough High Street, Southwark, London.
- Miles's country house in the 2007 reunion is the same location used in the first episode of the first series of Lewis, "To Whom the Gods Would Destroy".
Episodes
Series one (1996)
This Life is based around life in a London law firm and barristers' chambers of trainee solicitors and pupil barristers, but is essentially a character-driven drama.Egg and Milly have been dating since they were at university, 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 and Miles 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 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 plot device he is frequently seen discussing his feelings with a therapist who is heard and only rarely seen by the viewer.
Miles appears sometimes to dislike Warren, and subjects him to occasional homophobic abuse when angered. Miles's manipulative girlfriend, the drug addicted and bulimic Delilah, 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.
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Series two (1997)
During the second series, storylines were expanded to include other connected characters. These included Ferdy - Warren's boyfriend briefly, Rachel - new junior trainee at Milly's law firm and Francesca - Miles's girlfriend/fiancée - whilst previously secondary-characters Jo and Warren's cousin, Kira feature more heavily as they embarked upon a relationship. Moore, Spencer, Wright Receptionist Kelly also became much more prominent and a close ally of Kira. Ferdy was a bisexual character, seen as a replacement for Warren when Jason Hughes decided to leave the show. 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.
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''This Life + 10'' (2006)
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.
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Cast
- Miles Stewart, played by Jack Davenport
- Djamila "Milly" Nassim, played by Amita Dhiri
- Edgar "Egg" Cooke, played by Andrew Lincoln
- Anna Forbes, played by Daniela Nardini
- Warren Jones, played by Jason Hughes
- Ferdinand "Ferdy" Garcia, played by Ramon Tikaram
- Michael O'Donnell, played by David Mallinson
- Kira, played by Luisa Bradshaw-White
- Jo, played by Steve John Shepherd
- Rachel, played by Natasha Little
- Nicki, played by Juliet Cowan
- Kelly, played by Sacha Craise
- Graham, played by Cyril Nri
- Hooperman, played by Geoffrey Bateman
- Therapist, played by Gillian McCutcheon
- Lenny, played by Tony Curran
- Jerry Cooke, played by Paul Copley
- Dale Jones, played by Mark Lewis Jones
- Francesca, played by Rachel Fielding
- Montgomery, played by Michael Elwyn
- Sarah Newly, played by Clare Clifford
- Delilah, played by Charlotte Bicknell
- Truelove, played by Keith-Lee Castle
- Paul, played by Paul J Medford
- The Office and Sherlock star Martin Freeman appears in the first episode of the second series.
- Ralph Ineson, also from The Office featured in an early episode as a client of Milly, as the character Jessop.
- EastEnders actor Nitin Ganatra, appeared in an episode of the second series playing a prospective housemate.
- Martin Hancock, who went on to star in Holby City appeared in the second series.
- Clare Clifford, played lesbian lawyer Sarah Newly who propositions Anna in the second series.
- Stuart Organ, best known as Mr Robson in Grange Hill appeared in the first series.
Music
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".In 1998, Adam Buxton and Joe Cornish parodied This Life in their sketch show The Adam and Joe Show
In 2001, NBC broadcast a loosely-adapted US remake titled First Years. It attracted scathing reviews and low ratings.
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 which also starred Jack Davenport. He also directed episodes of the first series of the revived Doctor Who in 2005.
- Matthew Graham co-created the BBC One series Life on Mars 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 and How She Move.