Review of This Life Series 1 (2 Disc Set)

Introduction

The BBC, by now notorious for delayed and substandard DVD releases, finally pull their finger out to present the first series of the landmark legal/lifestyle drama on DVD. Follow the highs and lows of a bunch of lawyer types (wannabes, drop-outs and social climbers included) as they hole up in their cavernous London abode, sleep around, work far too much and complain about life. Included among them: Fickle soft-cell Egg (Andrew Lincoln), fussy and obtuse Milly (Amita Dhiri), intense and aggressive Anna (Daniella Nardini), elitist w***er Miles (Jack Davenport) and gay therapy nut Warren (Jason Hughes).

Video

Considering the show graced screens long before anyone was bemoaning the ‘joys’ of digital television, it comes as little of a surprise that ‘This Life’ on DVD looks less than reference quality. Compared to analogue transfers, its more defined and the colours more radiant, but the definition is hazy and the contrast rather bleached and messy. Almost full-frame, with very small muddy-black letterboxing. The harsh lighting and hand-held camera work don’t help.

Audio

A serviceable 2.0 stereo audio track, a bit mean to expect anything better to be quite honest with you.

Features

Some brief sound-bite text character descriptions, complete with helpful quotes. Some animated menus replete with the show’s harshly melodious theme tune. And, um, that’s it. Nothing else. What, an entire season and no outtakes? No deleted scenes? Nothing? Presumably the response is that its in a way very picky to complain of a lack of extra features when you’re getting 7+ hours of an entire season of a drama series on a double disc set. A response which, it has to be said, is fairly airtight. But the matter still stands: nowt.

Conclusion

Indulging in a most welcome and distinctly un-British immodest attitude to sex, drugs, nudity, homosexuality and the snobby materialists who inhabit the program, ‘This Life’ is addictive, youthful, smart and funny. If the cadre of legal eagles have a pleasing and surprisingly non-tokenistic variability in terms of ethnicity, sexuality and personality, the outlook is unswervingly middle-class, with all the self-deception, naivete, self-centred-materialism and cultural hypocrisy that implies. Anna and Egg even have the gall to lambaste The Beatles while at the same time indulging shamelessly in the Brit-Pop tunes that fill the corridors of their self-consciously dank, dark, Bohemian abode. Tossers. Still, they grow on you, particularly the spicy honesty of Nardini’s Anna (rarely has a canonisation of post-feminism been so much fun) and Lincoln’s Egg, particularly once the bitterness and depression of self-induced unemployment rears its ugly head.

It doesn’t take long however to realise that with its granular plotting, its melodramatic to-ing and fro-ing, its multiple plot-lines and emotional melting pot, that ‘This Life’ is basically a soap with swearing, shaky-cams, close-up shagging and the grainy verite feel that’s now become such a constant and irritating invasion of our house-holds. There are a couple of subplots too many (Miles getting entangled in a legal fracas involving his estranged father is abstract and technical). And the obligatory ‘case studies’ of the lawyer’s interactions with their clients are generally uninvolving (The skit involving Grange Hill’s Stuart Organ as a flasher accepted of course.)

However, for the most part, this is remarkably assured stuff, the drama handled with an urbane and gripping force that the overt melodrama of the meandering Series 2 failed to replicate (and with its plot-lines so closely mimicking Series 1, it didn’t half try!) The acting is first rate and the writing slick and snappy if occasionally self-important, and the negative reputation the show has slowly developed due to the diminishing returns of countless ripoffs proves entirely unjustified. So, if you can get passed the characters and their self-obsessed ways, get reacquainted, you probably won’t regret it.