Tepid second helpings of Soup

Published on Sunday 2 March 2008 20:47

Love Soup, BBC1, Sat Willie's Wonky Chocolate Factory, Channel 4, Sun

AT LAST, a grateful nation rejoices – finally a new series of **Love Soup! Yes, all those petitions and campaigns have paid off and the much-loved comedy, surely one of British TV's all-time classics, has returned to capture our hearts once again. Of course, characters like Alice, the blonde one and the ditzy one need no introduction, since you'll doubtless have spent the time since the last series rewatching the old episodes over and over again.

Okay, I'm being a bit harsh. I actually rather enjoyed the first series, back in 2005, but it's just kind of weird that of all the programmes to rescue out of the cancellation bin, the BBC have gone for this one, which didn't exactly set the world on fire then and has probably been forgotten by even most of those who did watch it.

Originally, it had an interesting premise: the separate lives of a man and woman, both single and enduring dating disasters, who would have perhaps been the perfect match if only they'd actually met each other. In the final episode Tamsin Greig's Alice and Michael Landes's Gil were in the same audience at a bad play, the only two people not laughing while everyone around them was in hysterics – yet frustratingly they still didn't meet.

And that seemed to be that, until the belated announcement of a second series. Except that Michael Landes hasn't returned, so now the show is simply about beauty counter saleslady Alice and her two wacky friends/assistants, which seems a bit pointless. Even after watching this first episode of the rejigged show, I couldn't really say what the "situation" of this sitcom is now.

It's not that Greig isn't a talented character actor – she was great in *Black Books, for instance – but too often she is left just reacting to her pals' daft storylines with a succession of pained faces. The ditzy one, Milly (Montserrat Lombard, who plays a similarly sweet character in *Ashes To Ashes) had a crush on someone's shadow, which was quite nicely filmed, almost like a scene from *Amelie. The blonde one, Cleo, is just Sheridan Smith playing more or less the same sex-crazed character she always plays in things like *Two Pints Of Lager and *Grownups.

There are some good ideas, though, such as Alice's driving lesson being hijacked by a fleeing robber, who instructs her at knifepoint to help him get away. But after we've got the joke that he's actually the best instructor she's ever had, there's a later scene in which she explicitly says so, which kills it.

Creator David Renwick's offbeat style has its fans, chiefly from *One Foot In The Grave, but so far this one feels like a dead series walking which should have been allowed to rest.

Speaking of bad ideas, Willie Harcourt-Cooze's scheme to set up a one-man premium chocolate factory in Devon, using beans grown on his Venezuelan farm, is presented as a fruit-and-nutcake plan in **Willie's Wonky Chocolate Factory, presumably just to create some artificial tension: will he succeed? Will anyone like the incredibly cocoa-rich (five times the usual high street bar) taste? Will his wife get fed up?

I didn't really care about that, but Harcourt-Cooze's infectious personality and seeing how the beans are harvested and made into the end product was more than interesting enough. And I don't know about you, but I'll certainly be trying his, er, unique recipe for roasting a whole pig in chocolate. I wonder if it will work with Dairy Milk?