'It's realistic, but they're better looking and have more sex'

WHEN the BBC last ventured into lady-loving territory, in 2002, with the historical drama Tipping The Velvet, five people complained that the show did not contain enough explicit sex. To date, no-one has complained about the lack of duvet (and desk-top and bath tub) action in Lip Service.

In the first episode Frankie, the chisel-boned bad girl, goes to a funeral parlour to view her adopted mother's dead body. Before long, she has the receptionist up against the wall of the mortuary with her pants around her ankles.

Lip Service arrived on our screens in a wake of a BBC survey which revealed a woeful shortage of believable lesbian characters. The few that made it onto the screen were either "butch" or "lipstick lesbians". What lesbian viewers wanted was to see gay people in everyday situations, as part of normal life. Around the same time, the campaign group Stonewall found that most gay characters on television are promiscuous, predatory or figures of fun. They studied 126 hours of television and found just 46 minutes of realistic gay experience.

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So is Lip Service, watched by half a million viewers on Tuesday nights, and by another 1.5 million on BBC iPlayer, this realistic portrayal of lesbian life that the gay community says it wants? Sarah Longley, 30, who writes the column Great LezBritain for the popular culture website afterellen.com, is a cheerleader for the show.

"I think it is a realistic depiction of lesbian life in Glasgow in the same way that Sex and the City was a realistic view of single girls in New York. It's television, so the characters obviously have more drama, more sex, are better looking and have better flats in their late twenties than the rest of us. The lesbian community can be a bit precious about how they are represented - which is understandable when you consider what little visibility there is for gay woman on television - but I never expected it to be a documentary. I recognise a bit of my life for sure."

Ruth Cochrane, 31, whose travel company Lovescotland is organising a Lip Service weekend break, feels the characters are believable. "Every lesbian knows someone like Frankie, a player, and someone like Tess, the ditzy one who is just hopeless and all over the place, always picking the wrong girls and having guys fall in love with her."

Others feel the gloss is gratuitous and unrealistic. Writer Jac Mantle, 24, says: "Lip Service isn't a very realistic portrait of the lesbians living in Glasgow. Its main characters do not look like the average women in gay bars in Glasgow. Lip Service has happily avoided some pejorative stereotypes, but it is really not representative."

The quantity and quality of the sex scenes are not to everyone's taste. Novelist Louise Welsh says: "The ethos of the show is pretty cliched for the 21st century.It seems to find same-sex relationships terribly naughty and, like the Daily Mail, imagines lesbians are at it all the time. The scene in the morgue was cringeingly awful." Eilidh MacAskill, 30, who works in theatre, felt the sex scenes improved as the series progressed. "As in real life, it gets better over time, with the right partner and lighting, but the first fumble in the photography studio resembled unblocking a drain and there was a lot of boob-prodding that looked uncomfortable."

A common criticism of Lip Service is that it gives Glasgow a vibrant lesbian scene that is conspicuously absent in real life. The consensus is that, while there are some good mixed club nights for younger women - Pretty Ugly, Lock Up Your Daughters, Death Disco - there is no real-life equivalent to Rubies, the cast's second home in Lip Service, and nowhere at all for older lesbians to hang out.

While many in the gay community have reservations about the series, Sophie Holmes, 27, who runs the Lock Up Your Daughters club and fanzine, is unusual in utterly loathing it. "Everything about Lip Service was second rate: the acting, the script, the plot, even the sex was unbearable. I'm dreading the second series."

This is a minority view; many others felt that the show, despite its faults, shows gay women who are comfortable with their sexuality and are getting on with their (admittedly exciting and sex-filled) lives. And that this is something to encourage.

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"Lip Service is definitely a good step forward for the BBC and I would like it to pave the way for more integration of gay and lesbian characters on other shows," says Sarah Longley. I like that this show is not issue led. "Series two can't come soon enough for me."

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