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This Life: An Analysis Of A British Drama

OVERVIEW:

This Life was first shown on the British Broadcasting Companies Channel 2 in 1996 and continued into a second season in 1997. As a fifty minute drama, it focused on the life of five twenty-something lawyers living in London and working at the same law firm. This Life premiered around the same time that Friends was becoming popular in America (Wikipedia). However, aside from the superficial faade of friends living in close quarters, the shows were quite different. This paper will explore the series This Life in general and several episodes in particular by examining it through aesthetic, discursive, and reality theory analyses.

REALITY THEORY:

If the test of reality theory is being able to say that you recognize a character from television as being like someone you know, then This Life passes the test with flying colors. It can follow a few days in the characters lives and then shift into weeks afterward. This parallels real life in that, when we are experiencing interesting or stressful situations, we focus on those situations. When they are resolved and life returns to normal we lose focus until another extraordinary event occurs.

Also, the characters in This Life all have flawed personalities; they all have failed or failing relationships. Several of them drink too much, and most of them do recreational drugs on the weekends. They curse, they fight, they f- um, they have sex. And while some people might compare this show to a soap opera, the situations the characters find themselves in and the way that they react to these situations makes it a slice-of-life drama.

For instance, Millie and Egg's relationship began when they were at college together. Five years later, Millie is a well-respected lawyer in her firm, and Egg is having an existential crisis. After quipping, "I've got a degree, I suppose I could make a really useful paper hat out of that..., " he leaves his career in law and tries becoming a sports writer, a novelist, a telephone solicitor...before finally buying a caf and becoming a chef.

Many young people, especially those in their 20's, suffer from a crisis of identity. Most people change careers at least twice in their lifetimes. And many people in long term relationships experience trouble when one partner seems to be doing better financially.

Millie and Egg go through several months in which they do not have sex. Millie becomes supremely frustrated and begins to try forcing Egg to seek employment. Egg feels emasculated because Millie is paying his rent, paying for their food, etc...and as a result of the stress, he becomes impotent. It is only after he gets a job in a caf that things begin to turn around in their sex life.

Also, while Warren is not ashamed of being a gay man, he is reluctant to tell his ultra conservative Christian parents about his sexuality. As human beings, it is natural to want to move away from our parents having direct control over our lives. This begins early with children deciding what foods, clothes, etc...they enjoy more than others. It continues in adolescence as teenagers experiment with different musical tastes and clothing. It continues as they leave home to find work or to attend college.

Warren left Wales and his family to explore his sexuality and find out who he was as a person. While that could be related to a hero's journey, it is much more easily relatable to nearly everyone who has ever thought that their parent's would never be able to accept some decision or practice that the son/daughter believed in.

DISCURSIVE:

Discursive criticism focuses on defining a dominant ideology and assessing whether or not a series or character is upholding or refuting that ideology (Vande Berg 301). In This Life, when Egg feels emasculated it is a direct result of his partner, a female, providing for him while he is unemployed. If the dominant ideology is that of a patriarchy, in which the male must provide for his mate, then Millie earning more than Egg is an aberration and Egg cannot accept this refutation of his set of beliefs about how a man should behave.

Warren refutes the idea that homosexual men are flamboyant or deviant individuals. He is a well liked, well respected man who dresses in three piece suits and a tie everyday, and believes in very conservative ideals. Some of his own clients believe that he is a heterosexual man.

When one client bashes homosexuals after his wife comes out as a lesbian, Warren tells the client he is gay, but keeps the client after he explains to the jilted husband that he would not have felt any better if his wife had been having sex with another man. Warren is an interesting character because he both refutes and upholds dominant ideologies. On the one hand he upholds conservative ideals of fidelity to one person after marriage, but he also refutes monogamy by having sex with multiple partners. However, as that sex is casual and outside of a "relationship, " he can justify his behavior.

If Warren refutes the idea of gay men as flamboyant, then Ferdy shatters it. He wears leather, drives a motorcycle, and has an impressive physical stature. From a superficial point of view, he appears to be a very macho man who upholds the patriarchal ideology.

But looks are all too often deceiving. Ferdy cooks, shuns clubs, loves silk, and is shy when speaking about sexual activities. He was engaged to be married, but after his fianc finds that he slept with Warren, she calls off the wedding and sends Ferdy into a tailspin. He has nowhere to go, so he returns to Warren and the housemates to explore his bi-sexuality. He has been forced to refute the patriarchal ideology that he once upheld by learning to justify and accept himself.

Miles, on the other hand, feels no need to justify anything he does. After a fling with Anna in college (he did not contact her for over four years after he had sex with her), he is shocked that she is still bitter over his behavior. When Anna is hired at the same law firm that he works for, he is upset. When Anna moves into the same house that he lives in, he is livid.

Anna upsets and challenges Miles' beliefs concerning men's and women's behavior. He has no problem with his own promiscuous lifestyle, but he misses no chance to scold Anna for similar behavior. In the patriarchal dominant ideology, men are encouraged to spread their seed and sew their wild oats.

Women, however, are encouraged to be chaste, quiet, and to keep out of the male's way. Miles believes in these ideals, and Anna does not. She is loud, crass, often rude, and has no scruples about playing dirty to win a case for her clients. In essence, she is upholding the male dominant ideology and not the females'. Or perhaps she has refuted the patriarchal ideology and embraced the feminist ideal of forming the male world to a woman's needs.

AESTHETIC:

This Life opens with a black screen punctuated with white letters. Heavy bass guitar plays an upbeat tune low on the tonal scale. The word "this" is displayed in very large font while the world "life" is shown in much smaller letters between the letters of the word "this." This seems to indicate that we as the audience, as well as the show's characters, are focusing more on the events of a life than on the life as a whole. Also, to illustrate that life isn't all black and white, the dot on the "I" of "life" glows yellow.

This Life uses lots of natural lighting and is shot in an almost documentary style. The music we hear is often the music of the housemates playing in the background (digetic music). We often see the stereo systems on which the music is playing. The characters change the music frequently, usually foreshadowing the entrance of another character into the scene.

Most of the characters dress very formally in suits and ties. They present the image of young professionals very well. And in keeping with the idea that they are still establishing themselves (i.e. they don't have much money yet), you will see the characters wear the same suits and shirts week after week. This isn't to say that they are unfashionable, but all too often on different series, you only see an outfit on a character once before it is retired.

In contrast to the formality of the lawyer characters (Anna, Miles, Millie and Warren) are Ferdy, Lenny, and Egg. Ferdy dresses like a Harley Davison biker. And he does own a bike, but he is a courier and not an outlaw. Lenny, the handyman who is sent to fix the boiler in the house during Season Two, dresses in a much more casual style than the other characters. He is seen in a jacket with paint splotches, t-shirts, and blue jeans. Egg also dresses casually, but in what appear to be newer clothes than Lenny's.

There is also the issue of how sex is presented on the show. There is never anything explicit being shown, the only time that we see male genitalia it is flaccid. There are very few times we see breasts while the women are having sex. However, we see much more of the non-attached members of the house having sex than we do of Millie and Egg. This is partly because they went through several month dry spell, but also because, as voyeurs, we are more comfortable looking in on people who aren't "married." If the characters are in it for fun, then we are given permission to watch. If the characters are committed to each other, we suddenly feel uncomfortable watching the physical aspects of their love life.

This carries over to how Warren's and Ferdy's sex lives are portrayed as well. Since Warren is very open and not confused about his sexuality, we see much more of his sexual activity than we do of Ferdy's. Because Ferdy is often awkward in his sexuality, we only see the parts of his relationships that he is uncomfortable with (i.e. the flirting/foreplay, the post coital glow, the candlelight dinners, etc...). The actual sexual acts are never shown because Ferdy knows how to deal with that part of a relationship.

CONCLUSION:

This Life is a slice of life drama highlighting the lives of young professionals in South London. The situations are reality based and could happen to any of us. The show is well produced and acted and throughout it, you feel as if this could be a documentary. By using aesthetic and discursive criticism, we see how reality theory applies to This Life.

Appendix ICharacter List

Miles: A misogynist who delights in torturing Anna, who he had a fling with in college. When she moves into the house with him and his other roommates, conflict in inevitable.

Anna: An independent, maverick Scottish lawyer, she still has feelings for Miles although she would die before admitting it. She believes in living fast and in the loving and leaving way of life.

Egg: Millie's boyfriend of five years, he leaves law and bounces from job to job before buying a caf.

Millie: Egg's girlfriend, she is a lawyer quickly on the rise in the law firm. When Egg leaves the firm, their relationship becomes strained and she begins to entertain thoughts of having an affair with her boss, Mr. O'Donnell.

Warren: An openly (except to his family) Gay Welshman, Warren sees a therapist regularly and appears to be the most well adjusted member of the group. However, as he lives a very conservative lifestyle as a lawyer, he enjoys letting his wild side out by having casual sex with strangers on a regular basis.

Ferdy: A bisexual man that Warren falls in love with. Ferdy was engaged to be married until his fianc finds out that he as been seeing Warren. Ferdy moves into the house when he has left to go and Warren helps him to accept that he has feelings for men as well as women.

Kira: Warren's cousin. She delivers mail at the law firm and creates trouble for Warren as she says amazingly inappropriate things at amazingly inappropriate times.

Lenny: A Scottish, openly gay handyman sent round to the house after the boiler breaks down. Ferdy begins a relationship with him as he continues to adjust to his newfound sexuality.

Rachel: Millie's assistant at work. Rachel has a habit of saying very mean things in a very nice way. Most people don't realize she is insulting them until after she's gone. She likes to stir up trouble in an effort to clear the path for her own climb to the top.

Appendix II Bibliography

Wikipedia. This Life. Retrieved March 10, 2006, from http://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_Life.

Vande Berg, Leah R., et al. 2004. Critical Approach to Television, 2nd ed. (pp.301-307). Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company.