Love Soup

Alice Chenery (Tamsin Greig) and Gil Raymond (Michael Landes) are perfect for each other. They like the same things, respect the same things, and share the same beliefs. The only problem is that they are completely unaware of each other's existence.

Alice is a modern woman with old-fashioned values, who lives in Brighton, and commutes to London, where she is the manager of a perfume company concession in a department store. She is trying to sell her flat and move, without success. Her love life is no success either. She can never find the perfect man. What is worse, her colleagues, Cleo Martin (Sheridan Smith) and Milly Russel (Montserrat Lombard), always seem to have more success with men, though their relationships never really last more than a week. Cleo and Milly try to pair her up with several men, but to no avail. She does have some family members (at least one cousin), but her parents, Arthur and Grace, are both dead.

Gil is an American comedy writer, who has moved to England to start a new project with TV producer Lloyd Drewitt (Owen Brenman). It is a series of six romantic comedies called Love Soup and he has been asked to write one of them. Things started badly for Gil when he arrived at his house (15 Carpenters Lane, Larch End), and discovered his girlfriend was seeing another man as soon as they arrived in the country. His next door neighbours are Bob and Irene Andrews (Brian Protheroe and Trudie Styler), who split up after Gil accidentally exposes Bob's affair with a prostitute. Afterwards, Gil becomes increasingly worried about Irene's intentions towards him.

The series follows both Alice and Gil's somewhat forlorn attempts to find the perfect partner, while it is clear to the viewer that they would be the ideal couple. The series itself follows each plot separately, cutting from Alice's story to Gil's throughout the episode. The only exception is the final scene of the first series, which shows Alice in the theatre watching a comedy where she is the only person in the entire audience not laughing – apart from Gil, who is sitting two rows behind her. They still do not find each other.

In the third episode of the second series, Alice arranges a date through a personal ad in a magazine. When he fails to turn up she returns home and rips up his photograph. She receives a phone call from Lloyd, telling her that his friend could not make the date. The reason is not stated on screen, but Alice, clearly shaken, picks up the torn photograph and reassembles it, it is a photo of Gil. The next episode, it is revealed that Gil died of a heart attack. In the seventh episode of the series, Alice is invited into Gil's world via Lloyd, where she begins a relationship with a writer, Douglas McVitie (Mark Heap). After a while she feels that there is little love in the relationship so she tries to break it up; Douglas, however, is determined to stay with her. Alice also moves in with Fae Maddison (Amelia Curtis), a famous actress she meets after a date goes horribly wrong.

Views of Love Soup are mixed. Andrew Billen in The Times said that, "Like David Renwick's previous sitcom creation, Victor Meldrew [from One Foot in the Grave], Alice is meant to represent a bunch of prevailing attitudes. In fact, like him, she is entirely implausible. Happily, this fundamental error makes her no less funny."[2]

James Walton in the Daily Telegraph commented negatively about the loss of Landes saying, "In the first series Gil's job as a TV scriptwriter meant that Renwick could always add a bit of edge by attacking modern television. Without that, and with Alice remaining so utterly lovely, the tone is often surprisingly soppy." The basis for this was subsequently rendered redundant as Alice began to move in media circles via her association with Lloyd, Douglas and Fae. Walton also wrote however that, "Renwick does his usual professional job with the script, and Greig is as good as ever at registering various shades of disappointment."[3]

Sam Wollaston in The Guardian was critical of Love Soup writing, "I don't like the fact that so little happens. Or how implausible the few things that do happen are. I know it's meant to be comedy, not a reflection of real life; but it helps if comedy can keep a toe in plausibility (unless it's so crazy, like Green Wing, that it's funny for that very reason). But Milly falling in love with a shadow – actually more like a projection of a man on to the side of a van that miraculously happens outside her flat every night – well, that's just stupid. And I don't like its irritating jazzy soundtrack, or how small and British it all feels (and I mean both in the worst possible way). Love Soup is insipid broth and I've had enough already."[4]

• Love Soup at bbc.co.uk
• Love Soup at IMDb
• Love Soup at the British Comedy Guide
• Love Soup at British TV Comedy
• Woman's Hour interview, 28 September 2005