Conversations from a Long Marriage

The British have had a long history of injecting copious amounts of saccharin into this sort of 'Britcom' plot - Second Thoughts, It's Awfully Bad for Your Eyes, Darling, My Wife Next Door, etc. - the list is long.

It always involves a sort upper / middle / lower class angst about thin walls in hotels or an amazed wife telling her husband, "But you never drink sherry!" "Well, !'ve decided to give it a go - we're off to Spain next week" Think of a nightmare mash-up of Benny Hill,Confessions of a Window Cleaner and The Good Life. The couples' age crisis is always mid-something but with the life experience of a fourteen year old who's just discovered tampons in the bathroom - ooh..errr, missus! And the actors love it. Where normally they would expect to be cut off mid-sentence for overdoing the wild, feigned outrage at a lack of sausages for breakfast at a seaside hotel in Southwold, nobody stops them. Of course we have always got the remote to ditch these programmes: but then sometimes a little light, self-inflicted torture makes you appreciate the best offerings.