The groundbreaking sitcom Boy Meets Girl (BBC2) is back for a second series, radiating warmth like a hot water bottle. The groundbreaking element – both the main character Judy and the actor who plays her, Rebecca Root, are transgender – is housed within a format so relentlessly, rigorously traditional that the effect is a little jarring. Everywhere else you look, stereotypes are being reinforced: old people are dotty; the north-east is quaint. Even the throwaway joke about a spiraliser seemed dated, as if Newcastle is a Christmas and a half behind the rest of us.
Boy Meets Girl has been compared to Gavin and Stacey, but as oppressively heartwarming as the latter was, I still seem to recall Gavin and Stacey having actual problems. Any challenges Leo and Judy’s burgeoning romance faced in the first series appear to have more or less evaporated. The plot, such as it was, spooled out for half the show before neatly winding itself back in. Stuff happened, and then unhappened: Leo got a job in London, but Judy couldn’t go with him because her mum was poorly, so then Leo decided not to go, and it turned out Judy’s mum wasn’t poorly after all. I won’t issue a spoiler alert before saying that Leo proposed to Judy at the end, because you could see it coming a mile away.
In fact that summary risks overstating the significance of the narrative, because Leo and Judy were a little bit sidelined in this first episode. The rat infestation at the beauty salon was a bigger deal. And Jim shagged Angie, although the whys and wherefores of that particular encounter were left to the viewer’s imagination. I had trouble imagining it myself.
I have nothing against comedy that locates itself squarely in the quotidian, and I can see the point, and the value, of placing transgender issues (I’m sure something will come up at some point) in a framework engineered for a mass audience. Boy Meets Girl is hard not to like – it would be hard not to like anything so gentle and well-meaning, full of hugs and wry smiles. There was a nice and all too brief turn from the journalist Paris Lees as a transgender group moderator, one genuinely touching scene and a few bright comic moments that served to highlight missed opportunities elsewhere.
It always seems to me that the measure of a sitcom is not the wealth of good gags, but the dearth of bad ones. “You know what mice are like, they breed like rabbits,” said Leo’s mum Pam at one point. There were better jokes, but they really shouldn’t have let that one stay in.
Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons books conjure up a lost England shrouded in gentle mist. Especially for me, because I’ve never read a one of them. The mist is more of an impenetrable fog.
My ignorance did not, however, spoil my enjoyment of Britain’s Lost Waterlands: Escape to Swallows and Amazons Country (BBC4). In this quirky one-off Professor Alice Roberts and Dick Strawbridge – the extremely handy environmentalist with the walrus moustache – examined the real landscapes in which Ransome set his stories: the Lake District, the Norfolk Broads and the East Anglian coast. Although they covered much of the same ground, Strawbridge and Roberts travelled separately – I thought perhaps they were feuding. They did finally meet up on the Naze, and managed a convincing impression of being happy to see each other.
Where Roberts is measured, Strawbridge is a man of surpassing enthusiasm. He even seemed thrilled about finding a leech stuck to his leg. His greatest state of excitement is reserved for the mechanical. If the people he visits will but give him a crank to turn or a boat to pilot, he is happy. Put him in the engine room of an old light vessel, and he is in heaven. Roberts chiefly concerned herself with the surrounding wildlife – oystercatchers, terns, warblers in the reeds. But their adventures overlapped even if their paths didn’t cross, giving the programme an amiable, ramshackle feel.
Occasional references were made to the Ransome stories – The Big Six, Peter Duck, We Didn’t Mean To Go To Sea – but this was more about place than narrative. In most cases the locations could still serve as backdrops for Swallows and Amazon adventures – they still look like they did in the illustrations. If nothing else it made me realise that those magical landscapes of lost, long ago childhood I never read so much about aren’t just fictional idylls. They’re real places, they’re mostly still there, and if I want I can go and visit them. Then again, that’s what my TV is for.
