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Read the second and final part in our series - a week in the life of a budding writer - with our short story competition winners. This time it’s runner up Mahsuda Shah.
January/February 2008
Mistresses
Channel: BBC1
Date & Time: 9pm (Tuesdays)
Duration: Six episodes
Rating: 
Review by: Joy Francis
With Sex and the City - The Movie close to completion, those still mourning the successful TV show’s end nearly four years ago have been presented with a British replacement - Mistresses.
Set in Bristol, BBC1’s racy six-parter is being touted as a credible successor to Carrie Bradshaw and her female gang. Let’s go through the checklist. Four women (check). Thirtysomethings (check). Colourful language (check). Successful careers (three out of four). Sexually active (three out of four). So far, so predictable.
Where Mistresses differs from Ms Bradshaw and her Manhattan counterparts is highlighted in the title: that these so-called intelligent women have chosen to be some married man’s bit on the side. But after the first episode you realise that the title isn’t entirely accurate.
GP Katie (Sarah Parish) is mourning her married lover of two years whose death she assisted while he was her patient. She appears to have recovered quickly as she is now intimately involved with his twentysomething son Sam (Max Brown). Wedding planner Jessica (Shelley Conn) starts off by having a fling with her insipid boss only to then switch sexual preferences to embark on an affair with a lesbian client whose wedding she is planning.
Mother of two Trudi (Sharon Small), a 9/11 widow whose husband’s body has never been found, receives £1 million in compensation. Saddled with a sex free life, she pursues a sad single dad. Finally lawyer Siobhan (Orla Brady), who is trying for a baby with her Asian husband Hari (Raza Jaffery), ends up bedding her colleague Dominic (Adam Rayner) to alleviate her feelings of being a baby making machine.
This should be a corker of a show. There’s the calibre of the actors for a start and the fact that the cast is multi racial. Yet it is pretty boring. The laughs are infrequent. The friendships don’t ring true, amplified by the fact that Katie failed to tell her ‘bestest’ friend Trudi that she was having an affair for two years. Siobhan’s illicit romp with her colleague isn’t believable. She is so in love with her husband that it would take more than a man with all the charm of an uncouth public schoolboy to make her stray. Dominic’s seduction technique hovered on the fringes of sexual harassment.
Like most of the plot, Siobhan’s fling was so clearly sign-posted that by the time she showed him her knickers in the office (I kid you not) my brain had wandered off. The predictability of the plot is one of the show’s biggest weaknesses, and the sex scenes aren’t so much steamy as occasionally misty.
Hopefully the promised sophistication, pace and originality will make an appearance by episode six. If not, the 4.9 million viewers who tuned into the first episode on Tuesday 8th January may start checking the film magazines for Sex and the City’s release date.
Madhvi Ramani praises Random, the latest play from debbie tucker green that taps into a growing crisis – random violence.
Joy Francis explains why BBC1’s new adult drama Mistresses feels as illicit as a late night raid on the fridge.
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