Alice in pain?

HEARTY! Love Soup, BBC One, 10.25pm

Poor old Alice. Stuck in a world with a completely different set of moral values to her own, being forced to sub-let her Brighton flat in order to be able to continue to pay the mortgage AND work in London, having been on the brink of meeting her perfect man after communicating through a lonely hearts’ column only for their first meeting to be scuppered by fate before it ever happened, constantly privy to the sexual misadventures of junior colleagues Milly and Cleo, held at knifepoint during a driving lesson, positioned almost directly beneath the woman who threw herself from the roof of her department store, caricatured in a pilot for a BBC Three cartoon series, living with a beautiful but increasingly insecure and vindictive actress, and faced with a seemingly endless stream of not entirely suitable male ‘prospects’ including a media mogul, a college friend, a revolutionary, a guillotine-maker, a film star, a necrophiliac and, on a longer-term basis, mild-mannered comedy writer Douglas McVitie, who, last week, accepted an offer of six weeks’ work in Tuscany with wayward actor Marty Cady and his pretty, sensitive young wife Denise, a major fan of Douglas’s work and, by extension, of Douglas himself. She’s not had it easy, you know.

In soup terms (hmmm), the second series of Love Soup has been more Campbell’s Condensed than the exhausting swim through an all-you-can-eat cash-and-carry industrial-sized vat of Heinz Tomato that was the first series. With Michael Landes gone, episodes were trimmed to a bite-sized half-hour, which initially led to early installments feeling a little light on plot and actual incidents/stuff. While  Alice and Gil’s separate adventures in the first series dovetailed neatly and sustained an hour of television as a combined story, it was questionable whether either character would be able to carry a series on their own. However, David Renwick’s masterstroke was to gradually introduce elements of Gil’s world into Alice’s life, initially through his TV producer friend Lloyd Drewitt, through whom Alice went on to meet Douglas and, by association, actress (and later flatmate) Fae Maddison. As Alice’s thrillsy new media acquaintances jostled for attention with longstanding colleagues Milly and Cleo, the series became less formulaic and Alice’s story took on a life of its own, with characters from all walks of life crossing her path, seeking her advice, or (more often) confiding slightly more information than she was entirely comfortable with. The half-hour format actually ended up suiting the series far better, with episodes picking up pace and some the elaborately-conceived subplots coming to head with a simple sight gag borne from a lengthy set-up, shaggy-dog style. As new characters meandered into Alice’s orbit, they took a central role and helped to carry the story as well, and the twelve-week run (in British comedy series terms, the equivalent of watching Audrey, Gail, Sarah-Lou, Bethany AND Bethany Junior’s lives in their entirety) helped create a real sense of the whole scope of Alice’s life and experiences broadening, even if, from her perspective, unexpected things just happened to her and she just sort of got on with it. What a trooper!

But how will it end tonight? As Alice considers Douglas’s fidelity (or otherwise) while he steadfastly remains in Tuscany and fails to call home, Lloyd considers whether it’s worth staying alive or not after his wife finds out about the toe-job and subsequent night of passion he shared with armless television executive Maxine (a fantastic wide-eyed turn from Helen Lederer last week). Will they be drawn together by the memory of Gil? Or is there a future for Alice and Douglas, despite his obvious attraction to Denise and the fact that Alice isn’t very enthusiastic about their relationship? One increasingly unlikely-looking possibility is that, despite all the indications to the contrary, Gil DIDN’T actually die the night he was due to meet Alice, and in fact there was some other complicated and frustrating reason why he had to vanish and hasn’t been seen since. There have been references to blind dates dying. And mentions of awful things happening to Gil. But nobody has actually said ‘Gil is dead’. Obviously he’s not going to pop up at the end and whisk Alice off into the sunset (will he? No, he won’t. Or will he? Of course not. Will he, though? NO.) but, well, you never know. (NO.)