Seven days

Filmed in uber-cool Notting Hill, where Hackney hipsters are put out to graze, as it turns out, this part of London is almost exactly how they made it out to be in that Hugh Grant film that everybody just loved. It is in fact all antique furniture and self-indulgent dinner party confessions!

As an added bonus, you don’t just have to turn to Twitter or demean yourself spending hours dialling a hotline number to vent your feelings. You can actually log on to the special ‘Chatnav’ website and ‘as the characters latest thoughts and dilemmas appear, you can guide them based on your own experience’. I imagine Chatnav crashed at around the time young Laura uttered the immortal words ‘fashion stress’.

Let’s start with Laura and her flatmate Sam. There were an awful lot of people to meet in this first episode (and apparently more to come) but these two in particular stuck in my mind, and my throat. Bearing a disturbing resemblance to those Diet Coke puppets who are always getting their strings in a tangle dans le boardroom, they were all legs and hair and silly accents. That’s it. That’s all they were. Within thirty seconds of them appearing on screen, I imagine most of the viewing public were fantasising about beating them both to death with a rolled up copy of Grazia.

Nobly bringing up the rear for the posh twenty something contingent was Hannah, a girl who got herself in a right flap over her interior design responsibilities, having to choose wallpaper without Mummy’s expert hand to guide her. Mummy’s expert hands were needed elsewhere you see, the New Forest to be precise, where her terminally ill husband was in residence. Why he couldn’t move up to London, or why Mummy and Daddy were living in different parts of the country was not up for discussion. So Hannah turned to the strong arms and vacant eyes of Dougal, an ex-boyfriend who will no doubt also be there to comfort her over her impending 26th birthday (oh the horror). There might even be a snog in it for him.

In a brief attempt to showcase the seemingly sparse population of Notting Hill that don’t have their own swimming pool / interior design business / huge personal fortune, came Javan and Moktar. They probably deserve a paragraph each, but as the programme makers didn’t seem overly concerned with either of them, I don’t see why I should have to be. Javan is a wannabe singer who I swear I have seen in the queue for X-factor auditions. He needs to get a job but I doubt very much whether he could fit much else into his day, given his rigorous gym routine (did you see the muscles on that?) and a demanding schedule of hanging around in other people’s kitchens. Moktar is a hard-working Muslim boy, about to start university yet still coming home at night to Mum’s curry and a pint of Ribena. Still, why should the white upper middle class types get all the stereotypical roles?

Malcolm (Rhys Ifans) was in property, and also getting in a right flap about some mortgage or other. He owns 14 properties in total, that’s a lot of stress. Not quite ‘fashion stress’ but pretty damn close. I can’t be sure but it is entirely possible that Malcolm may at some point in his clearly chequered past have experimented with drugs. That’s what the cat story would seem to suggest anyway. Malcolm’s girlfriend Susanne had ‘Malcolm’s girlfriend’ appear on screen every time she did. Perhaps she was little bit paranoid about the likes of Laura and Sam bumping into Malcolm in The Blag Club and getting their hands on him and his 14 properties. Or perhaps she just didn’t want to be mistaken for an escort.

If that was the case, then she probably shouldn’t have answered the door in a swimming costume to three ‘friends’ and then whacked 8pm (Till I Come) on the stereo. I didn’t expect this kind of thing from the Notting Hill crew. I am officially Disappointed of Tunbridge Wells.

Then there were the pilots, Cassie and Philip. The pilots were dreadful. They were into baby farming. Mummy Pilot, sat with freshly harvested newborn on her knee, proudly announced how ‘this guy’ came from the ‘same batch’ as the twins. This guy? You mean your son, right? He’s not a tomato you just plucked off the vine.

Presumably these people always knew they were being filmed? It’s not like in Big Brother where eventually everybody forgets the cameras are there. The crew were hurtling down the street after them. So are they actually like this in real life? Was this real life? Did this stuff strike a chord with anybody? ANYBODY?

I suppose we’ll have to wait until Chatnav bucks up to find out.