Kirstie and Phil: the princess and geezer who became C4’s class act
PHIL and Kirstie, TV’s most comfortable unmarried couple, are as familiar to us as a favourite pair of old shoes. They’re always around, they always feel right and it’s hard to imagine them any different.
So to see their very first show, when they barely knew each other, is like glimpsing footage of your mum and dad on their initial date.
Location, Location, Location: 20 Years And Counting (c4) took them back to the beginning in 2000, when 28-year- old Kirstie had a student bob and suedeheaded Phil, 30, looked and sounded like an extra from a Guy Ritchie gangster movie.
The difference in social class between them was far more pronounced than it is today. Phil was a bit of a geezer, dropping his aitches and rolling his shoulders. Kirstie strangled her vowels like a nervous Princess Margaret.
Location has become one of c4’s most successful series, but excerpts from this episode were a reminder it was commissioned when the channel was looking for ways to make shows for under a tenner. The handheld camera-work looked like it was done by a passing jogger.
Phil and Kirstie were helping a first-time buyer to find a flat in London for under £100,000. That would barely be enough for the deposit now. Much more has changed in two decades than just the haircuts and the accents.
The technology definitely has. When Phil called an estate agent to put in an offer, we saw a cable trailing from the back of his mobile. Either this was a primitive method for recording the call, or Phil’s phone was actually a landline with a very long extension.
The duo looked back on their career from the socially distanced comfort of two sofas in a chintzy front room, surrounded by heaps of brightly coloured cushions.
A pink ottoman sat between them, the shape of a dog’s bone and fringed with tassels. Original paintings hung on the walls, under a high ceiling. We weren’t told whether this was the drawing room of Kirstie’s stately home but, on the drinks cabinet under the big window, a row of posh bottles glistened. clearly, somebody lives in comfort here.
They picked four case histories, all illustrations of the varied compromises that first-time buyers must make. The choices underlined the premise of the show: whether the decor is dire, the back yard is a hole in the ground or the nearest parking spot is 50 yards away, the one thing that can’t be fixed is the location of the place. At least that basic rule hasn’t changed, even if everything else in 2000 was so startlingly different.
no one at the turn of the millennium worried about having their life destroyed by the internet. One louche old actor in the comedy- drama I Hate Suzie ( Sky Atlantic) remembered how he dealt with a sex scandal: ‘I bought the family a conservatory.’
This dark and fetid eight-part serial, created by and starring Billie Piper, imagines the instant and catastrophic consequences for Suzie, a former teen pop star, when her phone is hacked and sexually explicit photos are spread on social media.
It’s a timely idea, and Piper draws fearlessly on her own past: with her marriage already falling apart, Suzie has been typecast after she starred in a sci-fi TV series.
But the story hasn’t been thought through properly, and relies too often on cliches, such as a flat phone battery.
Billie’s character bursts into song-and-dance routines — it’s comedy one minute, psychodrama the next, and then a West End musical. Ambitious, but it needed much more work.
FORENSIC INTERVIEW OF THE NIGHT: Novelist Evelyn Waugh writhed under John Freeman’s questions on Face To Face (BBC4). The 1960 encounter is on iPlayer, beside conversations with Adam Faith, Carl Jung and Martin Luther King. Chat shows now are not remotely like this.