Thirty years since the cult show about sweary lawyers swaggered on to our screens in a fug of cigarette smoke, creator Amy Jenkins talks F-bombs, fellatio … and giving Ricky Gervais his big break
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ral sex in the kitchen. Weed-smoking and talk of temazepam. A full-frontal Andrew Lincoln shower scene. And that’s just in the first episode. Welcome to This Life. Pop on a Portishead CD and leave your inhibitions (and clothes) at the door.
This Wednesday marks 30 years since the landmark drama swaggered on to our screens in a fug of cigarette smoke and swearing. The BBC is celebrating the anniversary by rerunning the none-more-90s saga, with a new introduction by the actor Daniela Nardini, who played the breakout heroine Anna. It enables viewers to revisit a cult classic that not only captured the hedonistic spirit of the Cool Britannia era but left a lasting mark on TV.
Amy Jenkins, the show’s creator and chief writer, recalls how This Life came into being: “Michael Jackson – not that one, the BBC Two controller – wanted to be more like Channel 4, so decided to commission a cool drama for young people about trainee lawyers. When I told [executive producer] Tony Garnett that I’d briefly been a lawyer, his eyes lit up. But I didn’t want to write a show about lawyers! Fuck, so boring. That’s why I’d left to become a writer. I agreed on the condition that we never had courtroom scenes and it wasn’t actually about law at all. I had another idea for a script about the rave scene, so I brought that spirit into it.”
