Introduction
Starring Tamsin Greig and Michael Landes and featuring Trudie Styler and Sheridan Smith, Love Soup is a romantic comedy drama by the creator of One Foot In The Grave and Jonathan Creek, David Renwick.
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Love Soup looks at what happens when your first love is a distant memory but you haven't yet found 'the one'.
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Dealing with the parallel lives of a perfectly matched couple who have yet to meet each other, the comedy-drama follows them as, one by one, dates turn into disasters and the pair find themselves struggling to remain sane in a world from which they each feel increasingly excluded.
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Today, statistics show that we are a nation dragging our feet over settling down. People are getting married later - in 1991 the average age was 25, now it is 30. More people are living on their own - 41 per cent of women over 16 are neither married nor cohabiting.
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And by 2011 the prognosis is that more than 50 per cent of all men and women will never marry.
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So if more and more people are waiting longer and longer to meet their soulmate, what is happening in their love lives in the meantime? And what are their prospective partners getting up to in theirs?
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Tamsin Greig (Green Wing, Black Books) plays Alice Chenery, an account manager for a perfume company in a London department store, just about clinging onto a flat in Brighton she can't afford.
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Michael Landes (Final Destination 2, The New Adventures Of Superman and the West End stage version of When Harry Met Sally) plays Gil, a successful American comedy writer who has fled his home country in search of artistic integrity and a lasting relationship.
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Each week we see their continuing doomed attempts to find the definitive partner who will bring them the happiness they deserve.
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But will Fate ever put them together? Since when has Fate ever been kind?
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Trudie Styler plays Gil's neighbour Irene. Sheridan Smith and Montserrat Lombard play Cleo and Milly, not only Alice's colleagues on the perfume counter but also her unofficial and regularly unwanted matchmakers.
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Producer Verity Lambert says: "Everyone likes to think that there's someone out there for them, so this is something everyone can relate to.
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"Alice and Gil aren't running around looking for a relationship but they're both hoping they'll meet someone and we follow them through the trials and tribulations of doing just that.
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"We realise that these two people are soulmates and should probably be together but unfortunately, at this moment in time anyway, they have yet to meet."
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But what makes them so right for each other?
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"They are both slightly out of step with modern life and have similar outlooks," says Verity. "They're both thoughtful and concerned about the same issues and they both tend to get involved in situations despite themselves as they can't really say no to people. They also share a dry sense of humour!"
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Writer David Renwick says the idea for Love Soup came to him one day in the shower. "I was reflecting, as I often do, on the unlikely miracle of having met and married the one woman in the world who shares my unique and peculiar take on life, with whom I enjoy an almost telepathic bond that can only have been preordained by Fate.
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"And I started to think about all the years before we knew each other, and the experiences and emotions we had been through as we had explored all the wrong relationships.
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"And I beheld, with a God-like eye, two people in their unrelated worlds that Destiny had decreed should be together, who were as yet unaware of each other's existence.
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"As the fascinating cosmic flavour of this took hold I began to imagine a show in which we would observe two such parallel lives, laced with echoes and reflections and tiny resonances... where, by careful juxtaposition and implication, I could encourage the audience each week to create their own relationship between two characters who have yet to meet.
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"On the principle that your best bet is to write about what you know, it seemed pointless not to make the man a comedy writer, and the woman a perfumery account manager in a large department store (the position my wife Ellie occupied until two years before we got married).
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"In the show, I even sited the character of Alice in Brighton, where Ellie lived for many years, commuting back and forth to London. In fact we ended up using her old apartment block in Hove for our exteriors."
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Renwick wrote the part of Alice especially for Tamsin Greig.
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"Tamsin is oddly, ineffably, reliably funny to the core, an actress with the skill to ground her humour in reality, and with a delicious line in reactive understatement that makes her a joy to write for," he says.
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"And I was delighted when we managed to cast Michael Landes, who just happened to be over here last year in a stage production of When Harry Met Sally.
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"Taking on the autobiographical role of a neurotic defeatist was, I sensed, something of a stretch for him, but as the series progressed Gil Raymond and Alice Chenery developed organically and wonderfully into characters in their own right."
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The result is a series which is funny, touching and real.
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