Love And Marriage (2013)

Love and Marriage, ITV

It's a nice idea - but ITV's family-centric comedy drama is light on entertainment.

Love and Marriage, ITV's new six-part comedy drama, was about sacrifice. Alison Steadman played Pauline Paradise, a 60-year-old matriarch, who had spent her whole adult life caring for her large family and receiving not-very-much thanks in return.

When she left the house on her last day before retiring, her taciturn husband Ken (Duncan Preston) didn't even look up from his paper. When her father died, he went to bed and hoped she wouldn't want to talk about it. And Pauline and Ken were not the only ones with problems. Their offspring were all in trouble. Kevin, their eldest son, was in debt and newly redundant; Heather, their highly strung daughter, was racing against the biological clock to get pregnant; and Martin, their youngest son, was worn out by the demands of his huge family.

And that's just the "drama" half of this "comedy drama". To squeeze in the humour as well was asking a lot of writer Stewart Harcourt and, on the evidence of the first episode, perhaps a bridge too far. It's difficult to be funny when you're so busy establishing characters and plot (although including a joke about the Manson family, the subject of biting satire forty years ago, was pretty desperate).

So there are grounds for optimism. As we get to know the Paradise clan better, the jokes will hopefully improve. In the meantime, the drama should keep people tuning in.

Love and Marriage - TV review

In this comedy drama about a late-life crisis in the Paradise family, a great cast helps you go gentle into the viewing night.

Alison Steadman and Duncan Preston star as matriarch and patriarch of the Paradise family in this new six-parter about families and all the stuff that comes with them. But things aren't perfect in the Paradise's domestic setup - do you see what they did there? All the kids have gone off and got married and Mrs Paradise sees the yawning chasm between her and her husband. Will she grasp her autumn years in both hands and take them dancing or just carry on as usual? We've got six episodes to find out.

The peerless Alison Steadman walks the line between laughter and tears with aplomb, taking the lead as Pauline Paradise in this six-part comedy drama. Nearing the end of her road as a lollipop lady, Pauline is apprehensive about her looming retirement. But does anyone in her family care that her life is at a crossroads? Not a jot, it seems, with taciturn hubby Ken (Duncan Preston) being, well, taciturn, and her brood of offspring preoccupied with their own lives and rearing assorted infants. It's a Syndicate-style format, with the perspective shifting from one Paradise to another, week by week. The impressive supporting cast includes Celia Imrie, Larry Lamb, Ashley Jensen, Graeme Hawley and Zoe Telford.

Fans of Modern Family will recognise one of the conceits here: husbands and wives sitting on sofas, chatting amicably directly to camera. But Love and Marriage isn't Modern Family. In fact, judging by this first episode, I'm not quite sure what it is. Maybe it's down to the uneven tone. It begins so breezily you think, maybe this is a comedy.

Or even a comedy drama as the interwoven lives of the Paradise family slosh across the screen amid much shouting and laughter. Forbearing matriarch Pauline (Alison Steadman) is retiring from her job as a school lollipop lady and she's expected to fade quietly away. Then, suddenly, Love and Marriage becomes something else altogether, and there's a dash of Last Tango in Halifax and a daub of tragedy. Still, it's intriguing enough to make you want to return.

Gentle family dramas? They're bloody everywhere at the moment. Second series of The Cafe and Starlings are imminent on Sky. Frankie ambles on over on BBC1. And then there's this new offering in which Alison Steadman's long-suffering matriarch Pauline Paradise (whose name makes her sound more like a drag queen) decides - on the occasion of her father's funeral, no less - that she's fed up of producing party spreads, lending money, providing endless, one-way emotional support and spending time with her silent husband. Instead, she's going to bugger off and live with her sister; her brood can stand on their own two feet for once.

Initial signs aren't good - jaunty piano music signposts everything and the increasingly worn-out narrative device of characters delivering documentary-style pieces-to-camera feels lazy. But Steadman is a trooper, even in a role she could probably play in her sleep and, by the end, it just about feels worth hanging on for another episode. It's an extremely close run thing, though...

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Love And Marriage Q&A

An interview with the cast.

Alison Steadman shines in this over-complicated show

I think my issues with Love and Marriage started almost instantly as writer Stewart Harcourt introduced the various members of the Paradise family by having the couples introduce themselves straight to camera.