Personal Affairs

Personal Affairs - a bit of chick-lit bubblegum for BBC3 about four PAs in a city bank - isn't abashed about its influences. One of the characters does a Carrie twirl on coming out of the Subway, sorry, Tube station, and they even have the pert little musical stings from Desperate Housewives to remind you that they have their tongue in their cheeks. You'd need a bigger tongue and a much more cheek to get away with this, though. There's a lot of voguish, swooshing montages of the city in the breaks between scenes and Barbie-doll characterisation that gives you a fame-obsessed scouser, a porcelain organisation queen, a sex-hungry vamp and an Essex girl with dreams of jumping the fence from Secretarial to Executive. Last week's opener included several fantasy sequences, in which the various male executives saw their assembled PAs as a harem of dominatrixes or a rank of biddable Fifties stenographers.

Then the fantasy sequences faded away and it became clear that the whole thing is a kind of delirium, as unembarrassed about the ludicrous implausibility of its plotting as it is about the models it aspires to. As the sub-plots mounted - abduction, bank heist, enigmatic stalkers - it dawned on you that it was Enid Blyton with added shagging, a feisty all-girl gang who only break off from mystery solving to have a quick knee-trembler with the lift-repair man or disappear into a stationery cupboard with one of the less repellent bankers. It's terrible, but every now and then it glints oddly in the light in a way that makes it hard to write it off entirely. What are we to make, for example, of the posh lesbian with the Marie Antoinette pompadour and the taste for classical tags? I can't bear to watch another episode to work it out, but if you have suggestions I'd be grateful to receive them.

Oddly we missed this new BBC3 comedy drama off our list last week, but we're getting with the programme for episode 2. It's all a bit odd, with a sometimes outrageous line in comedy in-between this glamourous group of PAs attempting to solve the disappearance of one of their number. The cast are pretty (and on the whole very good), but there's a sense that this wants to be Green Wing when it grows up, but just isn't in the same league. Worth a look, though.