What's it all about, Charlotte? (Border Cafe)

Member Name: the historian

Product:	Border Cafe
Date:	21/02/03 (150 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Elizabeth Carling actress, Elizabeth Carling singer, Occasional country views

Disadvantages: Weak story line, Stereotypical characters, Purpose unclear

Having just seen the first couple of episodes of this - I can't exactly call it comedy - I find myself asking what it is hoping to achieve. I have read elsewhere that it is supposed to be reminiscent of the Rock Follies of the 1970s. I remember them well but have yet to see the resemblance. This programme, written by Tim Firth, was first broadcast on BBC free-to-air television in 2000. From other reviews I have read elsewhere it has been available on PBS in some parts of the USA. It is currently being shown on digital cable and satellite in the UK on the UK Drama channel. This fact suggests that UK TV no longer regards it as comedy at all.
The authors have a very strange idea of the geography of North West England. There is no point where the borders of Lancashire and Cheshire meet Wales! Indeed since 1972 there is no point where the borders of the administrative counties of Lancashire and Cheshire meet each other! The cafe is, however, well situated atop a hill which commands wide views over several towns and much countryside.
The star of the show - indeed the only person, in my view, who makes it worth watching - is Elizabeth Carling (formerly Phoebe II of 'Goodnight Sweetheart') who plays retired rock star Charlotte. She buys the cafe for her boyfriend of 15 years so he can fulfil his dream of playing live gigs in his own establishment and, presumably, so that she can settle down away from her long term stardom in a band called True North and become what she has always (one must suppose) secretly wanted to be, that is a woman with a husband/partner who is going places. By buying the cafe, however, she enables him NOT to go anywhere further than 5 miles from the place in which he was born, as has been his lifelong inclination to date. This is clearly not going to work out long term. Charlotte is clearly a grade 1 woman and singer (Elizabeth Carling does most things well, including singing) who in her teens got emotionally involved with a man w

ho isn't really in the same class as she. He does not really share her ambitions or sympathise with her desire, revealed as a 'fantasy' in the second episode, to have children and settle down. She hasn't grown out of her real fantasy yet (that her boyfriend is worth all her trouble) - but we live in hopes.
The cooking staff the boyfriend hires (his intellectually challenged brother Kidder) would soon induce a visit from the local Environmental Health department. He hasn't a clue about anything much except evesdropping on customers' conversations with microphones secreted in flower vases. His menu by the end of the second episode has not gone beyond a breakfast poetically termed an 'artery blocker'.
He is joined in the kitchen by waitress Ronnie, who formerly was a copycat singer of Charlotte and who seems to fluctuate between moderate intelligence and being on an intellectual par with Kidder.
Other characters include a cardboard cut-out leftie Physics teacher aged 55 if he's a day, who seems to be the object of the sexual desire of two of his teenage pupils. This causes him to agonise much before snogging one of them at a school dance. His foil is a similarly two-dimensional right-wing coach driver/tour operator called Edwardian Clive, whose wife, from an old Cheshire family, indulges in sexual fantasies of the 'Pretty Woman' type. The leftie teacher continually bates Clive with memories of school trips when Clive betrayed his stereotypically racist and xenophobic and homophobic attitudes which he tries to get him to do again. Clive, of course, can be relied upon to make a total and at times spectacular fool of himself. Thus the prejudices of the writer and producers vindicate themselves. It's all so predictable.

Summary: