Love in the 21st Century

... Who said it was going to be easy?
Six modern morality tales which takes a look at relationships from a female perspective; the hang-ups, letdowns, thrills, spills and misdemeanours of love in our time.

Shown On Channel 4 at 9.30pm on Wednesdays for 6 weeks from 21 July 1999

Written by
Catherine Johnson (eps. 2, 3 & 5),
Paul Abbott (eps. 1),
Paul Cornell (eps. 4),
Matt Jones(eps. 6)

Starring
Catherine McCormack, David Tennant, Tracy Whitwell, Tommy Tiernan, Marsha Thomason, Kate Ashfield, Oliver Milburn, Natasha Little, Ioan Gruffudd, Clare Holman, Matt Kennard, Daniela Nardini, Jason Flemyng.

Directed by
Sheree Folkson (eps. 1 & 2),
Matthew Evans (eps. 3 & 5)
Sandy Johnson (eps. 4 & 6)

Executive Producer
Nicola Shindler

Producer
Matthew Bird

Background

The inspiration for Love in the 21st Century came out of an initial meeting betwen executive producer Nicola Shindler and writer Catherine Johnson, who had been searching for a collaborative vehicle since they first met in 1993, when Nicola script edited Catherine's first television screenplay Sin Bin. Both Catherine and Nicola wanted to create a series for television with strong female characters that challenged the prevailing notion that women can only get ahead by behaving like men.

"We wanted to explode the myth that women are now like men," explains Nicola, "neither of us believe in the whole 'ladette' business." Instead Nicola and Catherine were interested in creating a drama which explored aspects of the real lives of women in contemporary society, looking at modern relationships in a serious but humorous way. The two women approached Channel 4 to discuss their ideas. The concept for Threesomes emerged from this meeting and shortly after a commission for a series of six original half-hour screenplays followed.

Catherine Johnson - who has written three out of six of the episodes that comprise Love in the 21st Century - began to gather ideas from women's magazines, daytime chat shows and the Internet. "What set it off for me was the idea of Threesomes," Catherine explains about her creative process. "I searched the Net to see what sexual things were out there," Catherine goes on. Storylines for Toy-Boys and Fantasies soon followed. Catherine set out to create short stories with a twist, or what Love in the 21st Century producer Matthew Bird calls, "modern morality tales."

Red Production Company solicited scripts from a range of young writers to find the remaining three stories for the series. "We commissioned a lot of stories very quickly to get a choice," explains Matthew Bird. Surprisingly for a series about women, three of the writers commissioned were men. "I don't believe that only women can write women and men can write men," explains Nicola. Good scenarios with strong characters were what the producers were looking for and, as Nicola points out, "Some men,unbelievably, are able to understand women." Matthew Bird continues: "We wanted to make women's stories, with strong female characters to drive the story along."

The resulting series is, Nicola Shindler says, about universal characters whom every viewer, male or female, can relate to. Having commissioned the scripts, Nicola and Matthew were faced with the challenge of giving each disparate story a unifying style. "Although it's an anthology series with completely separate stories and completely separate characters," Matthew explains, "we wanted to make sure that viewers, having watched the first episode, would want to tune-in to the second one and so on." Anthology series can be tricky because - with no regular running cast or locations - there is no immediate way to keep the viewer watching week after week.

Love in the 21st Century by-passes this problem by applying the same energetic feel and style to each of the six episodes, all of which were filmed in and around Manchester. It has the same high production values as Red Production Company's drama, Queer as Folk. Nicola has tried to ensure that the series has the aspirational look of US shows like Ally McBeal. "I've got a big thing about American television," she explains.Love in the 21st Century , in Nicola's view is a "combination of everything looking very good and very real at the same time. There's no reason why TV shouldn't look fantastic even if it's not shot on 35mm."

Director of Photography Ally Walker (whose previous credits include Irvine Welsh's Acid House Trilogy) and designer Pat Campbell (whose previous credits include The Lakes) helped to achieve the look. "Part of my job," explains producer Matthew Bird, "was to make Love in the 21st Century look like a purpose-made series, not a set of brought-in films like Short and Curlies used to be or Love Bites." The brief Matthew set the creative team, was to put together a series of - "something that was vibrant and colourful. So we got camera teams and design teams that were known for this style of work."

This same team shot each of the six individual episodes, with each of the three directors - Sheree Folkson, Matthew Evans, Sandy Johnson - working on two of the six films apiece. When it came to casting the series, the fact that each actor would only appear in one of the six episodes, and that each episode would be shot in six days, was a major selling point. Consequently, Nicola and Matthew were able to attract their 'dream cast'. Nicola explains: "We knew we'd be able to offer parts to people who wouldn't normally do TV."

An early triumph was securing Catherine McCormack - whose career to date has eschewed TV appearances in favour of film roles. "Catherine McCormack was really excited about working on something so focused." explains Nicola. The strength of each of the scripts also made it easy to attract a cast of top young stage and screen actors to the project. "The actors were drawn to the plots," explains Matthew. Also, each of the six scripts concentrates on one or two substantial leading roles, so there were few minor supporting roles to fill. "The main characters carry a lot of weight" says Mathew, "from an actor's point of view it's fantastic - a great part in a high profile, series."

Love in the 21st Century began production in Manchester in February this year and has been prepped, shot, edited dubbed and scored within a five month period. The schedule always looked tight, and filming did not get off to an auspicious start. Matthew tells the tale: "On the first day we were shooting the tram scenes in Reproduction. Shooting on a tram is difficult enough anyway, because the background is moving all the time, and if you want to cut anything you have to go back and get the same background. But the day of the shoot coincided with the FA Cup semi-final. Tottenham and Newcastle were playing in Manchester and we were on a tram at one station - literally four hundred yards from turning around - when the tram operators had to close the station and stop the tram because the Newcastle United supporters were wrecking one of the trams and were all being off-loaded. It took us about an hour to get through all of that."

The resulting series was branded with Red Production Company's own uncompromising style. In Nicola's words, Love in the 21st Century is "bold", "provocative" and "unapologetic". Matthew continues: "We are tackling sex but we also want there to be humour involved. There are moments of complete inane stupidity that are really funny." At the end of the day, Nicola explains, Love in the 21st Century has a very positive message for both men and women on the eve of a new millennium. "You can still be very modern, very fantastic and very strong," she says, "and hold down a relationship."