My Heart Belongs To ...

... husband Mark -- and his brother Rich. Emma's rocky relationship is at the centre of a gripping new drama series about a group of old friends struggling with the trials of life.

by E. Jane Dickson, Radio Times, April 29, 2000

Take a group of pals, a sofa, and a handful of star-crossed love affairs. Add a sprinkling of sure-fire ratings-boosting faces and a prime-time slot. What have you got? If you're smart, you'll end up with a one-size-fits-al amalgam of hit shows such as Friends, This Life and Cold Feet. If you're smart and original, you might come up with something like Hearts And Bones, the new BBC1 drama series that takes the "These Cold Friends" format and pulls it inside out. The result is the kind of television you take the phone off the hook for.

Hearts And Bones is set in the not very glamorous reaches of south London, where eight friends -- most of whom have known each other since their schooldays in Coventry -- are making their different ways in the metropolis (speaking of which, ITV also launches a twentysomething drama this week -- Metropolis -- starting on Monday). Dervla Kirwin heads Hearts And Bones' copper-bottomed cast, which also includes Hugo Speer (The Full Monty), Damian Lewis (Warriors) and Amanda Holden. Kirwin plays Emma, a young wife and mother on course for an emotional meltdown. From the opening episode, and despite her imminent marriage to Mark (her boyfriend since college and the father of her child), Emma is secretly in love with her husband's brother. And as she spins ever faster in her groove, the fallout affects everybody around her.

"When I first read the part of Emma, I didn't like her at all," says Kirwan. "But I understood what she was going through, and somehow she got under my skin. I thought, 'Here's a woman who's waking up at the age of 28 and wondering what she's done with her life. She's in a dead-end job and deeply unhappy. She knows she would never have married her husband. And that frustration makes her really dangerous.'"

Emma is the centre of the sexual vortex that keeps the series whirling; her will-she-won't-she relationship with her brother-in-law Rich will have viewers shouting at their TV screens, but she never degenerates into the classic "sexpot with problems" TV stereotype. The idea that the women of Britain will be plaguing their hairdressers to do them an "Emma" (as happened with Jennifer Aniston's much copied Rachel in Friends) brings a derisive snort from Kirwan. Hearts And Bones' strength, she points out, is its absolute refusal to tart up ordinary lives into something more telegenic.

"If I was playing this part in America, I'd be a bit depressed, but I'd look fantastic," she laughs. "But Emma doesn't have the kind of life where you go and have facials and have your legs waxed to cheer you up, and let's face it, most people don't have that kind of life. We're fed enough of that kind of thing in glossy magazines, we really don't need to see it on television, too."

She has a point. In an entertainment culture that equates ordinary with dull, the series writer, 32-year-old Stewart Harcourt, was taking a gamble in creating a series where the drama is indistinguishable from real life, but the real success of Hearts And Bones is the creation of characters and situations that are gripping not in spite of their ordinariness, but because of it.

"I really didn't want to write another show that has people sitting around on Conran sofas drinking chardonnay, because that is just not most people's experience," says Harcourt, an award-winning playwright whose previous TV work includes key episodes of Peak Practice. "Only a very small group of people in London actually live that kind of metropolitan lifestyle. For most of us, it's about getting by on not a hell of a lot of money and watching our relationships slowly drift apart. I've tried to keep the stories as low-key as possible, with themes that are, I hope, universal -- the problems of going for a job, or leaving a marriage or watching a parent die, because if you let the plotlines outgrow the characters you end up with soap opera, and before you know it you've got to have a multiple car crash or an outbreak of bubonic plague just to keep things moving."

This resolute ordinariness extends to the show's central relationships. There are no group hugs in Hearts And Bones, no schmaltzy outpourings on the nature of friendship, just a group of people whose lives, for reasons embedded in their pasts, are intricately linked. "It's a truer portrayal of friendship because everyone's always falling out," says Amanda Holden. After a career dominated by comedy roles in Kiss Me Kate and The Grimleys, she describes the role of Louise, Rich's girlfriend who lives with her terminally ill mother (Anita Dobson in a powerful performance), as "the job that I'm proudest of, to date. The audience will be able to relate much more realistically with these people because they're not all loved up with each other. Half the time they don't eve like each other. And that makes them normal."

For Harcourt, who -- like his characters -- grew up in Coventry (but has never been propositioned by his brothers' wives), the endlessly compromised friendships are the bedrock of the series. "Most drama series are built around a precinct, a place where people work, live or drink," he says. "I think that the really true relationships in our lives are the relationships we build up with our friends." For Hugo Speer, who turns in a luminously quiet performance as Rich, the not-all-together-unwilling object of Emma's affections, the people and situations in Hearts And Bones hit an unmistakable chord: "By the time you hit your late twenties, you've gathered friends from all the different bits of your life. I've got friends from home in Yorkshire who I'm still very close to, and friends from drama school and friends that I've made at work, and as you get older all these different circles meet and merge, or meet and don't merge. It's not like you go out and pick your own team of friends. It's an organic thing and that's what makes it interesting."

Kirwan agrees, although she is just a shade wistful about the idea of keeping friends from childhood. "I came over from Ireland to do Billy Roche's Wexford Trilogy in the theatre when I was 16, so there weren't those very strong bonds from home. I've made a life for myself over here and the friends that I've made, mostly through work, are quite short term but very strong relationships." On the subject of her most famous working relationship -- with her Ballykissangel co-star Stephen Tomkinson -- Kirwan sounds a forgivably weary note. The couple, who broke up last year, will this autumn be starring together again in a new ITV drama series Shades and Kirwan knows that this will prompt yet another public chewing-over of their relationship. "For too long I was defined as the actress who went out with someone else rather than the actress who actually did a bit of work, and that can be very frustrating," she says. "I hope people will understand that it's perfectly normal for people who once went out together to work together. Perfectly normal and -- I would say -- very healthy."

Filming seven episodes in just nine weeks, the cast of Hearts And Bones cemented an unusually strong bond of their own. On the rare occasions when the actors didn't have an early call in the morning, they would dress up and go out dancing, and now that the series is in the can (with a second series under discussion), the cast go bowling together every Tuesday night. "Working so hard really brought out the best in this bunch of people," says Kirwan, who also worked with Amanda Holden in the BBC1 Easter drama Happy Birthday Shakespeare. "There was an awful lot of genuine camaraderie on the set."

While comparisons with the American drama series Thirtysomething will inevitably be made, it is vital to the dynamics of Hearts And Bones that the characters are actually in their late twenties.

"People are much more sorted by the time they are thirtysomething," points out Damian Lewis, who plays Emma's beleaguered husband, Mark. Following the success of last year's Bosnia drama Warriors, Lewis is now filming the new Steven Spielberg Second World War drama series Band Of Brothers, based on the film Saving Private Ryan. "It was a brilliant stroke for Stewart Harcourt to fix our ages around the 28 mark. Your late twenties is just the age when you begin to change," he says. "You find that you're staying in, watching television with your girlfriend when you should be out with your mates. You start to read different sections in the newspapers, you start to care about interest rates. You realise that you're coming to the end of being young."

Kirwan agrees. "I'm 29 now and all through my twenties I've seen 30 as kind of Everest to have conquered. You think that once you go through that barrier it's downhill all the way and we'll all have sorted our lives out. And because, quite clearly, I haven't sorted out my own personal life, it's great to play someone who is going through all that. I don't know whether I'm the only person who could play this character, but I do know I'm going through what Emma is feeling at this time. As far as I'm concerned, Hearts And Bones couldn't have been better timed."

Hearts And Bones Sundays BBC1.

Caption: Emma (Dervla Kirwan) with husband Mark (Damian Lewis, right) and brother-in-law Rich (Hugo Speer)

Friends, Lovers, Rivals, Exes

Radio Times, April 29, 2000

1. Emma Rose (Dervla Kirwan) -- Emma is spinning out of control. She met Mark at college and had his baby when she was 22. Seven years later they are at the point where they marry or split up. They marry, but it's probably the wrong decision. Emma wants to sleep with her husband's brother, Rich.

2. Mark Rose (Damian Lewis) -- Mark is a biology teacher at a London comprehensive. He's a nice bloke, always trying to do the decent thing, but his jealous temper can get in the way. He has never quite been able to believe his luck at "landing" Emma, and now that luck is running out.

3. Richard Rose (Hugo Speer) -- Rich wanted to be a professional footballer, but ended up a butcher. His partner is Louise, but as they live with her terminally ill mother, their life together has never really got going. He knows an affair with Emma would be disastrous, but he's wavering.

4. Louise Slaney (Amanda Holden) -- Louise's life is overshadowed by her mother's illness. She wants to get out of the salon -- she has been working as a hairdresser since she left school -- but doesn't know what else to do. However, she has discovered an urge to learn and is always reading.

5. Sinead Creagh (Rose Keegan) -- Sinead is a romantic. She is an editor of romantic fiction at a big publishing house. She wears romantic clothes. She has been a little in love with Mark since she was 13 and they were at school together. Nobody has ever taken his place, but maybe she will find love on the Internet. ...

6. Michael Owen (Andrew Scarborough) -- Michael is the reluctant yuppy. He works in the City and earns a packet, but doesn't know what to do with it. He is still smarting over a disastrous affair with Amanda and is looking for a new love, but he is haunted by an experience he had at school which constantly makes him question himself.

7. Amanda Thomas (Sarah Parish) -- Amanda is a political hotshot and professional ballbreaker. Everyone is afraid of her and she is afraid of everyone else. She sometimes wishes she could settle down, but ambition and a blistering line in sarky put-downs are not helping in the search for Mr. Right.

8. Robbie Rose (Kieran O'Brien) -- Robbie, 22, is Mark and Rich's little brother. He hasn't got a job or responsibilities, and hangs around his brothers' houses taunting them with what they can't have anymore, i.e., a different girlfriend every week and a constitutional resistance to hangovers.