Tamara Drewe BBC 2

Tamara Drewe BBC2, directed by Stephen Frears, screenplay by Moiri Buffini.
Tamara Drewe (Gemma Arterton) returns as a successful journalist to the small Dorset village she grew up in. Her one claim to fame is she had a nose-job, when she made it into the big time and she made that part of the story of her success. I don’t usually like flashbacks, but these were very funny. A young Tamara, for example, asking Andy, her old boyfriend, why he was chucking her, and him trying to explain why he called her ‘beaky’. Another pair of adolescent girls with a fixation on a boy- band drummer that Tamara hooks up with were also brilliantly portrayed. In fact there were a number of surprises, because the setting of the first scenes, in a writing community run by an internationally famous writer, and his wife (Tasmin Greig, out of Green Wing and Black Books)and anything set among writers and how hard it all is, is usually middle class wankerish tosh, but Greig working out how her husband was cheating on her by referring back to a character in one of his novels, laying a false-trail for his wife, by being too nice and too easily found out was masterful, funny and true. The one potential false note. Let me tell you about those shorts first. Tamara steps over a style that separates her mum’s old house, which she is planning to sell, to visit the colony of writers and well, there are legs and there are legs and those were definitely legs. They even had a bum attached, which her shorts barely covered. She’d made a pass at Nicholas when she was younger and saw him as the sophisticated writer, but had been brutally rejected. It’s years later and she is stunning, not surprisingly as serial adulterer she is the only game in town. Tamara rejects his advances, but when she finds her one true love Andy having it off with the bar maid at their local and, at the same time having finished up with Ben, her boy-band fiancée, she lets him in (literally). This is great stuff. Everything about it rang true and, apart from the chocolate box ending I really liked it, but I’ll allow for that since it is Xmas.