The One to Watch
Coupling, Monday, BBC3, 10.30 pm

Coupling has always been a show about real life repeated as farce. Right from the beginning, the writer, Steven Moffat, shamelessly based the characters of Steve (Jack Davenport) and Susan (Sarah Alexander) on himself and his wife and, if she minds, it is too late to object now.

This is the fourth series, and the revelations are getting ever more intimate. Susan is pregnant, and the birth (in the final) episode is lifted directly from life. "The scene is verbatim. It's what I said and what she said, word for word, just for the hell of it," says Moffat. Similarly, Steve's nightmares about the baby were also Moffat's. "If you take most men aside when their wives are pregnant, most of them are pretty frightened and worried and faintly disgusted by the whole experience." Indeed, Steve's level of anxiety is so high, he is expecting the birth to resemble the John Hurt moment from Alien.

Coupling returns on good form. It has lost Richard Coyle, who played Jeff, but acquired Richard Mylan as the new doofus character, Oliver. There still lots of cheap jokes - "My phone is on vibrate. It's no substitute" - but the show has a spring in its step, as if anxious to prove that the Americans were wrong.

Last year, the network NBC acquired the rights to Coupling and subjected it to that peculiar form of hype that almost guarantees a show will crash to earth. Failing to survive its own publicity, it lasted just a few weeks. Moffat is maintaining a dignified distance. Contrary to reports, he says he did not have that much input into the version that got on the air. "I've got a T-shirt made to that effect." He says he had been hoping to make an awful lot of money, so not doing so was disappointing, especially the way the series was subjected to a double whammy. "The critics who like it and wanted to think they were in the know said it wasn't as good as the English version, and everybody else said it wasn't as good as Friends." Both, it seems, were right.

It has left Moffat predictably cynical about American television. "It's all about advertising space. You have got people interfering at every level, and these are people you wouldn't trust with light shopping. They are seriously idiots. I know we complain about our executives in Britain, but we really don't have idiots running TV here, and in America, actually, yep, they do. Complete twits. It's mind-boggling. And there are so many of them. You could toss a hand grenade into the middle of the room and not take out anybody who matters."

Not that Moffat need worry about returning to America for work. He has other projects to keep him busy, like working on Doctor Who, for instance. He says it will be much like it as always was but with more laughs and less shaky walls. "There's no point in doing it if it isn't the same, so it will be the way you remember it when you were 11 - though I'm not sure if Bacofoil will take over the world," says Moffat. As it happens, he had written a Dalek into episode two of Coupling before he was offered the Doctor Who job (Oliver, runs a sci-fi book shop) which just goes to show how busy the time lords are even now.

Originally posted by Original Desmond
this show does the alternate angle replay thing better than any other i've seen

Been some classics in the past, the foreign girl episode especially