Fat Friends older but not much thinner

By FRANCES GRANT

Search your memory for a television drama called Fat Friends and you might vaguely recall a Brit show about the members of a slimming club in the northern city of Leeds.

When the second series of the ITV drama starts tonight (TV One, 8.35pm), the action jumps forward two years from where the first left off. TV One, in its usual thoughtful scheduling manner, appears to have taken this gap rather too seriously, finally getting around to screening the second series three years after the first.

To jog memories then: Fat Friends centres around chip shop owners Betty Simpson and daughter Kelly, who tend toward the lard-ish end of the scales on account of their fat-frying profession.

The first series of the drama, written by Kay Mellor (Band of Gold), began with Betty (Alison Steadman) winning a Super Slimmers of the year contest while Kelly was trying to shed a few pounds to squeeze into her desired wedding dress. It ended with the fortysomething Betty's shock discovery that she was pregnant.

Along the way it focused on individual members of the slimming club - actress Lauren, fat teen Jamie, tragic Rebecca - as they struggled to lose weight and deal with more pressing problems.

As Mellor says: "The drama looks at people and how they relate to one another and use body weight as an excuse for all sorts of failings in their relationships, or not living their life to the full. What I am trying to say is don't put your life on hold until you're size 10."

One of the characters, journalist Val, is based on Mellor's experience researching the show. She went along to a slimming club and was weighed in.

"I thought I'd probably be a few pounds overweight. When she said stand on the scales and told me I was two-and-a-half stone [15.8kg] overweight I went into shock. I weighed nearly 12 stone [76kg]," she says in an Observer interview.

Mellor went on a diet, walked around with a calorie calculator and became a weight-obsessive - and started getting into the minds of her characters.

Tonight's new series begins with Betty struggling to come to terms with late motherhood and Kelly trying desperately hard to get pregnant. Both women have given up the slimming club for the sweatier and less guilt-ridden delights of the salsa dancing class.

Meanwhile, a battle royal is breaking out between start-up dieting club Count With Carol, run by the former Super Slimmers second-in-command, and the original club run by the godawful Julia Fleshman (Josie Lawrence). Both have severe handicaps: Carol is bulimic and struggling to come to terms with the fact that her husband has left her for a man, and Julia has a hairdo which looks like it should be attached to a mop handle and advertised on an early-morning infomercial.

Wannabe actress Lauren's love life takes a complicated turn as she falls for a clergyman - not a potential partner to please her overprotective Jewish parents.

Some other highlights to look forward to include a spot of binge-eating to a dance-music soundtrack and discussions of erectile dysfunction in a chip shop followed by scenes of embarrassment caused by a switched-on baby monitor.

Underpinning the action is Mellor's at times heavy-handed critique of the slimming industry: as Carol's pupils are forced to put together "emergency slimming kits" to take along when they go out to a restaurant, Jamie the teenager complains that the whole point of eating out is to enjoy yourself. Life isn't worth living without a bit of sin.