TV: Educating Lydia a matter of wisecracks and tonsils

By MICHELE HEWITSON

New Jersey must be a terrifying place. If we can believe the telly stereotype, it's overrun with wisecracking girls with tortured tonsils and stroppy attitudes.

Lydia (Heather Paige Kent) of tonight's That's Life is the latest of those New Jersey girls. She gets points for toning it down in comparison with the most irritating NJ girl of all time, The Nanny, but not many more points.

Lydia, as we saw last week, is 32 (this is television, so she looks 22) and about to get married. At the wedding shower, her mother gave a bassinet. "Wedding shower, baby shower. You think I'm gonna live forever?"

Turned out that Lydia, who is a barmaid, has aspirations. "I wanna go to school. I want to make something of my life." Hubby-to-be is not what you'd call supportive. She'd graduate at 36, want a job, then a promotion, then the kids would come along and she'd resent them for ruining her career.

Lydia was telling this story to a barfly. She gave him the version of what she wished had happened. Cue black-and-white fantasy shots of Lydia pushing the groom head-first through the wedding shower buffet.

This is what really happened: cue colour shots of Lydia pushing the groom head-first through the wedding shower buffet. Which must be the Italian/American way of making you eat your words.

You'd think they'd have had this conversation a little earlier in the romance.

We're supposed to believe that they've been engaged for eight years and it never came up? It's American television, stupid. Little things like huge gaping holes in the plot are no obstacle to the story.

Lydia is supposed to represent the modern woman. Her clock is supposed to be ticking. She can't hear it but "just because you happen to like candle parties and babies, doesn't mean you have to have them right on cue like a frigging dog."

Now, I have no idea what candle parties are but I'm fairly certain that dogs, even frigging dogs, don't have them.

On or off cue.

But where were we? Oh, yes. Lydia got to go to graduate college. She's taking photography. Because she's never done anything creative in her life, unless you count the time she went "to that place you paint the mugs."

She's a curiosity to the kids. She's 32 and at school, so "you must be divorced, right?"

What is also a curiosity is the fact that to study photography she takes classes like human sexuality, Post-modernism and the deconstructing of self, and psychology.

The psych professor, who is a drunk she sees gets home safely every night, asked: why do you want study psychology? To understand, said one of Lydia's classmates, "the redefining of intimacy in this high-tech society and how it restructures the bystander effect and reindividualism." Lydia was studying because "I want to know why smart people do stupid things." Prof was not impressed.

Perhaps she should check whether she had the right qualifications to be taking the course. Lydia stumbled from the room, saw a janitor, and (more black-and-white fantasy sequences) saw herself mopping the floor next to him. You can't keep a lippy New Jersey girl down. She marched right back in.

Tonight: Lydia considers dropping out of school. Boy, that must have taxed the storyliners. We can safely predict that every week Lydia will consider dropping out of school, that the line "your mother/father worries about you" will become a catchphrase, that wisecracks like the one on Pavlovian conditioning: "He's the one with the dogs, right?" turn her into a campus heroine.

And that that fantasy sequence of Lydia graduating will get another airing. I don't need to watch another episode. I've already seen how it ends.

* That's Life, TV2, 9.30 pm