New BBC3 Drama Does More Than Pay Lip Service

More This Life than Queer As Folk, and with less baggage than The L Word, BBC3's Lip Service follows five lesbian friends in Glasgo, writes Rebecca Nicholson...

Lip Service isn't the world's first drama about lesbians – that accolade belongs to The L Word, which finished after six series in 2009 – but it is the first that Britain can claim as its own. The show's grey and drizzly Glasgow setting differentiates it from The L Word's sunny Californian sheen as does its sense of humour. And unlike its Los Angeles cousin, it's not driven by issues: there's no co-parenting, no gender transitioning, no horrific tales of coming out gone sour, and no killer cancers to educate the viewers with. It operates on the basis that gay women being gay isn't really a story at all, but that love and heartbreak, friendship and betrayal, crap jobs and worse bosses happen to everyone, even though the sex bits might not always be the same. There's a mystery to unravel, lots of lounging around in bars and warehouse flats, and enough full-on sex to get it a 10.30pm timeslot; all of which makes it more of a This Life-style late-twentysomething angstathon about the ups and downs of the everyday, with added bra hooks, candles and feelings.


Writer Harriet Braun, who cut her teeth on dotcom drama Attachments and later Mistresses, had the idea for the show three years ago. "I'd seen a film called Go Fish, and Queer As Folk years ago," she says, "and been really inspired and excited by them. I thought I'd love to do something like that."

Though she admits that The L Word "paved the way", she thinks a Lip Service-style show wasn't possible until now because there wasn't anyone around with the knowhow. "There has to be the writer with the desire to do it," she says, "and a knowledge of that culture." There were several things Braun wanted to avoid in Lip Service, such as the characters being too "glossy", feeling the need to represent everyone, and showing characters struggling with coming out. She reels off a checklist of her ambitions for Lip Service: "Lesbians are under-represented on TV. I thought it was high time we had some on our screens. I wanted to show characters who happen to be gay, but their sexuality is completely part of their lives. I also wanted it to feel very real. And funny; some of our most painful moments tend to be the most absurd, and retrospectively, very funny."

The Lip Service gang gets its fair share of laughs, particularly Tess, played goofily by Fiona Button, who disastrously gets off with a Christine Bleakley-style TV presenter (Roxanne McKee, previously known as wobbly drunk/murderess Louise from Hollyoaks). But the heart of the show is the swaggering Frankie, who kicks off the series by returning from her hipster photographer life in New York to deal with a family death, encountering still-bruised ex Cat (Laura Fraser), sleazy best mate Jay (Emun Elliott) and many conquests along the way. The first episode does little more than set her up as the Moody One, though the subsequent story takes the show in a more mysterious and thoughtful direction. Braun says she had assumed casting Frankie would be difficult. "We needed to find an actress who could carry off androgyny, cockiness and confidence," she says. "I was thinking, 'Where are we going to find this person?' Then Ruta Gedmintas walked in the room."

A few days later, we meet Gedmintas in a posh central London hotel and recount Braun's tale. "When I read the breakdown for Frankie, I thought, 'This is brilliant, I'm never going to get it,'" she says, surprised. Her biggest role up until that point had been Elizabeth Blount in The Tudors (she's currently on a break from filming in Budapest, where she's squeezing into another corset for Showtime's series The Borgias). Ruta thought it might be a stretch, then, to imagine her as a scruffy lady lothario. "Frankie's really edgy and dark, and that wasn't really what I'd been cast as before. Plus, at the time, I had this big, long, glamorous blonde hair. I went into the audition straight off a plane, tired from a horror film I'd been making, like, 'OK, whatever, I'll just do it.'" And is that what made it work? "It was obviously Frankie to them."

The Lip Service shoot took place over "three or four months" in Glasgow last winter, and for Gedmintas it was an intense experience. "After a while I became a bit insane," she admits, saying she stayed in character for almost the whole duration, which didn't help much. "It was … dark. I had to call up my mum and say, 'Can you talk to me like a human being?'" Then there's the fact that the glamorous-looking loft spaces the characters inhabit were actually old post offices and warehouses. In Glasgow. In winter. "There are quite a few scenes where you can see the mist," she smiles. "When we had any sex scenes, it was warm coats until the last second, then pretending you're in this intimate moment."

She must have risked hypothermia, because there's a lot of sex in the show, and lucky Frankie gets most of it. "I'm actually really strict on when I do nudity," Gedmintas protests. "There have been jobs before where I've thought, 'I don't think there's really a need for that scene, so I won't do it.' For this, there was no question. You needed all those scenes. That's who Frankie is."

Writer Braun is similarly happy with the frequent and frank sex scenes. "It didn't seem like the kind of show where we'd go for a cutaway," she says. "It would be a bit naff. Also, let's face it, the internet is saturated with images of lesbians having sex but they're not very realistic. We wanted to get it right: a realistic representation of two women enjoying being with each other."

It's perhaps for this reason that Lip Service is being called groundbreaking, particularly by the gay press. Not that Gedmintas agrees. "Queer As Folk had a groundbreaking status because there hadn't been a show like that before. But we're not trying to do anything that hasn't been done before. We're just making a relationship drama." She's got a point: it's not groundbreaking, and that's no bad thing. Skins had first love; Tipping The Velvet had social history; even Corrie's got teens coming out. Lip Service is just about the ordinary, day-to-day business of lust and being in love. With added lady parts.