Love Soup - Situation

Situation

Alice Chenery (Tamsin Greig) and Gil Raymond (Michael Landes) are perfect for each other. They like the same things, respect the same things, and share the same beliefs. The only problem is that they are completely unaware of each other's existence.

Alice is a modern woman with old-fashioned values, who lives in Brighton, and commutes to London, where she is the manageress of a perfume company concession in a department store. She is trying to sell her flat and move, without success. Her love life is no success either. She can never find the perfect man. What is worse, her co-workers, Cleo Martin (Sheridan Smith) and Milly Russel (Montserrat Lombard), always seem to have more success with men, though their relationships never really last more than a week. Cleo and Milly try to pair her up with several men, but to no avail. She does have some family members (at least one cousin), but her parents, Arthur and Grace, are both dead.

Gil is an American comedy writer, who has moved to England to start a new project with TV producer Lloyd Drewitt (Owen Brenman). It is a series of six romantic comedies called Love Soup and he has been asked to write one of them. Things started badly for Gil when he arrived at his house (15 Carpenters Lane, Larch End), and discovered his then girlfriend was seeing another man as soon as they arrived in the country. His next door neighbours are Irene and Bob Andrews (Trudie Styler and Brian Protheroe), who split up after Gil accidentally exposes Bob's affair with a prostitute. Afterwards, Gil becomes increasingly worried about Irene's intentions towards him.

The series follows both Alice and Gil's somewhat forlorn attempts to find the perfect partner, while it is clear to the viewer that they would be the ideal couple. The series itself follows each plot separately, cutting from Alice's story to Gil's throughout the episode. The only exception is the final scene of the first series, which shows Alice in the theatre watching a comedy where she is the only person in the entire audience not laughing - apart from Gil, who is sitting two rows behind her. They still do not find each other.

In the third episode of the second series, Alice arranges a date through a personal ad in a magazine. When he fails to turn up she returns home and rips up his photograph. She receives a phone call from Lloyd, telling her that his friend could not make the date. The reason is not stated on screen, but Alice, clearly shaken, picks up the torn photograph and reassembles it, it is a photo of Gil. The next episode, it is revealed that Gil died of a heart attack. In the seventh episode of the series, Alice is invited into Gil's world via Lloyd, where she begins a relationship with a writer, Douglas McVitie (Mark Heap). After a while she feels that there is little love in the relationship so she tries to break it up; Douglas, however, is determined to stay with her. Alice also moves in with Fae Maddison (Amelia Curtis), a famous actress she meets after a date goes horribly wrong.