‘Four girls sharing a flat’ - an obvious premise for a sitcom perhaps, but given the widespread, ever-increasing demand for a fairer and more accurate depiction of female characters on screen, Vodka Diaries is set to offer audiences something truly unique.
My desire with Vodka Diaries has been to portray the realities of being a woman in your late twenties / early thirties – an age that, when I was in my teenage years, I believed would equate to professional accomplishment, dinner parties, property ladders and perhaps a husband – but so far I’ve only achieved harrowing thoughts such as ‘when my parents were my age, I was two’ and the seemingly never-ending conversations like ‘oh look, someone I went to school with just got pregnant/married / invented an app/ became a millionaire / is famous now/ owns the internet’.
The show has four female leads. The entire show and its characters are based almost exactly on the house and the women that I have lived with for the last five years. I read the pilot script aloud to them before it was filmed just in case anyone was offended, but fortunately they are all pretty laid back and had a sense of humour about it. It’s basically a motley crew of four very different women, with disparate interests, friends and hygiene habits thrown together as this make-shift, dysfunctional family.
We moved in together five years ago when we were all students. The house was a complete shithole - anything that could be wrong with it was. The bath leaked, there was damp in almost every room, the electrics were faulty and there was a complex ‘knack’ to working every appliance. But... it was temporary. This was the one (and seemingly only) belief that we shared, and certainly the only thing that enabled us to cope with the fights, the filth and the fact that more mice than people lived at our address. The plan was simple: we would live like this until we finished university, then go off to live our Cath Kidston lives. We discussed at length how we would meet up with each other once a month for ‘Come Dine With Me’-style evenings - smug events orchestrated to boast how far we had come since our days of squalor - and the fact that we now had toilets that flushed.
But lo... it didn’t go to plan. What we once believed to be a temporary solution had fast become our life. Five years later, we were not students anymore. We were professionals. Adults... albeit professional adults who still require a coat hanger and a carrier bag to make their toilet flush.
But this isn’t a show about shabby decor, it’s about the women whose lives are lived within it.
The cast are all incredibly funny and already accomplished in their own right, including award-winning comedians Cariad Lloyd, Aisling Bea and Luke McQueen, not to mention Rosamund Hanson (This is England, Life’s Too Short) and Gwyneth Keyworth (Elfie Hopkins, MisFits).
The whole shoot had to be done in three days – so, naturally, we had to rush like mad to get everything we wanted. There is one scene with Alex (played by Rosamund) where she ‘does some physical theatre’. In the script, I didn’t state specifically what should happen so she improvised on the day – and it’s the most hilarious thing I have ever seen. The director (James De Frond) simply said: ‘I don’t know what the fuck just happened. It’s either gold or just weird... but we don’t have time to film it again’.
Vodka Diaries is available on iPlayer now.
Follow Rachel on Twitter @MsRachelHirons
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.