I know that fiction is fiction. I can suspend credibility to know that time passes at a different rate in TV dramas (and films and plays).
I know they edit out all the inconsequential actions. It would be boring if they showed every meal, every visit to the loo, every time they check their emails or buy something - although it does mean that checking of emails, going to loo, or, indeed, presenting a credit/debit card is a shorthand for 'watch out, something is going to happen and it will be an axis on which the plot rotates.
I'm relaxed about juxtaposition of locations - except where they are iconic picture postcard locations: I'd be worried if they showed Buckingham Palace to be on the river, but I'm relaxed about a residential road I happen to recognise seeming to emerge onto the wrong main road.
I'm also very relaxed about the 'he/she wouldn't do that' because, just because you or I would wouldn't, or most people wouldn't, doesn't automatically prevent someone else from so doing.
What I hate is pure basic factual errors. It shocks me that with the number of people who go into making a TV drama not one speaks out and says "That's wrong!". Loud enough to get a researcher or unpaid intern scurrying off to Google.
Two classics from the past. One was in that comedy series starring Jack Dee that started off funny but deteriorated. He made some joke about some company highlighting their anti-environmental practices, which immediately caused their share price to plummet (unlikely but possible). As a direct result of their share price plummeting, they went bankrupt, notwithstanding whatever reserves they held, how many contracts they were fulfilling. Okay, I can envisage a situation where loss of reputation can lead to withdrawing of credit, but not overnight.
In some political drama or other, there was utter confusion between a White Paper and a Bill. I can't remember the error but it was so basic that it scared me they were making a political drama without consulting someone who knew anything about basic Parliamentary procedure.
Mistresses the other night provided another classic to add to the list - the retrieval from a house of the Title Deeds to that same house. A house that laid empty for several months. there was no evidence that the deeds had been stored in a fireproof waterproof safe. And in any case, didn't one person on set question this? Who stores the title deeds in the actual house?
Do they think we are really thick? I've cited three examples where I've spotted the flaw. The first - well, I'm an accountant, admittedly, but even so, I suspect there are tens if not hundreds of thousands of people more familiar with the relationship between share capital, turnover, cash flow etc of a business than I am.
I have an A-Level and a degree in Politics, but so do countless others, and there are many many more people who have experience and knowledge of the political process.
The final one is even more ridiculous. How many millions of home-owners are there in this country. Admittedly, most will be on a mortgage and therefore will have no dealings with the title deeds. But I thought it was just one of those things that is widely known, even if not universally.
I know no one's perfect, and we all mistakes, but it surprises me that they let these programmes go out with such glaring errors on matters so fundamental to the plot.
I have to say though, Mistresses has become very silly, pushing credibility to the limits. The scene in the kitchen where Trudie declares the buns need another '45 seconds'. Not to mention that she's flouting all the rules on good safety by wearing the wrong clothes, not having her hair covered and so on.
Then you get the wedding of the New York woman, who is marrying the ex of one of the mistresses, Siobhain. It's not unreasonable for an American woman to get married in her British husband's home town - I've been to a wedding where precisely that happened. And, inevitably, the friends/relatives are going to be predominantly his. But how likely is it that a significant proportion of the wedding party is made up of the friends - and their husbands - of the groom's ex-girlfriend? And yet, the groom's daughter seemed to be absent from both ceremony and reception.
I suppose I get annoyed by these programmes predicated on a friendship group. I will stand corrected but I doubt that any such group remains unchanged for decades, irrespective of who has kids, emigrates (and comes back). Don't most people have a network of friends, picked up from various places - old friends from school and Uni, people you've worked with, people with common interests, people whose kids are friends with your kids, and friends who you have to think what the actual connection is - maybe they are the sister of the ex-girlfriend of the housemate of someone you worked with briefly ten years go.
I think Mistresses is a good laugh and harmless fun. It's rather nice to see their ridiculously affluent lifestyles begin to crumble, based on an unsustainable basis of debt. But the message these programmes send out, if taken seriously - as immature insecure people may well - is that this is some sort of 'normality' something to aspire to. And that's very sad, because aren't they just the dullest self-absorbed people ever, not one of them having an interest in anything but themselves, their lovelife and - occasionally - their jobs.
