Amy Jenkins made one series that mattered, and it still does. This Life put young lawyers in a shared house, kept the law offstage and refused to lecture anyone about sex or drink. Nothing she has written since has come close, and it did not need to.
Fi1m perspective
A house full of trainee lawyers, and almost no law. That was the decision that made This Life (1996): Amy Jenkins put her twentysomethings in a flatshare and kept the cameras out of the courtroom, so what we watched was the kitchen, the pub, who was sleeping with whom and who wished they were. Nothing is announced as a subject. Casual sex happens the way the washing-up happens, and the series never stops to tell us what to make of it.
She had done a year of law herself and hated it, which is the one fact about her life that explains the work: she knew the offices well enough to find them dull and the houses well enough to find them funny. The characters came from the same place. "I wrote Anna as my alter ego – and Miles stood for all the self-satisfied but charming men I fancied," she has said, and Daniela Nardini and Jack Davenport play them as if they have been told. Our one complaint is the opening, which introduces its people a little too tidily, like a seating plan. It stops mattering quickly.
We laughed at these people a good deal, and then found we minded what became of them, which is harder to manage than it looks. Jenkins does it by treating their troubles as ordinary rather than small. Nobody's bad night is a catastrophe, but nobody's is waved away either, and the observational style lets the hangovers and the bad decisions sit inside the same week as the job interviews. The people are often poor company for one another and good company for us.
What came after is thinner. Elephant Juice (1999), a feature she wrote and produced, and a segment of Tube Tales (1999) that she wrote and directed followed soon after. Then she turned to novels, Honeymoon (2000) and Funny Valentine (2002). The reviews of the first were cold and found it slight beside her television work; it did not change our view of her either way. The most recent place we have met her name is The Crown (2017), on one episode of the second series co-written with Peter Morgan. We liked the series, and we could not tell you which lines were hers, which is probably what co-writing with Morgan involves.
She has not made another This Life. Hardly anyone has made one. It is where to start with her and, for most people, where to stop, and it holds up better than a good many things made since with more money and less nerve.
Biography
Amy Jenkins is an English novelist and screenwriter. She studied law at University College London after attending Westminster School and Pimlico School.
She created and wrote episodes of the BBC series This Life (1996–1997). Her other television and film writing credits include the biographical drama Daphne (2007) and, with Peter Morgan, episode 4 of the second series of The Crown (2017). She has also written novels, beginning with Honeymoon (2000).
Jenkins is the daughter of the journalist Peter Jenkins and stepdaughter of Polly Toynbee. In 2004 she married Jonathan Heawood.
