Published: 09 September 2010
by DAN CARRIER

LET'S get the moans out of the way. Posy Simmonds’ comic strip, which this film is based on, was the first thing ever in a newspaper that has stopped me diving headfirst into the sports section to find the latest  Spurs news.

Skip the sports section to read a serialised graphic novel? That is saying something. I loved it.

So it is with trepidation that I settled down to see what the big screen would do to the strip.

Firstly, the story has been changed to make Tamara Drewe and her loves the central plank. Understandable, as curvy women sell movies, but in the strip the story was told mainly through the eyes of bored teenagers Jody and Casey. 

They also drove the comic strip’s plot to a tragic conclusion, offering a thoughtful take on the teenage condition today, and, through their eyes, painted a pretty real and sadly depressing take on Blair’s Britain (this was dreamt up long before the former PM had embarked on “a journey”). 

But in the flick, they become more peripheral and, wow, surprise, surprise, an older man chasing a young woman who squeezes herself into tiny shorts is the main plot thrust! Would you ever have guessed it?

But such grumbles can be cast aside because, despite the tweaking, this is excellent fun. 

Funny quirks are written into the script, with the best lines falling to downtrodden and cheated-upon wife Beth Hardiment (Tamsin Greig). She gets it spot on.

And her vile husband, Nicholas, is so obnoxious that you forget this is an actor reading lines. I wanted to hiss every time he came on the stage. And even rock star drummer Ben Sergeant, a horrible caricature who is just one of Tamara’s many love interests, comes over well. 

Simmonds’ wonderful drawings, which must have made the storyboard creator’s job the easiest in the world, are writ large across every scene, none more so than when we get a glimpse inside the drummer’s London pad. 

The image hanging in the background of said rock star in his favourite sick-yellow is brilliantly imagined. Jokes come when you don’t expect them – and are often simple quirky lines, such as Beth sounding off to herself on the daily grind of dropping bottles off at the bottle bank and the fact it is time for the goats to come into heat. Her deadpan delivery makes these words come alive. 

There is lots of twee fun poked at writers, particularly failed writers or wannabe writers, faux intellectuals, who you can imagine Guardian readers guffawing into their muesli over. It gives both barrels to the type of people who read the small ads at the back of the London Review of Books, but you can’t help feel that the joke is reversed and those Guardian readers who feel superior to the gathered saddos are a bunch of snobby clever clogs. An example of this is how Nicholas Hardiment is sneered at for his own pretensions and how his success has been garnered through writing about the horrors crime fiction!

The audience are being asked in an English, snobby, middle-class way to be jealous and vindictive about other people’s success. 

An American author who writes heavy tomes about Thomas Hardy is cast in a much better light – never sells a book, of course, but at least his writing is about truth and beauty, etc.

Essentially, this is the most fascinating thing about Tamara Drewe – you’d be pushed to    find a truer or better-observed piece of middle-class navel gazing, nor such a cast of reptilian characters who you can feel no sympathy for gathered in one place.