What to watch tonight- is Drifters Britain's answer to Girls?
The new E4 comedy follows three graduates living in Leeds
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Your support makes all the difference.You last saw Jessica Knappett dancing awkwardly next to gangly Neill in The Inbetweeners Movie.
But tonight she returns to our screens in her own comedy, Drifters, about three graduates living in Leeds coping with terrible jobs and even worse boyfriends.
The show, which also stars Lydia Rose Bewley from The Inbetweeners Movie, is already being called the UK’s equivalent to HBO’s Girls.
There are certain similarities. Knappett’s character Meg is cut off from her parents in the first episode, much like Hannah in Girls.
She is also forced to move in with her weirdo ex-boyfriend and suffer a number of humiliating jobs dressed in lycra while she tries to break into the media.
Drifters doesn’t shy away from awkward sex scenes either. In the second scene of tonight’s episode we’re introduced to Laura, Meg’s childhood friend, as her boyfriend does her from behind while she answers her mobile because she’s so bored.
But the similarities end there. Drifters is much more like the female Inbetweeners than the UK’s answer to Girls. It’s humour is brassy and slapstick, and it pokes fun at how crap suburban life in Britain can be.
As Knappett told the BBC: “I am not as cool as Lena Dunham. I do not have tattoos. We do not go to Manhattan warehouse parties. We gatecrash rooms above pubs, and get scabies.”
Also to watch tonight
The Big Bang Theory, 8.30pm E4
Sheldon and Penny bond as the Emmy-laden (justifiably so) geek-com returns for a welcome seventh series.
Bedlam, 9pm Channel 4
Or the South London & Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust as the Bethlam Royal Hospital is now known. Apparently, the programme-makers agonised over the title, as they record patients such as Helen, who believes she is harming strangers (she isn’t), and James, whose big fear is that he might defecate in public.
Arena: The National Theatre, 9pm & 2.20am BBC4
The second half of Arena’s birthday tribute takes us from the strike-ridden 1970s to its garlanded present by way of Thatcherite hostility. Ex-directors Sir Peter Hall, Richard Eyre and Nicholas Hytner contribute.
Dracula 9pm, Sky Living
Jonathan Rhys Meyers (left) is making eyes at the ladies again, here as Romania’s most infamous aristocrat in a lush Bram Stoker mash-up. The setting is 1881 London, where Rhys Meyers’ Dracula is posing as an American industrialist.
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