Keris Stainton on the TV women we love...
Just in case you've never seen Black Books, the brilliant Channel 4 sitcom co-written by Arthur Mathews (co-creator of Father Ted), there are three main characters: grumpy, drunken, Irish, bookshop owner Bernard Black (played by Dylan Moran), his shambolic assistant Manny (Bill Bailey) and his whiny, lazy, frequently bored friend and neighbour, Fran Katzenjammer, played by the fantastic Tamsin Greig, who you will probably know from Green Wing or Love Soup (if not The Archers).
What I love about Fran is that she's not conventionally attractive and she's not the typical "girl" sidekick in a sitcom - she's as much one of the lads as Bernard and Manny. She gets drunk with them, smokes with them, skives off with them, in fact she's often the catalyst for the drunken skiving as she once again tries to avoid her unsatisfying work and, well, life.
In the first episode Fran sends herself demented trying to work out what a new, weird item in her shop is actually for. "God," she says, "I really do sell a load of wank, don't I?"
She's got terrible taste in men, falling for an arrogant explorer (played by Green Wing's own Dr Mac, Julian Rhind-Tutt) and being turned on listening to the Shipping Forecast (read by an ex-boyfriend with a ridiculously sexy voice). She also dates a guy who - unbeknownst to him - is a gay, which leads to one of my favourite exchanges of the series:
Fran: "Question: What do the following people have in common? Elton John, Ian McKellen, Jean Paul Gaultier?"
Date: "Well, they're all fabulous..."
When her landlord steals space from her flat to make a new flat - making it so hot she can't sleep - her solution is to make him an offer he can't refuse: "I'm offering me to you to enjoy. Like an eclair. Or a day at the zoo." Of course, she had no intention of going through with it. Once he moved the wall back, she pretended she'd made no such offer.
Another episode sees her attempt to learn the piano, but after ten minutes of playing Three Blind Mice, badly, she's ready to give up: "I can't play! I wanna watch a video. Can we go get chips?"
I love Fran because she doesn't know what she wants from life and she can't be arsed to find out. In this age of obsessive navel-gazing, that's refreshing. Plus, of course, she's really funny.
Keris co-edits Shiny Media’s fabulous women’s fiction blog, Trashionista and contributes to TV Scoop and The Bag Lady. She has a guilty crush on Bernard Black.