James Walton

A gentle soap opera with nudity and book chat: Conversations with Friends reviewed

Plus: BBC2’s extraordinary Floodlights will pin you to the sofa

Sasha Lane as Bobbi and as Alison Oliver as Frances in Conversations with Friends. Credit: BBC/Element Pictures/Enda Bowe

It’s official: television has a new genre. Its features include leisurely half-hour episodes, plenty of literary chat, several scenes set in libraries, not much humour and lots of close-ups of the thoughtful faces of clever young Irish women. It would also have presented a serious dilemma for teenage boys growing up before the internet, in that there’s not a great deal of exciting incident but there is a reliably high quotient of sex.

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