Sarah Ann Kennedy's Crapston Villas.

A More Daring Kind of Comedy
Guard likens her work to American series like Roseanne, Friends, and Ellen. And it's true that Pond Life, which centers on the angst-ridden life of Dolly Pond, explores issues in a more personal way than Crapston Villas, where the humor is spread across a broader social canvas. And, as is well known, the British can poke fun at the idiosyncrasies of their class system, but they get coy about showing their emotions. In this sense Pond Life takes a step forward into a more daring, international kind of comedy.

What Pond Life and Crapston Villas share is attitude to women's issues in which female desire is OK and political correctness is a thing of the past. Crapston, in particular, revels in the shagging culture of the nineties. Take, for instance, this slice of dialogue from Episode 3. Marge, the late thirty-something mum, who lives at the top of Crapston Villas with her delinquent, glue-sniffing children and senile old mum, is having a telephone conversation with her black female friend, Denise. They are both smoking and drinking:

Denise: "What you need is a good shag" (laughter). Marge: "Yeah, I quite fancy a handyman (gales of laughter). I've got a few odd jobs that need doing (shrieks of laughter). I don't care what he looks like as long as he can screw a few things in for me (more Shrieks). I'll advertise for an odd job man preferably with a large tool" (more shrieks). Denise: "Or what about, 'Scaffolders wanted, quick erection only, site in desperate need of attention,'" (collapse into hysterical laughter).

Pond Life takes a different route into equally taboo subjects as Dolly Pond pours out her neuroses to anyone who will listen. But neither series is afraid of representing women. The moral high ground, once occupied by first-generation feminists, in which all representation was offensive, has given way to feistier generation of women who have more self-esteem and are, therefore, less fearful of their self-image, and less moralistic and judgmental in their attitudes to their own sex.

Guard certainly doesn't think of herself as a feminist filmmaker, at least not consciously. On the other hand, it wouldn't have been possible for her to write Pond Life for a central male character. "So, in fairness, you can't really blame men for writing scripts with strong male leads," she remarks confidently. She wonders, though, whether Pond Life would have been made if the Commissioning Editor at Channel 4 had been a man...a question which thankfully, we are not able to answer.

Jill McGreal is an animation producer at Code Name: The Animation Agency, in Hampshire, England.