When Brendan Met Trudy

The dullest guy in Dublin meets a feisty girl in a pub. She fancies him rotten. He doesn't know what to do with himself. She does.

He's a teacher, who can't control his class. She's a thief, who doesn't wear gloves on the job. He's from petty bourgeois stock. She's from somewhere else.

He sings in a choir. She lies in bed with very little on. Somehow, you are supposed to believe in these people.

Peter McDonald plays Brendan like a plate of cold semolina. Flora Montgomery plays Trudy like salsa and corn chips. The sexual chemistry does not exist, despite needing to, wanting to, since chemistry is what this is all about.

Brendan is a loner, crippled with Catholic guilt, charmless, wet and an anorak. He memorises quotes from movies and blurts them out at inopportune moments. In fact, he lives through films. She's not interested in the cinema. She's only interested in getting his trousers off. Why him, for heaven's sake? There are men out there with degrees in the Karma Sutra.

What is surprising is that Roddy Doyle wrote the script. He must have been having one of those days.