Thursday, February 22, 2001

To Andy's last night, along with nine others, to watch the first two episodes of the US version of Queer As Folk. Andy's Old Street loft-style apartment was the ideal habitat for it, really.

Perhaps the most surprising thing about QAF US was just how similar it was to QAF UK. Shot for shot, character for character, situation for situation, identical. But with American accents, bizarrely making it feel like a soft porn flick. All the characters had bigger hair (boo) and better bodies (yay). Even the camp one (Anthony in the original) was shown pumping iron. But then, to judge from the conversation running round Andy's room, I was about the only one who didn't have a gym membership.

General consensus was that it wasn't as good as the original, though I thought it was every bit as good. Or bad. We forget just how excrutiating Aiden Gillen's trans-Irish-Sea accent was. Interestingly, the Americans didn't shy away from the sex aspect of it. In fact, the first sexual encounter between the Nathan-character and the Stuart one was more graphic than in the UK version.

It was certainly far, far better than "Metrosexuality", which started last night. And which I managed to watch five minutes of before the am-dram over-acting became too much for me.

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