Faking It review: Surrey posho turns Bolton trader — and it's loveable fun
Another day, another telly reboot. Are there no new ideas around? Still, if there is one thing to turn the frown of the modern-day TV viewer upside down it's the sight of Rex Adams, a floppy-haired, almost impossibly posh Surrey estate agent, trying to say the words 'big bad bastard' in a Bolton accent as he sought to pass himself off as a northern market trader.
The Channel 4 Noughties format Faking It has been nicely dusted down by 5 even if at first it felt as if the producers had taken the show's go-to subject of plummy person tries something working class to rather heavy-handed extremes.
'I'm going to some place up north called Bolton,' Rex told his friend 'Annie, darling' in a Battersea wine bar called aspen & meursault, which is so well heeled it doesn't need capital letters. 'Where's Bolton?' brayed Annie, who, it had been established, had last seen Rex 'at the polo'.
Was Rex real or a central casting hire? Perhaps he was a reincarnation of Tomothy, the brother of Jack Whitehall's well-off dimwit JP in the university sitcom Fresh Meat, only even more staggeringly high-born. Either way, Rex was prime meat for the show that has always played to the nation's social obsessions with its My Fair Lady twist.
Although here the rain did not fall mainly on the plain but on poor old Rex's head. Bolton, he soon discovered, wasn't the 'really cute, quintessential lovely little town' promised by Annie darling, but a rainy grey battlefield for tough men and women like Tony, the bullet-headed, broad-shouldered Bolton trader who naturally had his doubts about Rex. 'Bit foppy, bit soppy,' said Tony, who was none too impressed with Rex's packaging of meat: there were 'more wrinkles in that than my granny's stocking'. Rex dropped his first set of chicken legs on the floor and confessed to being puzzled when people asked for everyone's dinner orders, when of course they meant lunch. The smirks from everyone around him were telling.
But Rex was deeply likeable, game and ready to learn, and his mentors — Tony, his workmate Elliot (another lovely bloke) and the Ilford trader Tom Skinner, who had a grin broader than the Dartford tunnel — couldn't help warming to him. While this show seemed more interested in the comic set pieces than in getting under the skins of the participants in the way the Channel 4 original managed, it was the decency of everyone involved that carried the day.
Rex's mentors really did teach him something because he passed the test (which took place in Barnsley) in front of a panel of three experts, which seemed extraordinary given how his accent earlier veered from Yorkshire to Durham to, the obviously well-travelled Tony noted, Sumatra. Selling most of his meat when it mattered probably helped, as did his new name, Rob ('Rob on the job,' according to Tony; 'Rob the knob,' said an offscreen heckle). Some temporary tattoos and a short haircut completed the look that, in Elliot's estimation, made him 'one of us … a normal lad'.
Being a class-conscious country hasn't done us many favours over the centuries, but the sheer kindness and warmth of British people can be cheering. And it certainly made this work. Like Rex's steaks, I'm sold.★★★★☆
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