'Wife-swapping ? I thought that sort of thing went out with the Seventies !' said Robson Green, in Take Me, to his wife just after they'd attended the kind of party at which the keys to the Audi are passed around with the Twiglets.
During Take Me, all the parties held in Stepford Close, Amityville, Tyneside, looked as though the The Ice Storm had been remade as a mini-series by the Holby City production team, only this time starring a bewildered-looking Geordie bloke searching for suitable opportunities to flaunt his magnificently charismatic chest hair. Happily, however, there wasn't long to wait.
The big problem with the current trend for big-name actors to receive golden-handcuff deals to star in productions that have been effectively constructed around them is that it creates awkwardly unresolved, implausibly motivated Frankenstein characters who, although the focus of our attention, also seem oddly impotent because they are expected to be more hyper-real than they are human.
Robson's Jack Chambers, for example, a name necessarily more butch than even 'Robson Green', is a venture capitalist who has asset-stripped the shipyard where his father (Keith Barron in fabulous form) worked for the whole of his adult life.
Despite this alarming lack of heroic qualities, Robson has to become our Good Guy, so to this end he has been married off to Kay (Beth Goddard playing two parts Meg Ryan to one part Anthea Turner), a woman who wears dark, smoky eyeliner and red lips at breakfast and who is also sleeping with Jack's best friend for, apparently, no good reason other than to make Robson's beautiful yet cuckolded chest look even better than it already does.
Which, in addition to a script comprised entirely of Kylie Minogue song titles (I should be so lucky, better the devil you know - that sort of thing), means that Take Me has a fundamental dramatic flaw: these are not obviously nice (or even interesting) people with whom we are invited to empathise or sympathise, and nor are their friends and family (two stroppy kids, plus Kay's grief-stricken, hormonally unstable child-snatcher of a sister, Lauren).
In short, Take Me is complete pap. But it is also addictive, compelling, skillfully executed, well-acted pap that, just like a neighbourhood wife-swapathon, might suck you in against your will but will probably leave you writhing and gagging for more.
Kathryn Flett - The Observer (UK)