Up In Town is a six-part series of short (10 minute) monologues, featuring Joanna Lumley

Joanna Lumley

Joanna Lamond Lumley, OBE, FRGS is a British actress, voice-over artist, former-model and author, best known for her roles in British television series Absolutely Fabulous portraying Edina Monsoon's best friend, Patsy Stone, as well as parts in The New Avengers, Sapphire & Steel, and Sensitive...

 as the middle-aged, divorced and lonely Madison Blakelock. The series was produced for television

Television

Television is a telecommunication medium for transmitting and receiving moving images that can be monochrome or colored, with accompanying sound...

 by Baby Cow Productions

Baby Cow Productions

Baby Cow Productions Ltd is a UK comedy television production company established in 1999 by Steve Coogan and Henry Normal based in London and Manchester. It has since diversified into radio, animation and film. In 2008, BBC Worldwide bought a 25% stake in the company...

, and screened on BBC Two

BBC Two

BBC Two is the second television channel operated by the British Broadcasting Corporation in the United Kingdom. It covers a wide range of subject matter, but tending towards more 'highbrow' programmes than the more mainstream and popular BBC One. Like the BBC's other domestic TV and radio...

. It has subsequently been released on DVD

DVD

A DVD is an optical disc storage media format, invented and developed by Philips, Sony, Toshiba, and Panasonic in 1995. DVDs offer higher storage capacity than Compact Discs while having the same dimensions....

.

Summary

Madison Blakelock is delighted to be living her 'new life', since her executive class husband, who works 'up in town', and she parted company 18 years before. And now she has nothing more to do but sit before her mirror, picking over the bones of her past with an optimism and energy dizzyingly at odds with her reality. As the unrecognised failures of her life mount up, the loss of love, friends, money, purpose and her beloved cat, the cracks in her terrifyingly maintained facade begin to show.

Critical reception

The series received a positive reception from critics. The Times

The Times

The Times is a British daily national newspaper, first published in London in 1785 under the title The Daily Universal Register . The Times and its sister paper The Sunday Times are published by Times Newspapers Limited, a subsidiary since 1981 of News International...

praised Lumley and her "rich, darkly comic and beautifully observed performance".The Guardian

The Guardian

The Guardian, formerly known as The Manchester Guardian , is a British national daily newspaper in the Berliner format...

cited that the series deserved better scheduling.

The series has also been compared to Alan Bennett

Alan Bennett

Alan Bennett is a British playwright, screenwriter, actor and author. Born in Leeds, he attended Oxford University where he studied history and performed with The Oxford Revue. He stayed to teach and research mediaeval history at the university for several years...

's Talking Heads

Talking Heads (plays)

Talking Heads is a series of dramatic monologues written for BBC television by British playwright Alan Bennett. The two series were first broadcast in 1988 and 1998, and have since been broadcast on BBC Radio and included on the A-level and GCSE English Literature syllabus.A West End theatre...

series of monologues.