REVIEWED - STARTER FOR TEN'WHICH British comedy from 2006 features three separate actors with parents who achieved fame on stage and screen in the 1960s and 1970s?" Buzz! "Clarke. Trinity."
It's Starter for Ten, the diverting adaptation of David Nicholls's hilarious novel following romantic interactions among a University Challenge team, in which Alice Eve, daughter of Trevor, plays a vamp, Rebecca Hall, daughter of Sir Peter, plays a sardonic feminist, and Benedict Cumberbatch, son of Wanda Ventham, plays a nerd.
As well as offering idiots like me material for trivia questions, Starter for Ten should amuse readers from that generation which set out for university wearing Cabaret Voltaire badges on their lapels and Doctor Marten boots upon their feet.
Tom Vaughan's film is not quite as comically incisive about 1980s student life as was Nicholls's book. The script sheds some good jokes about the contortions male students went through expressing sexual desire in the days before the Loaded culture sought to legitimise the ogling of breasts, and some of the farcical set pieces seem a little hurried. But this remains a consistently good-hearted piece of work featuring touching performances and a delicious enthusiasm for social embarrassment.
The ubiquitous James McAvoy, an actor only a total ogre could dislike, plays Brian, a young man from Essex embarking on an English lit course at Bristol University. On his first day in the city he bumps into Eve's upper-class temptress and, seeking to impress her, signs up for the University Challenge team. Brian later encounters Hall's smarter, less snooty radical and sets about treating her as badly as young men of a certain age tend to treat girls who deserve better.
The outcome of the romantic plotline is never much in doubt, but the team's eventual appearance on the veteran quiz show leads to some unexpected twists and reversals. The picture justifies its existence alone by inviting Mark Gatiss to deliver a faintly sinister turn as the mighty Bamber Gascoigne, the great, original presenter of the series.
What? You were expecting Jeremy Paxman. I'll have to fine you five points.
