Update
For those of you who haven't discovered this fast talking intelligent women's soap opera yet. As well as pure entertainment, it is also useful for learning grammar, GSCE revision breaks, university last minute cramming and Christmas presents. Other posts on Gilmore Girls can be found here
For some reason Gilmore Girls is only broadcast on one channel of Sky, and so hardly anyone knows about it, let alone watches it in Britain.
We discovered it in Greece where our extra large satellite dish and pirate card allowed us to watch a large number of satellite channels in a variety of languages. Gilmore Girls was on Net Five, a Dutch channel which also had Desperate Housewives (before it came to Britain). We learnt a lot of Dutch from the adverts and the Dutch subtitles.
The plot of Gilmore Girls is about a single mum who brings up a daughter on her own after rich Mum and Dad kick her out for getting pregnant at 16. But that happens before the story starts. From there on, the plot departs from the predictable storyline.
Mum (Lorelei), sinking her own pride for the sake of her daughter( Rory, also short for Lorelei), grabs loan from horrid parents to pay for private school education for 16 year old daughter, in exchange for an obligation for the two of them to have dinner with the grandparents every Friday. The grandparents get to know their daughter and granddaughter again, not without many clashes of personality and values, especially about what money can buy and who is in control. The mother has worked her way up from maid in a hotel to become its manager, providing a successful role model for her daughter. Still she not so secretly harbours an ambition for the daughter to go to Harvard, to get the advantages she missed out on. Luckily the daughter is bright enough to actually achieve this (well actually it's Yale).
In between the family squabbles, the episodes are full of debates about the meaning of life and education, but not forgetting romance and the unsuitability of boyfriends (mother and daughter). The eventual divorce of the grandparents reassures us that it is really a soap opera. But its real appeal is the fast and witty dialogue between the mother and daughter, and the back chat between mother and grandmother. The cast and the settings include small town America but of the prosperous East coast type, no poor people or blacks to be seen much. A Korean girl with a fundamentalist Christian mother gets a good part as a friend of Rory and Lorelei's best friend is a large lady who is the hotel's award-winning chef. She also gets her man and lives happily ever after (as far as I have watched anyway).
Mother and daughter seem to live on junk food, take aways or go to the diner, so in our house, we can feel smug that we at least cook sometimes. But it is disconcerting that they never get any fatter.
No one who knows us will be surprised why we became hooked. There were no DVDs available anywhere, and despite two repeats of the early series, we never managed to see all the episodes while we were in Greece. So a lot of downloading took place when we got back to the UK and had DSL. Disaster struck when everything was backed up onto a mega large hard disk which someone then dropped! Remember never to rely on only one backup.
Sloph cracked first and bought the first series of DVDs, and I just found I received series 2 and 3 for my birthday. So now I can watch them from the beginning in the right order. It seems they have lost none of their charm and interest. But the dialogue is not quite so memorable as Monty Python. That's why I can't quote any here, though this is one on the website:
Daughter to mother: Listen I need a favour.
Mother to daughter: From me?
DtoM: From you.
MtoD: Let me get out my list. I'll write this down right under the one that says "gave me life"
