Required reading

The Book Group is currently the most compulsive show on TV. But it took an American writer to bring this Glasgow-based comedy to life. Robert Hanks talks to Annie Griffin about the latte literati

A headline in one national newspaper earlier this week announced: "Love blossoms at book clubs." Apparently, reading groups are becoming the new dating agencies "as single people shun bars and nightclubs in favour of the 'lattè literati'". Citing Chris Meades of the Book Trust as its authority, the story went on to say that these people had been inspired by Channel 4's Friday night comedy The Book Group.

This hardly seem plausible: this off-beam series has only been running for three weeks – hardly enough time for the effects to show up on the graph; and in any case to argue that the darkly compulsive blend of fantasy, lit-crit, social ineptitude and sexual rejection might encourage reading groups is about as convincing as saying that Jaws gave a major boost to swimming club memberships.

For those who haven't seen it, the programme revolves around a reading discussion group started by Claire (played by Anne Dudek), an American newly arrived in Glasgow and keen to make friends – just how keen was made gut-churningly clear at the end of the first episode when, her clumsy sexual overtures to a fellow reader having been rejected, Claire crawled brokenly along the hallway of her flat, shrieking, "No fucking fucking for seven fucking months" and "Nobody wants me". Typically, in a series that delights in pulling the rug from under the viewer, this lurching descent into melodrama was followed by an equally sudden about-turn into social comedy, when another reader emerged from Claire's bathroom.

The other members of the group are the wheelchair-bound, tongue-tied yet gorgeous Kenny, whose most anodyne utterances are greeted with well-intended choruses of congratulation from the others; Barney, the object of Claire's affections, a smug PhD student with, it's emerged, a heroin habit; a trio of bored footballers' wives – the tea-and-biscuit-obsessed Janis, and the Kenny-obsessed Dirka and Fist (it's a Dutch name); and the runtish, disreputable-looking Rab, who has some mysterious hold over Janis's husband.

Even if The Book Group is not inducing droves of frustrated singles to air their views on Captain Corelli's Mandolin to a sympathetic audience, it is well worth noting, for two reasons. First, it picks up on an interesting social phenomenon, the rise of book-chat and the book-group in a society that a few years ago looked to be heading towards post-literacy. Second, because it has a complexity, an allusiveness, a demure reluctance to rub the audience's nose in the jokes that is almost unheard of in the modern British sitcom.

Not that it is British exactly, being written and directed by Annie Griffin – like Claire, an American based in Glasgow, though for obvious reasons I'm reluctant to push the autobiographical element. Over the phone from Seville, where she is polishing her Spanish and working on another script, Griffin describes the social reality underlying The Book Group: "So many people are talking about books and I myself was spending so much time reading. The best places to hang out are those giant book-stores, like Borders and Waterstone's. And almost everyone I know is in a book group."

It is certainly true that the number of book groups has swelled enormously in recent years, in this country and abroad. For Britain, the most-quoted estimate is 50,000 members; according to Jenny Hartley of the Roehampton Institute, whose survey "Reading Groups" was published by the OUP last year, the groups are almost all newish – 67 per cent are less than five years old and 79 per cent less than 10 years. It is an overwhelmingly female activity: 69 per cent of groups are all-women, 27 per cent are mixed and only 4 per cent all-men. It is also not an activity favoured by the young: two-thirds of members are over 40, very few under 30. These statistics are not reflected in Griffin's fictional group (on the other hand, Hartley does note that the rare under-30s prefer mixed company, which is true of The Book Group). The readers tend to be well-educated and well-off; the books they read tend to fall into the category of middle- to high-brow modern fiction (a Booker shortlisting doesn't do any harm): aside from Captain Corelli's Mandolin, favourites include Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things, Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace, and Ian McEwan's Enduring Love.

Given that reading, in or out of groups, is one of the most popular leisure activities in Britain, it seems odd that television hasn't paid more attention to it – snooker and fishing do far better for airtime, despite having far fewer devotees. Griffin was aware of this when she came up with the idea for The Book Group: "It's something you always hear at producers' meetings, that they're looking for a book programme idea. I did have that in mind, why don't books work on television."

Perhaps, then, The Book Group came as the answer to a scheduler's prayer. All the same, it is bold of Channel 4 to have given over its primetime Friday-night comedy slot – home of Friends and Father Ted – to a relatively unknown quantity. Previously, Griffin was only known to a select few as creator of Coming Soon, a cruelly hilarious three-part series about the competing egos in an avant-garde touring theatre troupe, shown in 1999. It won critical acclaim but, as one reviewer noted at the time, for those outside the world of the arts and media it must have seemed rather alien.

Still, within that world its impact was considerable. Joanna Scanlan, one of the stars, says: "Wherever I go, people are constantly saying to me, 'Oh, you're the girl who was in Coming Soon.' They look at you with a funny, mushy face of admiration." Of Griffin, she says: "She's always come at everything from a side angle, not the conventional approach at all. So what you get from her work is something that's really invigorated – it might be material that you've seen before... but she comes at it from an angle that's quite unusual, quite hard and unsentimental."

That sense of approaching her material from a different viewpoint must have something to do with Griffin's transplantation from the US. One of the most exciting things about Coming Soon is its extraordinarily acute, ruthless observation of the British class system, seen in, for example, the utterly casual way that middle-class Barney dismisses working-class Rab, barely addressing a word to him during the entire series. Perhaps it's also to do with her background in fringe theatre and "performance", the source of Coming Soon: in that series and in The Book Group, she rehearsed intensively with the cast, developing characters in tandem with them and often taking their suggestions: "The best lines all come from the actors." Scanlan confirms that this makes her a joy for actors to work with; it also means that Griffin retains control of her script well into the production process, in a way other writers can't.

The result is a sitcom of extraordinary depth, one that repays (as I can confirm from my VCR) repeated viewing before you can grasp all the ironies of the dialogue and subterfuges carrying on between characters, and one that has the nerve to save some of its best surprises for last. In fact, the best compliment I can come up with is this: it isn't like a television series at all – it is more like a book.

'The Book Group' is on Channel 4 on Friday at 9.30pm