UPDATE 15:45pm: ITV has clarified their earlier statement, saying: "ITV and the BBC are talking about the title, Love Life, and a decision will be taken further down the line once both dramas have been produced."
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At the end of August, BBC One announced an exciting new drama commission titled Love Life.
The show, created by award-winning writer and director Dominic Savage, boasts a strong cast of British actors including former Time Lord David Tennant, Billie Piper, Jane Horrocks and David Morrissey.
And this week ex-EastEnders’ star Lacey Turner and Bafta-winning actress Vicky McClure were added to the cast of the “improvised drama series”.
It all sounded great.
So you can imagine our confusion when we received an email from ITV this morning unveiling a new drama commission for ITV One called, yes, you guessed it – Love Life.
Had ITV bought the show from the BBC already, because it looked like such a ratings winner?
Or were the creative television juices running so low inside ITV HQ that they’d resorted to nicking the BBC show’s name?
A spokesperson for ITV said: “We did check with BBC before announcing our commission and its name.
“The BBC aren’t planning to use that title for their drama any more, we had another chat and they are changing their name.”
However, it seems not everyone at the BBC is aware that these discussions happened, or that they are changing the title of their show.
A BBC spokesperson referred us to the original press release and stated: “The BBC's drama, Love Life, was announced on the 26th of August and discussed at Edinburgh Television Festival.”
To be clear, the name is the only thing that’s the same about the two programmes.
The ITV version is written by Bill Gallagher (The Prisoner, Lark Rise to Candleford) and is set in Manchester.
Their cast is yet to be announced, but the show’s blurb reads:
Love Life will tell the story of Joe and Lucy’s faltering relationship. Feeling in a good place and as if she’s ready to settle down, Lucy mentions she might stop taking the pill which sends commitment-phobic Joe running for the nearest airport to travel the world and scale Mount Everest before he gets tied down.
Twelve months later, travel-bedraggled Joe returns from trekking in the Himalayas and having conquered Everest to find Lucy has moved on with her ‘love life’...
The drama will intercut between present day and flashback to the previous twelve months as we piece together the jigsaw that is their lives.
The BBC have yet to respond to ITV's assertion that they will be changing titles.
Photo mock-up by Huffington Post UK picture desk.