Gogglebox

It’s time to acknowledge something that’s been painfully clear in all of these posts: I’m pretty sure I’m addicted to TV.  Things came to a head in these last few weeks of I’m A Celebrity.  Until the Sky man comes next weekend (so that I have ITV2 HD in time for Love Island – always set and achieve your life goals), I’m in a household without any decent way of recording off my massive OLED telly.  Unable to stomach a nightly hour-long show complete with adverts (especially at Christmas, the most odious time of the year) I decided to watch the show catching up a day behind on ITV Hub.  However, this VoD service has the picture quality of peering through a steamed shower panel, the ads are all still there but at higher frequency and it loses your programme coming out of each break with a cheeky Whoops! message that infuriates more than it sympathises.  Realising it would only be a matter of time before my remote was smashed through my LG 55” screen, I reluctantly switched back to live viewing.  Suddenly, we were back in HD, and I could tell which one was Ant and which one was Dec again.  The dreaded ad breaks became three-minute chunks during which I would find other things to do, banal things like wash up, clean the kitchen, Whatsapp pals or stare into space – each preferable to watching supermarkets argue about who can provide the most magical Christmas.  The bigger drawback, though, was that I became a slave to the appointment to view.

Every evening was a countdown to 9pm, lest I miss the opening link.  Before the I’m A Celeb final, the nightly show was running longer till 10.30, cutting thirty minutes into my sacred bedtime and making the 5.30am alarm the next morning for Crossfit all the more devastating.  It was hell.  I’m relieved it’s over, despite loving the show.  My point is, keeping up with my favourites and devouring new boxsets in order to keep this blog interesting is starting to dominate my evening life.  I’m ending up watching hours each night, normally too exhausted from the early morning and full day of work to do anything productive (first-world problem – it warrants no sympathy).  Once my bum hits the sofa, that’s it.  I’m supposed to be furnishing a new flat, but now that the TV den part of the living room is up and running, I’ve a bad feeling we’re going to be stalled here for some time before there’s any further progress.  I have become a couch potato.  I have become my father.

It’s only fitting, then, that this week I should take a look at another set of people who while away their time on this fascinating planet sedentary on DFS furniture staring at a telly screen (though my sofa is from Heal’s everybody).  So, let’s do Gogglebox.  But, before we go any further, I should confess that this is a programme I don’t watch.  Don’t worry, though, that’s never stopped me throwing in my two pennies’ worth before (see posts on The Apprentice and Keeping Up With The Kardashians).  I’ve channel-surfed on enough Friday evenings to catch sufficient chunks of it to have the measure of the format and its cast.  Please read on while I oscillate wildly between tearing it asunder and extolling its charm.

And I do have some bones to pick with Gogglebox.  For the unaware, it’s a TV programme about people watching TV programmes.  It’s a real-life The Royle Family.  Up and down Britain, we mutually view selected televisual highlights with a cast of actual non-famous normos.  That’s right – we watch people watch telly.  Despite all of the above making it clear I’m wasting my life away, this format is the very definition to me of wasted time, and it’s for this reason I never make any effort to watch it.  Additionally, it shows you all the must-see moments of the week just gone which I rightly suspect would have the effect of making me want to watch even more TV.  This would benefit no-one.  But what I didn’t realise about the filming process was that the cast of Gogglebox know what they’re going to watch – they have scheduled filming sessions.  The production team pick the shows, put them on and then sit down to shoot the reactions.  When I realised this, I was very disappointed.  I thought we had more of a Big Brother vibe: families sign up to a camera being in the living room, go about their viewing lives as normal, and then the best bits are picked up and edited together.  This, I always felt, would be a fairer reflection of what we really watch and how we really react.  It’s excessive and impractical, but that’s just where my imagination goes to first.

Linked to this first fallacy and the fact that the participants know they are being filmed we have the following consequence: their responses aren’t that natural.  It’s an artificial set up.  I therefore can’t escape the feeling they’re all showing off.  Don’t get me wrong, I love showing off.  I do it constantly and enjoy it in others if they are entertaining me.  But Gogglebox acts like it’s a sneak peek behind closed doors to a more humdrum evening, with interstitial shots of household façades leading to cosy living-room set-ups, allowing we privileged few to glimpse real truth from unaware subjects.  But no, it’s just regional accents trying to think of the funniest thing to say about that week’s news or the John Lewis advert.  And it’s at that point I stop caring.

Everyone talks about their favourite Goggleboxers, but I don’t really know who’s who beyond those that have appeared in other reality shows (looking at you, Celebrity Big Brother).  What I do love is the diversity.  We have all points of the UK compass covered here: a wide array of family structures, lifestyle choices, ethnic backgrounds, cultural values, political persuasions, incomes, faiths, genders, ages, sexualities etc – basically every flavour of Brit you can shove out of the way on a crowded train.  What unites them all is a need to redecorate their living rooms.  It’s a bit like Come Dine With Me when you see that someone’s kitchen is a bit natty in comparison to all the show kitchens you see on cookery shows.  That said, given how many of them have hundreds of dogs sprawled across their soft furnishings, rubbing their worms into the fabric and wafting their canine farts over the cushions, there’d be no point updating any of the interiors.  You can sometimes smell the dog breath through the screen.  But it doesn’t matter what I think: what’s touching is the genuine love and affection these family members and friends have for each other.  That, at least, is always reassuringly genuine, if sprinkled with dog hair.

So, who on earth do I think I am talking disparagingly about Gogglebox simply because the people on it watch TV and do showing off?  This whole blog is based around the exact same concept: I watch too much TV and then show off about it, desperately seeking attention for my musings, awaiting offers of global syndication and secretly beaming when friends compliment my writing in real life.  The difference, sadly for me, is that Gogglebox still has millions of viewers, whereas I’m only getting tens of thousands of reads here…

F Is For Family

I think we’ve all seen this little box.  There it sits in your Netflix menu, coming up time and time again.  You’re looking for that latest boxset that’s become mandatory viewing within your social circle, or double-checking just in case Netflix have started putting popular films on again (they haven’t).  But no, drawing your eyes from Wild Wild Country or Kingdom is this show: F Is For Family.  Yet, you’ve no idea why.  Its beigey-whiteish hues, its crudely illustrated characters (each with a scowl), its name that doesn’t really make any sense: none of these things are particularly appealing.  But don’t worry, I won’t let you be worn down by attrition.  Frequency is not the same as quality.  I, the boxset ranger, have done you all a favour.  Ladies and gentlemen, I’ve only gone and watched all of F Is For Family.  And now, by vindicating me with a reading of this blog, I shall impart unto you whether you should succumb to its persistence (like a Riverdale) or if you should ignore the programme’s existence entirely, thereby maintaining your quality of life (much as I didn’t when I sat through all of Altered Carbon).

It's an animated show about a dysfunctional family.  So far, so Simpsons.  Also, so Family Guy, so Bob’s Burgers, so so many other programmes.  You’ll note I haven’t dared yet cover the first two in this list on Just One More Episode.  However, keep reading my posts forever, as both are in my strategic content plan (Bob’s Burgers, though, I have totally done, so click on that link then and you can get yourself caught up on that post in case you’ve ever missed anything I have to say), but such influential cultural phenomena require a bit of a run up.  I’m still laughing that I used the word strategic in relation to my content plan.  There’s no strategy; there’s no plan; and there’s not that much content beside me talking about myself (so, to that end, keep telling me what I should cover).  The trick to approaching any new animated family is to find what’s different about them compared to all those that have sat on cartoon sofas before them.  Otherwise, you risk King Of The Hill happening all over again: everyone expects Simpsonian high jinks and ends up with a more subtle and specific form of humour.

Our big difference in F Is For Family is that everything is set in the seventies.  From our morally advanced glasshouse of 2019 and beyond (Brexit, Trump etc), we can throw stones at this bygone decade’s attitudes towards all matter of things about which we want to believe we have achieved greater enlightenment: gender equality, racial equality, health and safety.  These are all played for laughs, leaving you to marvel that things were ever that way, before an ensuing crisis of confidence in your own open mind: is this joke at the expense of former attitudes to women in the workplace, or is it at the expense of women?  Well, here’s a moral conundrum nobody wants when watching a cartoon.  Either way, I’m not sure why I’ve brought it up, as I’ve always loved subversive comedy: the main thing is that you’re thinking about what you think.  Why not have some uncomfortable laughs along the way?

That’s the big difference covered then.  Otherwise, the family in the For Family bit of F Is For Family is run of a certain kind of mill.  Frank Murphy is our paterfamilias (a word I’ve never used before, and I’m 34), all white shirt and angry voice.  His tirades are laced with enough effing and jeffing that you can’t help thinking about calling social services to ensure the safety of his children.  But don’t worry, as wife Sue is a strong foil to his clenched fists and spewed vitriol.  Indeed, eldest son Kevin is such a loser (enjoying wizard-based rock and failing at school) that you can see why Frank is not a fan.  Youngest offspring, Bill and Maureen, add an extra element of sinister undertones, most notably whenever Bill is forced to witness some sort of harrowing violent or sexual act: his haunted eyes will stay with you long after you’ve chuckled at his plight.

Beyond the Murphys, it’s the supporting cast that are more interesting.  Ginny Throater is a creation whose neighbourly annoyingness is compounded by her incredible accent: she extends her every vowel to cover the full range and this just bloody tickles me, alright.  Bob Pogo, Frank’s morbidly obese, chain-smoking boss at the airport, serves to lampoon our past’s bad attitudes to personal health.  You can literally hear the fatty flesh of his neck compressing his windpipe when he speaks or wheezes while trying to reach mayonnaise from his mobility scooter.  A completely unacceptable figure in many ways, yet why does his ilk still block my path on many a busy street?  The blackest humour is saved for Ben and Kenny, two neglected neighbourhood kids inhabiting woodland when shooed out of houses.  Neither has jackets, but Kenny does have a full nappy, despite being way beyond the age of potty training.  Their throwaway lines are dark, especially when they mention they are looked after at home by a grandmother who is sleeping at the end of the stairs.

Let’s conclude now.  Those were my observations.  You have read them.  Should you watch this show, though?  Well, I’m going to go off my response to hearing that a fourth series was on the way: I felt positive about the prospect of watching more.  Therefore, this is a good show.  It’s neatly episodic, yet the Murphys’ fortunes progress (or decline) across the sequence of a season.  I want to know what happens next.  There’ll be loads more silliness to chuckle at when we reach the eighties.  So next time that little beigey-whiteish box is staring at you from the TV screen, and you’ve got half an hour spare, click it and watch it.  Just don’t ask me what the F is for.  Probably f***.