Sally4ever

One of the most-read posts on Just One More Episode has been my piece on Nighty Night, a slightly obscure and incredibly offensive sitcom from fifteen years ago.  It remains one of my favourite shows of all time and its creator and star, Julia Davis, has long held hero status among a group of friends and me who live our lives by the teachings and best lines of this comedy.  Whenever Julia is involved in anything else, I am there.  She’s known for playing the perennial sourpuss Dawn Sutcliffe in Gavin & Stacey (whose recent Christmas special was the best thing about the festive season this year), while her 2016 series, Camping, pleased fans with its trademarks of Davis’s brand of comedy: inordinate social awkwardness caused by politeness forcing others to tolerate unacceptable behaviour and the sexually predatory jezebel.  I’ve also watched a series of Hunderby, a period black comedy that again explores many of the same tropes.  While the BBC was Nighty Night’s home, all subsequent vehicles have operated within the empire of Sky, and 2018’s Sally4ever is no exception.  Lacking a subscription during its debut and subsequent BAFTA win, I’ve only just caught up on my Julia Davis fix.  So, journey with me as we turn my ill-thought-out responses into another one of these posts.

Firstly, I’ve been able to assuage some of my Julia Davis withdrawals through the medium of podcast.  Dear Joan And Jericha sees Davis team up with Vicki Pepperdine (who steals the show in Camping) as a pair of local radio agony aunts responding to listeners’ letters about relationship and anatomy woes.  Rather than sympathy, they deal out female-hating judgement while criticising graphic accompanying photos and dispensing appalling advice.  All the while, their own ludicrous backstories are fleshed out, cementing the view that they are in no position to be telling anybody else what to do with their life.  Either way, its first series was a joyous listen (if you enjoy turning heads on the bus by laughing out loud uncontrollably) and the second delivered more of the same.  In fact, I was lucky enough (through work) to go to the launch party of the sophomore season.  So, er, yeah, I got to see Julia Davis in the flesh.  And by see, I mean stand as close as possible to her while my eyes bored into her face and she (hopefully) was unable to detect my fandom.  I was offered the chance to meet her (and two thirds of My Dad Wrote A Porno) but I don’t cope well with celebrities (see post on House Of Cards) so I scarpered off into the night, colliding with Cardinal Burns’ Seb Cardinal on the way out (more on this later).

With that distance from its creator, then, allow me to crack on with my unsolicited views.  Let’s organise them into the three best things about the show and then we can look at the three worst things.  It’s important to be balanced in your arguments, as we all learned doing our GCSE essays, alongside the holy rule of always read the question.

First best thing about it

Sally.  It’s not called Sally4ever for nothing.  Sally is played by Catherine Shepherd who you’ll recognise as one of Mark’s girlfriends from Peep Show.  As the programme’s name suggests, people get obsessed with Sally.  The funniest part is that it’s very difficult to see why.  Shepherd’s performance perfectly captures the mousey blandness of this sort of non-character, making everyone else’s fixations all the more alarming.  Her outfits are all impractical flowy cardigans and such.  She is terrible at thinking up reasons to say no to things, relying on “I’m really tired actually” or “I need the toilet” when it’s already too late.  It’s equally charming and infuriating.  Her ineffectiveness sees her in a loveless relationship with skin-crawling David (Alex Macqueen – Neil’s “gay” dad from The Inbetweeners and not his first collaboration with Davis) and his terrible bump, before getting inexplicably smitten by Davis’s own character, Emma.  Its Emma’s self-serving manipulation of Sally that propels us through the seven half-hour instalments, duly escalating beyond all repair thanks to Sally’s overruled protests.  She’s all of us lost in our thirties with out-of-control lives.

Second best thing about it

Felicity Montagu is here for another great character turn with Davis, this time as Elanor, the personification of the annoying office swot.  Using her mobility chair for sympathy and privilege, Elanor’s every line is a condescending drawl that will irk you senseless before you can muster the ability to start chuckling.  From her fluffy-topped stationery to her infatuation with Nigel (Julian Barratt as the office’s most desirable chap, and that’s scraping the barrel), she’s a joy to behold, particularly when she is aiming her wonderful passive-aggression at Sally, who can barely stick up for herself.

Third best thing about it

It’s Julia Davis all over.  If you loved Nighty Night, you’ll love this.  Because it’s nearly the same thing.  Which leads me on to the negatives.

First worst thing about it

It’s the same as Nighty Night.  Instead of Jill Tyrrell chasing Angus Deayton, you’ve got Emma ruining Sally’s life.  There’s the same gentle mocking of Christianity (easy target, though), obsession with toilet humour (especially poo), delusions of sexiness, cuckolded hideous lover and many other Davis-isms, right down to the self-entitlement around fancy hot drinks, graduating from Nighty Night’s “It would be nice if someone got me a cappuccino” to Sally4ever’s “I’m just waiting for that cortado.”  Don’t get me wrong, I’ll continue to campaign for Davis’s national treasure status.  As a fan of anything she does, I’ll celebrate that Sally4ever is similar to Nighty Night and lap up every moment, spurning more populist trash like The Apprentice and Gogglebox.  But that enjoyment is all sadly tinged with a slight concern that this is all we’ll ever get.  But, who am I to criticise?  I currently have zero successful sitcoms against my name, and just one unsuccessful blog, so I’ll try not to be some sort of angry internet troll.  I still lolled through most of Sally4ever.

Second worst thing about it

It does sort of bumble along.  Well, why shouldn’t it?  Let’s just leave Julia alone – she’s a goddess.  Episode one sets up all the business of Sally’s dreadful relationship with David, her terrible job and ineffective performance at it (under batsh*t boss Deborah) and initial encounter with the exotic sexy promise of Emma’s alternative lifestyle.  But then episode two is just more of this.  Luckily things pick up with the introduction in the third part of Sally’s old friends who invite the new couple to dinner, throwing into contrast Sally’s meandering approach to life against the settled-down-with-kids routine.  In conclusion, neither seem very happy.  Cast as the dissatisfied husband is Seb Cardinal (from paragraph two of this very blogpost).  Clearly having too much fun playing the dad who doesn’t want to grow up, his character is easily corrupted by Emma, culminating in her sliming into a film he’s directing with an ill-gotten background role.  What unfolds on set is toe-curling in its cringeability, but what happens in the trailer afterwards will have you question everything about this production.  Well done Seb, though.  He also coped really well with my fanboying over him when I bumped into him when leaving the podcast party.  “You’re Seb Cardinal,” I said, as if pointing out useful information, “I’m a massive fan.”  Cue awkward pause before he mentioned texting Julia about getting the access code for the party and I die inside about not being cool, talented and famous.  He had liked my tweet promoting my blogpost on Cardinal Burns that very week but going into that would have just been too painful, so I’ll write about it on the internet here instead.

Third worst thing about it

I have to be honest: I would love Julia Davis to have had a West Country accent in this.  Why not just be exactly like Nighty Night?  It’s basic of me to want this, and there are plenty of funny voices to go around in Sally4ever.  It’s my issue that all I want is a third series of Nighty Night and I’ll just have to live with that.

Anyway, let’s conclude by saying that Sally4ever is one for the fans, and everyone should be a fan of Julia Davis.  But not everyone can take the unique brand of humour.  If you don’t think it’s funny to watch a graphic lesbian sex scene (played for laughs, mind you) that culminates in a soiled sanitary product being flung across a room (with no hands) then maybe you should stay in your lane.  I’m here to celebrate a strong woman in comedy, known for her creativity with language (frothy might be one of her favourite words), her casting of wonderful actors (I’ve not even gone into Pepperdine’s classic turn as nonsense therapist, Belinda) and her ability to capture perfectly our paralysis by manners.  The next time someone’s mugging you off, have a word with yourself, or you’ll end up in a situation you can’t get out of.  JuliaDavis4ever.

This Time With Alan Partridge

I’ve been doing something a bit naughty recently.  I’ve been snorting on packed trains in various failed attempts to stem my chuckling at different comedy shows, holding my poxy iPhone (battery life of 20 minutes max) a hair’s breadth from my nose while peering into its fractured screen and the hilarity within (unless the sun is streaming through the window directly onto it, in which case I can’t see anything).  I’ve been doing this with Fleabag, but there’s a second prime piece of iPlayer content that’s been causing me to snigger into my keep-cup coffee on the painful Southern service to Angmering (where I’ve been spending weekends learning how to Sunday roast in my parents’ kitchen (not a euphemism)): This Time With Alan Partridge.  There was a lady next to me on the return jaunt to Clapham Junction who I caused to jolt awake with my rampant tittering at Partridge’s antics, but luckily that wasn’t the most annoying thing I did to her as I did also accidentally drop my whole jacket on her head when trying to get it out of the overhead rack without exposing too much of my soft, soft tummy flesh while reaching overhead.  So, why has this show been causing me to do so many laughs?

Firstly, let’s look at the character himself, as Alan’s been with us since 1991.  We’ll need to take this post as me ticking off sideswiping at all of his previous output, from Knowing Me Knowing You With Alan Partridge to I’m Alan Partridge.  Played so ably by Steve Coogan, Partridge’s character frontier has blurred into most performances by his co-creator, but this is more down to my tiny mind’s lack of capacity rather than Coogan’s abilities.  He still kills it in The Other Guys (watch now for immediate LOLs) and has a great time in Hamlet 2 (definitely a real film and definitely enjoyable).  Back in the nineties, Partridge parodied the kind of vile, middle-class, jingoistic, chauvinist chap who lounged across many of TV’s chat sofas, exaggerating delusions of grandeur and self-righteousness to comedic success.  But, in a subversive twist, as with House Of Cards, real life has plumbed depths deeper than writers’ darkest imagining of our dystopian day-to-day lives.  2019 is home to broadcasting men who shouldn’t be listened to whilst raving wildly in bus shelters with their trousers round their ankles, let alone telling people what to think about driving cars while wearing bad jeans (Jeremy Clarkson) or still on telly trolling minority groups after publishing fake Iraqi prisoner abuse photos in a national newspaper (Piers Morgan).

This blog isn’t really a place where I want to attack people, but Piers Morgan isn’t people: a slathering antique whose chinly ambiguity is surpassed only by the variation in distances between his beady eyes.  I firmly believe that there is a fourth type of matter in the universe in addition to solid, liquid and gas, and this is Piers Morgan’s chin.  What even is it?  Before I get worked up, I should land my point: in comparison, Partridge suddenly seems harmless, with just enough charm that you sympathise with his terrible ambition but not too much pathos that you can’t laugh your head off when it all inevitably goes wrong for him.

Secondly, then, This Time apes a much-loved staple of teatime telly so well that we really do need to ask ourselves some tough questions as a nation: why do people tolerate mindless twaddle like The One Show?  It’s just so broad that it’s dripping in blandness.  It’s nice enough, but, for a bastard like me, being nice is not enough.  The moment I hear the opening note of the theme tune, I get shivers down my spine.  Surely there is more to life.  I remember a family holiday to Menorca when my niece was still crawling.  My dad’s first priority when entering any room is to turn the TV on (guess where my love of telly comes from) and villas on Mediterranean holiday are islands are no exception to this rule.  There we were, free of the banality of UK weekday life, ready to kick back and relax, escaping the drizzle, when suddenly: “Ooooooone, do-do-do-do-do-do, ooooooone, do-do-do-do-do-do…”  We had come all this way, only to be subjected to VTs about dog-walking in Wales and a live interview with someone who once did something underwhelming.  I immediately jumped in the pool.  The only good thing to come of it is that my toddler niece learned to blow raspberries in tune to the music, demonstrating a precocious skillset in recognising tosh and, also, the performing arts.

A former flatmate of mine used to work on the production team, going out around the UK making VTs.  I was able to ask him who the people were behind the cameras sneering and jeering at the hosts, like some sort of rent-an-audience designed to make The One Show feel like more of an impromptu spectacle than a settee-based conversation slowly dying in front of a floor-to-ceiling window.  Often, on his way out the door after a day’s editing of features on Britain’s favourite paving slab, he would be intercepted by a manager, innocently asking why he wasn’t hanging around to watch the live show.  He’d then lose his evening to providing the in-studio atmosphere, understandably reluctant to stay late as you would be in any job, though instead of finishing a deck or bashing out emails, he was forced to pretend to enjoy The One Show, possibly seeing a Hollywood A-lister asked for their views on the sexualisation of pre-pubescent girls or witnessing a politician being pushed to provide a response to the question: what is your favourite owl?

At this point, I should probably mention This Time With Alan Partridge in some shape or form.  The premise is that there exists a live BBC magazine-format show (This Time) which desperately needs a step-in male host.  Cue the With Alan Partridge bit.  As viewers, we therefore revel in the live links as they are filmed, the downtime in the studio as they play out and some of the actual VTs themselves.  Alan is true to form, desperate to go to any length to make his appointment permanent, drawing the limelight back to his terrible chat but then getting annoyed when his moments to shine drown in misjudgement, mediocrity or disaster.  Not only is the fake show stolen from Partridge, but the actual televisual format this post is about is also stolen.  Susannah Fielding plays Jennie Gresham, the existing host who must slide up the sofa felt to make way for Partridge’s man-spread legs and scotch egg breath.  She goes beyond being spot on in convincing us she is a real host, arriving at some kind of comedy peak where her shocked responses and professional cover ups merit more praise than I can conjure with my by-comparison shoddy prose.

As ever, a warm welcome is extended by me to Felicity Montagu (loved for her work in Nighty Night) as Partridge’s suffering-addicted assistant, Lynn.  She shuffles onto set when the cameras are off, seeing to Partridge’s refreshment needs (“Glass of water!”) or to slut-shame Jennie Gresham passively aggressively in relation to her choice of blouse.  More Lynn would really only improve things, but there’s a steady stream of guests and contributors who bring vitality to the comedy, from Ruth Duggan’s refusal to agree with anything Partridge says, to Simon Denton’s inability to make his giant interactive social media screen work properly (which is gratifying in itself given that no programme ever has been improved by the inclusion of a tweet expressing the opinion of Dave from High Wycombe).

Despite all the praise I’ve heaped here, though, the main office conversation around This Time With Alan Partridge concerns itself with mixed reviews, dwindling audiences and no recommissioning (an ironic situation for Alan).  To borrow some of his own self-assurance, I would conclude that anyone that doesn’t get the humour in this Partridge vehicle is completely stupid.  The awkward flow is all part of the concept, with every second orchestrated to enhance its own ridiculousness.  If you can’t bear the cringe with each unexpected silence, then, by all means, watch the actual One Show, or Good Morning Britain with Piers Morgan, because you’ve truly found your level.  Meanwhile, I’ll go back to ruining public transport with my content consumption, which has now expanded beyond overloud staccato laughter while viewing the iPlayer into brandishing the dodgy cover photography of I, Partridge: We Need To Talk About Alan while I indulge in reading Partridge’s autobiography on the Tube.