I Hate Suzie

Something terrible happened towards the end of last year.  As a liberal hipster, my easily distracted thumb was pottering around on the Guardian app and I came across an article counting down the top 50 TV shows of 2020.  Like you, I did wonder for a moment why I hadn’t been asked to write it, but then realised I am not actually a professional journalist.  But, as an amateur connoisseur of boxsets, I quickly clicked it and read it, anxious to see whether I could nod in reassuring agreement or reel dramatically at their choices.  Naturally, in first place we had I May Destroy You.  Well done me; I had watched this.  But, at number two, was I Hate Suzie.  For shame, I had never found the promos of this show appealing.  I had in fact ignored a friend’s recommendation to try it, even though he was the same rascal that turned me on to my beloved Industry.  With lockdown going on forever, I made my way through its eight episodes on Sky Boxsets.

Billie Piper is as much a part of British culture as xenophobic newspaper headlines and voting in comedy prime ministers.  A massive popstar when I was in secondary school, she purveyed pop songs so cheesy and catchy that we laughed derisively about how uncool she was.  We were much cooler, being obscure, untalented children and all.  Until recently, though, my household did contain a CD single of Honey To The Bee, an underrated subsequent release of hers that almost references my surname.  It might still be around here somewhere.  But, thanks to my own perception of her as a singer, I never engaged with any of her acting up till now.  Secret Diary Of A Call Girl was a mainstay of pre-Love Island ITV2, but not of my viewing schedule.  Yet my friend, and the Guardian write-up, promised something worth investigating.  As a sufferer of FOMOIEOYCRL (fear of missing out in end-of-year cultural ranking lists), the completionist in me was prepared to embrace Billie and welcome a bit of Piper back into my life.  Because I wanted to.

Our premise is eerily similar to Piper’s own real-life trajectory.  She plays Suzie Pickles, a national sweetheart shot to fame on a reality TV singing show (hello X Factor) before transitioning into a TV actress.  She’s one of those people in the magazines and on the gossip websites and just doing this now.  Only the last thing she’s just done, putting at risk her entire career, is suffer a leak of private, explicit photos to the media.  Sadly, the shots are not a solo performance and her accompaniment comes in the form of an extramarital phallus, so there’s all that to deal with as well.  Each whirlwind instalment focuses on a single one of the eight stages in Pickles’ response to the trauma.

In the process, Piper and co-creator (and full writer) Lucy Prebble (as previously collaborated with on Secret Diary Of A Call Girl) use the unfolding disasters to provide deliciously inventive commentary on a huge number of our daily staples: the treatment of women, motherhood, fame, disability, loneliness, sexuality and so on.  From the audible diarrhoea-induing first discovery of the pics to a proliferation of meltdowns, via awkward family events (the wedding of Pickles’ sister is outrageous and universal at the same time), frustrated self-loving (for more or less a whole episode) and the ripest sending-up of celebrity culture, Piper’s performance is everything.  The camera often just gives us all that face and it becomes our anchor in the madness, trapping us with Pickles in her nightmare.

Yet more intriguing is her agent and best friend, Naomi (Leila Farzad).  The dynamics of their relationship creak under years of irreconcilable imbalance until we scream at Naomi to respect herself and prioritise her own needs.  Naomi gives one of the best ever shutdowns to casual, micro-aggressive racism I have ever seen, but her wronging by men knows no end (that train journey).  Pickles’ husband is himself human collateral in the fallout.  Daniel Ings (one of the joys from W1A) is exasperated as Cob, eagerly weaponizing their deaf son to his advantage yet less than keen to lose the perks of having a famous wife.  Even with her success, it is he, as the man, who expects to be more important in everything that happens.

I admit to lacking patience with some episodes, but I am learning to love this freewheeling style (as seen in I May Destroy You) where creativity and storytelling gang up not to care about what you’re expecting.  By the final scene of the final episode, my sympathy for Suzie Pickles was at its peak.  I had never hated her and I don’t know who did.  Having it all is simply another thing to feel lonely in spite of, only it emphasises the unjustifiability of that loneliness, so you feel even lonelier.  Does Suzie’s preoccupation with herself drive others away, or do they give up on her when she doesn’t give them what they think they need?  I still can’t work it out.

Motherland

I’ve been doing some parenting recently.  Well, I held a friend’s baby for about half an hour while she had a crème brûlée (the mum, not the three-month-old).  Despite not having procreated, I was fairly confident I could keep the young lad content with my impressive jiggling skills, honed over a decade ago when I was a quaternary caregiver to my niece.  A couple of times however, I could sense his bottom lip quiver, his copious cheeky cheeks redden and his little face screw up in unhappiness, prompting me to adopt a new position to distract him from any number of distress sources: hunger, overheating, a soiled gusset, boredom with the view.  When the moment came, I was fairly satisfied to be handing him back over, even if the girls had commented that his 6.5kg of weight had leant my biceps an alluring bulge.  If I factor up the duration of that brief stint of (quite literally) baby sitting to a week, I have to multiply its difficulty by 336, and if we go all the way to the eighteenth birthday at which point I assume you turf your progeny out into the street and cut them off from the family fortune, that’s a total of 314,496 units of parenting.  In short: child-rearing is hard.  And as the owner of a phallus, I’ve got the easy end of the stick, as it were.  Motherhood is hardest of all.  Here, then, is the hilarious truth that forms the comedic backbone to BBC sitcom, Motherland, whose achievements we will be celebrating today.

Too millennial ever to be aware of what’s scheduled on the actual TV, I was only vaguely conscious of Motherland’s two series when they first went out, catching glimpses whenever the real telly came when switching from Netflix to Amazon Prime.  I knew one of its creators was Sharon Horgan, who had co-created Catastrophe, and again, following my nose in working out why people on podcasts like a thing, I finally plumped to dive in after spotting Motherland’s first series appear on Netflix, before eventually tracking down the second on iPlayer.  I was craving the wit and cynicism of British humour after having so many glossy American boxsets in recent rotation: Power, Watchmen and, er, Love Island USA.  The situation is suburban London and the comedy is balancing childcare, a career, a relationship, and, worst of all, other mums, so let’s meet the mothers of this land:

Julia

The master of the fake smile, Julia covers up each episode’s mounting shower of disasters with a suitably correlating uptick in false cheerfulness, effectively using effusive exclamations to paper over cracks in her best-laid plans until she ultimately breaks down in ranting and raving.  We cross our fingers and toes that she will catch a break, but she’s ever thwarted by each element of what should be her support structure: her husband would help but he has to play golf with the lads, her mother would help but she’s entitled to enjoy her retirement, the other mums would help but they’re busy forming a sort of mummy Mean Girls (mean mums?) at the local café, consigning Julia to the table by the toilets.  A career in PR only makes matters worse, as it does most things, but it’s the people Julia meets at that lavatory-adjacent table who finally offer help.

Liz

The queen of laid-back parenting, Liz has had to develop more extreme coping strategies as a single mum.  Her seemingly thick skin places her well to encourage Julia to be less anxious, though Liz does herself later struggle with pushchair extraction when her youngest finally abandons her for nursery.  Life’s too short not to cut corners, and that time saved is better spent having a cheeky drink anyway.

Kevin

Yes, it’s a man, but Kevin is perhaps the mumsiest of all.  Contrasting with Liz’s workaround and make-do methods, Kevin is not happy unless he is out-parenting left, right and centre.  Desperate for the approval of the other mums, he volunteers for every PTA gig going, yet fails to find the acceptance he yearns for.  Mostly seen in a cagoule, his highlights are his throwaway lines about never-seen wife Gill as it’s clear to everyone but him that his approach to parenting makes her skin crawl.  Yes, Kevin is cloying, but his heart’s in the right place, and his very inclusion provides a spirited commentary on gender roles for those that are looking to find one.  Otherwise he’s a silly sausage in a bicycle helmet.

Amanda (not Mandy)

With her expensively coiffured blonde hair and yoga-taught frame, Amanda is the alpha-mummy whose every utterance either allows her to show off (less of the humble, more of the brag) or serves as a backhander to put down the other mums around her.  For some reason, I love her.

Anne

My favourite mum.  She begins as one of many flunkies to Amanda’s act as chief mum, but soon accumulates enough scene-stealing lines to guarantee belly laughs so loud that you can only hope you’re giving your neighbours a taste of their own medicine for all those lockdown reggaeton parties you’ve endured.  She’s a cautious parent, convinced all adults are out to molest or poison her offspring, which makes trick or treating challenging.  Her wardrobe malfunction at a swimming pool party and her poor management of her own IBS during a weekend away in half term both endear her further to me.

The second series also sees the introduction of Meg, a hard-partying, hard-working mum who hasn’t got time for any of your nonsense, unless it involves being abusive on night buses.  I can’t work out what they’ve been trying to do with her beyond address a lack of diversity but it’s great to have her along.  Let’s say she is wonderfully complex.

On the other hand, the kids rarely merit any significant characterisation and this is, again, because they don’t really matter.  The humour is brittle and acidic when it comes to deploring the role of modern working mums, running households, keeping everyone happy, sacrificing their interests and yet still being expected to knock up a harvest festival costume at a moment’s notice.  They’ve been told they can have it all, but yet somehow it feels like having nothing.  The swimming pool party episode illustrates this perfectly when Julia, hair done and posh outfit selected for a career-important work do, is strong-armed into in-pool supervision that leaves her showing up later at her function as drowned as a rat.  We laugh because it’s true, but as I recovered from each chortle, I had to check my childless male privilege lest I feel hopeless about a status quo whose imbalance looms large in daily lives.  Motherland’s comedy comes from its universal truth, but I’m sure we could find something else to laugh about if gender inequality no longer existed.

Catastrophe

It’s easy to feel like your life is a mess.  Maybe you’re not where you thought you would be by this age.  Maybe your social channels lead you to believe that your lifestyle is not as enviable as your friends’.  Maybe it seems like everyone you know is desperately repopulating the earth with constant progeny whose names you’ll never really be arsed to learn while you’re channelling your energies into writing an unpopular blog about your views on recent TV shows you have been watching.  Well, have I got the show for you!  This week, we are doing Catastrophe.  I had somehow completely missed this show’s existence, yet became conscious of the appearances of creators Sharon Horgan and Rob Delaney as separate guests on a number of different podcasts whose back catalogues I am working through while sitting on buses wondering how far I can let my nose peak out of my facemask before someone scowls at me.

But there it was one evening on my unnavigable Amazon Prime EPG, drawing me in during one spare half hour before bedtime.  The comedy-drama’s origins arise in a business travel fling conducted between Delaney’s Rob Norris, our American in London, and Horgan’s Sharon Morris, our Irish fortysomething single lady at home in the capital.  Norris returns to the States, but Morris has conceived a baby and it’s this mini Norris-Morris that forces Sharon and Rob to upheave their whole lives while they work out what to do next.  Can a brief affair last for four hilarious and poignant series while Sharon and Rob repeatedly end up almost self-sabotaging their own happiness?  Well, yes.

Despite originating on opposite sides of the Atlantic, Rob and Sharon’s shared sense of humour unites them into a lasting bond which neither of their respective misdemeanours ever successfully ruptures, though you repeatedly worry each time that this will surely be the end.  Trading affectionate insults while scraping back the fanciful façade in which so many marriages shroud themselves for palatable public consumption, we’re shown a truthful relationship awash with painfully raw honesty, yet still dogged with sufficient dishonesty to engender tension.  We never shy away from the blood, sweat and tears required to keep things going.  At first, I found the bickering difficult, unused as I was to such harsh storytelling.  I couldn’t hook myself into a likeability anchor with any of the main characters.  But as time progresses and the Catastrophisers grow more familiar, a familiarity develops, and you become equally invested in their happiness.  And with this comes even greater laughs – by the end of the fourth season I was disturbing my neighbours with my chortles.  Well, I imagined I was, but one was probably screaming into his headset while playing computer games and the folk upstairs were having another lockdown party with reggaeton dancing.

Most importantly, nothing is overly dramatised.  Rob’s own struggle with alcoholism in particular, while blowing up rather climactically, progresses there with a believability that makes it all the more horrific.  In short, everyone is struggling, including Rob and Sharon’s own family and friends.  Extras’ Ashley Jensen is worth her weight in gold as Fran, Sharon’s old friend who’s on call with a passive-aggressive comment at every juncture, until her own life starts to fall apart thanks to husband Chris or precocious actor son Jeffrey.  Sharon’s brother persists in being a hot mess throughout proceedings while Rob’s own friends and colleagues veer from one crisis to the next.  It’s probably only occasional babysitter Anna (played by Misfits’ goddess Lauren Socha) who has her life most on track, simply because she’s too laid back to care.  Or too young.

Storylines scatter and scarper, but, throughout, the kids are refreshingly ignored.  Rob and Sharon’s growing brood rarely come to centre stage, unless the plot requires them to bite someone or to have a name that’s difficult to pronounce.  This is about how hard it is to be an adult, a parent, a person.  The kids have it easy and are therefore not of interest.  Catastrophe’s episodes thus became essential comfort, four sets of six charming half hours to enjoy in the bath or at the end of a long day trapped inside.  The wit zips along with intelligence, anything generic is jettisoned and we’re left with a perfect balance of pure enjoyment and tempering miserable realism.  Any show that fails to acknowledge life is disastrous will ring hollow after Catastrophe, so you might as well view it yourself in order to distract from the terrible mess you have made of things.

Fleabag

It seems I’ve been going around handing out national treasure status to people willy nilly.  So let’s just recap those who have been adorned with this accolade so far on Just One More Episode.  I’m pretty sure I would have said this about Julia Davis for her work in Nighty Night (and Gavin & Stacey), plus there’s Michaela Coel from Chewing Gum.  Surely there were others, but I’m not about to read through eighty-something blogposts to check.  And it doesn’t even matter, anyway, as we are today adding another name to the list.  Step forward and wink at us cheekily, Phoebe Waller-Bridge.  There are three reasons she could be here.  The first is Killing Eve, but I haven’t actually watched that yet, as I kind of find assassins a bit unappealing (it’s a meh career, like being a surveyor) and, although it’s trapped in my iPhone on the iPlayer app (ha – two things starting with a little i) I just haven’t got around to it.  She also did Crashing, but I haven’t seen that either…  No, this week, we are doing Fleabag.

We’ll skip over my viewing’s genesis here (a friend literally asked if anyone had seen it, and I immediately died inside because I hadn’t), and get straight into why it’s great.  Fleabag is unflinchingly honest.  The opening scenes of episode one, series one revolve around our (anti-)heroine, Fleabag, actually called Kate, as she receives what is essentially a booty call.  She bends over backwards to accommodate her gentleman caller, rushing to get her body ready for his standards before finally opening the door and putting just as much trouble into pretending the whole preparation performance was no trouble at all.  I was floored by the honesty.  It felt ballsy and painful, laying bare the fact that, even in 2016, women were still busting a gut to perpetuate the myths men expect of them.  The issue was treated with even more transparency, thanks to Waller-Bridge’s pieces to camera.  That’s right, just like Miranda’s end-of-pier winks, Fleabag breaks the fourth wall and interacts directly with the viewer.  We are let in on her secrets, which in turn boosts her universality through intimacy and proximity.

But why is Kate called Fleabag?  It seems to be a mixture of her lack of self-esteem and her conviction that she probably isn’t a good person.  I don’t know about you, but I sometimes look at myself and conclude that I am a bit of a shit.  The other week, when returning from dinner with friends, a large man had collapsed in the street.  Some Chinese tourists seemed to be on the case with wrestling his gargantuan frame from the concrete and A&E was just around the corner.  My friends were desperate to stop and help, but I refused to break my stride (I wanted to go home and watch Netflix).  My pals were appalled at my assertions that it was probably the man’s own fault, the Chinese seemed to be coping and, as mentioned, A&E was just around the corner.  Well, like me, and like all of us, Fleabag seems to end up doing bad things.  The first series gradually reveals in flashback the poor choices she has made, costing her dearly and leading to her current predicament.

There’s laugh-out-loud comedy, driven by the awful characters that constitute her family.  But, because of the above, this is only ever a knife edge from being sliced into desperate sadness.  The show’s origins as a one-woman show blow my mind – what could have been packed into those ten minutes which Waller-Bridge first produced after a friend challenged her?  And now look!  She’s a few months younger than me but has achieved about 15 times as much.  Why haven’t my friends been challenging me?  Although, I suppose they challenged me to help that fallen man and I just ignored them.  But yes, it seems the one-woman show is a rich environment for narrative brilliance.  If you’ve never seen Luisa Omielan, please do so immediately.  Or Google Tiannah Viechweg’s Carnival Queen and get gut-punched by its strength.  I’ll wait.

Fleabag, though, is an ensemble.  Sian Clifford’s performance as her older sister, Claire, rings frighteningly true.  I’m reminded of so many people who confuse happiness with success and who conflate ambition with humanity.  Claire’s expressions are electric and her conflicts with Fleabag mirror the worst parts of sisterly relations in a way never seen before.  Meanwhile, having far too much fun as the self-centred godmother-cum-future stepmother is Olivia Colman.  I’m not sure why she’s only cropping up now and wasn’t in my initial list of national treasures (see her work in Peep Show and watch out for her coming to The Crown).  Sure, she’s got an Oscar now in her downstairs cloak, but she still knows where the good writing is (I mean, in the programme, Fleabag, right; not necessarily in this sentence of this blogpost…)

Series two has just begun (praise be) and I managed to catch its first episode on my phone while flying from Innsbruck to Gatwick.  Despite the lack of sleep on a boozy work ski jolly, despite the appalling Samsung J5 headphones I am forced to use, despite the tiny iPhone screen and despite wanting to be anywhere but on an economy flight, I’m going to bandy around words like masterpiece and genius.  We open on a family dinner, with most characters as yet unreconciled from the fallout of the previous season’s climax, some months ago.  Throughout the thirty minutes, we barely leave the restaurant, the claustrophobia and tension increasing with every additional pouring of wine (by the very enthusiastic waitress, with Waller-Bridge making even an incidental character hilarious, and tragic).  The sisters end up confronting each other in the loos; a bombshell is dropped and handled with such brutality that my gasping could be heard three rows back.

So, here’s me, staggered someone can produce such telly with such consistency.  This is the bleakest black humour, with raw truths I can barely handle, yet jam-packed with LOLs, cheekiness and bad human behaviour.  Phoebe Waller-Bridge, welcome to the hall of national treasures.