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.

Peep Show

I’ve just undergone a rather major lifestyle choice shift, going from someone who doesn’t watch Peep Show, to someone who’s nailed all nine series on Netflix in a matter of weeks.  For years, I found the concept of the show really off-putting, despite countless recommendations in the office that it was right up my street.  From what I could see, it was about two losers.  British folk love an underdog, they say, but I think I chase success like a wasp hounds a picnic of jam sandwiches.  If our heroes were unsuccessful, then surely I would root for the bad guys, proving to everyone that I was an evil psychopath after all.  Say what you like about bad folk, they’ve got the ambition, drive and get-up-and-go to crack on with those bad acts in the first place.  The two men at the heart of Peep Show, from the trailers I’d seen, seemed to whinge about things not going their way and then do little to take matters into their own hands.

What, then, possessed me to dive into a show 15 years after its debut, selecting it from a Netflix menu that I’ve all but given up hope of ever completing?  Truth be told, my current flatshare doesn’t have access to much TV beyond Netflix (how I miss the old Sky Plus) so my options are limited.  In addition, I’ve made my way through a high volume of glossy American drama in recent times (from House Of Cards to Chilling Adventures Of Sabrina).  I wanted something British.  And not just a bit British, with just our silly accents and some rain.  No, I wanted filthy British.  I wanted humour that was inaccessible to other parts of the world.  I wanted character actors in lead roles.  I wanted locations so banal I wouldn’t even notice if I had walked past them hundreds of times.  I wanted to be depressed by our soggy island, but then I wanted to chuckle at clever British writers exposing its ridiculousness.

Suddenly, everything that had put me off was part of its appeal.  And appeal it did do.  It did it loads.  Transported back to a 2003 world of clamshell phones and actual CDs, I was immediately charmed.  For those that don’t know (which was me until recently) Peep Show focuses on two flatmates who waste their lives while going about most things the wrong way, with most things usually being trying to get girls to go out with them.  So astoundingly relatable are the two protagonists, that I firmly believe that the whole population of the world can be split into Mark Corrigans and Jeremy Usbournes.  If you ever feel uptight, paralysed by indecision and the modern world constantly disappoints, then you’re a Mark, bulging at the eyes in frustration and disgust until such a chance arises that you can hide inside with some red wine, a book on Byzantine history, and the heating on 21 degrees (and not higher).  If you’re a Jez, then you’ll sort things out later, you’re working on your art so someone else can take care of the boring stuff, you enjoy errant sexual pursuits and the modern world constantly disappoints.  In fact, if you’re a Jez, then you haven’t even read this far.

At once universal and disgusting, each episode builds up our false hope that Jez and Mark might just get themselves sorted, before unleashing sploshing disappointment, while each series of six episodes follows a more complicated, longer-term arc, that ultimately always lands them back just where they started.  The cumulative effect of working through their lives from 2003 to the final series in 2015 is that they go from young people who can’t be expected to know better, to chaps nudging into their forties who still don’t know any better.  Drug binges and orgies are replaced (or added to) by childcare and soft play, yet the disappointment of the modern world somehow hasn’t dampened everything.  Jez’s free spirit still hopes to crack the music scene, and Mark yearns to pen the definitive tome on the Byzantine church.

If you’ve ever done some growing up in the UK, then you’ll recognise yourself.  Cue cult status, compounded by the script’s relentless quotability: “I’m the Wolf of Wall Street. Look out, Boots! I’m going to buy 100 meal deals and eat them off a prossie in the nude.”  But Peep Show immerses you further in the sticky surfaces of its action by using point of view shots.  Mark and Jez both talk directly to the camera, making you, the viewer, the recipient of the line.  You then switch to be the other, which is why it’s easy to think of yourself as both of them.  You can get lost in David Mitchell’s dark dark eyes before alighting at his crooked lower teeth, or you can slide about on Robert Webb’s smug mug until, again, you arrive at the teeth and get a bit distracted.  I love them both and I love their teeth.  At first, I thought only core characters had their point of view used in this way, but it can happen to anyone, however incidental.  But we only hear Jez and Mark’s inner monologues, and this is the factor that drives the most proximity for me.

Throughout, a bevvy (horrendous word) of equally accurate female characters come and go as foils to the boys’ lechery, affection and dreams.  From Sophie, played deliciously by Olivia Colman (clearly enjoying herself – roll on her appearance in The Crown), to Big Suze, Dobby, Nancy and poor poor April.  It’s clear that nobody is doing great at life, despite first impressions.  You root for Jez and Mark to pair up happily with any of them, and yet you scream at the girls to run for their lives.  Inevitably, the only partnership that stands the test of time is Mark and Jez’s.  Some people say that the wrong friends can hold you back, but it’s more like Jez can hold you back.  Mark can never succeed, because Jez is there to drag him back.  But it’s more fun for us that way, and maybe more fun for Mark too.  There’s always someone worse, though, and we have Super Hans (about whom there is literally nothing super) to keep Jez from ever progressing to true adulthood.

So I hereby make this blog’s first apology.  I mean, probably, I haven’t checked if I’ve done one before.  Sorry to all those people who urged me to watched Peep Show.  All they got from me were sneers and scoffs.  They were right all along.  But I too was justified in waiting all this time.  I needed a bit of distance and only recently was the time right for me.  I’m fully ready now to confirm my status as a fan of Peep Show, ready to champion the cult classic to all comers.  I’m probably more of a Mark than a Jez, but I do have my Jez moments.  One of them was bingeing all nine series and not feeling guilty about it.  Just say you never met me.