The Night Of

You might be wondering what I’m doing talking this week about something from 2016, but over the previous 197 posts I think we’ve established well enough there is no method to my madness.  The Night Of was one of the first boxsets recommended to me at the very beginning of this project, and it’s been lodged in my brain ever since.  It even got downloaded (by me, on purpose) to my Sky box at the start of the year when I finally decided that I must get down to following up on its recommendation.  But there it stayed, cruelly ignored while I worked through Fargo and a variety of other Netflix trappings (Call My Agent!, Last Chance U: Basketball).  But then, with Oscars season upon us, its star, Riz Ahmed, was everywhere.  I needed to see what all the fuss was about and conveniently had a slot in my viewing schedule.

I’m ruing the day I didn’t dive in as soon as this show was recommended to me.  Episode one immediately got its claws into me and I tingled with smugness at the thought of finding something to watch that was not going to disappoint.  There was intrigue from the first minute, all against a backdrop of the much-missed city of New York (what with foreign travel being an impossible offence while the sniffles keeps on going round the world).  Knowing something terrible is going to happen: there’s nothing more compelling than that.  From the moment Nasir (played by Ahmed with wide-eyed conviction) gets invited to a Manhattan party from his Pakistani enclave of Queens, the show’s very title makes it clear this isn’t just a pleasant evening in the city.

I’m not going to get into too many details, as these would all be spoilers, and I know for a fact you’ll be following my pleas to see for yourself this exquisite boxset.  Needless to say, there’s a certain amount of being led astray, of trying things for the first time and of cutting loose from a conservative upbringing while potentially ill-equipped to deal with its consequences that makes this fateful night all the more significant.  The tension then takes hold, with us as the viewer violently willing Nas to slip out of the precinct while awaiting processing for his initial misdemeanour.  Cleverly, we are left in doubt regarding his innocence as far as the evidence shows, but we are desperate for him to be cleared of all charges at almost any cost.

Along the way, every character that enters the universe of The Night Of comes with such depth and richness that we almost don’t notice Nas’s long absences while they work their way into our lives.  John Turturro’s John Stone oozes New Yorker, hardened and brash, and with no shits left to give about what anyone thinks of him or any of his skin conditions (at least, so his outer shell would have us believe).  I did wonder at the size of his out-of-home advertising budget as his Subway posters are everywhere, especially if he only charges $250 a case.  Nas’s parents do a huge amount with very little, dignity burning behind their eyes, while Detective Dennis Box earns our sympathy as he retires and Helen Weiss, the district attorney, even as she works against us, carries a certain charm.  The Wire’s Michael K. Williams haunts as Freddy, showing us everything that’s wrong with the American justice system.

That said, it was the cat that I got most excited about.  It just goes to show that great writing and great character development are lost on me when there’s a purring feline rolling about on the floor.  I felt I could have cured John Stone’s allergies simply by wishing them away.  So, from New York night life, the episodes progress to a taut court case.  At points, all seems lost.  At others, the characters’ behaviour aggravates both you as the viewer and their own sorry situations.  But we’re kept guessing till the end, fed some red herrings to keep us going and distracted by artful production design and cinematography from the fact this is (apparently) a rehash of a 2008 British show.  I don’t care where it came from, this gem was a great find, and maybe the story is more universal than as specifically New York as I had thought, but it’s elevated by so much else that it’s definitely one for the boxset list.

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.

Euphoria

Following on from I May Destroy You and Normal People (let’s forget about Final Space for now), we’re continuing this week our run of blogging ourselves silly about outstanding drama.  Fair enough, this show was on a while back, so I’m well behind the curve here (we can even call it a second wave unless people find that triggering), but, realising I wasn’t making the most of my Sky subscription, I decided to go for something available on Sky Atlantic here in the feudal state of the UK (where you can be a lord if you’re mates with the government).  I’ll admit that Chernobyl was top of my list when it came to getting more into the channel that became the British home of Game Of Thrones, but people had been telling me about Euphoria since it first broadcast.  However, what they said was kind of off-putting.  They talked about club kids.  Whatever these are, they’re not inherently interesting.  I myself am immune to FOMO and therefore haven’t been awake past midnight for many years.  However, TV shows about people who do go out at night can offer a useful vicarious route to the thrills, chills, spills and queuing up outside in the cold to pay real money for the privilege of going inside a place experienced by the kinds of people who do have social lives.  The Euphoria advocates also talked about drugs.  Again, not a part of my life, unless you count the crazy crazy highs of pre-dawn crossfit sessions, but I suppose I thoroughly enjoyed Narcos, even if I only used my post on that show to point out that, currently, buying illicit substances funds criminality.  As such, my expectations of Euphoria were that it would simply be sequences of drugged-up teenagers raving to house music under the glow of colourful lights.  Superficial, yes, but potentially just what I was after.  For some reason.

Euphoria is so much more, however, and I am now grieving for the fact I have finished all eight episodes.  Set in East Highland, presumably a generic American neighbourhood that feels a bit Californian but could be anywhere, this is a show about high school teens that elevates the trope to new (drug-fuelled) highs.  I’m sure I could research the actual location, but I’m bashing this out during a lunch break, and the one thing about working from home (slash living at work) that I’ve learnt during lockdown is that nobody is allowed a lunch break, so speed is of the essence – something by now we’ve hopefully grown used to in my weakening week-on-week prose.  At the heart of our stories, we have the main character of Rue.  She is our guide to this world and the point around which a lot of it revolves.  Rue is played by Zendaya, who is an actor who doesn’t need a second name.  I think there has been news about her, but I’ve never really seen it.  What I have seen, though, is her mesmerising and heart-wrenching performance as Rue.  Freshly back from rehab following an overdose, Rue is a victim of America’s addiction to prescription drugs.  A lot of our narrative tension comes from her palpable struggles with keeping clean.  Intersecting with these are the challenges of her budding friendship with Jules, a brightly dressed new student who forms a kindred spirithood with our Rue.

This would be compelling in itself, but I have to confess that Rue’s arcs are, to me at least, some of the least interesting in the whole of Euphoria.  They’re still more gripping than 99% of TV out there, but it’s the surrounding cast of other high school classmates that really hooked me in.  Rue, however, serves as our introduction point, often narrating the opening scenes of each episode, sparing no production expense in bringing to life scene after scene depicting various tableaux of childhood dysfunction.  Every family we look into is a hot mess and a product of visceral pain.  Whether we’re introduced to McKay’s (father’s) dreams of NFL stardom (a dramatised Last Chance U of sorts) or given a whistle-stop tour of the origins and undoings of Maddy’s incredible confidence, you can’t take your eyes off the screen until everything is divulged.  This renders the ensuing plot points all the more significant, serving as a grounding for our teens’ otherwise reckless actions.

This structure also permits Euphoria to tread tired old high school and growing up themes in a way that completely resists any definition as generic.  Instead, we are awash in originality as we consider the blossoming (ugly head rearing) of such onset-by-adulthood innocence losses, including but not limited to: gender, sexuality, body image, parental disappointment, mental health and many many more.  Seriously, all your favourites are here.

Somehow, this plays out with a high level of stylisation while retaining a contrasting grittiness.  Euphoria is at once dreamlike yet realistic.  And yes, I’ve just said the same thing twice, but with some of you I really feel a need to labour the point.  There’s nothing for me to criticise with my usual archness.  Sure, maybe I could do without so much importance being placed on eye make-up/furniture, but it’s an aesthetic that gets confidently owned.  Euphoria loves a tracking shot as much as I do; we’re either following a single character on the march, or watching a beautifully choreographed ensemble march play out in varying directions.  This adds a compelling and masterful intensity to the glorious unravelling that brings together all the characters’ narratives in the fairground episode.  No doubt the originality of the soundtrack helps glue the individual strands to each other.

Everybody, this is the show Skins wishes it had been.  I am desperate to find out more about the whole gang.  I want to be told more about the sadness behind Cassie’s eyes.  I want to know if Kat will persist in her delusion that she is using sex as a weapon on others rather than on herself.  Why do I feel such sympathy towards Fezco?  Can we get more of Lexi (whether dressed as Bob Ross or not)?  And dare I ask: how can things end between Nate and his father?  So let’s view my gushings here as a well-deserved round of applause for something that will guarantee you at least eight evenings of entertainment and thought-provoking diversion, all while looking pretty nice on your telly and leaving nobody uncertain that the televisual golden age rumbles on.

Game Of Thrones (Season One)

WARNING: CONTAINS SPOILERS

Right then, EVERYBODY, here come some big ones.  I haven’t put myself under this much pressure since I took on Love Island.  But don’t worry.  I’ve every confidence this will be another amazing post.  When I first started Just One More Episode, Game Of Thrones was at the heart of my plans for the kinds of boxsets I wanted to be talking about (but have ended up with posts on Naked Attraction and Keeping Up With The Kardashians instead…)  But why has it taken 131 posts to reach this momentous occasion?  Well, I had planned to cover this show in the run up to its eighth and final season, but a cruel twist of fate saw me in a household without access to Sky Atlantic, dashing my carefully lain plans to review all prior series in preparation for this final swansong (as I had done for the two previous instalments – this is already too much fanboying).  But the panic is over.  I am now the proprietor of my very own Sky contract.  I’ve alluded already (Chernobyl) to the fact that this pivotal saga didn’t figure among the available boxsets when I first sat down with my new Sky Q remote and box, but suddenly it’s back on there!  And how did I find this out?  An advert in a podcast (Teenage Mixtape) voiced by none other than Sean Bean himself (that has since been served to me 500 more times and that I now can’t skip fast enough).  So, no more putting up with ersatz-Thrones (I’m looking at you, The Witcher), I’ve been back to Westeros (again) and I’m bloody loving it.

Before we begin, though, let me explain two key rule breaks with my approach.  Firstly, we’re going to split things up by series.  Normally, once I’ve “done” a programme, I move on.  It’s over.  No returnsies.  The only way I’ll ever go back to it is if it adds a colon and some more words (like Narcos: Mexico) by which action it definitively becomes a new show.  But this programme is more than that.  For a while, it was a global cultural phenomenon, with episodes commanding feature film budgets.  It’s the ur-boxset, the originator from which our new norms of staying in and watching episodes eclipsed any desire to brave it out into the rain and sit among a variety of coughs and illuminated smartphone screens in the cinema or, heaven forbid, actually talk to people.  Secondly, I’m alerting you to spoilers.  Typically, I take pains not to reveal any twists or unexpected plot progressions that can’t be gleaned from a marketing trailer.  But, with this show, if you haven’t seen it yet then you simply need to get off my blog right now.  This post ruining a Game Of Thrones twist is the least of your worries.

So how did you discover Game Of Thrones?  This is the question nobody is asking me, but I’ll have you all know I was early to this party.  I remember some tube posters across the tracks of the Northern Line featuring an array of moodily-lit and characterful faces.  It didn’t say much about the show or emphasise its fantasy roots too heavily, but something piqued my interest and I remember adding the first series to my Lovefilm account, with the DVDs arriving soon after (I told you this was a long time ago – that sentence is definitively historical memoir).  Sure, the rest of the world caught up and jumped on the bandwagon, but my first moments in Westeros still feel as if they were only yesterday.  Like the books, which I later devoured, each series’ opening scene features only peripheral (short-lived) characters, setting up some dramatic tension before those famous credits roll.  Series one’s prelude foreshadows the coming threat of the White Walkers, but keeps the northern bogeyman obscured in enough mystery that their plausibility is easily bought.  And that’s the beauty of this first foray into Thrones, the fantastical elements are only gradually revealed to us in such a way that we accept them as reality.

The key example of this are the dragons that finally emerge from the Essos ashes around poor old Daenerys’s (almost constantly) naked body.  At first, they are just some calcified eggs, and characters only speak of them as legends that died out hundreds of years beforehand.  Seems legit, right?  Only carefully is their being escalated into the fire-breathing beasts of the later series, with no serious viewer dismissing them as excessive as the show has thoughtfully prepped us for their coming glory.  But no, it’s not just the dungeons and dragons that draw us in.  Game Of Thrones has one of the richest settings ever attempted in TV.  Again, the books provide plenty here as a source material, but I commend the first episode and its offspring in introducing us to a world that’s totally made up yet easily believable.  The Seven Kingdoms are rich in history and folklore, dogged by opposing religious rites and ineffective government, riddled by rivalries and grudges among the nobility and regions.  It’s the inspiration for Brexit Britain.  The only question mark I have is related to the fact that there doesn’t seem to have been a single technological or societal advance in thousands of years – it’s made clear that people have lived this way for a long time.  But I can forgive this as the complexity is still delicious enough to fuel eight series of epic drama.

So cast your minds back to how that first episode drew you into a world where there were so many truths to establish before we could even progress to storyline.  Quickly, the viewer progresses from “Who are these serious-looking people shrouded in fur?” to “Ah yes, it seems an uneasy truce has descended on the lands and brought peace yet is about to bust apart at the seams.”  It’s artfully done.  For me, I lost all doubt as the Stark children stumbled across their direwolf pups.  I was in.  Sure, some initial lines from certain cast members carry a slight hesitance due to their pomposity, but that all passes quickly, and things get going without delay.

On that note, I should probably allude to the main thrust of season one: what actually happens.  Well, I’ve been thinking that it could otherwise be known as Ned Stark Investigates: The King’s Landing Mysteries.  But it’s more than murder mystery.  Thrones’ beauty is in its layers.  We have the present actions where Ned is strong-armed into leaving most of his family to take up a position of Hand Of The King to King Robert.  However, before that, and before even episode one, we go back a layer in time to the circumstances of Jon Arryn’s murder as a result of uncovering the truth about the supposed Baratheon line of succession.  Beyond that, yet another layer exists that binds the myriad characters (numerous as they are): the teaming up of the Westerosi houses against the Mad King, resulting in the overthrowing and end of the Targaryen dynasty.  The interplay between these layers of time propel every scene from “Oh look there might be a dragon” to politicking, intrigue and an impending sense of doom.  And this is all without mentioning the critical layer of peril present at all times: the coming White Walker trouble beyond the wall.  Filter this all through several theatres of action, factor in the geographically distant yet essential narrative of Daenerys and Viserys in Essos, multiply by a thousand, and you can only conclude that Game Of Thrones owes its success to crediting the viewer with the ability to cope with a lot of information.

Language, too, plays a part.  Each character has a nickname which, rather than complicating things, somehow makes them easier to remember, from Jaime Lannister’s Kingslayer to Petyr Baelish’s Littlefinger.  Each house also has its own mantra that easily slips into common parlance.  As a result, we all know winter is coming.  But a further stickiness comes from two other areas: gratuitous sex and relentless gore.  All the highbrow political debate is one thing, but at any moment a tavern whore might flash her downstairs, or the pointy end of a sword might suddenly protrude from someone’s eyeball.  It’s another layer of jeopardy among an embarrassing excess.  But it leads to one of Thrones’ most credible points: nobody is safe.  Big name actors like Jason Momoa and Sean Bean fail to survive to the end of the series, setting into motion a trend that heightens further the already great stakes at play.  Thus, we start to see how this became the biggest show in the world, but let’s conclude on some gentle trolling below.

Best newcomer

Slightly redundant here as everyone is new, but let’s take a moment to acknowledge the rise and fall of Khal Drogo here.  Never one to miss chest day at the gym (or wear a top), Drogo has mastered the smoky eye off a YouTube tutorial but continues to struggle with basic Common Tongue (English).  He prefers to mount his women from behind, but it’s actually strangely touching when Daenerys finally tames him sexually.  Sadly, his immune system fails to protect him from a rusty axe blade, but not before he spectacularly kills Viserys by pouring molten gold on him just when he’s at his most annoying.  We’ve all dreamt of doing this to a colleague, which is why smelting is not allowed in offices.

Most valuable character

Playing beyond her status here, I’m going to go for Mirri Maz Duur.  Not one to let a bad hair day stop her in any endeavour, Mirri is a crucial catalyst who sets Daenerys off on her path to emergence as a great leader.  From her wonderful accent, to her cheery screams as she is burned alive, Mirri can take a bow for life-coaching the Mother Of Dragons to be the best that she can be.

Best death/jaw-dropper moment

Back in Westeros, it has to be Ned Stark’s head rolling around on the floor that counts as one of the most shocking moments in episode nine, nay, the whole series.  Every pointer leads us to believe he has done enough to save himself, despite our regret that he seems prepared to compromise his morals to survive, but Joffrey’s bloodlust wins out and the seeds are sown for shit to kick off for seven further seasons.

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.

Chernobyl

The Sky man finally came a week ago.  I had planned to live without Sky in my new home, resolving not to line the Murdochs’ pockets.  But two things compounded me to sacrifice my values and change my mind.  The option of a life where I can take more control of what adverts I am forced to see was one of them, as ranted about in my post on Gogglebox.  Secondly, we’ve got the next Love Island around the corner and you can apparently only get ITV2 HD on Sky.  With all the access to boxsets my package promised me, I was buzzing to re-watch Game Of Thrones for treatment on here.  But no, that show doesn’t seem to be available at the moment.  Next on my list was something people had bleated on about in May when I was in full first-time buyer meltdown: Chernobyl.  Dealing with a meltdown of a different time, this miniseries dramatization of the 1986 disaster was held aloft as the best thing that anyone had ever seen, now ranked at number 5 in the IMDB list of Top Rated TV Shows (9.4).  With high hopes, I downloaded the first HD episode on my Sky Q.

I also drew the curtains (John Lewis, obviously) and put my phone out of reach, preparing to give the apparently untold quality of the drama my undivided attention.  Sadly, though, there were still about three minutes of adverts to wade through, but I was able to fast forward these immediately, once I finally worked out which button was which on my new remote in the darkened living room.  A week later, after limiting myself to no more than one episode per night of the five that make up this series, I have completed the boxset.  And I hereby attest to the incomparable greatness of Chernobyl – the TV programme, not the nuclear explosion.  The former made me punch the air and shout “worth it” at the inordinate expense of my OLED fifty-five incher, while the latter spread life-threatening levels of radioactivity of thousands of European square kilometres.  Let’s not confuse the two.

My attempts here to do any sort of justice to Chernobyl will fall short, but I’ll crack on with running through what makes this programme so remarkable all the same.  You’re already in the third paragraph so please don’t pretend you’ve got anything better to read.  Now, I was never that arsed by chemistry or physics at school, but you will come away from Chernobyl with quite a thorough understanding of nuclear fission.  I now know my boron rod from my graphite tip, but this isn’t down to my child-wonder levels of intelligence.  Thanks to Craig Mazin’s script (Craig a-Mazin, more like) multiple scenes contrive to see expert characters illuminate others on what’s gone wrong.  These happen in layers so that, once you’ve built a foundation of basic comprehension, you’re able to get your head around the sequence of events in greater detail.  It’s no mean feat: just as fission generates electricity as if from nothing, Chernobyl generates drama from our understanding of what should and shouldn’t happen in a nuclear reactor.  It would be worth watching for the educational benefits alone.

Linked to the above is the constant threat of radiation.  As if the explosion itself doesn’t build up enough tension, the action plays out against varying backdrops of radioactivity.  I don’t want to reveal spoilers, but one of my questions before watching was whether our main narrative was the build up to the disaster itself, or the consequences that followed its occurrence.  Through its dynamic and intelligent structure, the answer is that Chernobyl is both.  This allows a single event to be played for multiple crescendos of suspense so strong you’ll suddenly realise you’re hovering metres above your sofa rather snuggling into your scatter cushions.  Between these peaks, though, we have background radiation to prevent anyone from ever relaxing.  The erratic ticks of the Geiger counter begin to haunt you.  While this invisible threat is actually a very cost-effective form of horror when it comes to production budgets, depictions of its effects are disturbingly graphic.  This is not a relaxing watch.

But we’re not done.  Slathered over these layers of tense action is the amplifying factor of our Soviet setting.  Gilead-like in its control of every waking minute, this further threat to human survival rears its head several times, whether it’s Communist Party credibility getting in the way of the population’s best interests or the intense exchanges with head of the KGB (a spine-chilling performance from Alan Williams).  At odds with this workers’ and peasants’ utopia, which is already looking a little tired around edges and at odds with eighties fashion before the incident, is the fact that the all-powerful regime can draft in hundreds of thousands of expendable human conscripts to clear up its messes.  Chernobyl is able to relay the disaster’s impact at every level; whether a scene shows the evacuation of thousands or bristling dialogue between our heroes leading the clean-up, each detail is artfully executed and captured, from the constant smoking, the ill-fitting suits and the tacky interior designs to the suspicious glances, overuse of the word comrade and the suffocating lack of freedom under the state.

To recap, the subject matter, the writing, the setting and the production all give us top-quality drama, but the penultimate piece in our puzzle is the acting.  It’s very good (said in a British luvvie commenting at the theatre sort of voice).  Emily Watson displays why she is the sort of actor who makes any line sound like a masterpiece in her composite role as a key scientist risking her own safety to help solve Chernobyl.  Alongside her, Jared Harris (known best to me as the least sexy partner in Mad Men) commands our support as the individual who has to make the USSR realise the extent of the problem, Valery Legasov.  Each cigarette he lights is a manifestation of another realm of human exhaustion.  We’ve also got a Skarsgård (Stellan) doing his best gravelly-voiced military old man routine, completing the trinity of our three central parts.  Alongside them, a retinue of faces you’ll recognise from all sorts of places bring to life the rest of Soviet society on the Belarussian-Ukrainian border and in Moscow.

Finally, the structure.  To build on my earlier point, this is a masterclass in drawing from a singular horrific moment to drag us to the edge of our seats and beyond for five hour-long episodes.  This is TV-making at its best.  Sure, maybe it could have been rushed through as a feature film, but I’d only have fallen asleep (though I made it through Blue Story and everyone needs to see that too).  We’re able to take our time building up not just the setting, the period and the tension, but our longer format allows a depth of detail that enhances the whole drama.  An earnest review is a rare occurrence on this blog, but I wouldn’t be lying if I said that I’m in two minds about indulging in a second viewing altogether, such was the level to which Chernobyl impressed me.  Though, perhaps impressed is the wrong word.  It chilled me: a nightmarish scenario that comes into being when a nation has the wrong leaders.