Money Heist (La Casa De Papel)

“O bella ciao, bella ciao, bella ciao, ciao, ciao.”

These lyrics have been going around my head ever since I finished the latest available episode of Money Heist on Netflix last night (and immediately started the making of documentary).  Dear readers, abandon the sourdough yeast you’ve been nurturing and for god’s sake stop sharing your top 10 albums on Facebook, for I’m about to school you in the world of the planet’s most popular Netflix boxset.

It’s a damning yet fair indictment of English-speaking people’s intelligence (please see evidence: Trump and Johnson as leaders of nations) that the name of this programme in our mother tongue is the most basic example of labelling ever known to mankind.  Yes, this programme is about a heist, and yes, money is stolen in that heist.  It is a money heist.  For some reason, whoever translated the Spanish title only had thirty seconds spare to think of the new name.  It would be like taking a beloved comedy such as Friends and entitling it Relationship Sitcom or renaming Tiger King as Outrageous Large Cat Documentary.  As you would expect, the original Spanish moniker has more poetry and art to it: La Casa De Papel.  I spent most of the first series thinking this meant the house of the pope.  However, no crusty old white man telling millions how to live their lives appeared and I remembered that papel actually means paper, so we have the house of paper – a synonym for the Royal Mint where the first two seasons play out.

That’s the title covered, and a bit of its content, but what I’m sure you’re all dying to know is why did I start watching it?  I have a vague memory of, at some juncture before we got locked down, Netflix sharing data on their most watched programming.  Of course, as expected, Stranger Things and Sex Education appeared as worthy leaders of the pack.  But, top of the pops was Money Heist.  Something about Dalí masks and red boiler suits.  “Don’t worry,” everyone said, “that’s just a show that’s big in South America.”  For some reason, the accolade of being number one had to be dismissed.  But then I got far too into Elite and, on the advice of pals with more open-minded approaches to finding good TV, selected Money Heist as my next boxset.

As a touch of expectedly brutal honesty, I don’t mind admitting that I didn’t feel grabbed by the show straightaway.  Sure, the set up was sexy, the stylisation was classy and the Spanish language with subtitles a great way of keeping my focus (do not watch this with English-language dubbing – if eyesight problems preclude you from tolerating subtitles, we all know there’s a Durham castle you can drive to if you wish to assess your ophthalmological abilities), but for some reason I didn’t really care about the characters.  I felt another The Boys coming on.  But, by the seventh installment I had connected.  Since then, it has been a whirlwind of affection between me and the atracadores.

I’m struggling to put my finger on the exact reasons, but I’m not alone in my appreciation.  A modest feature in Spanish TV schedules, La Casa De Papel slipped into Netflix’s international back catalogue and nobody thought any more of it.  That is, until the actors’ social media accounts started to swell with thousands of new followers.  Word of mouth generated buzz that compounded itself over and over until Netflix greenlit further installments which themselves were hampered by huge numbers of fans crashing the shoots.

At its heart, we have la banda – the select group of diversely skilled ne’er-do-wells assembled by the enigmatic Profesor.  They do the dirty work that brings to life his masterminded plans, taking on a robbery of such far-fetched ambitions that your only option is to go with it: taking over the Spanish Royal Mint and printing their own stash of billions of euros.  The action plays out in multiple timebands, with scenes from the Profesor’s robbery boot camp foreshadowing events that transpire explosively in the mint itself.  You root for the robbers, but also for the hostages inside and the police outside trying to regain control of the situation.  Some things go to plan, while others require a fair bit of thinking on the spot.  But the tension almost never lets up.  Someone once asked if it’s like Prison Break, with a new hurdle to overcome in each episode, but it feels more sophisticated than that (and the subsequent series don’t get exponentially worse).

Let’s call it Stockholm Syndrome.  Suddenly, Denver’s staccato laugh goes from being annoying to something that fills you with joy each time you hear it.  Nairobi’s constant shouting stops irritating you and you come to love everything about her.  Even Helsinki goes from being a background bit of hired muscle to a key player.  Nevertheless, Arturito is a prick the whole time.  These beloved characters’ development is deftly woven through a plot that thinks of pretty much everything, resulting in a compelling piece of drama that, even with it’s gun gratuity, shootout porn and slap-you-in-the-face silliness, is everything people are looking for in a TV show.  The fact that this achievement is replicated across multiple heists is staggering.

And now it’s a social movement.  Like the Handmaid’s Tale outfit, Money Heist jumpsuits have characterised protests for equality and better prospects throughout the world.  The gang, even the morally dubious ones like Berlin and Palermo, are fighting the system, and the show plays on their exploitation of PR to bring the Spanish population on side.  Money Heist resonates, and without it, I am now bereft.  I’ll miss the soundtrack, I’ll miss the cast (even though a load of them are in Elite anyway), I’ll miss the sentiment.  I’ll gladly be held hostage by the wait for another series, but till then, those same lyrics (bizarrely in Italian, rather than Spanish) will be going around my head.

“O bella ciao, bella ciao, bella ciao, ciao, ciao.”

Elite (Élite)

Rarely do I start on a new boxset and then proceed to watch only that boxset until I have devoured every episode in existence.  Normally it’s a case of adding another show into the mix, alternating its position in my evening viewing schedule (it’s now the law to stay in) among some of my favourite themes for programming: post-apocalyptic shows featuring zombies (The Walking Dead, Kingdom), adult animation (South Park), offensive comedy (Nighty Night – now on iPlayer here) or things about sport that aren’t the same as actually watching sport (Last Chance U).  But from the very first minute of Elite, I couldn’t stop until I had devoured the whole lot.  Granted, it ticked one of my other favoured categories: things set in schools (Sex Education).  But it also seems to be striking out a new theme which is wreaking havoc with my paranoia about what my neighbours can see through my windows: shows with a whole lot of f*cking (a bit like Game Of Thrones roulette where naked body parts could be splayed all over the screen at a moment’s notice).  More on this later.

But first, what is Elite about?  Well, for starters it’s nothing to do with the liberal elite, ruining everyone’s lives by trying to create a society that’s fairer and better for everyone.  It’s about the privileged teenage children of wealthy Spaniards who enjoy the fanciest education that money can buy.  This all takes place at Las Encinas (which Google Translate reveals to mean holm oaks – no idea), a swanky, fee-paying school with its own bridge.  After three seasons, I’m fairly sure it’s in Madrid, but we can assume this is a generic Spanish town or city.  Characters do pop off to Asturias, which seems too far a jaunt from the capital.  Pupils avail themselves of its ample opportunities: swimming in its pool, arguing in its corridor, being disruptive in its one classroom, ogling its ugly trophy, calling its teachers by their first names, being very sexually active and occasionally murdering one another.

This would all be boring if we didn’t add some tension, so our first series opens with three scholarship kids entering Las Encinas for the first time, their new, improved educations funded as an act of charity after their old poor school fell down, on them.  They’re about to find out its not so easy rubbing shoulders academically with the rich and privileged.  But don’t worry, everyone is beautiful.

Each season’s arc builds to a climactic terrible crime but foreshadows this throughout with police procedural flash forwards in a way that, while narratively a little clunky, makes you unable to resist your desire to know immediately how it all ends.  Subsequent series also build on and compound their predecessors’ misdemeanours, lending the whole thing a perverse credibility that couldn’t be achieved if brand new adventures had to be dreamt up.  And there we have it: soap-operatic trashiness, elevated by tension you’ll be powerless to resist.  Each evening, when you log off working from home, you’ll be excited to return to Las Encinas.

And what a world it is.  Diversity is everything for these young people, with a head-on tackling of European society’s response to Islam.  Siblings Omar and Nadia struggle to balance their academic and romantic pursuits with their Palestinian parents’ expectations, which mostly involve worrying about who will staff their grocery shop.  Seeing as there almost never seems to be a customer in sight and most of the employee labour goes into rearranging the lemons one by one, they could probably chill out a bit.  Sexuality is also enthusiastically box-ticked from a diversity perspective, with fans of boy-on-boy loving richly rewarded, as well as frequent shout outs to the polyamory community.  Add in the straights, and you’ll see what I mean about a whole lot of f*cking, in all its available flavours.

For language fans, there’s every imaginable swear word, often in the same sentence.  No sooner has someone begun an exchange with “hola” than they are following up that statement with “joder puta madre coño” in such rapid succession that the subtitlists get overwhelmed and just put the F word the whole time.  But this reflects the extent to which this really is adult stuff.  Aged sixteen and seventeen, no known laws seem to prevent the Elite crew from getting up to all sorts: drug-dealing, clubbing, easy access to alcohol.  The Inbetweeners this ain’t.  Elite builds its own sexy mythology around axioms you will willingly accept: Glee Warbler school uniforms look sexy, it doesn’t matter that Samu is shorter than all his girlfriends, Las Encinas’ coursework is farcical at best.  The only idiosyncrasy that bothers me is that nobody seems to kiss with tongues, which makes the graphic love-making scenes fall somewhere flat when all the naked characters are only pecking each other on the lips.  That’s right: I’ll buy everything else Elite serves, but the illusion is shattered for me when they don’t kiss properly.  Now I can see why my neighbours might think I’m a pervert.

Having raced through Elite, I’m now bereft to return to a reality where I am no longer part of the gang, especially if this is a world where summer Love Island is cancelled.  While animosity between the characters dominates earlier episodes, our alumnos go through so much that new relationships form as they develop and change their prejudices, accommodating the new individuals injected into proceedings each season.  You’ll warm to them, even as they murder each other.  So, if you’ve got some lockdown nights to while away, and you’re confident your TV screen isn’t overlooked by minors or curtain twitchers, lose yourself in the world of Elite and join me in the impatient wait for a fourth season.  Joder.