Hollyoaks

How the mighty have fallen.  This blog was going to be all about the high-brow boxsets I had uncovered.  Well, let’s be honest, that and a whole load of trash TV that I only watch ironically and as part of my job in media and just out of cultural curiosity and not because numbing my mind with garbage is the only way to cope with the traumatising experience of living in a country that’s repeatedly voting itself into oblivion.  Throughout, I’ve been scathing about the world of the soap opera.  Even though soaps give us a lot as a nation.  They provide the contestants for Strictly Come Dancing.  I think that’s it, actually.  I suppose they also reflect us as a nation and our slowly liberalising attitudes.  My nineties childhood teatimes featured witnessing a lesbian kiss in Brookside, swiftly followed by the discovery of a body under the patio (in Brookside, not at home in Surrey).  The British press railed at this travesty in a way not out of place in The Handmaid’s Tale, but, as we enter a new decade, nobody would bat an eyelid at this now.  People on TV (and in real life) are free to snog whomever they choose and, in this new apparently Tory4life Britain, we can hide whatever bodies we like under the patio.  So, with that in mind, let’s tear Hollyoaks apart.

While I don’t currently watch this soap, there was a period when I did.  Specifically, this was the early summer of 2007.  I was a finalist at Oxford, an institution that still asks me for money (I don’t have that much and they certainly aren’t top of the list for getting it), and every waking minute was spent preparing for our final exams, safe in the knowledge that roughly 100% of my final grade would be generated by the eight three-hour papers I would be sitting (in academic clothing known as subfusc).  Ever since I began the degree back in 2003, I’d noticed a guilt around our approach to studying: if you weren’t working, then you were aching with the bad conscience that you should be.  Pals at other academic institutions talk fondly now about memories of watching Neighbours twice a day and whiling away hours between a weekly lecture.  My average week involved 3,000 words of essay-writing (for which 40 hours of reading were expected – lol!) and translations in four different directions.  Therefore, as things inevitably ramped up under increasing pressure while finals approached, more and more time was spent studying and fewer and fewer moments remained for leisure.  However, this was and still is a recipe for burnout.

After a day buried in books, we would meet for dinner in hall, desperate for social contact and the support it brought.  Naturally, this was informal hall, rather than formal hall.  Informal hall involved a more canteen-like service, whereas for formal hall you had to don your gown over your normal clothes and be served a three-course meal that began with grace in Latin (which was sung by the choir on Sundays).  Just imagine Harry Potter and you’re pretty much there.  Both types of hall needed to be booked on a computer in the porters’ lodge (the main entrance to college) before lunchtime.  No, you couldn’t access this through the internet as that would be Oxonian heresy.  And yes, they really did need that many hours’ notice to broil an unidentifiable meat and mash some swede in time for that evening’s meal.  What a tangent!  The point is, after wolfing down this subsidised sustenance, we would still crave a further moment of unwinding.  Being 6.30, we would end up in front of someone’s TV.  And thus, Hollyoaks would end up in front of our eyes.

What began as ironic activity became something more important.  We began to look forward to our scheduled viewing, anticipating the storyline developments and speculating on the fallouts, anything to distract us from the 7pm drudge back to the library or our rooms for more fusty book-learning.  To this day, the first few notes of the Hollyoaks theme tune set my teeth on edge, but for that one summer, they were solace.  Our main problem, though, when it came to identifying with the characters in the production, was that they didn’t seem to be afflicted as we were with a constant need to be doing work.  They would walk about, talk to each other, do things, all without the omnipresent commentary of “Well, I really better be getting back to it.”  The reality didn’t match ours and their lack of work ethic didn’t compute.

But that didn’t stop us.  We were lost in the scripted tension that finally built up to John-Paul kissing his best friend Craig, all while Nancy and the other evergreen characters got smashed on half a sniff of Smirnoff Ice while “going out” at a venue that was, as with all local amenities, on the one street that they ever went along.  That was a terrible sentence, but it really brings to life the production quality of your average episode.  Let’s say my standards must have been lower, as, at no other time, have I been able to stomach multiple weeks of soap watching.  The plot developed at an agonisingly glacial pace, trapped within its own limited reality, chunked into daily cliff-hangers that got stretched so thinly you could see the next few weeks’ episodes through them.  It was still better than revising.

Exams completed, university a distant and overpriced recollection, I never returned to Hollyoaks.  To this day, it remains billed as the teen soap.  Yes, it’s still being made.  Occasionally I’ll catch a marketing trail on Channel 4 and be like: “Oh wow, this looks good,” but then I have to check myself and remember that this is one of those programmes whose marketing is better than the actual product.  Given the huge community of characters that make up the cast, unwieldy storytelling has to be avoided: only a handful of characters feature in any particular week.  It’s acting shift work.  And that’s always the complaint with soaps: the sheer quantity of entertainment they are required to produce harms its very quality.  Brookside may have long-since perished to cul-de-sac heaven, but Emmerdale seems to be on 43 times a week.  Either way, the 6.30pm broadcast was often well before home time once I became an office worker.  In fact, my favourite joke when on calls late in the day was to tell people planning to leave at 5.30 that it was good news they would be home in time for Hollyoaks.

So yeah, I’m not opposed to Hollyoaks being the 129^th programme on Just One More Episode.  As this week’s post demonstrates, this is mostly about me anyway, and Hollyoaks was in my life for a brief period in a former decade, despite there being nearly 4,000 episodes to catch up on, not to mention late night specials with extra sex and a whole array of scantily clad calendars nobody asked for.  Its approach to issues, too, should be commended, serving a national purpose to the country’s youth (who still watch TV and not just inane YouTubers) when it comes to coming to terms with and coming of age in a political entity that hates them.  With cuts to public mental health funding, Hollyoaks will soon be the sole method through which our young people are cared for, so I better get used to the jangly guitar notes of its opening sequence.  It’s only a moment of discomfort when compared to a future lifetime of being locked out of Europe.

University Challenge

Blimey, this is relentless.  Trying to keep up with my boxset viewing so I can post about a new show every week is taking its toll, so I’m having to trawl the archives again.  I’m spaffing the best part of an hour a night on Big Brother, plus Netflix has distracted me with new series of Bojack Horseman and Making A Murderer.  These aren’t just first world problems, they are overwhelmed-with-content first world problems.  This will be the greatest challenge of our modern age (after Brexit, Trump and global warming): there’s too much to watch.

Luckily, recent events have reminded me of a whole category of televisual programming that has been entirely absent from Just One More Episode: quiz shows.  Everybody loves a good quiz, especially me.  My college years saw me develop an unhealthy addiction to quiz machines, touring townie pubs under the mistaken view that the local clientele’s sub-par intelligence would be no match for our 18-year-old brains.  The machines’ algorithms were calibrated in our favour, we thought arrogantly, until we lost all our pound coins and finally realised that seasoned drinkers are some of the greatest treasure troves of trivia in British society.  My grad years in London saw many weeks punctuated with a good old pub quiz.  I think we once won the jackpot at The King William IV in Hampstead, where the quizmaster was a drag queen devoid of any sense of humour, though we never repeated this success at The Flask around the corner.  Each week, a band of elder gents calling themselves The Drinklings clinched the title, though they too looked thoroughly miserable about it.  So, does this mean that quizzes bring no joy?

Heck, no.  A friend’s birthday at the weekend included a quiz as part of the organised fun.  We all transformed into competitive monsters, none more so than I during the Beat The Intro round.  I’m genetically pre-disposed to a few things, such has having bits of ginger in my beard or feeling travel sick in automatic cars, but one of my favourite DNA traits is being able to identify any known song from its first beat (and by known, I mean known to me – I have no hope, obviously, if I’ve never heard it).  In that single second, the whole song plays to me instantly in my mind’s own radio station (where nobody judges the playlist).  Science has proven that this is genetic, as my dad and sister are the same, whereas my mum claims to have lost interest in music in 1983 (when my sister was born), so we know this is a dominant Honeywood gene, alongside tolerating comments about our surname and still laughing out loud at You’ve Been Framed.

Hang on, we’re three paragraphs in and I’ve not even reached the show in question yet.  To chime in with this recent quizzical development in my life, I’m taking on University Challenge.  Don’t worry though, as we’re not going to dwell on every tedious detail since the show first broadcast in 1962 or the fact it’s been on both ITV and the BBC (a bit like The Voice UK, but in the other direction).  Doing that wouldn’t allow enough time to talk about me (in addition to the first three paragraphs) so we’re just going to focus on my interactions with it and subsequent one-sided opinions.  I’m assuming this is entertaining for you, but there are gifs throughout which you can look at if it’s not.

I’ll confess to the fact I never really knew what the show was until I got to university.  People seemed to think it was acceptable during Freshers’ Week to talk about an intellectual gameshow, a format that was already 41 years old in 2003.  It’s worth clarifying that our Freshers’s Week lasted a matter of days before the first essays were set and the fun was killed off – welcome to Oxford, bitch (a throwback to a previous post on The OC; swap Californian sunshine for bone-chilling frost, surfing for swotting and enjoying your teenage years for a higher volume of work than a person can ever realistically deliver, and they’re basically the same thing.)  New fellow students asked if I had seen how our college had done (getting beaten by London Metropolitan University in the first round, but making it through to the quarter finals on a highest losing score loophole).  I hadn’t; I was probably watching Little Britain or Celebrity Big Brother instead.

Fast forward a few years, and I was an impoverished graduate sharing a flat with four others above a Costa in Belsize Park.  Income was low, but London was (and is) expensive, so communal TV viewing became a mainstay of our pastimes (alongside the pub quizzes mentioned before).  On Monday evenings, in particular, none of us were out and about.  Thus, University Challenge soon became our favourite programme.  And this was because we didn’t just watch the show, we watched it competitively.  The trick was to shout out answers before the contestants did, or, better still, before Jeremy Paxman even finished the question.  To this day, even if I find myself watching Uni Chall (my affectionate abbreviation… that’s never caught on), I still call out answers to nobody.  Maybe the neighbours upstairs, when not trotting about in heels on wooden floors, are impressed.

“Woah!” I hear you readers cry, “What do you mean you knew the answers!?”  Indeed, let’s dwell on the fact that this is TV’s most academically challenging quiz.  This isn’t The Weakest Link, where questions come directly from the GCSE syllabus for double science, nor is it National Lottery In It To Win It, where Sally from Ashby de la Zouch is counselled through deciding whether Rome, Paris or Madrid is the capital of France by a wonderfully patient Dale Winton (RIP) before plumping for Rome because Pat off of next door once went there and said it was well good.  No, these are the hardest questions ever, veering from chemical formulae to mathematical equations via obscure literature, forgotten painters and niche geography.  Yes, there can be music rounds, but this isn’t Beat The Intro on the biggest radio airplay hits from 2000 to 2010 (my specialism), this is opera and classical and all that jazz, including, funnily enough, jazz.  Therefore, if you’re getting between one and three answers in a thirty-minute episode, you’re reaching the upper echelons of British intellect (although this is against a low base of people who’ve voted Conservative and for Brexit).

Each university that is being challenged puts forward four of its brightest minds.  Oxford and Cambridge, however, divide themselves into their constituent colleges, so the 70 or so students of St Benet’s Hall, Oxford can take on a team representing the 28,000 undergraduates and 13,000 postgraduates of the University of Manchester.  A starter question, worth ten points, is read out, and anyone can buzz.  Get it wrong, and you’re punished with a deduction.  Get it right, and you freeze out the other team, unlocking three questions, worth five points each, on a single subject, though the answers must come through the team captain.

Play then ensues and often features the following highlights:

Jeremy Paxman telling off the contestants

Paxman by name, man who packs a lot in, by nature.  Does that work?  Never mind.  In short, Paxman ain’t got time for your shit.  If the conferring goes on too long, viewers are treated to a gloriously withering, “Come on, Emmanuel, let’s have it,” wrong-footing the captain into giving a clanger of an incorrect answer.

Jeremy Paxman laughing at you for being wrong

Further derision from Paxman greets each clanger.  Nothing consolatory is ever said, as stupidity is a sin at Uni Chall.  “No!” he’ll chuckle before shuffling his question cards.  Easy for him to hurl out abuse, what with the answers written down for him.

Contestants’ faces during a music round

While some unknown concerto fills the studio, it’s hard to know what expression best befits the situation.  Poised to identify the sixteenth century composer, our academic challengers inadvertently strike something between a baby’s poo face and the nose wrinkle you make when walking straight into a dangerous fart.

The Shakespeare strategy

I’ve made this up, but the three five-point questions are always on a theme.  If you even understand the question, which can be demanding in itself, you might as well guess the answer, as you’ve got three changes for it to be right.  Therefore, if Jeremy asks “Which Shakespeare play…?” just keep shouting Macbeth and, chances are, you’ll pick up five points eventually.

A slightly embarrassed mature student

There’s no age limit, so don’t be surprised to see a silver-haired sexagenarian studying for a doctorate in anthropology and aromatherapy cringing in their cardigan each time a greasy teenager exposes their lack of knowledge about the Byzantine Empire.

Some personalities

Over the years, controversy has swirled around the show.  Debates have arisen over whether female contestants’ appearances are subjected to unfair criticism, something the men are spared (though should also experience based on some of their jumper choices).  Student life is a time to try out being an adult with no obligation to buy the real thing, so if a young mind is more focused on the deep study of Renaissance architecture than on how often human hair should be washed, then more power to them.  We scoff at their jumpers and hairstyles to cover our own insecurities.  We don’t know any of the answers, but these bright young things will go on to earn more than us, or their further studies will add knowledge to human life and provide a benefit to us all that we simply can’t see yet.  So yes, chuckle now at the double-barrelled pipsqueak going cross-eyed doing on-the-spot geometry.  His thesis will render your whole industry obsolete, probably.

University Challenge is a safe space for the intellectuals, holding out on primetime TV while we race to the bottom of human achievement with the likes of Love Island and Ex On The Beach.  It’s as British as being splashed by a bus driving through a puddle, only we’re showered in useless knowledge instead of murky rainwater.  May Uni Chall last another 56 years, brightening our Monday evenings with the sight of young geniuses getting berated for not knowing their Boticelli from their botany, their Galileo Galilei from their Gail Trimble and their network topology from their Netflix.

Black Mirror

Times are bleak.  It’s wet.  It’s cold.  There’s nothing to look forward to.  We have to go back to work.  We have to leave Europe.  Trump.  Why, then, would Netflix choose this time of year to unleash a fourth season of Black Mirror on us?  I, for one, am feeling particularly vulnerable, following a family Christmas where my thirty-two-year-old self reverted to a moody teenager under my retired parents’ roof.  Have I gained no maturity in the fourteen years since I left home?!  No.  No, I haven’t.  But maybe rock bottom is a great place from which to stare into bleak oblivion.  And that is precisely what Charlie Brooker’s suite of near-future dystopias offers us: a reason to be hopeless.

Brooker himself is a terrifying character.  His rants on the wonderful Screenwipe and Newswipe carefully detail each side of various political and social arguments before proving that both sides are stupid (a bit like a South Park episode).  His Guardian features make sparkling reading.  I rode out a notice period at my first (awful) job simply reading through the entire back catalogue of his Screen Burn column, cleverly minimised to a tiny square on my screen so the fusty old partners had no idea what I was only pretending to work.  As a child that was probably too young, I even cherished his TVGoHome book (based on the popular website from before I had internet) which was a parody of a TV guide – the comedy literally wrote itself.  Then he did Dead Set, bringing together two of my favourite things: reality TV and zombies.  Before I descend into sycophancy, let’s just say I subscribe to Brookerology.

But it is indeed a dark, dark mind that brings us Black Mirror.  The first point to commend is that each episode stands alone.  It’s that uncomfortable experience that comes with starting a new boxset: who on earth is that?  What the fudge is going on?  Am I going to enjoy it?  Well, get used to it, because that is every episode of Black Mirror.  And while your brain is working this all out, there’s also a new interpretation of our soon-to-be future to get to grips with.  To generalise brutally, most episodes take a small life-changing technological invention and show how it revolutionises our behaviour.  This could be an implant that records all your memories for future reference, such as in The Entire History Of You, or the robot guard dogs of Metalhead.  A lot of this stuff tends to revolve around applying some sort of device to your temple.  So far, so sci-fi (but not geeky, everybody).  But yes, we were commending each episode standing alone, weren’t we?  Whereas your average boxset just needs to set everything up just the once, Black Mirror has to reel you in and hold you with something new over and over.  And it manages to do this very skilfully.  You can feel immersed in a brave new society within just a couple of minutes.

The downside is that this, combined with the stark imaginings of our future, makes for relentless viewing.  Therefore, this is not a series you can binge on like so many Quality Streets.  Try and ration them out, maybe one a week.  Don’t do it on Sunday nights, though, or you won’t want to return to your mind-numbing job on Monday.  Pick a time when you feel quite resilient.

This is because things go wrong.  Whatever the episode’s premise, whatever the technological tweak to reality, things will go wrong.  And then they will go wronger and wronger and you will wonder what possessed you to subject yourself to such entertainment.  You could have been watching old Friends, but no, you wanted to chime in with the office Netflix discussion.

If there were a gun to my head making me criticise the show, then it would be that this awry-going has become slightly formulaic.  You could almost break an instalment down into 10% set up new world, 20% things go a bit wrong, 60% things go very wrong and then 10% bloody hell.  But it’s a formula that works.  As with every advancement in our standard of living, there are always consequences we never dreamed of.  I swear my thumb bone is now as brittle as chalk due to iPhone overuse.  I don’t want to use an Alexa as I can’t imagine sitting there in front of housemates and asking it how to cure a runny tummy.

Finally, the show’s progression is curiously from a British thing, into an American thing.  From a Channel 4 property in series one and two, Netflix swiped the rights for what has become the third and fourth series.  As with our beloved The Office, we feel this is a marker of something being good: “Oooh they’ve made an American version; this must be quality.”  This isn’t always accurate, but it works here.  In addition, times may be bleak here, but they’re also bleak in America, so it makes perfect sense.

Stranger Things

I don’t think I ever want to go to Hawkins.  Luckily I won’t have to, as it’s fictional, and it’s in 1983 (at the start of series one).  But the odds of having a good time there, especially for the residents, seem low.  This is because the town’s main employer, Hawkins National Laboratory, appears to be a force for evil as well as one of its biggest employers.  In Stranger Things, this kind of gets skirted around.  Its exact purpose is nebulous, but I’ve seen the mighty big car park from aerial shots and that place has room for a lot of workers.  Interior scenes always seem fully staffed.  The turnover of personnel from on-site fatalities must be costing them a fortune in death-in-service insurances payouts.

But this is part of the fun: it doesn’t matter.  Stranger Things is all about the adventure.  Surely, the less able we are to explain things, the stranger those things are.  Therefore, the show has freed itself from having to follow any well-known mythology, building from scratch a belief system that feels perfectly at home in its 80s setting.  I can’t explain more without giving away the mysteries of the first series, but we can go into detail on what makes the show so appealing where other supernaturally themed programmes have failed to capture such a dedicated audience, treating each strange thing in turn:

The perfectly observed period setting.

Millennials can’t get enough of the 80s, and nothing is more 80s that Stranger Things.  Even the 80s themselves.  The music, the outfits, the smoking, the hair, the references: it’s a joke that we’re all in on.  Of particular importance is the 80s technology.  This was a time of walkie-talkies and landlines, enormous video cameras and huge arcade games.  Whenever a TV appears in an episode, we are aghast at how poor the picture quality is.  I’m right back to sickdays as a child, when my parents allowed the spare black and white telly into my bedroom, complete with channel change by turny knob and more snow in the picture than in a Raymond Briggs animation (about a snowy character – not one of the normal ones).  Every classic film of the period has been mined for inspiration and the result is a winning formula on screen.

The opening credits.

I’ve talked before about the importance of opening credits to establishing a show, massaging viewers’ minds into the optimal state for embracing every item of storyline that is about to be thrown at them.  From the first mmmmmmmmmmmmvvvvvvvvmm of Stranger Things’ opening credits, you’re right back at primary school buzzing your socks off at getting to watch a video in class.  You can almost hear the chunky cassette noisily shunting itself into position inside the VCR.  Netflix offers you the chance to skip the credits, sparing binge watchers a chilling reminder of how many episodes they are consuming, but I have always opted to indulge in the full sequence with Stranger Things.  It’s at once wonderfully tacky and completely beautiful.  It’s about as sophisticated in execution as a PowerPoint, but everything has been planned with meticulous cunning to get the tone right.  There are even tiny white flecks that appear, blending our HD viewing experience in 2017 with the limitations of the 80s tech we remember.  And then, the chapter heading floats into view before fading off with glorious tackiness, and I swear to myself that my year six teacher has let us watch Badger Girl.

Winona Ryder.

This is spot-on casting.  As a hysterical mother, Winones is in her element.  She is welcome to chew the scenery as much as she wants, as the chipboard walls are some of the chewiest scenery I have ever seen.  I can’t get enough of her and the show’s creators can’t seem to get enough of torturing her character.

Friendship.

If you can’t identify with the 80s because you’re too young (well done) or have never seen the films Stranger Things so closely references (booo!) then at least the relationships between the characters should warm your heart.  Even when being cold to each other (for example, Nancy ditches Barb to join the cool kids) there’s a lot to identify with.  At the heart of the show and governed by the very just motto “Friends don’t lie” is the Party.  Here they are in order of how much I like each character:

Lucas

He is just a lot of fun on the screen.  He just gets on with things, pedalling about on his BMX, looking shocked when shocking things happen and furrowing his brow when mysteries need solving.  Holding a walkie-talkie like a boss, I really enjoy his little face.  In series two, he steals more and more scenes, so we just need more of Lucas please.

Dustin

You can tell that the show’s creators love having Dustin swear.  Nothing is funnier than him shouting “Son of a bitch” at his friends’ parents.

Will

Perhaps the tiniest boy ever seen, with his bowl haircut being at least 60% of his total volume.  He spends most of the first series absent (and I do wonder what the toilet situation was during that time as I don’t imagine the facilities are great in that dimension) and most of the second series probably wishing he was still absent.  Anyone with Winona as their mother is, let’s be honest, not going to have a great time.

Mike

The whiniest member of the Party, his negativity has got him fourth place on the list.  His hair is also not as good as Will’s.  It’s like when best friends copy each other’s appearances and one ends up being the better version of the other.  I might as well mention Eleven here as well, as she is, at times, party to the Party, at the insistence of Mike.  She and Mike deserve each other really.

I only really struggle with two elements in Stranger Things.  One is that so many scenes are set up with an all-American period car pulling up in front of a house.  Given that I own neither a house nor a car, both are items that lack significance for me and so tend to look the same.  Ultimately, it never matters about not knowing who is in the house or the car, as the characters’ eventual emergence always reveals this to my limited brain.  But, I reckon, on average, ten minutes of each episode is lost to this tool, and it’s ten minutes I could spend watching something slash getting through the full set of episodes more quickly.

Secondly, it’s that tissue paper that floats about in the air.  I won’t say when and why it appears, as that’s technically a spoiler, but it gets quite distracting.  I keep wondering if it’s real or CGI.  What does it taste like?  Does it hurt if it gets in your eye?  I think it probably stings a bit.  At least it’s a special effect you can create at home with matches and loo roll, should you want to, bringing to life a 4D viewing experience, like when a plant fell on my friend when we first watched Avatar on DVD and she thought Pandora was bursting into the living room.

In conclusion, don’t go to Hawkins in real life.  But do go there via the medium of watching both series of Stranger Things.  Then your life will have meaning, as you can weigh in on office discussions about which was better out of series one and two (series two has a better overall structure but of course lacks the surprise and delight of the first as you already know what’s going on).  Enjoy the mysteries and the magic, safe in the knowledge that I am doing enough worrying about the practicalities of Hawkins Laboratories’ finances for all of us.

Fortitude

On its launch in January 2015 you couldn’t move without seeing a billboard for Fortitude.  Huge out-of-home formats in train stations and by roadsides told everyone to stop what they were doing and to watch this massive show immediately.  There was a stellar cast.  Not just big names, but credible character actors who are in those shows and films that you like, and who did ever such a good performance in that thing where maybe they got some award nominations as well, probably.  Plus, there was snow in the background.  A show in the snow seemed like something a bit different, so what wasn’t to love?

Around the same time, I was lucky enough to meet the man at Sky who had commissioned Fortitude.  As part of my real job, I was at their HQ in Osterley (not worth the Tube journey in itself) for an immersion day and we were granted an audience with this very nice chap (which was worth the Tube journey).  Commissioners are often the most interesting people you can meet in media.  They have to predict and then cater to the desires of audiences, both telling us what we should want to watch and responding to what we actually want to watch.  For a drama like Fortitude, the gestation period can last years, but I remember being told that the script was like nothing he had seen before and like nothing on TV at the time, so he gave it the green light.

Now we are two series into Fortitude and, indeed, it is like nothing I have ever seen before.  In fact, after sitting through many hours of it, I still have no idea what it is like or, really, what it’s about either.  Is it science fiction or realistic?  Is it a murder mystery or is it a drama?  Is it a crime thriller or arthouse foreign nonsense?  Luckily, it’s all of these things, and most likely a few others as well.

I spent the first series imagining that Fortitude was an island near the Arctic, maybe like Svalbard.  With its governor and everyone speaking English, I thought it might be a British or US territory.  I think now it’s actually near Norway’s border with Russia, but it doesn’t really matter.  It’s snowy AF and the best thing about its place name is hearing all the cast pronouncing it in their wonderfully different accents.  Not the Americans or the Brits, but the various Scandinavians.  I’ve already talked of my love of a good Nordic accent in Vikings, but they don’t get to singsong For-ti-tude over and over again till it sounds ridiculously entertaining.

That aside, there are things about the show that don’t quite work.  Given the environment, action scenes do tend to end with people running in the snow.  But people can’t run very fast in snow.  Especially if they are wrapped up in big coats.  And the big coats make the characters hard to recognise.  Therefore, I find it hard to be excited by the snow chases, but it doesn’t matter, as I don’t know who the people are anyway.  The cast is pretty big – it’s a whole town.  If you don’t cotton on to names quickly, or remember everything you’ve seen, then abandon hope now.  Quite a few of them die, so series two regenerates with new people who you’ve never heard of and whose origins aren’t really explained.  The mysteries are also complex, mostly rooting back to a decomposing mammoth carcass in the permafrost.  And, you know, wasps.  If advanced biology, zoology and archaeology aren’t your idea of entertainment then you should probably be keeping up with a Kardashian instead.  However, if the gore of shows like Fear The Walking Dead isn’t enough, then Fortitude has many gruesome treats for you.  It’s the first show where I’ve had to mute the sound to spare myself the grotesque audio of some unnecessary surgery.

But yes, get drawn in by the stellar cast (until their characters die), enjoy the breath-taking snowscapes (even though they tone down any action chases as people are worried about slipping over) and stay for the twists and turns (because it doesn’t really matter if you have no idea what’s going on).  At no point will you be more entertained than when you hear a Scandinavian cry out the place name For-ti-tude…

BoJack Horseman

So far in my life, I have failed to give anyone a decent description of the concept behind BoJack Horseman; everyone claims it doesn't make any sense.  And now that the fourth series has snuck into Netflix, I will be repeating that failure in this blog.

Imagine a world where some people are animals.  Most things about this world are the same as ours.  There are humans and they have lives.  But in their lives are other people who are dogs or cats or horses.  BoJack is one of these horses.  And, because some animals behave in certain ways (fish live in water, dogs bark at vacuum cleaners, flies fly) so too do these characters.

If you're not thinking "Wait, what?!" by this point, in the appropriate southern Californian accent of course, then read on.  Our hero is a washed-up actor whose 90s sitcom projected him into the big time, only for his ego and insecurities to drive him into has-been status.  Yet we root for BoJack, as he embodies our own fragile sense of value, and laziness about most things.

The stellar voice cast alone should be an indicator of the show's quality.  Unlike adult cartoons where everything must end as it began, the characters' stories intertwine and move on.  And adult this is, with drug binges and overdoses featuring, not to mention the strange need throughout to imagine how all these different animals have sex in a world where interspecies dating is perfectly acceptable (but that might just be me).

While the animation takes a while to get used to, as it's not that pretty, and the pace of the script can seem relentless, as gags are packed in at a mile a minute, it's the subtle and not-so-subtle touches to the flashbacks that I always remember.  Sure, the 90s heyday of Horsin' Around (the cheesy sitcom where BoJack plays a horse that takes in three orphans) is lampooned.  But even 2007 is exposed for the load of old tosh it really was.  The most cunning stroke every time is the sarcastic soundtrack especially produced for each period.  Listen out for it and ask yourself if this is the first time you’ve ever noticed the lyrics to songs used in TV and that they have secretly been trolling you all along.

I've read this back, then, and it still makes no sense.  Rest assured I have done the programme no justice.  But trust me, it's worth watching.