Dear White People

Sometimes you come across something on Netflix that seems perfectly aimed at you.  This is how I felt when I was first served Dear White People via their unfathomable algorithm (probably based on the fact I had watched Friends From College and The Get Down).  Surely, this was a show for me, as I am definitely a white people.  But, you know what?  I’ve got a careful line to tread here using the snarky and irreverent tone that regular readers of this blog are used to.  I’m still going to be flippant when taking apart its style and pace, but its head-on tackling of racial sensitivity will not be coming in for that sort of treatment.  Firstly, because that would be whack, and secondly, because this part of the show is absolutely banging.  From a cynical perspective, we can view this purely as a plot device and state that the black/white friction throughout each episode generates gripping drama.  But as a human (from one of the least diverse villages in one of the least diverse counties of England) it prompts constant questions and internal discussions, ladling surprises on disappointments on confusion on outrage in an endless cycle of much-needed re-evaluation.  Sometimes, we all need to be challenged.

Welcome to the fictional Ivy League college of Winchester.  Here, the USA’s brightest (and wealthiest) young minds pursue further education among the leafy quads and historic traditions.  One of these traditions is that a particular hall of residence’s residing residents are African-Americans, leaving the campus segregated.  Each episode focuses on an individual student’s experience of this situation.  Not only are they navigating their own transition into adulthood by way of the pretend adult world of university life, but most of our characters are also coping with being minorities in a historically white-dominated environment.  Romantic relationships, friendships and academic stress, along with a lot of extra-curriculars, are par for the course, but, for our black and dual heritage characters, they must also cope with the prejudice, fetishisation, enthusiasm and guilt of their fellow students of all skin tones (but with heavy emphasis on liberal white students getting it totally wrong – white readers will cringe hard each time they recognise themselves).

Don’t worry, though, almost everyone is beautiful, and each episode is tantalisingly shot as if this is fodder for a boutique cinema showing European arthouse flicks.  But it’s not; it’s really good telly.  Even the colour palette of the lighting, the wardrobe and the interiors carries a stylised theme, with warm autumnal hues circling the storylines.  You will, however, stop and wonder how so much garishly patterned wallpaper needs to adorn the walls of Winchester’s dorms.  This crafting calls to mind shows like Girls, and the thirty-minute run time drives the likeness further.  In fact, it hoodwinked me into quite a run of allowing myself just one more episode (as each was only an extra half hour before I got off the sofa) and I got through the current two seasons in two days.

So how does each episode unfold?  Well, there’s a clever formula.  An omniscient narrator sardonically eases us into each instalment before revealing who’ll be our focus.  There’s Samantha, the host of Winchester student radio’s eponymous phone-in, Dear White People, in whom it’s easy to recognise the idealistic student activist.  Far more interesting is her best friend, Joelle, who combines a wicked sense of humour with being top of the class in everything.  On the boys’ side, there’s Troy, the dean’s son struggling under the weight of expectation, but still finding time to do all the sit ups so you’ll feel like a blob each time his clothes come off (which is all the time).  There’s also Reggie, whose unrequited love for Samantha is matched only by the unrequited-ness of Joelle’s love for him, but I was forced to question the latter because he makes some really dodgy choices with his sweaters, and then let’s not forget Lionel, the unassuming, aspiring journalist coming to terms with his sexuality.  At first, the cast seems like a standard run-through of generic college tropes, but their depth and originality is uncovered as we journey through the racist-infested water with them.  They all also have a fair bit of sex, as all students do, so be prepared to look like a perv if your viewing is ever interrupted.

At each episode’s conclusion, the focus character makes eye contact directly through the camera with you, the viewer.  It took me a while to notice this and then it became all I thought about.  Is it a knowing glance to acknowledge the overall artificiality of the whole production or is it in the spirit of being caught red-handed as a voyeur feasting on other people’s (racial) dramas from a (safe, judgment-free) distance?  Either way, the soundtrack cranks back up with an epic song selection that leaves you sitting there letting it all sink in.  Until Netflix’s autoplay kicks in and you’re back in to find out what happens next.

And I genuinely wanted to know.  The thing about young people, whatever their skin colour, is that they are idealists.  Their passions burn brighter than those of people who’ve been chained to office desks for the last eleven years (hiya!), so I defy anyone not to connect with all the dear different people of Dear White People.  Series one deals with the fallout of a black-face Halloween party, before building to an altercation with a white, gun-happy college security guard and climaxing with a sham town hall meeting to iron out racial tensions on campus.  The second series doesn’t feel as tightly packed: the characters cope with the rise of anonymous alt-right social media accounts and prepare for controversial public figures to descend on Winchester.  Throughout both, our intelligent and articulate heroes broadcast their responses in the student paper or on the student radio station.  If anything, this was the least credible part.  Based on my university experience, nobody listened to student radio, and we only looked in the newspaper to see whose pictures had appeared in the Fit College section.  But series two offers some explanations, showing that the radio is broadcast over speakers into the quads.  It also shows for the first time that these students actually go to class.

We don’t have dorm segregation in the UK, but Dear White People should be essential viewing everywhere.  I laughed out loud, I did myself mischief through excessive cringing and I cared deeply about the human drama.  I was entertained, but not in a way that was intended to distract me from realising that discussion about race, and specifically the experience of black people in America at the hands (and patronising comments) of white people, is not something to shy away from.  IMDB claims a third series is coming and I can’t wait.  Not because I’m taking pains to sound woke in my writing here, but because Dear White People is Netflix at its best.  More please.

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.