Arrested Development

Right, say this name: Bob Loblaw.

Ok, now say it again, but in an American accent: Bob Loblaw.

Now say it a few times at speed in the same accent.  Congratulations, you’re just sitting there saying “blah blah blah” over and over.

But, isn’t that clever?  I certainly thought it was back at university when we were flicking through the TV channels in a friend’s room.  It must have been around 2006, back in the days when digital TV was still new and people were excited to have a handful of extra channels on offer.  The word digibox was seen as futuristic and progressive, whereas it was obscure and redundant within years.  In those days, this was at odds with the actual age of my friend’s room, which dated back to the fourteenth century.  My final-year room was just next door, both in a part of our college called the Buttery, though its relation to any sort of dairy produce seemed to have vanished with the evenness of its floors and ceilings many years prior.  Her open-door policy gave the rest of us free reign to use her illegal microwave (which college authorities demanded be moved to a kitchen and we happily ignored for the whole year) and to park ourselves on the cheap old sofa for a bit of telly.  Coming from a household that revolved around TV screens, university had seen me go cold turkey on television.  Mostly.

I’ve already mentioned the time we gathered for the last-ever episode of Friends, and then there were of course the kindred spirits I found to watch Big Brother with (which I haven’t actually covered yet so let’s just hyperlink Celebrity Big Brother again).  By final year, though, I felt more adult and sophisticated and better able to handle my time, surviving with greater ease an average week of two thousand words of essay and four translations every which way between English and French and English and German.  Despite the need to be studying at all times, we found the odd moment after dinner in hall to sit through thirty minutes of Hollyoaks, despite being unable to identify with any character that wasn’t studying at all times.  Then, one evening, scrolling the channels, we stumbled across an episode of Arrested Development on BBC2.

The cameras were shaky. The characters were numerous.  The dialogue was almost faster than we could think.  The jokes poured in one after the other, playing on words, playing on visuals, playing on anything.  And, in the midst of it, this odd family were discussing a lawyer called Bob Loblaw, mentioning the name so speedily that everything simply descended into blah blah blah.  I was deeply impressed.  This felt like clever stuff.  Finally, a sitcom for smart people!

Years later, I managed to make my way through the first three series, potentially renting the DVDs off Lovefilm.  I don’t need to recap the story for anyone, as the opening credits explain everything, but nothing else will make sense if I don’t, so, I actually do.  It’s all about the Bluth family: a wealthy bunch of Californians up to no good in the property market.  The development that is being arrested, I assume, is that of their son Michael, as he is the only sensible hard-working one, so they all rely on him while carrying on with terrible behaviour.  He just wants to get his son, George Michael (I know), away from their clutches, and this is thwarted repeatedly.  You’ve got Ron Howard narrating, as there’s a lot to keep up with, and each episode is beautifully structured around a climactic misunderstanding or assumption whose complexity makes you raise your eyebrows at the final reveal.  On the way, you’ll chuckle at the plays on words as the characters’ foibles develop.  I began to assume that the writers literally thought of something ridiculous and then worked back from it to contrive its occurrence.  It’s all about setting up: reams of dialogue go into letting one character say something that is at once outrageous, yet perfectly, plausibly innocent in regard to the plot, such as the famous Tobias line: “I blue/blew myself.”

Earning a cult status, the show naturally got the shit cancelled out of it.  About a decade later, Netflix resuscitated it.  All the actors were too busy and important to make time for filming, so a fourth series was teased out in a way that didn’t require them all to be together.  Then everybody said that was silly and the scenes were remixed into a better version, which is the one that I watched.  While the first three series roll along joyfully, I found this fourth a poor echo.  It’s probably me, at capacity for whimsical homonym abuse, or maybe the main characters, worn from over usage (apart from Buster, who has a million miles left), just had nowhere interesting left to go.  But finishing that season, and the fifth, has recently been a right old chore, just so I could write this post safe in the knowledge I had consumed the full body of work in order to type snarky shots about it.  I would begin each episode determined to pay attention and keep up.  But, without fail, I would find myself desperately scrolling anything on my phone rather than following the action on the TV.  The tone just felt constantly the same.  It’s entirely my loss, but it also indicates something wasn’t right with the show.

In fact, it was the peripheral characters that provided the most entertainment, so let’s run through some top picks:

Lucille 2

Liza Minnelli with vertigo.  It’s been great to have the chance to look at her face and hear her voice, because she’s such a bundle of enthusiastic energy.  Her attempts to seduce any of the Bluth boys have rendered me scared of apartment building corridors.

Steve Holt

Steve Holt!

Kitty Sanchez

A secretary who aggressively lifts up her own shirt as a form of attack.  Deeply disturbing.

Ann Veal

George Michael’s girlfriend who is so boring that everyone forgets her all the time.

Tony Wonder

Ben Stiller as a crap magician (still better than Gob, though I maintain that all magicians are crap), always on hand in a puff of smoke asking if someone said wonder, which nobody did.

So yeah, I’m being kind of meh about one of the cleverest and most critically acclaimed pieces of TV out there, on a tiny blog that only my Facebook pals can find.  I don’t think I mean to be.  Try this show out.  Come for the quotable one-liners.  Look great at dinner parties.  Freak yourself out that Michael Cera at once doesn’t age and does age, and you’ll be terribly distracted trying to work out which.  But that’s the point – don’t watch this show with any distractions.  It needs your full attention, because it’s smarter than you and it’s smarter than me.  Miss a moment and the rest of the plot falls apart as if a tiny screw is loose.  And then, it just feels like you’re watching a load of blah blah blah…

Footballers’ Wives

I have no idea why I’m doing a show from 2002, but it seems to have been a classic year for vintage TV.  In addition, the Desperate Housewives post whipped up a storm of reads, so I’ve decided that wives is a popular theme, and this show is about wives as well (clue’s in the title).  Then, I’m amplifying that with the power of nostalgia, after the Buffy The Vampire Slayer post drew more attention than I was prepared for: turns out we like to relive our memories of shows from when we were younger and less jaded, safely in the EU and certain of an economically prosperous future.

The next uninteresting detail I will talk you through at length is the orthography of the show’s name itself.  After some soul searching, I’ve decided to go with Footballers’ Wives, as you’ll see from the header on the post.  This is significant because at any one time I am devoting 20% of my life’s energy to grammatical pedantry.  Even at the age of 17, when this week’s programme was first broadcast, my teenage self was appalled at the lack of plural possessive apostrophe concluding the opening credits: Footballers Wives.  You’re only young once, so I’m glad I spent that time obsessing about punctuation.  Otherwise, how on earth are you supposed to know that the wives belong to the footballers?  It just looks like a strange, unconnected list.  But then, matters were made worse once I reminded myself how things really appeared: footballers wive$.  I won’t unpick why this is an abomination in my eyes (and if you don’t know why, then get out now please), but it does serve handily to illustrate the level of class on offer in this show.  In short, there was none.  Let’s crack on, then.

But first, it’s 2018, so let’s dispel the myth that wives are the property of their husbands (with or without the appropriate apostrophe to indicate this possession).  Yes, in this day and age, people can’t wait to rush up the aisle in order to spend thousands of pounds on flowers that nobody will remember and to secure a sofa buddy for future series of The Crown, but vows tend to be more about an equal partnership rather than referring to any duty of obedience.  But this was the beauty of Footballers’ Wives – the ladies wore the trousers.  Everything about the menfolk was incidental.  There were merely possessions to trade.  Even their footballing prowess was limited to a couple of lines in the script – almost no actual match footage ever appealed.  For someone with better things to do than sit through any sort of ballsport (such as watching reruns of dinnerladies) this only added to the programme’s appeal.

Let’s look at Tanya Turner, the ur-WAG.  Throughout the five series (yes, five!) she ended up in all manner of relationships, working through around half of the Earls Park FC first team, a proportion of the support staff and anyone else who just happened to be passing for that matter.  This wasn’t a search for love, though, but a quest to keep herself in acrylic nails and extraordinarily tacky outfit choices with no expense spared.  Once ex-captain Jason was dispatched, she fought for a place in new signing Conrad Gates’ bed (despite his straightened hair), dallied with sports agent/chairwoman Hazel Bailey and even found the time to get herself astride Frank Laslett, the overweight, over-age chairman of the club, specifically with the intention of shagging him to death.  Imagine talking about that storyline in the office the next day.  But the combination of cocaine, booze and vigorous love making did the job – our Tanya got what she wanted out of each chap (or chapette, in the case of Hazel) and then moved on to the next one.  Played with bags of aplomb by Zöe Lucker (whom I don’t seem to spot on TV these days, but ought to be a national treasure), Tanya was a popular creation, rooted for by an audience that was fully entertained by her outrageous behaviour.

In fact, the show suffered whenever she was absent.  IMDB tells me that Gillian Taylforth (Cathy from Eastenders, everyone) appeared in the most episodes, playing Jackie Pascoe, the overbearing pushy mother.  Yet, my most memorable character is Nurse Dunkley.  The name in itself is a comic moniker for someone you’re never going to take seriously.  But her arc was as sinister as they come: caring for Frank Laslett during his coma (obviously) she went from an apparently incidental background artist to front-of-camera abuser, pursuing a physical relationship with the unconscious man in her care, while whispering sweet nothings to him in her simpleton-sounding northern accent.  Her spectacles practically steaming up with lust is an image that still haunts me to this day.

But this was what we all tuned in for: far-fetched melodrama.  But you can watch that in most soap operas, so the attraction is better qualified as: far-fetched melodrama involving wealthy, mostly attractive people in glamorous settings.  Which is loads better.  Babies were swapped.  Boob implants caught fire.  Murders were attempted and completed.  Sex videos were leaked.  Joan Collins popped in.  Peter Stringfellow popped in.  This was the level of Footballers’ Wives.  As a result, it was wickedly fun.  I’m not ashamed to admit I also really enjoyed the foul language and frequent nudity – seeing someone being told to f*** off when their boobs are peaking over the duvet is oddly gratifying when you’re a teenager with punctuation-related anxiety.

Sadly, the show ended in 2006; it may well have been shagged to death itself to be honest.  I don’t even know if there’s any way to watch it these days, shy of trawling car boots for the old DVDs and then squinting at the appalling image quality with your HD-accustomed eyeballs, before realising things look appalling due to the noughties fashions the show so willingly embraced.  In fact, I don’t even recommend re-watching; times have changed, and the old show’s website still exists here, reminding you how crude the old internet was.  Have a click around and think of times past.  This is the trash that brought millions to ITV’s peak schedule.  At least now we have Love Island, eh?

Summer Heights High

After all these stupid posts, I’ve just realised something.  I’ve only ever written about shows produced in the UK or the US.  It’s as if nowhere else in the world can make any good boxsets.  But, there’s a whole international body of content out there.  Don’t think I won’t sit through something just because it’s got subtitles.  I bloody will.  And let’s not forget the other countries that speak English.  To be fair, everywhere does, if you shout loud enough.  So which proud nation will join the two Uniteds?  Step forward, Australia.  It couldn’t be further away, but its culture and Great Britain’s are like two old friends who hardly ever see each other, but, whenever they do, they pick up right where they left off.  If you don’t have any Australians in your life, get some now.  I can highly recommend them.  In the time it takes me to agonise at the weekend over the fat content of hummus in Sainsbury’s, your average Australian has visited three different European cities and attended an orphans’ event somewhere in London.  They are having too much fun to need to go to bed at all.  They willingly leave behind the glorious weather and space of their homeland, just so disgruntled Brits can shove them on the Tube before they head out into the drizzle, and yet they still appear to have the best time.  So, there they are, coming over here and being awesome.  And they’ve only gone and brought a banging comedy with them.

Summer Heights High’s brilliance comes from its credibility.  It’s a mockumentary, like The Office, so we can’t help but feel it’s a real place of education.  The school is in another country, so our lack of knowledge about schools there allows us to stifle our scepticism even more.  Without a closer frame of reference, you’ll swallow anything; admit it.  For all you know, every Australian school really is like this.  But, most importantly, Summer Heights High’s believability comes from the performances.  Sure, most of the supporting cast seem like innocent passers-by who’ve had scripts thrust into their hands and still don’t know how they ended up in front of a camera.  But that doesn’t matter.  It just pulls the focus even more sharply onto the show’s creator, writer and star.

It’s not for me to be sycophantic (though I have gone around declaring national treasures willy nilly – see the posts on Chewing Gum and Nighty Night) but let’s give Chris Lilley a big hand.  This is a fully-grown man whose portrayal of a year 11 girl is the most realistic portrayal of a year 11 girl anyone anywhere has ever seen, done or imagined.  I didn’t want to resort to exaggeration, but I’ve been driven to it simply by the way Chris Lilley looks in a school dress.  On that note, let’s examine the three main characters of Summer Heights High, and bask in these comic creations.

Ja’mie King

Note the pronunciation, with the emphasis on the second syllable.  Take one Chris Lilley, add a wig, some pop socks and one of those summer dresses that schoolgirls wear in hot weather, and you’ve got yourself every teenage girl tantrum ever.  Ja’mie offers a unique perspective on the school, as she is on an exchange from her beloved private academy, experiencing the harsh realities of a public education for the first time.  Self-assured to a fault, she rates herself as the smartest non-Asian in year 11 (but she finds disabled people so cool) and doesn’t let anything stand in her way when it comes to being the most popular girl in her new year group (because she doesn’t want to look slut, she wants to look semi-slut, and that’s fair enough).  You’ll be shocked by her manipulative approach to relationships, and she actually appears in a previous Chris Lilley show, We Can Be Heroes: Finding The Australian Of The Year, exemplifying this perfectly by trying to get the African school boys she sponsors for charity to send her dick pics.

Jonah Takalua

I’ve always struggled with this character the most.  He’s basically your naughty lad at school, learning to use inappropriate humour to offend teachers while not being clever enough to carry it off.  His main feature, however, is being Tongan, which isn’t a place lots of Brits come from (so Tongans, please come to London in large numbers so you can join in with everyone being welcome here, despite the fact our mums and dads voted for Brexit) so I’ve had to infer that this seems to signify his status as part of a social underclass.  He can be charming and sensitive, so there is depth to this character, but I secretly always willed his bits to be over, and these days, the sensitivities about dressing up as another racial group mean that he is a bit dated as a concept.

Mr G

But two out of three ain’t bad.  Along with Ja’mie, Mr G is a hoot, everyone.  With a similar level of self-interest, Mr G is the camp drama teacher who believes no subject holds more value than Performing Arts, simply because that’s what he teaches.  He’s happiest at the centre of attention, and the scene where he explains that he often just spends whole lessons performing to the kids has me nearly wetting myself every time I watch it.  He defines the quotable comic creation, with his sexual meowing in the sequence just mentioned shattering the peace and reverence of a many a temple visit during a recent trip to Japan.  Mr G is perfectly at ease with exploiting tragedy for personal gain, turning a student’s death from a drug overdose into a school musical (one of the wow shows, as opposed to the traditionals that have to be endured every second year).

Each of the eight episodes in the single series works back and forth and back again among these three terrible people, but you’ll really only be able to love them.  Originally shown on BBC Three in the UK, you’ll be able to join the Summer Heights High-quoting community once you have tracked the programme down and consumed it in full.  And you should.  If you’re unlucky enough to lack Australians in your daily life, this will go some way to helping you get your RDA of vitamin Oz.  Also, carry on reading this blog each week, as I’ve now covered off three different countries’ telly programmes, demonstrating the wokeness of Just One More Episode.

Extras

Part of coming to terms with adult life is realising that it’s not all it’s cracked up to be.  The most interesting Facebook post I’ve seen in recent times (yes, I still seem to be on Facebook) was a friend asking for tips about how to stack Tuppaware in a dishwasher.  There is probably nothing more banal, and yet the engagement rates were high.  This is, after all, adulting.  Luckily, I’m already really good at stacking Tuppaware in a dishwasher (it’s all in the angle and the anchoring), but this did cause me to reflect on the stage of adulthood I am finally reaching.  2018’s sole goal is to buy a home.  After twelve years of professional flat sharing, I might finally be able to lounge around watching boxsets in my underpants like some sort of hairy, sofa-based mammal without people wrinkling their noses at me (unless the neighbours can see in through the windows of any new place I buy).  This has meant that adverts on TV that just seemed like total white noise before have become endowed with a new significance.  Take DFS.  I’ve never thought about buying a sofa before, but I do know there’s always a sale on and you don’t have to pay anything for six years or something.  And also 0% finance.  I don’t really know what that is, but it’s very important and lots of adverts say it.  I might start offering 0% finance on me as a person and see if that makes me more popular.  It’s got to be better than consuming boxsets in my underpants.  Suddenly, DFS ads started to capture my attention in a new way.  And then the voiceover sounded familiar.  And then I realised it was Ashley Jensen.  And then this reminded me of what a delight she was in Extras.  And now here I am writing another of these blog posts about it.  Shall we?

We probably all remember the huge fuss that ensued when Ricky Gervais was faced with topping the genre-redefining comedic achievements of The Office.  Extras was different in two ways: moving away from the mockumentary structure and reflecting Gervais’s propulsion to the A-list with cameos from some of Hollywood’s biggest household names.  And Barry from Eastenders.

Extras follows Andy Millman, an absolute everyman stuck working as a background artist while dreaming of getting his own sitcom off the ground.  The various film sets that form his workplaces offer a new setting for each episode and a supporting cast that replenishes itself throughout.  Facing the daily prospect of unflattering costumes and waiting around all day doing nothing alongside Andy is best friend, Maggie (played by Ashley Jensen, hence the banging on about her in this week’s tedious and irrelevant opener).  Together, they both end up confronted by the whole gamut of awkward social faux-pas, from casual racism, to homosexuality, via treatment of the disabled, and everything else, including genocide, but that’s a bit more than a faux-pas.  In this respect, Extras has dated itself slightly, as our views on so many of these things are far more woke than they were in 2005.

Where the humour still shines through is the ridiculous moments that Maggie and Andy’s naivety and haplessness thrusts them into.  I would now like to run through some of my favourites:

Custard

In the Les Dennis episode, Andy has a role in a pantomime alongside the fallen-from-glory TV personality.  On choreography is Bunny, an overbearing stage father whose adult daughter, Lizzie, is making up the chorus.  Maggie, who happens to be an old school friend, is reluctantly reunited with Lizzie and ends up invited to Lizzie’s very depressing birthday party (hilarious in itself).  She somehow ends up singing Food Glorious Food, but Bunny chimes in over and over to make sure she hits the right notes for custard.  I have since never been able to hear the name of this vanilla dessert sauce without his voice going right through me.

Patrick Stewart’s face

The famous cameo appearances all involve a real person playing an awful version of themselves.  In Extras, Patrick Stewart is only interested in situations that involve a lady’s clothes falling off and, despite her scrabbling around to get dressed, he’s already seen everything.  He recounts these scenes with deadpan earnestness and then, once finished, his little face glazes over, terribly pleased with itself, so that you’ll never see him in the same light again.

Prophylactic or sheath

In series two, Andy lands a gig on an epic fantasy movie, starring a bratty Daniel Radcliffe.  Apparently only just reaching sexual maturity, Radcliffe tries to chat up Maggie in the catering bus, revealing he already has an unravelled condom ready to go.  He then accidentally flicks this and it lands on Dame Diana Rigg’s head.  Her withering expression goes to show why she totally nailed the role of Queen of Thorns years later in Game of Thrones.

Pug pug

As the story unfolds, Millman’s sitcom gets picked up, goes into production and finally airs, despite ending up a million miles away from the original vision.  Millman gets access to VIP treatment in a bar, and ends up rubbing shoulders with David Bowie, who in turn takes to the piano and composes an on-the-spot ditty about this silly little fat man.  Cue the rest of the bar’s patrons joining in with the refrain.

Darren Lamb

Don’t worry, Stephen Merchant is here as well everyone.  He plays Millman’s atrocious agent, barely aware of the name of his client’s sitcom (When The Whistle Blows) and always clad in a naff dad coat that looks wrong wherever he goes.  Their exchanges in his office have consistently guaranteed me a hearty LOL.

The sparkling water bottle

In the Sir Ian McKellen episode, Millman apes a visiting old school friend’s chat-up technique, without realising what’s in the bottle he has just been chucking about with affected nonchalance.  It’s worth watching all of Extras just to see his puffy cheeks and bulging eyes when he realises the terrible mistake he has made.

But what’s the point of all these highlights?  They all show us that adult life is hard, because you have to grow up into your own disappointments.  It’s a series of excruciating moments surrounded by awful people.  So, maybe you expected that, by now, your hit sitcom would be enjoying rave reviews, but you’re actually using social media to scoff at other people’s approaches to stacking Tuppaware in a dishwasher.  Extras may have some dated humour and deviate from real life with its ready availability of acting royalty, but as an exercise in expectation management, it really hasn’t aged a bit.

Desperate Housewives

Yes, because sometimes we all need the help of our friends.  Yes, because sometimes neighbours become closer than family.  Yes, because sometimes we need to learn that there’s more to life than appearances.  And so on and so forth: these are just some made-up lines from Desperate Housewives because it’s too hot to bother checking for real quotations on the internet and it’s funnier to think of your own.  Each episode in the eight-season run of this classic show drew to its conclusion with omniscient posthumous narrator, Mary Alice Young, saying “yes” in her slow calm voice before passing judgment on the goings on of Wisteria Lane.  Cue a montage of shots featuring each family coming to terms with that episode’s action.

This week I’m delving into an iconic boxset from years ago, just because it’s sometimes nice to be nostalgic.  Yes, because sometimes it’s nice to be nostalgic (oops, Mary Alice-ing again).  In many ways, Desperate Housewives was soap operatic trash, but the clever narrative framing outlined in the previous paragraph gave it an original spin, elevating its suburban banality to high-end drama.  Premiering in 2004, my nineteen-year-old self and all of my new-found nineteen-year-old college buddies at university instinctively knew that this was a big moment in TV.  Any show that opens with the suicide of a lead character is bound to combine enough mystery with enough dark humour to reel in anyone looking for distraction.  We were hooked.

The aesthetic offered great escapism.  There were sunshine-drenched white picket fences, leaned over for the exchanging of gossip by glamorous ladies whose intertwined stories were brought to life in the richly imagined town of Fairview.  Visiting a dear friend in Connecticut years later, I fulfilled a lifetime goal of beholding a place that looked just like Wisteria Lane, alarming locals with my coveting of their garden borders.  The show’s leads ran households, kept down jobs, raised children, drank too much wine, all without a hair out of place.  The perfection on the surface was so clichéd that you knew it would only take a small scratch on the surface to find dystopia beneath.

It was around these secrets that each series was structured.  While some inconsistency abounded in the quality of each mystery, the pacing and cliffhangering kept us coming back for more.  And these were the days before Sky Plus, so we would literally need to convene around someone’s actual television at the pre-ordained time as confirmed by the TV listings page in a newspaper.  There was even a hairy moment during the holidays when everyone with a TV had returned to their regions of origin and those of us remaining behind were forced to use the college TV room in order to keep up with the action.  This was a place best avoided, as it was dominated by chain-smoking communists (this is neither exaggeration nor embellishment) but after a very spirited democratic vote, we managed to enact a change to Channel 4.  Sadly, my year abroad meant I missed the whole second series and have never caught up with it since, but, on reflection, my fluent German is some consolation to me for the fact I never found out who the Applewhite family were keeping in their basement.

But who are these wives, and what about the houses they live in?  What makes them so desperate?  Prepare yourself for a journey through each in turn, peppered with my subjective judgments.

Susan Mayer

Often cited as the lead, mostly because Teri Hatcher had the biggest star power on day one, Susan Mayer was dominated by her endless complicated relationship with Mike Delfino.  At her best, she would be scurrying around her neighbours’ flower beds, mischievously spying, but she never really seemed malicious and was therefore easy to root for.  Her kids were kind of tedious.  I had forgotten about Julie Mayer’s total existence, and Mike Junior got brattier by the episode.  Her rivalry with Edie Britt, however, generated some of the most barbed shade ever committed to dialogue.

Edie Britt

Despite not making it through all the series, let’s deal with this character ahead of the others.  She owned her sexuality, was unashamed to get what she wanted and took advantage of others’ weakness, all while looking banging.  What a hero.  I think we could all learn a thing from Edie.  The show was poorer without her.

Lynette Scavo

This housewife had balls.  When she wasn’t dealing with cancer or suffering an unruly brood of ginger children, she was bossing things in the husband department.  Tom Scavo defined flannel, combining various levels of infidelity with trying to open a stupid pizza restaurant.  I remember she was also committed to recycling during some awkward product placement in series six, but I’ll forgive Felicity Huffman anything.  Anything.

Gabrielle Solis

The bombshell with a lot of the best lines.  Eva Longoria clearly had too much fun rolling around with the gardener, while later series saw her battling with two chubbily cute daughters giving her as much sassmouth as she deserved.  Her partnership with Carlos was tested throughout the show’s lifetime, but his constantly exasperated expressions showed that nobody could resist Gabrielle’s charms.

Brie Van de Kamp

The ur-housewife.  Named after a soft cheese, but with a heart of stone.  Anyone who keeps a household so immaculate has got my respect.  I can barely pick my underpants off the floor at the best of times.  Her devious nature was a delight, yet seeing her terrible children torture her in return was even more gratifying.

Karen McCluskey

I admit that she was never one of the core housewives, mostly appearing to fulfil the recurring role of elderly neighbour.  But this old battleaxe easily outsassed the others.  Straight-talking, self-serving and snarly, she would occasionally melt into such kindness that her steady presence over all eight seasons has earned her a special mention here.

So…  yes, because sometimes it’s important to dwell on the shows that shaped your life.  I still have friendships now based on shared viewership of Desperate Housewives in my student days.  Running all the way to 2012 (though ending up set in 2017 due to a five-year forwards leap that boldly refreshed the character and storyline arcs) the show also featured in my farcical media career, with various brands involved in bidding for its UK broadcast sponsorship back when I was always the last one standing at any free drinks event.  Now I get anxiety if I’m not in bed by 10pm.  Your real life might not necessarily include tornadoes, kidnaps, vengeance, murder or home-making, but Desperate Housewives offered exemplary entertainment and, for that, it must be saluted.  Yes, because sometimes it’s- sorry, I’ll stop that now.

Rick & Morty

If you ever start watching this adult animation (and I’ll tell you why you should in a minute), you’ll instantly be struck by three very irritating things about it:

1.      The animation is so crude you’ll be forgiven for thinking the show’s creators couldn’t be bothered to spend any time on it

2.      Rick and Morty, despite being grandfather and grandson, refer to each other by their first names.  Not just on the odd occasion either, but constantly, till almost every sentence is punctuated with unending reciprocal name-dropping

3.      Rick, the grandfather, is a cranky old bastard, and while this is hard to adapt to at first, it’s the fact that he burps while he speaks that will have you reaching for the remote to try watching something else due to sheer disgust.  He doesn’t pause in a sentence to belch and then carry on.  His throat reverberates while it emits digestive gasses in the middle of words, so that he uses this emission to power his speech, rather than air from his lungs like the rest of us.  Let’s not generalise, but old men are mostly kind of gross.  Rick out-grosses them all.  In addition, when he’s a bit sloshed, he has this patch of drool on his chin that just makes you want to get out a hanky and start wiping your TV screen, even though he’s an animated character

Acknowledge these things.  Take a note of how they make you feel.  But believe me that they soon go away for the following reasons:

1.      As you work your way deeper into each of the three series, you’ll realise that the animation is actually breath-taking.  Sure, Morty still looks like a kid scribbled him into life, but as he and his grandfather travel to more and more planets and alternate realities, this whole universe of rich imagination comes to life before your very eyes.  There are aliens from the depths of the darkest trenches of human minds (sci-fi orientated, geeky writer minds), with limbs on limbs on sex organs.  There are landscapes that no live action or CGI could realise.  The brutal action demands total attention.  You’ll want to rewind and watch bits again just to bask in the spectacle

2.      The excessive name-using never really relents, but you simply stop noticing it, so don’t worry about that

3.      And, as for the burp-speaking, you will come to terms with it.  In fact, you might even go as far as starting to feel affectionate about it.  Don’t tell me you’ve never been surprised by a digestive interruption in the middle of a conversation and simply tried to pass it off as a change of tone, or blurted out “Oh, excuse me” while clasping a hand over your mouth and its offence.  The fact is, Rick doesn’t have time for this.  So let’s look at why

The basic premise of this programme is fairly generic.  American family in the suburbs.  Farcical things happen in a way that they only can in a cartoon.  The twist is that live-in grandpa, Rick, is a supremely intelligent scientist with his own portal gun and extensive experience in travelling between universes and dimensions.  Rather than bonding with his grandson by pretending to find football interesting, he drags him on adventures across the full spectrum of space, time and reality.  It’s pretty high-concept stuff, but it’s all brought down to earth (literally – lol) by the fact the family members just see these trips as adventures.

And what a great word.  Adventure.  Adult life simply does not contain enough adventures.  Though, as a child, an adventure meant going to the park when it was raining and pretending to be in Jurassic Park.  As an adult, it means getting your smartphone out on a busy street and seeing if a moped-mounted thief is going to come and grab it off you.

So, off go Rick and Morty, gallivanting around in their clapped-out spacecraft and leaving a trail of world-altering destruction.  Sometimes, cynical older sister Summer, is allowed to come along, brilliantly juxtaposing the drama of high-school crushes against the demise of a whole alien race.  Further banality comes in the form of Morty’s parents’ relationship, with Jerry and Beth teetering on the edge of divorce while the universe teeters on the edge of catastrophe.

Some episodes do seem to pair up family members into a formulaic plot and subplot structure, but their adventures still strike consistently entertaining chords, with the show’s overall subject matter elevating it above standard crude humour-based animation for adults.  Rick & Morty never shies away from intelligence.  Rick, as the owner of an unmeasurable IQ, must balance out his genius with the view of the world it forces upon him: he recognises the absurd farce that constitutes life.  This makes him seem cold and unhuman, something which the programme embraces in its plots.

In turn, this is why the show is so far up the IMDB list of the top 250 TV shows of all time, based on average ratings, with a score of 9.2 landing it in eighth place.  Not bad for what looks like a puerile cartoon.  A 22-minute of Rick & Morty packs a whole universe of challenging philosophy, eye-popping artistry and laser-sharp social commentary into your brain via your eyeballs and earholes, so jump on this bandwagon and get ready to impress fellow office drones with the news that, yeah, you’ve seen all of the eighth best TV show of all time.

Little Britain

Hello and welcome to the fiftieth blogpost spectacular.  Looking back, it’s remarkable I’ve been able to draw this much rambling out of me, and even more remarkable that people have been reading it.  I hope you can appreciate that it’s a rollercoaster each time I press publish on one of these things.  I’ve had posts go wildly popular almost straightaway, like the Love Island one, and I’ve had carefully crafted pieces about hidden gems, like Wild Wild Country, struggle to get much traction.  All I have to ask is that everyone reads everything please.  It’s not worth missing out on my opinions just because you happen not to have seen every series and every episode of Bob’s Burgers.  The good news is that I have, so each post promises the perfect blend of subjective views and overly personal condescension.

But what show is getting this unique treatment for such a landmark milestone on Just One More Episode?  Little Britain.  There are many reasons for this.  The first is that I can’t believe I haven’t covered a sketch show yet.  There’s not really a sketch show I haven’t enjoyed.  You have the dizzying highs of a sketch whose punchlines open your eyes to an elevated form of comedy and you have the terrifying lows of jokes whose flat landings and laboured extractions make you question your will to live.  Constantly whiplashing between such strong sentiments is good for the soul, and it’s better to have a strong reaction than to feel meh about the whole thing and start checking your Whatsapp when you’re barely ten minutes into the appalling second series of Westworld.

The second is that the programme was hugely important in my life.  It was autumn 2003 and I had been packed off to university after seven years in the same school and eighteen years in the same village.  I was not good at meeting new people.  Luckily, my Little Britain DVDs had come with me (yes, DVDS; remember them?  This was the past after all) and rumour soon spread among the first years that I was willing to lend them out.  I was a bit like a Blockbusters of British comedy.  We would watch each episode as if we were discovering a new horizon in laughing out loud.  Then we would compare our impressions of the characters and debate endlessly and aggressively who was better.  Some of these new friends seemed cooler at the time than anyone I had ever come across.  They lived in cities like London and had backpacked through foreign continents, whereas all my stories were about doing the trolleys at Cobham Waitrose.  This BBC comedy united us.

And the third reason is that I recently spotted the show in the Netflix list of programmes that I might like (well done Netflix) and couldn’t resist clicking on it to see if it was a good as I remember and next thing I knew I had worked through all three series at the expense of any of the premium content I was consuming at the time (step aside, The Alienist).  This is where we need to handle Little Britain more carefully, as some of it has not aged that well.  It always trod a fine line, and that line has moved over time.  For example, Emily Howard seems like a harmless character.  She is transgender, but the humour comes from numerous situations where her efforts to pass fall below expectations, exacerbated by her insistence not just on being a lady, but on being a stereotypical lady from a bygone age.  But, all these years later, I have to ask myself if we are just laughing at someone because they are transgender.  In the wokeness of 2018 (with the long way to go that we still have in many of these matters) it’s hard to be sure.

Similarly, Sebastian Love, the prime minister’s aide, is funny because of his badly hidden unrequited love, or are we just laughing at him for being gay?  Daffyd Thomas, the only gay in the village, veers towards a similar sense of uncertainty.  The bad taste doesn’t come from the jokes about rimming, but from the idea that homosexuality is ridiculous and laughable.  On the other hand, we shouldn’t expect single characters to represent whole diverse communities, but it’s good to talk about it, isn’t it?  Having a little chat about contentious issues helps everyone spend more time in a constant panic they are offending someone.  And that’s better than being a bigot.  I think.

From its original home on BBC Three (RIP), Little Britain went from subversive to mega mainstream.  The three series are remembered for their shocking and explicit moments: WI ladies that vomit on minorities, a Fat Fighters group leader spitting on Vanessa Feltz’s face, Bubbles DeVere’s fat suit with flappy tits and a bum crack that spreads realistically on bending over, bitty.  But more than that, it was its quotability that gave it lasting mass appeal.  By 2005 you couldn’t move without someone saying “I want that one” or “yeah but no but yeah nut no.”  Criticism began to stick about its lowest common denominator appeal, relying on catchphrases and offensive willy content to please the great unwashed and the great uneducated, resulting in no great art at all.  “Bring back repeats of Are You Being Served?,” whined the more conservative people, “at least that only had innuendo.”  But had Britain lost its subtlety?

This brings me onto my favourite thing about Little Britain: the lines you don’t remember.  Everything was so well observed, but filtered through a lens of ridiculous absurdity.  Sure, it was quite a chuckle whenever Andy told Lou that he wanted that one, but it was even funnier when Lou would deliver a throwaway line enlightening us on a previous opinion of Andy’s regarding the matter in hand: “And besides, you don't like George Michaels. You said that Jesus to a Child aside, you found his output emotionally vapid.”

Let’s deconstruct an example, with my all-time favourite quotation from Vicky Pollard:

“I know cos we was all down the arcade and Kelly flobbed on Destiny and a bit landed in my hair.  Cos Kelly hates Destiny.  Cos Destiny told Warren that Kelly pads her bra.  It’s true; Nathan reckons he put his hand down there and pulled out a bag of Jelly Tots.”

1.       The names – we immediately imagine the types of people that have names like Destiny

2.       Down the arcade – nothing aspirational ever happened in an arcade, and being down anywhere is the accurate precursor for trouble ensuing

3.       Flobbing – a great piece of British slang that we frankly don’t say enough; we vividly picture it hanging off Vicky’s hair in a big lump

4.       Girls hating each other – remember school, everyone?

5.       Padding a bra – see above

6.       What Nathan reckons – the word of a lad being enough to condemn a young lady’s virtue.  Isn’t the world unfair?

7.       Jelly Tots – oh I forgot about this brand, but thank goodness I am being reminded of it now as its reference is increasing my nostalgia and amusement

Again, are we just laughing at poor people?  Probably.  Sorry.

I’ve already said too much, but I really want to list out some of my most beloved, yet widely underrated characters, so I’m doing it anyway:

Anne and Dr Lawrence

David Walliams in a dress going “eh eh eh” doesn’t sound great on paper, but hearing him answer the phone in a perfectly civilized manner and apologise for being rude before creating havoc is a unique juxtaposition.  But are we just laughing at mental health?  Probably.

Sir Bernard Chumley

Rather than being a national treasure, this retired actor is confined to a council flat with his equally elderly sister, Kitty.  His vile desperation, whether it be for extra Meals on Wheels or for the chance to manhandle aspiring younger men, leads to some harrowingly dark scenes.

Mr Mann and Roy

The concept got done to death, but there was something so simple yet so artistic about this awkward customer and hapless shopkeeper.  I just don’t know if Margaret ever got out of the store room, as she didn’t have any arms or legs.

I’ll stop here.  David Walliams and Matt Lucas, whatever they were making fun of, could turn themselves into such a wide array of believable characters, that each scene felt real despite its absurdity.  The former is now a children’s author whose books I have read to my niece, whilst I once spotted the latter in a café and secretly hoped he had overheard how funny I was being with my friends.  Both are now firmly established in the British comedy hall of fame, and rightly so.  Around 15% of my speech is influenced by the nonsense that they crafted, so it’s only fitting I leave you with a definitive quotation from Tom Baker’s berserk narration of each episode: “Britain, Britain, Britain.”