Narcos

In a recent survey of one person (me) I asked (myself) what’s the second most Netflixiest show after Orange Is The New Black?  One hundred percent of respondents were unanimous: Narcos.  So here we are, years after the third and final season was released on Netflix: you, reading all my silliness, and me, looking for attention while I find my (sarcastic) voice as a writer.  Thank you for humouring me.

The decision to click Play Episode on the first instalment of series one was a smug one.  It felt like a grown-up choice.  Rather than something cheesy about high schoolers (Riverdale) or, er, something else cheesy about high schoolers (The Vampire Diaries), this was adult fare: high-quality historical drama, dealing with dealers and distribution around a class A drug.  Not only would I learn more about a social issue, but it would be period-faithful.  It was even a bit foreign.  I couldn’t really get any more cultured unless I sat there reading poetry.  But nobody in the office has ever talked about poetry, so getting a good boxset under my belt was more important.  And I hate poetry (unless it rhymes and is funny).

But who are the Narcos?  There are two sides in our epic battle.  On one hand, we have los narcotraficantes.  The most famous of these is Pablo Escobar, who I only really knew about from various glamorising rap lyrics and a segment in Dark Tourist where the scenes of his crimes can be visited by those enamoured with his ruthless brutality, potentially a result of the glamorising rap lyrics.  Escobar and pals went from petty criminals to major global exporters of cocaine, netting billions of dollars in the process.  Trying to stop them, we have the other narcos: the agents of the DEA, a US agency that puts moustachioed men in hot countries to jog about in the heat with handguns, smoke cigarettes and sport an array of aviator sunglasses.

Thus ensues, over the first two series, an international high-stakes game of cocaine cat and cocaine mouse while our DEA agent heroes close in on Escobar.  But who to root for?  Escobar is cool, because we live in a culture where murder, bribery and corruption are cool.  Wagner Moura’s performance merits immediate viewing.  I especially enjoyed being able to tell how stressed Escobar is in a particular scene based on how heavily he breathes through his nose (and over his moustache).  But you may have been more focused on his attire than his nasal respiration.  Escobar’s outfits in the early nineties are exactly what my dad wore in the early nineties: loose-fitting light denim jeans, white trainers, size large short-sleeved shirts tucked in.  I’m fairly certain my dad wasn’t running a drug cartel, but I do have my suspicions now.

Surely we should prefer the goodies?  Steve Murphy and Javier Peña, however, are far from perfect.  Whether they’re bending the rules, smoking too many fags, womanising or neglecting their families, their drive to end Escobar never lets up.  I’ve seen people give up on a scheduling a meeting with me after just two rearrangements, but these guys happily chase Escobar through jungles, favelas and more jungles with little or no sign of an encouraging annual performance review from the powers that be.  And that’s what compels: the seediness, the corruption, the sweaty stake-outs.  Everyone is humanised, rather than glamorised.  The DEA agents gotta go bad to get Escobar.  Escobar loves his family more than anything (even though his son is super annoying) and who can hate a family man?  Oh, the internal conflict, everybody.

The third season’s focus shifts to a new cartel, and Boyd Holbrook’s absence is felt keenly, as he was our fish out of water by which we navigated the sweltering streets of Medellin.  But the new chase soon draws you in with the same excesses of tension.  The gore is gruesome and relentless, and the sheer wasting of life is distressing enough, but then you realise that this is all based on true stories.  In fact, the documentary elements threaded through to give historical context are all the more harrowing, as archive news footage of real fatalities reminds you that no dramatic gloss can cover up the true horrors of the cartels.

And that was my main question: what’s so good about cocaine?  As someone who routinely goes to bed at 10pm, the allure of this party drug is lost on me.  A former friend did once recommend the white powder, claiming I would want to talk to everybody in a room as a result of taking it, but I explained that that was an affliction I already had.  Anyway, I’m sure all the death and destruction in developing nations is worth it for those who like a little bump of a weekend at their trendy London parties.  No harm done, right?

But I got more from Narcos than just affirming the fact that I’m enough of a handful without any intoxicating substances.  I also seem to have learnt Spanish.  I did do a GCSE in a single year (A*, obviously) in this language back in my sixth form days, so the basics were there, reinforced over the years by pop songs like Despacito.  Narcos is half in Spanish, so get your subtitle eyeballs ready, as there’s plenty of reading.  Somehow, though, I seemed to attune to the Colombian accents after a few episodes, so if anyone does need me to arrange shipments of coca paste from a Latin American rainforest to a Miami nightspot, just give me a call on a massive nineties mobile phone.

Yet more great TV from Netflix?  Well, yes.  Am I embarrassingly late to the party with this one?  Also yes.  Have I answered all the questions I set out to?  I don’t know – I just kind of start bashing these out and see where they end up.  Is Narcos: Mexico a separate programme, or just the fourth series of the same show?  I’m still not sure.  I’m working my way through that as we speak, so let’s stay tuned for a future post.  I’m sure I can find plenty to be silly and sarcastic about.

Kingdom (킹덤)

Well, a lot of people filled their boots with the Shipwrecked post, didn’t they?  Learning nothing from that runaway success, this week I’m veering recklessly to the other end of the TV spectrum.  We’ve not chatted about my love for zombies since both The Walking Dead and Fear The Walking Dead (the latter a spin-off of the former) were subjected to my sardonic snarkiness months and months ago.  So, brace yourself for the flesh-eating undead.  But that’s not the only swap we’ve made.  Replace a Pacific Island with the Korean peninsula.  Switch bikini-clab British Millennials for medieval Koreans.  And sub inarticulate youths saying “you know, kind of like” for a violent onslaught from the Korean language, with subtitles straight out of the How To Speak Archaic English textbook and, ladies and gentlemen, you’ve got yourself Kingdom.

But, as always, due to a grave inability to take anything seriously, I jest.  Kingdom is literally the best thing I have seen on Netflix in ages.  I’m not even sorry about writing such a weak sentence as that previous one – it doesn’t need dressing up.  I’m still in a state of excitement, and I finished all six episodes about a week ago.  I’m looking at the clock as if it’s going to tell me when series two will come into my life and provide me with equal measures of horror and entertainment.  Let’s be honest, I get both of these in my office, but very little of this comes from historical Koreans, so it’s nice to have a change, isn’t it?

The bit where I tell you what it’s all about will now follow, but again, we’re going for a certain laziness of language, as the rest is verging on highbrow (historical, foreign language) and we need to average things out to keep the majority happy.  So, there’s this prince, right?  His dad, the king, is on his deathbed, yeah, but the prince is being kept away by the new queen, his stepmother.  She’s expecting a baby by the old king, so she needs her husband to survive until the birth in order to secure succession.  She’s part of a clan who are hungry for power, so let’s just say there’s a rather Westerosi approach to this whole throne ownership business.  Her clan’s devious attempts to keep the king alive are what cause the inevitable zombie outbreak, while dismissing a physician back into the countryside is what spreads the pestilence to the peasants beyond the palace.  Meanwhile, our poor old prince also has to flee for his life on a quest to find out the truth.  He’s about to find out it’s not so easy being a prince in zombie-riddle medieval Korea.

What sets this apart, though, is bloody all of it.  But let’s distil from this two of the main TV-viewing features upon which you can feast your eyes.  The first is that every shot is exquisitely cinematic in its beauty.  From ancient palace buildings to dramatic landscapes, the visuals’ lushness is exceeded only by the ancient costumes.  You’ll wonder who ever thought those big hats were practical for soldiers, or question how warm so many layers of silk can be, but you’ll always end up impressed.  Somehow, this aesthetic doesn’t distract from the drama; instead, it becomes the perfect frame for the zombie fare, which often needs further theming to become plausible.  Having been to modern South Korea, I’m not sure the impact would have been the same among the grey buildings of Seoul, evidence of the whole place getting smashed in during the 1950s’ Korean War.

The second main setter-aparter is the incredible dramatic tension.  A zombie origin story is always fraught, as you, the viewer, sprawled on your cushions and shoving snacks in your face, know full well that doom is due while the characters all too slowly put two and two together and come up with some sort of denial of the epidemic chasing them down country lanes (yes, these zombies run, fast).  Skip this bit if you don’t want any spoiler content whatsoever, but one element of the zombie mythology in Kingdom has to be mentioned: the undead are only active in the dark.  Cue limitless possibilities of the sun setting, corpses starting to twitch, silly Korean magistrates being inefficient in their jobs and all hell being unleashed.  Conversely, you know your beloved main characters just have to survive each night before the daytime brings a bit of a breather.  A whole episode got so tense, the build and build to nightfall so domineering, that I had to press pause and pace about the room a bit to restore all sense of perspective to myself.

Alongside all of this, Kingdom finds time to make comparisons between the haves and have nots in society: a sort of socialist message to accompany the consumption of flesh, if you will.  The nobility are repeatedly shown to cock up their handling of an issue of national importance, while our royal hero, the prince, also learns that the peasant fodder bearing the brunt of the infestation don’t actually deserve to be eaten alive.  It’s funny how Brexit bleeds into everything, isn’t it?  (Or is that a bit of a reach this time?)  It seems that any dishonour towards a royal, however, does come with the alarming punishment of one’s whole family being annihilated.  What a great way to target crime.  The next time someone swipes your iPhone on a moped, you can rest assured that they won’t just be found and jailed, they won’t just be executed, but their whole family tree will be erased from the earth.

I’ll finish by saying that I don’t care if you don’t like subtitles.  You should have tried harder at school if you can’t read fast enough.  Stepping outside of the English language into Kingdom allows you to access one of the most compelling additions to the zombie canon in quite a few years.  Sure, it’s based on a comic book, like The Walking Dead etc, but it’s set apart by its uniqueness in the Western TV marketplace.  It’s also endlessly gratifying to watch the various extras really go for it in their performances and energetically give something extra of themselves, become extra extras.  Just remember, don’t come for me when you reach the cliffhanging end of series one, because it was me who opened your tiny mind to the intense tension of Kingdom.

Sex Education

If you’ve ever wondered where all the ugly jackets in the world have gone, I can now reveal their whereabouts to you.  They’ve been hoarded by the costume department of Sex Education.  Don’t worry, I’m about to say a whole load of nice things about this show, but let’s just dwell on the programme’s aesthetic before we really get into things.  Every character, from an eccentric older patient in an abortion clinic, to the fundamentalist protestors outside, is clad in the sort of coat you’ll remember from embarrassing (actual, not digital) photos from your eighties or nineties childhood (people with childhoods any later shouldn’t really be reading this as I don’t know what to say to them).  The colours clash, the shoulders box up beyond human anatomy, the sleeves tease you with mysteries.  If you’re going to embrace bad taste, though, then you might as well own it.

I’m reminded of a costume hire company in the ski resort of Morzine where I was lucky enough to be taken on a jolly with work.  For our ironic night out, a van load of dated onesies was brought to the chalet and laid out on the pool table; we were invited to make our selections amidst the inescapably recognisable odour of jumble sale.  Our criteria were simple: the more garish, the better.  In these extravagant (and warm) disguises, we could be amplified versions of ourselves, dancing on podiums, recreating the video to I’m A Slave 4 U by Britney Spears or photographing ourselves draped over petrol pumps in the snow.  It was as if the outfits came with added character.  That evening around the pool table is how I imagine jacket selection day during the filming of Sex Education.  These were the same bad-taste onesies, they just had the legs and crotches cut off (thereby making them jackets obviously).

But it works.  Sex Education takes place in a version of Britain where everyone wears these jackets (and a whole host of other eye-catching items).  Moordale Secondary School teems with teens who are at home balancing irony with style in order to create a look and feel that is at once real and yet an enhancement of reality.  The office Netflix chat around the show was universal: everyone should watch it because it’s great.  But the second comment was always a reference to the fact this UK-based comedy-drama seemed to unfold in an American high school transplanted from the USA to South Wales.  Regular readers will know that the high school is one of my favourite settings for TV (see posts on The OC and Teen Wolf) but I would argue that Moordale is actually a mid-Atlantic fusion.  Sure, there are letterman jackets for the swim team and wide corridors filled with big US-style lockers, but these just serve to signpost and facilitate the setting, the relationships and the storylines.  The characters inhabiting this setting are as bloody British as spending two years failing to get a Brexit deal (so let’s please remain).  My school didn’t have a pool, and our shoebox lockers were just places where we forgot a packed lunch of sandwiches over the Easter holidays.

In fact, Moordale Secondary seems to be what we would call a sixth form college.  We’re not told much about its setting – there’s no named town to host us (like Riverdale).  It’s rural, which, based on my Surrey youth, means everything is too far apart to walk and you need your folks to cart you about until you pass your driving test, but the characters dash about in the dark between each other’s homes without too much difficulty.  Why my mind focused on the transportation practicalities is a reflection of my own anxieties, and it’s not interesting for me to write about here, so I don’t even know why you’re reading this bit.  Let’s instead focus on the British countryside looking breath-taking and cinematic – our nation of crap towns hasn’t looked this good on camera since The End Of The F***ing World.

Even that observation isn’t important.  So, now for the main bit: Moordale is packed with a young community of sexually active students whose enthusiasm for fornication (for the most part) is only outstripped by their cluelessness.  Our link into this world is our hero, Otis, whose disgust at sexual acts is at odds with his mum’s occupation: she is a sex therapist, practising what she preaches with a parade of casual (and cringe) lovers.  Played by Gillian Anderson, Dr Jean F. Milburn might know her away around a phallic ornament (the house is dripping in them) but she’s as lost at raising a modern teen as any parent would be.  Nevertheless, her vocation rubs off, with Sex Education’s premise being that her son ends up charging his academic cohort (a delicious piece of jargon, courtesy of my old headmistress) for his own brand of sex therapy.  His virginity is no barrier to imparting his teachings on scissoring, gag reflexes and ejaculation.  And if you’re wincing at those sexual terms, then this isn’t the show for you.  Bonking appears on screen every few minutes, with frank discussion of it filling most of the rest of the time.  Brits are prudishly reserved when it comes to open conversation about slap and/or tickle, but we’re also obsessed with it.  Sex Education treads this balance beautifully, celebrating sexual diversity, inexperience and experimentation in all its silly sloppiness.  After all, it is our vagina (reference to episode five).

Navigating this hormonal onslaught alongside Otis, his fellow students are all a source of constant joy in their own ways.  Rather than box-ticking a series of high school tropes, their genuine uniqueness brings grit and proximity to Sex Education’s colourful costumes.  You root for them all.  Audiences will fall in love with Eric, Otis’s best friend who doesn’t let being average at French horn (not a euphemism) hold back his extravagant wardrobe choices, but I was charmed by Aimee, a member of Moordale’s own Mean Girls, The Untouchables, who finally learns to put herself first.  I also want to mention Lily, not just for her erotic alien fiction, but also her combinations of rollnecks and bumbags.  I can’t leave out Maeve and Jackson either, but I’ll finish on Adam, the bullies-get-bullied bad boy and chest-hairiest teen whose last-episode resolution will either blow you away (literally) or prove correct suspicions you’ll have had since his first appearance.

I haven’t been this saddened by finishing a show since the end of Parks & Recreation, but thank goodness news already abounds of a second series getting commissioned.  If the rumours of 40 million streams are true, then I can just hear the LOLs echoing out around the world.  Get yourself sex educated.  Just don’t focus too much on the jackets.

Shipwrecked

This is a battle between two shows.  The first was a Sunday morning staple from the very earliest days of reality TV, which, when looked back on from 2019, is imbued with youthful nostalgia and innocence.  The second is a reboot of the format after nearly a decade’s hiatus.  The cynic in me wonders if this return is a response to the discovery by ITV2 of the formula for 16-34 TV gold: beautiful young people minus clothing plus sunny island equals captive audience (that would otherwise be on Instagram and not watching telly).  Yes, I was talking about Love Island just then everybody, but this post is about Shipwrecked in all of its guises, on T4, e4 and Channel 4, and with and without its suffix: colon Battle Of The Islands.

Cast your minds back.  It’s nearly the Millennium (which I still think of as the Minnellium, as the word better encapsulates the absolute naffness of this pointless event) and we children have been brought by our mother to Devon for a party with old family friends.  I remember two things: my sister’s guinea pig died while we were away, continuing our pets’ tradition of snuffing it on special occasions, and I laughed so hard during a game of cards that I farted loudly in front of my parents’ grown-up friends.  But, at the same time, months before Big Brother, Shipwrecked came to our screens.  Those first series, one running in 2000 and two (yes, two!) following in 2001, were from a more naïve era.  There was no competition.  This was simply a documentary crew following young people living a back-to-basics existence while receiving permanent skin damage in the sun of the South Pacific.  Animals were slaughtered, people got sand in their cracks, and dramas ensued about kissing boys and raising gay community flags.  But this wasn’t 24-hour surveillance; a film crew chased the islanders among the palms, waving a boom and clutching cameras, so we never knew how much was reality and how much was showing off.  Rumours later abounded that the juiciest action never made it to air: an island strewn with condom wrappers was the only physical evidence of how the crew and the cast inevitably succumbed to the holiday combination of heat, scantily cladness and being away.

Five years later, the format returned, only this time there were two islands.  And they were at war.  Adding some spice and jeopardy, new arrivals would appear each week, spending time with rival tribes before ultimately picking their permanent home.  The most populous tribe would nab some prize money, which, once divided twenty-five ways, was probably just enough to cover the psychological counselling anyone would need after spending weeks in a tropical paradise and then having to return to the UK.  As a sixth former, this was religious viewing.  You needed to be able to enter the common room debate about whether you’d rather be a Tiger or a Shark.  I honestly can’t remember which of the two was the tribe for me, but I do know it was the same animal each series.  T4, a curious youth strand on Channel 4, had cornered the market in weekend morning hangover TV, and we, graduating from being Inbetweeners, were more or less legally allowed to drink alcohol.  Every weekend was filled with eighteenth birthday parties and all the Smirnoff Ices you could drink.  Shipwrecked: Battle Of The Islands was perfect viewing.

I would go into more detail on what occurred in these episodes between 2006 and 2009, but this period, at least in terms of the internet, is a very long way away.  How we’re able to excavate ancient ruins and carbon-date millennia-old fossils, yet I can’t find a non-pixellated image of the 2008 cast is beyond me.  I do recall, though, that at some point, the scheduling shifted from weekend mornings to weekday evenings.  More specifically, Tuesdays.  In this age before reliable catch up and when your dad still controlled the VCR, I was devastated.  On Tuesday nights I pushed trolleys around the car park of Waitrose in Cobham.  I still therefore miss the series I never saw, despite the generous wages and benefits of the John Lewis Partnership.  Instead, I have memories of dodging the BMWs and Audis while fetching back the abandoned shopping carts, refusing to wear the high-vis jacket even when it snowed as it stunk of someone else’s BO, overhearing mums telling their children to work hard at school so they didn’t end up like me (despite me having a place at Oxford) until I finally got moved indoors.  Ramming twelve trolleys into the back of a Mercedes might have been part of it (the driver was still inside).

One series I was able to enjoy fully was the 2008 season.  This was when I started my job in media.  It was July 2008.  I had misspent a year in a headhunting firm where people were very serious, discussing the economy or rugby or braying about their children.  I had got in constant trouble so I was determined to keep a low profile in this new role.  I would resist piping up in all office discussions until I had proven I was good at my job.  But then, I overheard new colleagues (who are still beloved to this day) talking about the previous night’s episode of Shipwrecked.  It took all my willpower (and there’s not much) to resist wheeling over there in my desk chair and joining in.  But what it did prove was that I had come to the right place.

And now, it’s back.  This time, we’re broadcasting at 9pm each weeknight on e4, so we can have as much swearing and boobies as we like.  Sadly missing is Morcheeba’s The Sea, a track I will forever associate with Shipwrecked.  We have a new narrator.  Gone are Andrew Lincoln and Craig Kelly, both of whom sounded bored out of their minds while describing the antics of attention-seeking twentysomethings.  Vick Hope gently pokes fun at the characters, but mostly gets on with it, which somehow leaves me craving the acid-tongued lashings of Love Island’s Iain Stirling.  But much is the same.  Even Aygo by Toyota (the old sponsor of T4) is back on board (shout out to the friend who did this deal).  We have Sharks and we have Tigers.  The ante is upped though, as the new arrivals, who have so far in this first week come in pairs, also have to be picked by the island they choose, with a mismatch resulting in a one-way ticket back to Blighty.  This has brought high tension and just desserts, though I have just watched the fifth episode, where the complication of having a pair of identical twins as the arrivals made the format seem slightly cruel.  Having gone through secondary education with five twins in my form of thirty (and a further two pairs in the year group – clearly something in the water in Horsley) my twindar felt quite sensitive to the onslaught.

Sadly I’m not yet watching this on a massive f***-off telly in my own home.  I can pick between the non-HD live broadcast where I’m overwhelmed by adverts, or catch up on All4, where I’m overwhelmed by adverts.  Both scenarios also include the inhabitants of the flat upstairs, divided from ours by a ceiling made presumably of hopes and dreams, stomping about constantly, so if I’m not distracted by the heel-walking of the morbidly obese, I’m squinting at the low-def picture, filling in the gaps with my imagination.  This year, the Sharks are a lovely bunch, while the Tigers have a nastier streak.  I’m therefore definitely a Tiger, as that sort of person is always more interesting.

Is it as good as we remember?  Well, after some acclimatisation, this could be a vintage year.  Times have changed, and it’s hard to work out if this is a dating show or a survivalist documentary.  In addition, I’m now ten years older than most of the contestants, rather than them seeming like inhabitants of a distant future adulthood that was years away.  I can’t help but wonder if it would be rewarding if the cast had greater maturity and life experience.  Maybe I could bowl up: hi, I’m Rob; I’m 33 and work in advertising; I enjoy too much telly and going to bed early.  Maybe not.  It’s just that these young people seem to shriek so much.  There’s a boat: cue screaming.  There’s a palm tree: cue caterwauling.  There’s a pontoon: cue sh*t being lost.  Then a friend articulated my reservation perfectly: this is hangover TV, but we don’t have hangovers.

Riverdale

If you’ve ever watched Chilling Adventures Of Sabrina on Netflix then it’s probable that, like me, you’ve been followed around by Riverdale when browsing for the next boxset to jump into.  There it is, in the Popular On Netflix list, in the Trending Now list, or in the Because You Watched Sabrina list.  It even came up in my Because You Watched Making A Murderer list.  Just give in to it.  I did.  There’s no point delaying the inevitable: we’re all weak.  While Sabrina’s characters, residing in nearby Greendale, refer liberally to Riverdale (joining both shows’ origins in their Archie Comics roots), it wasn’t until I journeyed there myself that I uncovered something truly entertaining.  Episode one makes every effort to hook you in with such force that you wonder how subsequent instalments will ever maintain the level: there’s mystery, there’s style and atmosphere, there are throwaway lines so witty that you can practically feel the writers air-punching as they thought of them.  Warning: some of the dialogue sparkle does die away as the drama progresses, but it’s taken over by the endless mystery and ever more stylised atmosphere of Riverdale town, until the place and its inhabitants take on an alternative universe quality, offering just the escapism you might need from your pointless life.

The trick is to immerse yourself in Riverdale and accept it for the nonsense that it is.  The first barrier is the hair dye.  Lead character, Archie, is supposed to be ginger, but apparently they couldn’t find enough male actors with red hair.  KJ Apa, naturally dark-haired, was hired for other reasons, it seems, as the poor lad’s clothes are constantly getting torn off to prove to everyone he has done all his sit ups (and to distract you from his dodgy barnet).  If this makes you wonder how much steaminess the show purveys, then I can tell you that there is romping aplenty.  All the Riverdale High Schoolers are pretty active in this department, as are some of the parents.  It’s not really a family show, but the line is drawn at the female nipple, with below the waist out of bounds.  Sex and relationships are a big part of the plots, but it seems there’s no need to be explicit.  For one thing, it would look out of place next to Riverdale’s drug culture.  This idyllic forest town eschews your standard class As and Bs for its own brands of narcotics.  Try sounding dangerous when you’re talking about jingle jangle, which basically looks like pixie sticks.  Or if you want the harder stuff, there are fizzle rocks.  We’re shown stabbings and shootings over and over, and a growing body count is paraded in front of our eyeballs, but illicit substances take on a Wonka-esque whimsy that’s just part of the Riverdale experience.

But the weird names don’t stop there.  Archie’s best friend is referred to as Jughead by the rest of the cast, all while they manage to keep straight faces.  His sister is called Jellybean.  Their dad is FP.  There’s Midge and Moose.  You just get used to it, but I have to mention that Jughead’s hat is perhaps the most displeasing thing in the whole show.  I can only tolerate its tattiness and contrived kookiness because it seems to be in homage to the original Archie Comics characters, with Wikipedia reliably informing me that they first appeared in 1941.  Americana nostalgia frames a lot of the action: the teens consume thousands of calories of milkshakes in Pop’s Chocklit Shoppe (the ur-diner of diners, but with a weird name), Riverdale High is all letterman jackets and cheerleaders, gang members are identified by their leather jackets.

The gangs!  Alongside the jingle jangle, Riverdale gang culture has also been through the PG process.  The South Side Serpents (the South Side is the bad part of town: there is litter and graffiti there) drink in a dive bar and ride motorbikes, but they also do some sterling work in the community and just want to live their trailer park lives while clad in leather no matter the weather.  That said, they’ll pack some punches whenever the Ghoulies come to town to push fizzle rocks, resulting in dialogue that feels more CBeebies than The Wire.  I’ve decided they’re the male equivalents of tarts with hearts.  One is even called Sweet Pea (see earlier snarky comment about Riverdale nomenclature).

What actually happens, then?  Each series revolves around a mystery, from Jason Blossom’s death, to the Black Hood, who lingers unwelcome into season three’s Gryphons and Gargoyles boardgame-based shenanigans (no idea why it’s not spelled griffins, but think Cones of Dunshire from the amazing Parks & Recreation, only with more death and fewer cones).  Archie and Jughead form a central quartet with Betty Cooper (ornamental collars) and Veronica Lodge (pearls), supported by a handful of other teens who tend to get the better lines whilst coming and going.  The mysteries actually feel less interesting than the day-to-day relationships between the cast, but they contrive hard to drive tension between the kids and their parents.  In a stroke of self-referencing, the parents, who are of course as photogenic as their beautiful offspring, are played by high school movie royalty.  Step into shot Luke Perry, Skeey Ulrich and Molly Ringwald.  This reference loop almost inverts itself in a throwback episode when the young actors play their parents’ characters in a The Breakfast Club-inspired exposition of the Gryphons and Gargoyles’ origins.  It doesn’t matter, as the parents’ behaviour is often much more puerile than any of their children’s, partly because the writers aren’t shy of wild u-turns to drive the plot forward.

So, take a trip with me to Riverdale.  It’s not like the real world.  I’m literally going to coin an adjective here: Riverdalian.  It’s Riverdalian not to swear or say the real names of drugs or to be called Fangs.  It’s Riverdalian almost never to be seen in class at school because you’re too busy solving mysteries.  It’s Riverdalian that the episode where the students put on a musical (of Carrie) is a musical episode itself.  It’s Riverdalian to be melodramatic, far-fetched, heavily stylised and aesthetically cast.  But then it’s also Riverdalian to indulge in this guilty pleasure and not to be sorry about it.

Miranda

Sometimes, you need to make sure you have enough silliness in your life.  I don’t mean harmful silliness, like dragging the UK out of the EU because economically inactive pensioners are scared of foreigners, or panicking about a handful of migrants crossing the Channel to be absorbed into a wealthy country of 66 million people.  I mean fun silliness, like being unable to resist the urge to gallop instead of walk down long empty corridors, or pulling rude faces at your colleagues when you spot them bored in glass meeting rooms.  You can probably tell that the silliness evident in these posts is also embraced in most areas of my life.  One environment that gets more than its fair share of my own personal brand of silliness is the office.  There’s something about such a grey, grown-up, corporate environment, all furious typing and professional profile raising, that makes me want to respond with laughter.  After a feral childhood, spending adult daytimes for the last 11 years in the UV-deficient glow of computer screens could have been crushing.  But, if enough silliness happens, the subsequent belly laughs are enough to stave off the threat of submitting to being a full worker drone.  Sadly, one of my closest partners in silliness recently fled our office home after many years of laughing till we cried.  I therefore found myself with a silliness deficit in my day-to-day existence.

But there, nestling among multimillion dollar new content on Netflix was the old BBC sitcom Miranda.  I was helpless, working through all three series in no time at all.  I hereby announce a new genre of TV: comfort telly.  In my friend’s absence, and in the face of other things in life I would describe as bad (Brexit, gluten, people who sit behind me on the bus at 6.30am after smoking so many cigarettes that I am unwillingly bathed in their tobacco-riddled breath, misplaced apostrophes throughout the media industry), watching Miranda brought cheer to some dreary January evenings.

Most importantly of all, I have to stress that my friend is nothing like Miranda.  They are polar opposites.  She has a high-powered career for which she has to wear roll necks, whereas Miranda pootles about in a joke shop she set up with some inheritance.  My friend has a top-notch husband, whereas the main joke about Miranda is her disastrous love life.  While Miranda’s idea of a good meal is to catch crumbled chocolate biscuits in her mouth while using a hair dryer to blow them off the table (biscuit blizzard), my friend has promised me one of her famous weekend roasts (not a euphemism).  I could go on.  The main point is that their only common trait is their love of silliness.

We’ll go into the exact ingredients of this silliness, but we should dwell for a moment on the polarising nature of this sitcom.  Most people’s responses to my evangelising about the joys of rewatching Miranda have been wailing indignation that I could subject myself to something so unfunny.  I’m happy to be told I’ve got bad taste, but I think Miranda’s perceived unfunniness is more complex than that.  I’ll grant you that you can see some punchlines coming a mile off, but it’s that predictable payoff, with Miranda Hart’s silly charm, that can be so reassuring and comforting.  The show came about at a time when comedy was moving away from the obvious sitcom (like The Office).  Conversely, Miranda embraced the format, adding to the presence of the live studio audience by ending each episode with the cast waving at the camera and dancing before their fans like an amateur village panto.  Two words: such fun.

Right then, here’s how Miranda is silly:

She is a show off

One of our hero’s celebrated foibles is her awkwardness in social situations, but her response to sensing a faux-pas is to behave worse and worse until the awkwardness is exacerbated beyond the human ability to cringe any further.  If a throwaway sentence stumbles into a song lyric, she’ll launch into the next verse and chorus, veering between shyness and attention seeking.

She looks at the camera

Perhaps the biggest sitcom crime of all, but the one that makes me laugh the most.  The knowing glances she shares with us when her mother, Penny, is being awful, or when she is quite pleased with how she has handled something elevate a standard joke to something much more hilarious.

She enjoys how words sound

Cusp.  Thrust.  Moist.  English has a vocabulary in the hundreds of thousands, so it’s inevitable that some of those words are more fun on the tongue than others.  Miranda will pause mid-argument to enjoy the repetition of such words, always finishing with a final flourish of saying it directly to the audience via the classic look to the camera.  Cue laughter from me which I am not sorry about.

She falls over

I laugh every time because it’s silly.  It’s not big, it’s not clever, but this is my level.  I also crack a smile every time she pushes best friend, Stevie, off a stool.

She breaks wind

See previous comment about my level of humour.  It’s not so much the parp that gets me, but her surprise at having done it.

She is posh

Posh people are silly – you just have to hang around a Waitrose to realise this.  And their expectations of each other are even sillier.  Miranda might never be able to escape her boarding school days, but it makes for a pleasant stream of nonsense.

She is from Surrey

I suppose this is linked to the above, but this county really is ridiculous, and I therefore glory in any lampooning of it in popular media.  Being so close to London (making Surrey the patio of England to Kent’s garden) the million people that occupy its four-bedroom homes are often overlooked in culture, but their silliness deserves the spotlight.

But her friends are sillier

We’ve mentioned Stevie, owner of the allure, the Heather Small cut-out and very diminutive proportions.  There’s soulmate Gary, whose own stupid inability to commit to Miranda contrives to give the various series some dramatic tension, as it can’t be all about falling over and accidentally farting.  Sally Phillips gets the best lines as Tilly, the boarding school pal who peppers her passive aggression by spicing up all her words with suffix flourishes that nobody needs, declaring things tremendulant or exclaiming about major disaster and his friend, colonel cock-up, all while demanding others “bear with” when reviewing text messages or ending conversation by declaring “c’est fini.”  See, if you had someone to make eyes at now, you’d be doing it.  So much of Miranda’s silliness comes from laughing at her friends’ behaviour.

So, hello to you, Miranda Hart, and kind regards thank you caller (this is a reference to in-show dialogue, not me padding out the words).  You are a champion of the many, those of us who know our real life can’t be filtered, so we might as well embrace its silliness.  I’ve loved her ever since I saw her cameo in Nighty Night (not a euphemism again) and having her back in my life as a vegeta-pal has been just the dose of silliness I have needed.

Come Dine With Me

I’m on the cusp of being able to buy my first ever home.  This doesn’t mean I have been squatting in a crisp packet this whole time, but that I have spent the last 11 years renting and sharing (and huge apologies to all former and current flatmates; I really am dreadful).  I’m around 18 months behind on my own personal life schedule with this purchase (let’s blame Brexit) but the fact that it’s so close is half-terrifying, half-spectacular.  I even found myself looking at massive tellies in John Lewis today, even though my parents have saved me one from a dead neighbour and are keeping it under their bed for me (the telly, not the neighbour).  As a future home owner, what I plan to do, and what I have never really done in any of my rentals, is to have friends round for dinner.  I have a list of all the dear chums I need to pay back for the hospitality: all their wine I’ve drunk, all their main courses I’ve not really chewed but swallowed down like a gannet due to hunger and hanger mismanagement, all the puddings I’ve spooned in my face because excess fat and sugar don’t count if you’re in someone else’s house and have already surpassed your recommended daily allowance of alcohol units.  I’m not going to be held back by the fact I can only really make a few things and have little to no interest in how food tastes most of the time.  I just hope they all like porridge.  I do.

Anyway, this has led me to consider Come Dine With Me for this week’s self-absorbed few hundred words that I’m hoping some people will want to read.  It’s a show that’s about having people round to dinner as a competitive sport.  And please note, these aren’t friends you’re having round, these are strangers that the casting team have decided will make good telly.  Each guest scores their host, before the tables turn on the following night.  Once everyone has had a chance to arrange Parma ham on slices of melon and to slag off each other’s desserts for being too sweet, the highest-scoring contestant is revealed and richly rewarded with a wad of cash and some intensely petty envy.  TV gold, I’m sure you’ll agree.  In the UK, ITV Studios produce this show for Channel 4, which is a fun fact for your next dinner party (you’re welcome).  It’s also, the last time I checked, the most syndicated TV format in the world, currently showing in, I don’t know, a million territories or something.

But now that the serious journalism bit is out the way, let me tell you what things I like about the show the most:

The terrible characters

You need an array of personality defects to want to be on this programme.  There are the obvious ones, such as over-confidence in your cooking abilities, a strong conviction that your approach to hosting is world class and a compulsive need to be the centre of attention.  But this is where the genius of the casting comes in.  That annoying loudmouth in your office whose voice you can’t block out?  They’d be in.  The person in your family that seems to create awkwardness every Christmas?  Them too.  That schoolfriend who’s always showing off about their unorthodox lifestyle choices?  Of course.  Oh wait, I’m just describing myself now.

The irreverent voiceover

I believe strongly that irreverence is the best way to treat most things (though this does mean I have lost the ability to know if I am being sarcastic or not, which is challenging).  The narrator of Come Dine With Me takes this to another level, though, as he clearly thinks that every contestant is an absolute bellend.  It’s probably what inspired the mickey-taking of Love Island’s voiceover, and we all know what joy that brings us.  The hosting contestants often genuinely believe they are culinarily gifted food professionals, so when they talk us through their pedestrian recipes, they are ripe for ribbing.  The guest contestants behave like seasoned restaurant critics, often directly to their hosts’ faces, so it’s a gratifying shared joke for us viewers to hear the voiceover take them down a peg or two.  I can guarantee you laughing out loud here.

People’s awful homes

When you watch a cookery programme normally, things take place in some sort of deliciously artisanal kitchen with rustic herbs a-dangling and distressed work surfaces a-glistening and clutter-free.  But if you delve inside the actual average British kitchen, it’s a bad-taste buffet of mismatching cutlery, damp patches and novelty teacups hanging limply from mug-trees.  Behind closed doors, that dodgy chopping board or the limescale visible on the side of your kettle are just part of what makes it a normal home.  But on camera, it always looks like the site of a natural disaster.  You expect to hear Michael Buerk asking you to give just £5 a month so these people can afford some decent kitchenware.  But then I don’t know if the people that already have quite nice stuff are actually worse, because they seem to have no taste in the first place.  They arrange rocket salads on square plates, or use wine glasses the size of church fonts, or have blingy knives and forks.

I didn’t mean to slag it all off so much, as it does make for wonderful entertainment.  Being rooted in reality, however, does take away any aspirational edge (for most people – for me, having friends to dinner is still only an aspiration).  Therefore, watching it, despite the titters, can end up accompanied by the suspicion you could be doing something better with your time.  Episodes either last an hour and cover a group of four contestants with each dinner party in a fifteen-minute segment, or you can get strips of five episodes, where each lasts half an hour and covers a different event, with more focus on the prep.  The latter has a curious habit of drawing you in for, quite literally, just one more episode, if you ever stumble across it on More4 of a Sunday afternoon.  We’re running out of time to mention the celebrity specials, the fact that contestants also snoop around each other’s homes, or the story that some colleagues once recreated the format in real life, which involved one of them getting up repeatedly throughout the night to moisten their pulled pork, and still not winning.  My final nugget though, which I once read on a trashy website, is that each episode takes hours to film, what with all the pieces to camera, so the hosts end up serving desserts at 3am and the guests end up sloshed off their faces.  Maybe this explains some of the behaviour.

Once in a while, then, it’s ok to treat yourself (in the style of Parks & Recreation) and wallow on your sofa, scoffing at these real people, their homes, their food and their manners, safe in the knowledge they can’t see you, where you live, what you eat, or how you treat your guests.