Final Space

While nobody will really recall 2020 as being a golden age for anything (unless this really does turn out to be the year everyone stops being racist), I would like to suggest that TV is, overall, doing a very good job at the minute.  We are spoiled for choice.  Luckily, this big old pandemic has come along and given us more time at home to keep up with boxsets.  If anything, let’s spread the rumour that telly started the corona-thon.  Thanks to my evenings in, I’ve torn through (and loved) Normal People and I May Destroy You from the BBC (great to see the institution taking time out from delivering news coverage biased to chinless Tories), I’ve been making the most of my Sky subscription for once (look out for upcoming posts), but I seem to have totally bricked it with my Netflix decisions.  There’s a third series of Dark and a fifth of Last Chance U, both absolute gems, that I am yet to start.  Instead, I’ve been trying to follow up on my impressive achievement of devouring the fourth series of Rick & Morty.  Suddenly, I’ve craved cartoons about space.

Enter Final Space, a Netflix animated series that my tired mind hoped might just be in a similar vein.  There’d be laughs, clever humour, but also philosophical provocation and richly imagined worlds.  I really do love a richly imagined world.  But let me get this out of the way upfront: the world in Final Space is so richly imagined that I couldn’t keep up and, before long, I had no idea what was going on.

This is totally my fault.  And, in my defence, it only happened in the second series.  Season one of Final Space introduces us to our hero, Gary Goodspeed.  An astronomical everyman, Gary is nearing the end of a space prison sentence, living in isolation in a 2001: A Space Odyssey-inspired ship with an Alexa-esque companion called HUE.  His concerns are obtaining cookies and staving off boredom.  Enter Mooncake, a squishy green floating being who makes Pokémon sounds and turns out to be a hugely significant, er, thing.  This is where my understanding runs out.  He’s a creature, but also, I think, an energy source, or a key, or you know, whatever you like really.  Either way, I was pretty gripped by the first series, slowly realising that each episode, rather than being a self-contained animated sitcom, is a sequential instalment in a hugely ambitious story about the very nature of space and time.  Throughout, irreverent humour is peppered.  We come across a lot of silly characters and ludicrous situations proliferate.

It’s well-crafted storytelling, but somehow, something didn’t connect with me.  That is my loss.  By the second series, as the universe, literally, of characters and backstories and mysteries expanded, my tiny mind lost its footing and Final Space, in all of its potential to entertain, ended up being a background show I had on while inexplicably baking gluten-free sponge cakes simply because it’s something to do in lockdown.  Ultimately, the show’s humour seems to detract from its serious storylines, while its serious storylines undo its humour.  Maybe it’s basic of me not to care about the end of the world when someone is whingeing about a cookie.

But there is a lot to love, and the animation is breath-taking.  If you like action happening in space, then feast your eyes on these cosmic bodies.  Futuristic vessels slip past, all slinky, while battles and asteroid clusters come to life in three dimensions.  It reminds me of a book I had as a child: some sort of graphic novel from the Ulysses 31 series.  I don’t know where it came from and I never actually read the words, just looking at the pictures in the early nineties and thinking: yeah, this is space and that.  If that specific reference doesn’t work for you, and why would it, then think anime.  And if you don’t know what that is, you’re probably better off watching Love Island Australia.

While I typically advocate for almost all Netflix animations (Bojack Horseman, F Is For Family, Big Mouth, Disenchantment) I will swerve any subsequent series of this.  If I have failed to do it justice, then so be it.  Let the talented voice cast, the incredible animators and imaginative writers all come after me.  Justice is already served in that I am persisting with a poorly read blog while their creative output is getting greenlit by the planet’s biggest streaming giant.  At least there can be no spoilers in this post, as I couldn’t even tell you what Final Space really is.  But yes, give it a go if your sci fi skills are better than mine, but otherwise there’s a host of animation out there that’s easier to connect with.

Normal People

It’s alright guys; I’ve read the book.  Now we can talk about Normal People.  Fair enough, most normal people finished talking about Normal People a few weeks ago.  At one point, a greeting as common as “Hello” or “I think your mute button is on” became “Have you seen Normal People?”  It was, if anything, completely normal to discuss your response to this show and, in particular, its gratuitous sexual content, before proceeding with whichever Zoom call you had dialled into that day.  But no, I seemed to have been taken by the notion that, while my curiosity was of course triggered by all and sundry’s compulsion to signal that they had been watching along, I would rise above all this popularity and universal experience by pulling my smuggest face, adjusting my voice to be more patronising than normal, and declaring: “No I’ve not been watching Normal People.  I’m going to read the book first.”  I’m all for gratuity.  I only got into Big Brother twenty years ago as my teenage self read an outraged newspaper article about nudity on the television.  The constant threat of an unneeded shag helped to suspend disbelief each time a dragon is mentioned in Game Of Thrones.  I came to Elite for some foreign language swearing and high school high jinks, and stayed for the constant erotica.  But the sensible me felt a need to impose a literary barrier before joining in with everyone else in gawping at the body parts onscreen.

Once I finally got hold of the book, though, it was a great read.  A dear friend promised to lend me the book, but subsequently either forgot to bring the book to our lockdown park walks, or I would forget to take the book with me on leaving, or we wouldn’t think about the book for a few weeks while I was lost in reading something else (such as the book Unorthodox is based on), or we’d just lose all hope that I would ever get my hands on the book in order to read the book.  But then I got the book and I went ahead and read it (the book).  That task out the way, I was able to catch up and dive into iPlayer to see how everything came to life televisually.

On reflection, consuming a drama straight after devouring the book from which it sources its material probably isn’t a flawless approach.  There isn’t sufficient distance to be surprised and delighted by elements of the novel you had forgotten.  You’re only really checking off the adaptation against the pages you’ve just torn through.  If this were A-Level English, we’d have just finished taking it turns to read the book out loud in the classroom together (worryingly highlighting that a significant number of 18-year olds are not fluent readers) before the teacher gave up hope and wheeled in the big VCR so we could sit through the BBC production over and over until the end of term.

My own stupidity aside, Normal People is a beautiful series of filmmaking.  Every shot is a luxury.  Set in and around Sligo and Dublin in Ireland (plus some Italy and Sweden, reminding me constantly that Ireland gets to stay in Europe), the mundane looks cinematic.  Even drizzle takes on a sexiness.  But part of the reason our settings all crackle before our very eyes is the truly gripping tension of our central story.  Normal People is the tale of a relationship between Marianne and Connell.  Almost banal in its secondary school origins, we follow our protagonists as they navigate university and beyond, at once incredibly compatible and somehow prone to the no banana part of an idiom that starts with the words close and but.  As I read the book, I hadn’t seen any stills from the show, so Marianne and Connell remained faceless to me.  But, on starting episode one, I was able to conclude immediately that this was perfect casting.  As Marianne, Daisy Edgar-Jones perfectly captures what it feels like not to fit in at school but to find your niche at college.  Walking round Trinity in her velvet jackets, she is almost everyone I went to university with.  She’s utterly believable when navigating banal and awkward social moments, particularly when coming across Connell’s friends one New Year’s Eve in a pub in their hometown.  I felt I was literally in that moment.  As a character, Marianne is damaged by her family.  I obsessed over the exact situation here.  Her mother’s coldness, her brother’s fixations – where do these come from?  The fact we never seem to get the full picture (unless I was looking at my phone when this got explained) makes the circumstances all the less generic and all the more credible.

Meanwhile, Paul Mescal must wrestle (and win) with Connell’s complexity, ensuring we buy him not just as the sporty lads’ lad at school, but the keen reader, the keen writer and the struggling student.  Some of their dialogue is drawn out to the point of snapping, but you don’t wish for them to hurry up (unlike the constant pausing for effect in Skins) because every swallow, hesitation, eyeball swivel, neck tendon tightening, hair adjustment, all of this washes over you in a way that brings you into the heart and the heat of the emotion.  And yes sure, just as the book is frank about their sexual interaction simply because it forms a significant part of any relationship of this kind, we have a lot of opportunities to see their whole bodies emote and perform with a full-on and unblinking focus.  It’s not all vanilla, so this is certainly the element that got tongues wagging, but given how certain I am that my neighbours’ children can see my TV screen through the window, I could probably have sacrificed about 50% of the slapping and tickling and lost nothing of the sentiment.

I’ll spoil none of the plot beyond its premise, but I will comment on my inability to understand the motives of either lead at various points in their relationship’s journey.  They do things that will make your soul wail in frustration.  You yearn for a glimpse of resolution, which means that even a slither of potential happiness for them brings on floods of tears (if you’re the kind of person who only experiences emotion in relation to TV shows).

I’m off to find the soundtrack on Spotify, looking forward to the next time I can drop into conversation that I’ve read the book and watched the TV programme when it comes to Normal People.  Basically, I’ll win.  I’ll leave you with some quick mentions of the supporting cast, simply because they’ve left a similarly deep impression on me.  Sally Rooney’s book enhances its own reality with such believable friends for Connell and Marianne.  Joanna (Eliot Salt) charms with every line and doesn’t seem to be acting at all (a similar comment was made about I May Destroy You), whereas lovely Karen from the school days deserves far more backstory.  I’m still creeped out by Fionn O’Shea’s horribly recognisable turn as the terrible boyfriend, even though his behaviour is sadly commonplace in some of the dreadful people I have come across in my life.  And that’s the strength in this drama – it’s at once normal yet abnormal in its familiarity.  The everyday elements set up a level of recognition, but the specific and unusual details enhance that reality.  This isn’t the movies, where films end with co-stars kissing, leaving us to envision them not parting till death.  This is much realer life.

I May Destroy You

I wasn’t sure if I was going to write about this show.  In fact, I had already decided that I wouldn’t.  It was never up for debate whether I would watch it.  I was committed to viewing the whole thing the minute its PR machine swung into action and my daily trawling of the Guardian app for things to read that are relevant without being depressing (favouring articles about slavers’ statues being thrown into rivers at the expense of content relating to Tory gammonflakes personifying genuine incompetence and alarming inhumanity) saw me clicking on anything and everything to do with Michaela Coel.  Regular readers will have noted in my post on Chewing Gum that I have strong feelings about Michaela.  I’m not being funny (and, indeed, those same regular readers (both of them) will know I rarely am) but I am committed to her being recognised with national treasure status.  Friends are still only just uncovering Chewing Gum in lockdown, but if you’re expecting the same laughs generated by our Tracey, you’re in the wrong boxset.

I wasn’t going to write about it because I wasn’t sure I would have anything of value to say.  But now I am definitely writing about it.  I should have expected this, but I May Destroy You is a deeply affecting piece of television.  I have no choice but to throw my unwanted voice into the mix of unpopular online commentators looking to influence others’ behaviour.  As such, I urge everyone to watch this.  I’m not sure if the BBC felt the same, scheduling broadcasts of the twelve half-hour episodes in late-peak Monday-and-Tuesday pairs over the last few weeks, though the whole thing was available on iPlayer throughout.  We’ll get into why it’s a necessary watch, but I’ll first take it upon myself to tell you how to watch it as well.  Put your phone in a different room, settle down somewhere comfortable, give the screen your full attention and, most importantly of all, make sure nobody else is in the room who might make you feel awkward about some of the scenes that will ensue.

Like her previous hit, I May Destroy You has roots in Coel’s own real-life experiences.  However, if I were to say what it’s about, I would need to cop out with a list of things.  First and foremost, it deals with consent, particularly in the sexual sphere, and more specifically, the lack of it.  Whether this absence relates to hard-and-fast undeniable crimes, or shifts into a spectrum of permissibility that examines the interplay between deception and reticence, it’s a journey that is gruesomely fascinating.  The hooks that this series gets into you latch in deeply and quickly, and soon the onscreen action captures your attention to such an extent that you won’t even have twitching thumbs for your phone in the next room.  It’s a challenge on all levels.  Yet, it’s also entertaining, rewarding each provoked thought with a gem of universality, a raised eyebrow of humour or an eyeful of delicious delicious cinematography.

I promised myself I wouldn’t gush till the fourth paragraph, but it’s too late now.  You’ll get the point though: I rate this show.  Coel, whom I’d watch do anything, plays the central role of Arabella, a new writer approaching the twilight of her young adulthood.  She can follow her impulses to make bad choices, both enabled and thwarted by her two best friends: wannabe actress Terry (Weruche Opia) and Grindr addict Kwame (Paapa Essiedu).  These three things are brighter and younger than I’ll ever be, forming a sparkling trilogy of city-dwelling points of intrigue.  Through their lenses, we examine the discourses on consent that form our various plots.  But we look at so much more: race, gender, relationships, ambition, creativity, youth, family, heritage.

As if these three didn’t have mileage enough, they are surrounded by a seemingly endless swirl of supporting cast.  Coel creates the unique situation where you want to find out more about every incidental character and supporting role.  They are not just there as a foil or device to contrive along our next plot beat.  Why is Susy Henny so manipulative?  What has become of Theo (credit to Harriet Webb for genuinely making me forget I was watching acting)?  Why can’t I work Simon out at all?  In an honest reflection of London’s diversity, the glorious casting of such talent really lands the point that we’re all sick of seeing so many white people on TV.  In the neat packaging of the twelve episodes, you’ll find yourself wondering what happened to so and so from an earlier instalment, proving that Coel has created a universe of such credibility that it presents as truly real.  But, in throwing out the generic rulebook about how a drama should be constructed, that universe is also as enhanced as the colours of Arabella’s various wigs.  Suddenly we’re in Italy, then we’re back in the noughties, then we’ve moved on from those people to these people – keep up.  Coel doesn’t need your rules.

I only hope we continue to give Michaela Coel carte blanche to tell her stories.  The burden on one person to produce and replicate such quality TV must be enormous.  Even the soundtrack feels laced with sly nods to a greater understanding of her own message (great to hear Babycakes again).  She’s taken on sexual assault and revenge, creating in the process something that demands everyone’s attention, dancing between gravity and levity, but ultimately making you hold your breath through each episode.  This is intense viewing and I would like part two straightaway please.  And this is why I wasn’t going to write about it, because my only response would be to ask for more.

Love Island Australia

To what extent is showing a 2018 season of Love Island Australia an adequate replacement for a new series of summer Love Island in the UK?

While this is a question I could ask ITV, it’s actually the essay question I have set myself for this week’s blog entry.  No, sadly I’ve not completed an impressive foreign boxset that I’m going to tell you all about this week (though a third and final series of Dark has dropped).  So we’re turning to what is fast becoming my favourite lockdown viewing.  Let’s be honest, this pandemic has a lot to answer for.  We’re not allowed to have strangers invade our personal space on public transport.  We can’t spend all day in an office wondering what the dog is doing while we’re not home.  We can no longer speculate whether our elected (no, really) government could cope with a national crisis (they can’t).  These are all things we can live with (or without).  But when ITV pointed out that a socially-distanced version of our favourite reality dating show might not fulfil our expectations (you can’t watch a couple under a twitching duvet via night vision if they have to be two metres apart), all while having no clue whether foreign travel would be in any way possible, it felt like the final straw.  This pandemic might just be a bad thing.

However, in a stroke of genius, they decided to whack on another nation’s first series, probably reasoning it was close enough.  The good news about Australia is that we’re super familiar with it.  It doesn’t suffer from the gloss of the US’s TV output (the scripted dramas, I mean, not the dross of their political news).  Generations of Brits grew up on Ozzie soaps – every weekday dinner of mine after primary school in the early 90s was accompanied by Home & Away and Neighbours.  We swap our populations back and forth, nowhere more so than in the media industry (where I work (from home)).  Australiana is pretty easy to get used to.  In addition, the Australian version has all the familiarity of also being filmed in Majorca.  Not in the same villa, mind, but near enough.  I’m struck by the imagined statistic that 80% of this Balearic island’s GDP comes from various nations filming their versions of Love Island on it.  These two points made Love Island Australia a much more obvious choice than the US version, whose departures from key format points and inclusion of actual Americans means it loses all the charm of the original.

Alongside the classic setting, we also have the characteristically irreverent voiceover, though the Celt of choice here is an Irishman instead of a Scot.  The stray cats that visit the villa provide most of the ammo for his humour but I think we can all agree there is nothing funnier than a cat.  Just look at the reason for the internet’s invention: cat videos.  We also have a glamorous hostess entering the villa with bad news for the couples at random junctures.  Sadly, we lost the UK’s OG presenter earlier this year after our vile tabloids hounded Caroline Flack to her death yet faced no consequences, with Laura Whitmore taking over from her dear friend.  In the Australian version, former popstar Sophie Monk proves a feisty equivalent, and her antipodean vowels are so wonderful that I can’t help but suspect she may be a new character from Kath & Kim.  There are still texts with hashtags in them.  In summary, it’s similar enough then…

So, in order to answer the question (and if I learnt anything from GCSE it’s that’s you must make sure you answer the question) we need to look at the contestants.  This was perhaps my greatest stumbling block when it came to convincing myself that I had been provided with a worthy replacement.  They didn’t do much to grab me in the first episode, though the girls’ reluctance to step forth for anyone at all was amusing.  There was a major lack of diversity.  But then, with any season, it takes a few days to marinade and, before long, I began to look forward to catching up on the previous night’s shenanigans with all my new pals after a videocall-heavy day at the laptop.

Somehow, then, this can become an adequate replacement.  But there are certain rules that I must impart when it comes to being able to enjoy it as much as a brand new series of our own.  The first is that you mustn’t look ahead online to find out what the future held in store for these young Australians who are so full of hope in 2018.  To do so would deflate any of the tension that makes the show so compelling.  The second is that you need to attune to a different vibe on the behaviour.  So far, the Australian girls have proven much quicker to attack one another, never hiding their mutual dislike (split along hair colour lines) which, while a contrast to the British besties that emerge, is actually palatable as a more honest approach to the villa’s interpersonal relationships.  The boys seem to be predominantly from the socio-economic group that Australians describe as bogan, but on the whole are a slightly gruffer and less flamboyant equivalent of our own tattooed chaps.

I’ll conclude my essay with the answer to my own question.  Love Island Australia is quite an adequate replacement, offering charm and entertainment in its own way.  To illustrate, we’ll touch on my favourites of each gender.  From the boys, it’s Josh who, while one of the slenderer and under-tattoeed specimens, wins out consistently on personality simply because he speaks with the authority of someone who knows that confidence is the same as, if not better than, intelligence.  When the boys ask him for wisdom, he’s happy to fabricate his responses with the hilarious consequence that they almost always believe him.  From the girls, it’s Millie.  Shrugging off any nonsense from those of her own gender when it comes to disagreements, she’s practical and resilient, and would much rather be writhing around in the pool on an inflated flamingo than getting into arguments.  Wouldn’t we all.

Flight Of The Conchords

If you’re anything like me, you might have asked yourself on multiple occasions why can’t all TV be musical.  Following on from last week’s post on Netflix’s Soundtrack (still a masterpiece) and a previous unpopular rant from me about what Glee did wrong (it’s here and needs more reads), we’re going back in time to look at one of the few boxsets that managed to be musical and cool at the same time.  I had nearly forgotten all about Flight Of The Conchords.  But, back in January, I was lucky enough to fill a spot with friends in a French ski chalet and found myself bombing around Tignes with some very advanced practitioners of winter sports.  So adept were they at swooshing down black runs, treating their inordinate speed with nothing but nonchalance, they had earned the right to annoy less stable alpinists by carrying speakers in their rucksacks and playing music out loud.  Older gentlemen do this a lot in lockdown London, cycling through crowded parks with loud beats emanating from their bicycles.  I’m not proud to say that we were equally anti-social, especially when it came to forcing others to endure prolonged exposure to us on various ski lifts and in their various queues.  As six adults in their thirties (four doctors, one commercial airline pilot, and me, someone who tits about in media partnerships) you may find our music choices challenging.  After exhausting the soundtracks of various Disney films, from Moana to Frozen, and reliving our youths with Tenacious D, our next source of musical accompaniment was Flight Of The Conchords.

I defy anyone not to appreciate the wanky Brit-abroadness of zipping down a sheer ice face in a busy French ski resort while singing along to Foux Du Fafa.

So let’s unpack the enduring appeal of these minstrels.  Firstly, Flight Of The Conchords, as themselves, are a New Zealand comedy music duo who’ve been active since 1998.  This blogpost is about the two series of their HBO New York-based sitcom that ran from 2007 to 2009.  I’m not sure if it was ever broadcast properly in the UK and, like my friends when it comes to sorting out our first meal in a restaurant since the start of lockdown, I’m not prepared to log onto the internet to do the appropriate research that would benefit everyone.  It was one of my many Belsize Park flatmates who must have brought home the DVDs probably around 2008, drunk on the swagger of unearthing early-adopted content to show to his co-renters.  Let’s not take this accolade away from him, as he remains a dear friend, going on to have two daughters with the wife he met in that very apartment, giving my life some value by virtue of me being the one who chose his future spouse off Gumtree.  It turns out, we only had the first season, but we would watch it over and over, and then listen to the CD soundtrack, also over and over.  The second series was something I only came across in 2020 on my Sky Q box, as it seems Sky Comedy have the rights.  I therefore peppered this into my regular viewing: new Rick & Morty, a fourth season of F Is For Family, lockdown-induced reruns of old Big Brothers and, er, Cruising With Jane McDonald.

Everybody, there is so much to love about Flight Of The Conchords.  Let’s start with our heroes, Jemaine Clement and Bret McKenzie.  Unlucky in love, they’re a kind of kiwi Peep Show pair, their strong accents only adding to the silliness as almost all of their vowel sounds get swapped around for the wrong ones.  The cheap appearance of the first season brings to life perfectly the absolute shitness of the Chinatown neighbourhood they inhabit on their shoestring budget.  Gainful employment comes in the form of a posting as the in-house band of New Zealand’s consulate, an organisation occupying the most depressing-looking office block in all of the five boroughs.  This premise sets up the perfect contrivance: as a band, they of course burst into song.

Only, they don’t really burst.  They slip.  They shimmy.  They irreverently and knowingly look down the camera lens, in on the joke that codifies their song: we’ve met a woman of average attractiveness (The Most Beautiful Girl (In The Room)), we’re laughing about the banality of long-term relationship sex (Business Time), we think we’re better than we are in reality at social gatherings (Prince Of Parties).  Their lyrics are often juxtaposed with reality, the whole thing packaged up with a heavily themed video, whether taking inspiration from Bowie or 90s rap.  In short, nothing takes itself seriously.  Why then, indeed, wouldn’t you have a Gallic number composed entirely of stock GCSE French expressions?  Cue titters as we all laugh about asking “Où est la piscine?” or saying “splish splosh” in a Parisian accent.  These silly songs are silliest when it comes to their catchiness.  Forgive me for only focusing on our first series here – it’s a familiar place for me, whereas the cameo-heavy second season, which seems on first watch to match its predecessor on song quality, has yet to get its claws into my short-term earworm faculties.

Alongside their failures with the ladies, Bret and Jemaine also fail to get anywhere with their music career.  This is often down to their manager, Murray (Rhys Darby), whose focus is the attendance register and agenda of band meetings at the expense of having a clue about anything else.  Nevertheless, their one and only (super) fan is on hand throughout: we have wide-eyed Mel played by Bob’s Burgers’ wonderful Kristen Schaal sporting an anorak and being, frankly, a pervert.  Fans of the anglophone world will also enjoy the long-running rivalry with their counterparts from the Australian Embassy, made all the more insulting by most Americans assuming our lads in the band are actual Australians.

For me, the only thing that has aged is the portrayal of New Zealand.  The country and its consulate are positioned as a running joke, with the Prime Minster himself acting the fool throughout his official visit and the ill-fated establishment of Newzealandtown (squashed between Chinatown and Little Italy).  In reality, New Zealand is fast earning international respect as one of the best countries.  Instead of being run by round blonde racist toddlers like the US and the UK, NZ has gone for a goddess who pursues welfare over growth, all while keeping a pandemic at bay.  Please may Jacinda Ardern take over Britain?  You may ask where I got that preposterous hypothesis.  Did Steve tell me that, perchance?  Mmmph, Steve.

Seriously, though.

Soundtrack

Every minute, 6.5 boxsets are uploaded onto Netflix (probably).  As soon as you think you’re on top of your consumption, there’ll be a new season of that thing you like, or an unseen weekly instalment of that other show that person at work said you should watch.  It’s easy to feel you’re falling behind with a lifetime ambition to complete the platform as if it were a video game, sacrificing your other civic duties of staying at home and ordering stuff online.  But don’t worry, this blog is here to support you in your boxset choice fatigue.  You don’t look at the BBC schedule and despair that you’ll never get round to sitting through everything.  So it should be the same for the online streamers – you only need to watch what you want.  And, to help, I have another hidden gem that might appeal to you.

It has been freely acknowledged that previous hidden gems (un)covered here may not be to everyone’s taste.  As an unregulated, practically unedited, weekly stream of my own opinions, all that matters here is what I think, but all healthy debate is invited.  I was one of the few who thought The Get Down was pretty much a masterpiece.  I would still recommend Friends From College to anyone with a sense of humour.  Everyone should watch Dark, as the wondrous complexity of its plots is only one of its many virtues.  I could go on.  This week, after a recommendation from a dear friend, I have been uncovering Soundtrack.

The trailer ticked a lot of my boxes, mostly because the presence of singing and dancing indicated that this was probably a musical.  Finally, something to come along and meet the unreasonable expectations that I had of Glee.  But this is the first point of difference to cover with Soundtrack.  The cast don’t actually sing the songs.  They lip-synch to the soundtrack.  This is best illustrated by one of the opening scenes.  Nellie, our female lead, is getting ditched by her self-centred boyfriend in a busy restaurant.  As the emotion hits home, the opening sirens and beats of Sia’s Elastic Heart are played to us, the audience.  But it also becomes clear that these aural indications of mood and theme are perceptible to Nellie.  She mouths the words.  She dances choreography.  The background artists, masquerading as waiters, join in as if her subconscious has expanded to include those around her.  You’ll either run a mile at this point or find it to be stirring stuff.

I was hooked.  Throughout the ten episodes, the soundtrack of, lol, Soundtrack, bleeds into the characters’ actions and stories, often culminating in a quite aggressive mash up in some episodes’ climaxes.  While today’s hit parade is often the source of these tunes, later instalments raid Broadway and beyond.  Gender, race and age of recording artist are irrelevant.  It’s all about the sentiment.  Some performances play out as dream sequences, others are more naturalistic, but the whole piece has an experimental feel.  And that’s why I laud Soundtrack: it’s trying something new.  We could easily dismiss this as a gimmick, and some clanging moments (blocking!) in the earlier episodes nearly saw me switch off, but its second strength comes from its story.

Set in LA, Soundtrack at first appears to be a generic love story, documenting the relationship of Sam and Nellie.  Paul James and Callie Hernandez prove so charismatic in these roles that you’re almost disappointed that Soundtrack turns out to be an ensemble piece, with most episodes structured around two other characters and their interplay, drawing focus to Sam and Nellie’s family members, friends and social workers.  That said, the episode Gigi/Jean is carried solely by Megan Ferguson as Nellie’s best friend, though with Nellie herself almost entirely absent, and I found it one of the most compelling instalments.  Sure, this is part La La Land, so everyone is trying to make it in art or music or dance, or has made it in acting.  This is also Netflix, therefore some elements do take their time in order to fill the ten hour-long instalments, but this also somehow doesn’t feel like the kind of fluff that this characteristically flippant write-up would otherwise have you believe.  It’s more affecting, though this might be down to my own (and all of our) emotional vulnerability in lockdown.

So why not watch something that hardly anybody else is?  Soundtrack is not as derivative as it first appears.  It has devastating drama alongside banging choreography that is filmed in a way that really lets you appreciate the movement.  Some of the cast are better at lip-synching than others, but this is part of its style.  It’s a great injustice that I don’t think we’re going to be treated to any more of it, but let that reassure you that this won’t become something that burdens your to-watch list with constant additional instalments.  Soundtrack is the most hiddenest of gems, but if you believe people should burst into spontaneous song and dance in real life then let this single item in your Netflix algorithm offer some diversion from reality.

Cruising With Jane McDonald

See how many of these words and expressions you can get through before you start smirking.  Sausage.  The biggest one.  Such a big organ.  Tugging away.  Now, if, like me, you’re already laughing out loud, then this means you are a fan of innuendo.  This blog has long proven a safe space for those that identify as loving silliness (see post on Miranda), but the time feels right to welcome on board each and every fan of innuendo out there because, this week, we’re going on us holidays.  We’re going Cruising With Jane McDonald.  If you didn’t enjoy any of the double-entendres, then get out.

Ever since Adele Roberts’ luxury item on I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here was a framed photo of Jane herself, I’ve been meaning to return to this show.  I remember one Christmas visit to the parents some years back.  We differ on lots of things, from politics to food, but TV viewing behaviour is perhaps home to the biggest generational divide.  I therefore spent the festive period, as a guest, tolerating such nonsense as Countryfile, the BBC news, Antiques Roadshow and countless advert breaks filled with spots whose frequency was approaching a billion.  I wasn’t entertained but I mostly wasn’t listening.  Then, one evening, after a slice of Christmas cake and a peppermint tea, something came on about cruise holidays.  There was our Jane, she off of a 1998 BBC reality documentary called The Cruise (back when everyone in this sort of show was guaranteed a showbiz career), still going strong, still going on cruises, 20 years later.  Apart from a stint on Loose Women (Jane, not me), I hadn’t seen much of her outside of some Victoria Wood sketches (insert plug for dinnerladies).  Yet, this one programme was the highlight of my winter break.  My parents and I chuckled throughout, enjoying the entertainment, unified in Jane’s silly innuendos.  Channel 5 had previously only served one purpose in my life: hosting later series of Big Brother.  Now it was giving me something more.

But why now?  Well, as someone who’s lucky in lockdown (a job, a place to live, online shopping), one minor pain point has been the lack of going on holiday.  I expect no sympathy as the world has bigger problems just now, but don’t worry anyway as I have solved this myself through the format of travelogue television.  I can’t go abroad, but Jane can.  So when I’ve reached the end of my WFH day, I move from the home office to the sofa (same room), treat myself to a tonic water (as a pretend gin and tonic, to avoid the start of a slippery slope whose first step is drinking alone) with ice and lemon, and crack open an episode.

We always start with Jane enthusing about her love of cruising.  Her Yorkshire accent leads to a certain pronunciation of the R in cruise that I wish I had remembered enough of the linguistics in my degree to be able to transcribe phonetically here.  Imagine cruise, but said in a more fun way.  And that’s the joy of Jane – she’s happy to be there.  Whether she’s getting taken up the Danube, hitting the Caribbean islands or bobbing about the Inner Hebrides, Jane always bursts with excitement before she gets on any ship.  Her passion for cruising is palpable.  Sometimes, she has some hours to kill in her first port, but before long we’re following her deep into the bowels of the vessel as she tries (with mixed success) to locate her cabin.  With cruise companies wising up to the PR her trips give them, later series see her occupy the swishest accommodation, but Jane is mostly genuinely glad to have a bed and a clean toilet.  She’ll test the shower’s acoustics and always pull out a clothing line so she can make comments about people’s smalls.  And that’s what you really need when considering what cabin to book.

We’re then served a jazzy infographic, using a glitzy cutty-outty head of Jane to document her itinerary (always starting in Wakefield).  My favourite of these is for her Iceland trip, as she simply gives up pronouncing the place names properly after several false starts.  Then, for the best part of an hour, to quote Jane, we’re on us holidays!  At each port, she packs in all sorts, whether spurning the average tourists for a personal guided tour of something or other, or joining in with elderly British couples in anoraks who first got the cruising bug in 1972 and now won’t go anywhere unless it’s on a waterborne hotel with nine bars and six à la carte restaurants.  Jane is up for anything, and that’s one of the best parts.  She jumps off a building in New Zealand, takes a zipwire down Niagara Falls and asks any man below the age of 50 if he is married.  Her heart is on her sleeve, easily moved to tears by Budapest’s Holocaust memorial, Gracie Fields’ tomb on Capri or the sight of the Taj Mahal.  The only thing she doesn’t like is walking up steep hills, but she can normally balance out that inconvenience with some sort of cheeky drink, a whopping innuendo and a quick whizz round any gift shop.  Other highlights include interactions with her hair and make-up pal, Sue, and the bit where she explores the ship on her own, wielding a camera on a stick while she bothers holidaymakers who desperately try to act like they haven’t just overdone it at the buffet.

Now we must touch on how each show ends.  Middle series include a cheeky “What?” moment where we catch Jane up to no good – I can confirm I laughed out loud at each of these.  But, throughout, the singer in Jane comes into play and we are treated to a musical number.  I would love to have been in the production meeting where this part of the format was decided upon.  Song choices are linked to the location, with Jai Ho and Ray Of Light accompanying her up the Ganges, and the Evita soundtrack saved for Argentina, for example.  I delight in Jane because she never takes herself seriously, but for the musical number moments, her performance is more studied.  But what better end to the high camp of the high seas than a baffling bit of a singsong?

So, join me in agreeing with Bafta that this is an excellent show.  For now, Jane may have hung up her cruising smalls and the show is over (just like our EU membership, for now), but if you’re looking for a bit of comfort, whimsy and vacation-simulating entertainment in lockdown, all without the actual hell of being trapped on a ship with other British people, then this is the perfect bit of television, at least until we can go on us holidays again.