Mad Men

So, advertising, then.  It’s a pretty big part of modern life.  It’s the industry I pretend to work in (I really do have a job in it, but my contribution mostly boils down to titting about).  Outside of the BBC, it has historically been the necessary evil that has funded content.  Without content, there are no boxsets, and without boxsets, this whole blog would just be me revealing inappropriate and banal childhood memories.  But I also hate it.  I don’t read freesheets or listen to commercial radio, but I do watch TV.  My version of watching TV, however, is setting the Sky Plus so I can fast forward all the ads.  Or I pick shows from Netflix and Amazon in order to keep up with office conversation (though this also includes half an hour or more of agonising over what to begin watching, checking the various trailers over and over until I’ve totally run out of time and have to go to bed).  This Christmas, however, when summoned to spend the enforced festivities at my parents’, I realised some people still watch linear TV, checking in the Radio Times for when things are on, debating scheduling clashes until they compromise on watching bits of most things but never all of one (unless it’s Call The Midwife – not a moment was missed of that horrendous tat), rushing meals to catch the start of a show and then sitting through all the advert breaks in full.  On average, there are three minutes of ads ever quarter of an hour.  In short, Christmas, for me, was watching the same DFS ad over and over.

“Right, let’s make a show about advertising,” said someone at AMC apparently.  But this wasn’t going to be a show that went behind the scenes on the ScS double discount savings shoot (sale starts 9am Boxing Day).  It was to be about the early days of advertising.  In fact, relatively speaking, these were still the early days of consumerism.  Because mass production and consumption were new, they were also sexy.  If you follow, all new things are sexy, then they just become things, and then they are things that we are tired with and want to move on from, and then, when they have been out of our lives long enough for us to miss them, they are nostalgic, and we want them back and want them to forgive us for ever growing tired of them (see my post on Friends).

Thus, we are onto Mad Men.  It might, technically, be a show about working in an office, but it’s one of the sexiest boxsets you can get your teeth into.  But the sexiness doesn’t come from the usual sources: hot cast, wearing not much, engaged in storylines that involve them getting off with each other (though there is plenty of all of that too).  Instead, the show perfectly captures the sexiness of the times, when so much was new.  1960s New York was the throbbing heart of a brave new world.  The show is at its best when pitching the values of past times against a revolutionary regime.  But this is not our modern outlook being catered to.  Mad Men does not meekly give us what we want as a twenty-first century audience, it wrong-foots us repeatedly with its characters’ 1960s mind-sets.  We cannot understand their behaviour because we are of a different time.  This asks so much more of the viewer than something like Downton Abbey that gives us only what we find easy to accept.

This is Mad Men’s appeal.  It is for the discerning.  It makes no concessions.  Remember that old man character from two seasons ago?  Neither do I, but he’s back, and what he did last time is important.  Keep up, stupid!  If you like finishing one episode and going on to the next to see how a situation was cleared up, Mad Men will only disappoint.  It simply moves on to what it finds interesting.  Fill the gaps in yourself, you idiot!  Finally, if you need clear cut directions on which characters to root for, then turn away now.  From Don Draper himself, to Peggy Olson and the rest, each cast member does terrible things for terrible reasons (and they all never stop smoking or drinking).  You’ll be so conflicted you won’t be able to resist the next episode.  Guess what, people are complex!

Importantly though, the viewer goes on a journey with these characters across the show’s seven series.  You’ll also be willing their actual fictional advertising firm to do well.  There is a massive distance between where they and it start, and where things end up.  Along the way, you’ll only get glimpses, but that will be enough.  The perfect stylisation helps you to forgive the show its challenges.

Selling a product is selling a dream.  Buy this thing and your life will be better.  Your dreams will come true.  Seeing the characters launch into these sorts of pitches in the many fantastic boardroom scenes throughout the episodes is the only time you will hear script clichés.  Otherwise there is not one lazy exchange in the dialogue.  It all fizzes in just the right way.  And if they’re not talking, they’re giving knowing looks (which nobody does better than Christina Hendricks’ Joan).

No other industry tries to make the humdrum of everyday life into an aspiration.  I have no point of reference, but I’m sure no other show makes working in a 1960s office so glamorous.  Even with their sharply tailored suits and outfits, the coiffured hair, the (sometimes) impeccable manners and social graces and their (initially) idyllic marriages, however, we are left in no doubt that these people will never be happy.  And in that way, their 1960s fantasy seems entirely relatable.

Chewing Gum

Ever heard of Michaela-Moses Ewuraba O Boakye-Collinson?  It’s an outrage that she’s not a national treasure.  It’s also an outrage that I didn’t even type the whole name out – I copied and pasted it from Wikipedia.  Known professionally as Michaela Coel (as well as Michaela The Poet), Coel’s graduation project from the Guildhall School of Music and Drama was the play Chewing Gum Dreams.  That was in 2012 (I was dancing in the Olympics Closing Ceremony but I don’t like to go on about it) and by 2015, the material had been developed onto e4 as series one of Chewing Gum.  Cue a BAFTA nomination then.

Coel wrote it and played the lead role of Tracey Gordon, all in the same 2015 that I spent playing email bingo in my office job.  Maybe it was that distraction that prevented me from watching that series or indeed the second, which hit our screens in January this year (when I was still ping-ponging the same emails in the same office in the same job).  But, and this is a big but, it went on a list of things I ought to watch.  And yeah, I’ve only gone and watched it now, so let’s pull it to pieces.

Tracey is 24 but her hymen is super duper intact.  This is thanks to many things, including her mother’s religious fundamentalism, her sister’s prudism, her friends’ terrible (and terribly misinterpreted) advice and her own over-enthusiasm for having all the wrong ideas about sex.  Her life goal is getting that hymen smashed through.  Imagine, then, how hilarious it is to watch that journey unfold.

There are elements of Miranda in Tracey’s pieces to camera.  She even plays on this when her cousin, Boy Tracy, visits and starts talking to her camera.  How meta.  Her wiggling about in underwear takes me back to Nighty Night’s Jill Tyrell, as does her obsession with sex at its most gruesome.  It’s graphic stuff, and it’s become a regular occurrence for my housemate to find me watching some eyebrow-raising scenes.  Oh well.  The supporting caricatures come and go with mixed results, but her sister Cynthia is consistently among the funniest.  Who knew how many jokes could be had about Ludo?

The constant e4 trails always made me laugh, and I chuckled often at the early episodes.  But once acclimatised to Chewing Gum’s sunny London estate universe, it was more mildly amusing than hilarious.  Some episodes bumble around a bit, but it’s all the more charming for not having a team of writers tightening every script into mechanical slickness.  It’s cute and it’s relatable (in that these are characters in central London, rather than LA or Westeros – I must stress that I’ve never had a hymen).

Tracey, as a character, eludes me.  Despite the window into her soul that her pieces to camera should offer, her behaviour is unpredictable.  It often seems at odds with itself, veering from confidence to shyness with maniacal intensity.  And where does she get them awful shirts?  Either way, the disparate elements to her complex personality are hard to reconcile, but surely this only makes her more realistic as an extreme representation of our own childish tittering about sex and relationships.  And now I am lolling to myself about the word titter.

I should point out that I am in no way ridiculing Coel’s amazing full name above – let’s not forget I’ve carried the surname Honeywood around with me these last thirty-two years.  It was just a hook to start this post.  As were the comments about her being a national treasure.  In fact, recent events should see her become an international treasure, as she appears in the latest Star Wars (the one that descends happily into Minions through the addition of cute furry birds – what the franchise has been missing all along) as a Resistance Monitor for the baddies.  She’s onscreen only fleetingly, but my heart leapt at the prospect of her talent being recognised and finding the largest global audience possible.  I can’t wait for her next project.

Stranger Things

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

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

The perfectly observed period setting.

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

The opening credits.

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

Winona Ryder.

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

Friendship.

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

Lucas

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

Dustin

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

Will

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

Mike

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

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

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

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

The Handmaid’s Tale

One of the best dramas of 2017 slipped onto our screens almost unnoticed.  The internet was abuzz with teasers and trailers and stills of this long-awaited adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel.  The author herself could barely contain her excitement in her social media feeds, and rightly so.  But, I asked myself, what on earth is this Hulu thing it was going to be appearing on?  Did I need another subscription alongside Amazon Prime, Netflix and Sky?  But we don’t have it here, so what about people in the UK?  How were we going to watch it?  This, in itself, was a reminder of how long we used to have to wait for entertainment to reach our shores from North America until the internet made most things immediate.  At the last minute, Channel 4 acquired the rights and with little ado, the show made its Sunday evening debut.

I’ve talked before of that final hour of Sunday being a key slot for comfort programming: nostalgic period pieces or luscious footage of natural history.  Snuggled on sofas, we’re at our most vulnerable and will do anything to soften the blow of Monday morning.  The Handmaid’s Tale was having none of it.  Every harrowing moment brought the crushing reality of how awful life can be straight to every Sunday evening viewer.  Suddenly, the TV boxset was a terrifying place.

Atwood has pointed out that there is nothing in The Handmaid’s Tale that isn’t already happening somewhere in the world.  When I first read the novel, it was the very feasibility of Gilead, a religious-fundamentalist state where parts of the USA used to be, that chilled me the most.  I couldn’t shake the concept.  In it, women are objects to be possessed in service to men.  The entire system is based on faith.  It’s over thirty-two years since publication (and twenty-seven years since a 1990 feature film adaptation where everyone’s hair was too big) and faith still abounds in the modern world as a tool to excuse all sorts of reprehensible behaviour.  If enough people believe something, then it must be right, right?

I’ve managed to get to the fourth paragraph without saying dystopian, but it’s the essential descriptor here: in this dystopian vision of the future, (wo)mankind’s fertility is running out.  Handmaids, as the last remaining group that can bear children, are envied by barren women and punished for their fecundity by both genders.  Love doesn’t come into it, as they are assigned to wealthy and powerful childless couples, solely for the purpose of conceiving, birthing and giving away their progeny in a series of ceremonies that display inconceivable brutality.  Yet, in real life, inconceivable acts are justified by faith every day.  So far, so hauntingly realistic.

Our focus is Offred/June, a Handmaid who cannot reconcile her role in Gilead’s society with the life she had before.  The drama is deftly woven with flashbacks to the breakdown of America, the somehow plausible emergence of Gilead through a gradual erosion of women’s rights.  Nothing is ever explained properly.  Instead, we are granted the credit to piece together this society and culture from the evidence presented.  As such, we share June’s horror as she peels back layer after layer of cruelty.  It is Elisabeth Moss’s outstanding performance that heightens not just the credibility of each scene, but the acute suffering June must go through as she becomes Offred.  Yet, she never lets us in that far.  We must guess her next move as much as any other character must, which prevents The Handmaid’s Tale, thankfully, from ever descending into mundane predictability.

The supporting cast is studded with further quality.  Yvonne Strahovski plays the wife to whose family Offred is assigned and bristles with the internal conflict her Handmaid’s role causes her.  The other Handmaids each invite untold curiosity: cruelty begets cruelty.  In addition, Amanda Brugel as the household’s Martha (multipurpose maid, also barren) positively seethes with quiet dignity.  So, not only is the concept utterly gripping, its execution is almost faultless.  My only niggle is that a lot of bumping into each other takes place in Gilead, as if there is only one shop or something, but I will honestly forgive this programme anything.

The medium of a ten-part series has allowed the show’s makers to mine the book’s material in order to expand and enrich the universe Atwood first created.  Carefully teased into tense drama that hooks a viewer within minutes only never to let them go (a housemate got totally sucked into the sixth episode after walking into the room ten minutes in), Channel 4 had an absolute touch sneaking this into their schedule.  And it turned out to be one of their highest rating shows of the year.  The teasing out has paid off as a second season is in the works, so I can only beg as many people as possible to make sure they have seen the first ten episodes before more are unleashed on us.  This show and what it has to tell us cannot go unnoticed.

Friends

Growing up, I used to think everyone had a breakfast room in their house.  We did.  This doesn’t mean it was a massive mansion.  It was your standard four bedroom detached house in Surrey.  There was a dining room, but this was for best.  We sat in there on Christmas and select special occasions.  The breakfast room was a smaller affair right next to the kitchen, with a table and chairs for the four of us.  This is where we ate not only breakfast, but also lunch, dinner and any other snacks in between (so I can only apologise for the misleading name).  How does this relate to Friends?  Well, it’s where I first came across this programme in 1995.

You might have guessed I come from TV-viewing stock.  My dad can watch TV for hours.  At one point there was a TV in the garage so he didn’t miss old films while working on the car.  Because he couldn’t get through a meal without telly, we of course had a small set affixed to the wall in the hallowed breakfast room.  I don’t think I ever had tea without Neighbours AND Home & Away as an accompaniment.  I’m not sure why this meal lasted an hour.  As I came on for ten years old, I started to want to watch my own shows, and this meant leaving the comfy sofas of the lounge where my parents watched things that mums and dads like to watch.  And so, perched on one of the uncomfortable wooden chairs in the breakfast room, I came across my first episode of Friends one Friday evening while being daring and watching Channel 4.

Series 2, episode 1 opens with Phoebe recapping the latest in the star-crossed saga of Ross and Rachel: Ross has returned from China with Julie (Julie!) just as Rachel has realised he loves her.  I was hooked.  I had never heard people speak like this before.  They said cool things like “Hey” rather than “Hello” and peppered their sentences with “Like” which was brand new at the time and hadn’t yet ruined the ability to articulate of a generation of British school kids.  They were young, but they didn’t need grown-ups.  There was a sofa in their coffeehouse and, curiously, nobody else ever sat in it but them.

I have since seen all 236 episodes several times.  I think everyone has.  Twenty-two years after first meeting the Friends, I still end up watching around one and a half episodes a day.  It’s not on purpose, but it’s also something I allow to happen.  And this is a show whose last episode aired thirteen years ago.  For a while, I couldn’t bring myself to sit through any of the constant repeats on e4, so I would watch anything but Friends.  It was too soon.  If it came on by accident, I had to get the channel switched over before the claps at the beginning of the opening credits.  But now, Comedy Central is our default channel when the telly boots up and episode upon episode of Friends is lined up to catch young professionals getting in from work who want to be reminded of when they were a bit younger and less professional.  Of course, as a channel, its new home comes with an onslaught of promotional trailers for The Middle and Impractical Jokers (stop trying to make Impractical Jokers happen), but that can be forgiven, as it’s these old episodes that are so comforting after a day in the office.

Some jokes have dated.  Some storylines are from a distant age before mobile phones and the internet.  Some hairstyles and wardrobe choices seem unfathomable in 2017.  But I still laugh.  The better I know a scene and the more I know what’s coming next, the more I laugh.  I forgive punchlines I would never tolerate from a new show made in this day and age.  But this is because Friends practically defines the modern sitcom.  Ross even had a pet monkey in earlier series.  Could anything be any more sitcom?

So here we are, on an eternal cycle through all ten seasons.  Each time we go back to series one, the charm starts all over again.  I’m even now measuring my life in rotations of the entire Friends canon.  And by life, I mean crushing adult disappointment at how much time I spend watching TV.  My fear is that this behaviour will never end.  I will become my parents, who spent my childhood indulging themselves with repeats of Dad’s Army, Only Fools And Horses, Open All Hours and Are You Being Served?  Over time, their comments went from “Oh, what was he in last?” to “Oh, course, he’s dead now” – do I want to go through the same thing with the cast of Friends?

Just as I know where I was for the first episode I ever saw, I also know exactly where I was when the final episode of series 10 aired in the UK.  It was summer 2004 and I was in the first year of university.  I needed to find someone with a TV in their room, as did the rest of the freshers.  We piled in to a tiny dorm, pressed our faces to one of the tiny television sets we used to watch in those days and prepared ourselves for the end.  The girls cried.  The boys pretended they didn’t want to cry.  Life as the Friends knew it was changing, and so was a part of our lives.  We said goodbye to a show that had accompanied us for the best part of ten years.  With so many new shows available to us, the fact that I have welcomed Friends back is testament to the quality of not only its comedy, but its relatability.  That breakfast room might be in a house that belongs to a different family now, but Friends will always be my friends.

Blue Planet II

One of the best things that can happen on telly is that David Attenborough will get wheeled out to narrate the most epically beautiful photography of Earth’s wildlife.  The BBC is currently showing a second series of The Blue Planet, following on from its 2001 predecessor with more fish, whales, corals and, er, Bobbit worms.  We’ve only waited sixteen years, but it’s been worth it.

There is no classier and more dignified voice than Attenborough’s.  He can make anything sound majestic and significant.  Imagine watching the dustmen coming down the road with a David voiceover: wheelie bins being emptied into rubbish trucks would take on a poetic beauty.  All the groupers he has watched being eaten in this current series must be so proud that their deaths in the mouths of reef sharks have been marked with a couple of dramatic sentences from this absolute idol of TV.  Surely the life goal of any animal is for their demise to feature in a BBC documentary voiced by Attenborough?

If this is what the license fee pays for, then the BBC are welcome to my money.  We pay about £9.99 a month for Netflix subscriptions just to watch old series of Teen Wolf and documentaries about prisons (just me?) – although I’m luckily able to surf a friend’s account and am therefore not paying anything (even though they keep putting the subtitles on and they’re in no way hearing impaired). 

Indeed, obtaining the awesome footage we expect can’t be cheap.  But then, at the end of each show, they explain to us how they got some of the most impressive shots.  I feel I would always rather be left wondering how on earth they have managed to film Bobbit worms ambushing fish.  There’s something nice about it being a mystery.  The explanation inevitably involves a whole load of people spending months and months in some awful place, all for a few minutes of footage.  Some poor cameraman probably didn’t see his kids or another living soul for months while looking for a little crab.  It feels like a waste of time and money, especially as I was probably whatsapping someone while it was onscreen. 

The magic also evaporates slightly when every episode comes back around to some sort of environmental guilt.  Cue image of a baby turtle wearing some sort of plastic neckpiece and looking forlorn.  It’s of course right that we must be shown this, but it takes the edge off the escapism the show otherwise provides.  Luckily, being told off by David Attenborough takes on an almost seductive element.  You feel very naughty and instinctively vow never to use another plastic product again.

And it’s that escapism that makes it perfect Sunday evening viewing (the main part of the show, I mean, before the environmental slapped wrist – I normally stop watching before it comes on).  Although, Blue Planet II can also be saved for a Monday night, when the shock of a new week and its first day hit home.  For some reason, Monday is always the most aggressive of all the commutes, but it can be washed away in a visual sea of lantern fish as they’re devoured shoal by shoal.  It might have been busy on the Tube and someone might have shoved you at Stockwell, but at least there weren’t five different types of predator racing to eat you and everyone you know.

That said, at the risk of great unpopularity, I have to confess to finding this new series slightly repetitive.  I’m sure most things were covered last time around.  There’s always a shoal being finished off in a feeding frenzy.  There’s always Attenborough explaining where nutrients are in the water due to various currents, enunciating the word nutrients until it becomes almost sexual.  Nutrientsss.  Each scene opens with some sort of curious image.  Shot after shot shows variations on the same thing as we are led to wonder what on earth this will be.  Is that a sperm whale?  Upside down?  I don’t know.  Maybe David will explain in a minute.  The problem is, that minute takes so long to come that it feels like padding.  The old confuse ‘n’ reveal ends up getting overused if it’s what frames every sequence.  I know I said I liked the mystery of not knowing how things were filmed, but I just want the straight-up facts about which animals I am watching straightaway.

But these concerns are minor.  This is must-watch TV.  There might be no snake island this time, which was YouTubed the Monday after broadcast over and over, but the drama of the real-life battles for survival that dominate the animal world easily outdo anything scripted and greenlit by Netflix.  And if you happen to be watching it in the nineties, there’s a factsheet to accompany the series, as Attenborough explains at the end of each episode.  You just have to phone up for it (again, in the nineties).  I hope Dave answers the phone.

Broad City

We’ve all been young.  We’ve all lived pennilessly in big cities.  We’ve all made bad decisions.  But if you’ve stopped doing any of those things (though I’ve only stopped doing one of them – I finished being young in 2010) you can live vicariously through two young, penniless-in-New York, bad decision-making characters in the form of Broad City.  Your experiences might not be as hilarious as theirs are, but it’s worth remembering your life isn’t actually a sitcom penned by two of the funniest people ever to be given a film crew and some development budget (by Amy Poehler.  Sort of).

The first of these people is Ilana Glazer.  If someone’s ever shouted ‘YAS queen’ at you, or written it beneath something impressive you’ve done and then shared on social media for attention and approval (maybe your baby looks cute, or you’ve been having overdue catch-up drinks with this one – shudder), it’s due to this lady.  Ilana plays Ilana (Wexler).  She is the wild one of the two New York broads around whose lives the show revolves.  While both have hopeless careers, Ilana wilfully refuses to adjust her behaviour no matter what the situation.  Her colleagues typically hate her and onlookers gawp in the street, but her priority is affirming her dear friend.  And also being a bit sexually inappropriate towards her.

Cue Abbi Abrams, played by, Abbi Jacobson.  Everything she says sounds cute.  Three years older than Ilana’s twenty-two years (the characters, not the actors), series four explains how the two met and instantly connected.  Occasionally there is a glimmer of hope that Abbi will get her life on track, but Ilana is always there with something that appeals to her impulses.

Doing justice to their relationship is not possible among all my usual snarky remarks.  It just works.  What drives them to each other are the grotesque characters outside of their friendship.  There’s Bevers, Abbi’s roommate’s boyfriend.  However, you never see this roommate and therefore Bevers is the definition of an outstayed welcome.  Particularly if that welcome is shedding bodily hair onto the bits of your bedsheets it hasn’t already sweated or spilled ice cream onto.  As with all gross people, he mistakes the rage he causes for affection, considering Abbi his (ample) bosom buddy.  He showers her with mistimed, miscalculated and misfired acts of friendship, which makes him all the more entertaining in his skin-crawlingly saccharine gestures (while he sweats and sheds hair and spills food that stains).

Abbi fares no better at work.  A would-be illustrator, she languishes at Soulstice (universally representing all gyms that have disappeared so far up their own philosophy that the air is thick with smugness) as a trainee trainer for many episodes.  I will never get tired of watching members throw towels at her face, mistaking her for a laundry hamper.  People in gyms really only do see other people as places to discard of towels.  I know I do.  Soulstice is the habitat of Trey, the embodiment of all personal trainer clichés.  Never seen with sleeves, he patronises Abbi and his clients, making skin crawl in a way that is somehow completely the opposite of Bevers, but just as comedic.

Balancing out Trey and Bevers, there’s also Lincoln.  He has a lot of chill.  He is Ilana’s frequent sexual partner and devoted rescuer, though she responds to his requests for a real relationship with an insistence that things remain casual.  This is often done with graphic language at his place of work: a dental clinic for children.

So, YAS queen, that’s the character highlights, but what actually happens?  Anything and everything, mostly.  There are wild nights that perfectly capture the sort of evening which is followed by waking up and wondering what happened.  Also, where are my shoes LOL?  There are hare-brained schemes to play the system.  There are awkward workplace moments.  It doesn’t really matter, as the girls keep the amusement going and celebrate New York for all of its beautiful unfairness.  Hillary Clinton even shows up.  I might still be penniless in a big city, I might still make bad decisions, but this show makes me want to be young again.

Bromans

I don’t know what it says about me as a person, but Bromans really was 100% my format on paper.  Even back when I had only just found out what it was called, I knew I would be watching it.  It was an inevitability as certain as me fast-forwarding through the bad dances on Strictly Come Dancing or averaging about 1.5 episodes of Friends per day (and still laughing out loud).  In my real actual job, I work closely with ITV and had seen this gem coming up in the schedules a mile off.  In fact, it was going to be called Ladiators, but changed at the last minute.  The fact that both names are genius just goes to show that we are working with televisual gold here.

Have you ever wondered how today’s lads would fare if they were forced to train as Roman gladiators?  Have you ever wondered how their girlfriends would also fare if they were forced to live in Ancient Rome?  Me neither, but Bromans strove to answer these questions with as much slow motion footage as possible of attractive young people in scant cladding.

Despite its 2017 debut, Bromans stuck rigidly to assigned gender roles.  Was this historical accuracy, or just a lazy format?  The boys were the ones who actually got to take part in the fighting, wrestling, posturing and chasing.  Casting was a reality TV dream.  There was the skinny TOWIE cast off, the muscular TOWIE cast off, lots of tattoos, a Northern joker and a very well brought up rugby chap (each with a matching girlfriend).  Mostly in their underpants, they would take part in training sessions in the blazing sunshine under the watchful eye of Doctore.  I’m not sure what was more entertaining, none of the contestants remembering the word Doctore for the first few episodes, or David McIntosh’s very earnest attempt to play a serious character while he put the lads through their paces.  I’ve since bumped into David at a party. And by bump into, I mean that I was knocked across the room like a rag doll after accidentally colliding with his enormous bulk while getting out of someone else’s way.

Meanwhile, the girls would pursue more domestic activities, such as crushing grapes for wine and offering spa treatments to the boys.  In Bromans’ defence, the couples did share the duties during the laundry task, which descended into a piss fight.  I should point out that, for historical accuracy, the show recreated the Roman practice of using piss as a detergent, much to the contestants’ retching.

Each episode would culminate in the lads’ final competition, before, in a lavish ceremony, the bottom two performers would be forced to try and persuade the others to keep them.  Public speaking didn’t seem to be on the list of requirements when casting Bromans, so these slightly awkward moments are luckily topped by what follows: the remaining Broman couples then stand behind which lad and girlfriend they want to save.  The losing boy subsequently realises that everyone has mugged him off, is forced to remove his toga and march off in his golden underpants.  Classic.  Meanwhile, a banner emblazoned with his face is torched to signify his departure.  Depending on the wind, it might also flap into the other lads’ banners and set them on fire too, but they don’t show that on camera.  It’s more something you can assume.

In all of this, you have an epic set, complete with extras.  The budget seems to have been there literally to rebuild Rome, and it probably took more than a day.  Maybe two days.  I’m assuming the show was filmed abroad, which probably means the toga-clad extras have no idea what’s going on, but I’m sure they still really enjoyed themselves.  Because the couples live and sleep on set throughout, the show takes on a Love Island vibe.  They don’t shout out about getting a text (this is Ancient Rome, silly) but there are the usual arguments which tick the boxes of people looking for a bit of drama.

So finally, I hear you ask, what happens when you watch Bromans?  Firstly, you are torn between lust and wanting to go to the gym, depending on your sexual preferences (it’s 2017 so we are making no assumptions).  There are muscles, if you like those, and there are bikinis getting torn off, if you like those.  If you like both, then you may need to sit on a wipe-clean surface.  Secondly, you will learn approximately one thing per episode about how the Romans probably lived.  But you won’t care.  And lastly, knowing that this show was a must-watch for me, you’ll be appalled at me and my viewing choices.

Fortitude

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fear The Walking Dead

If you’re going to watch a lot of television shows, it’s worth figuring out what sort of themes you like the most.  For some reason, I’ve never been able to interest myself in shows about solving murders.  I’m (probably) never going to murder anyone, so it all seems largely irrelevant.  However, any show with a hint of zombie apocalypse goes straight on my watchlist.  If I follow my own logic, then this should mean that I fully expect to live through humanity being killed off by the undead.  But then, I don’t think I do see this in my future.  Yet, it’s still feels more relevant to my life.  And this is most likely because half my days are spent in a zombie-like routine, catching the same buses, standing in the same spots on Tube platforms, thumbing through the same apps and repeatedly writing the same office emails.  It’s not quite apocalyptic, but its tedium is probably as painful as being eaten alive by cadavers.

Anyway, we’ve got distracted.  The point is, I love anything about zombies.  Ever since I was dragged to see 28 Days Later (actually about an infection), I’ve never found anything as compelling as working out what I would do in the same situation.  That said, I still don’t have a plan.  And so, with the eighth series of The Walking Dead hitting UK screens, it’s time to turn attentions to the spin off, mostly because I’ve just finished the second series.

With the democratisation of TV content, allowing viewers to pick their own schedules, a model that’s done so well for Netflix and Amazon, it was an absolute mugging off that BT did the worst thing ever with Fear The Walking Dead on its UK launch by holding it hostage on its paid-for channels in order to force people to sign up.  Instead, people simply resorted to pirating it, so go fudge yourselves, BT.  I have been a good boy and simply hung on for the episodes to come under Amazon Prime.

The show’s lack of ubiquity is a real shame, as its quality really is up there with The Walking Dead.  Sure, the gore maws your eyes sore, but having the fall of civilisation as a backdrop really makes a good character arc seem all the more compelling.  The action centres on LA in the early days of the outbreak, complementing The Walking Dead’s setting in the well-established future of the same apocalypse.  The tension that dominates the first series as the characters try and work out what’s going on while we’re fully clued up on their fates makes for epic viewing.

But, it’s actually very hard to like any of the characters.  The show still has you rooting for them to survive, but they mostly are a real bunch of bastards.  This continues into the second series and ties in with the theory that, while monsters may walk the earth, humans will always be the biggest bad guys.

Beyond describing the premise as following a band of survivors attempting to live out the end of days, there’s not much else you need to know.  Comparisons to The Walking Dead might be all we have.  While everyone in that show looks sweaty as balls in the Georgia humidity, Fear The Walking Dead plays out in the dry heat of California and beyond.  As someone who is almost always too hot and can barely keep any clothes on, my biggest concern is how someone can bear to wear jeans in a desert, not the fact that they are being chased by brain-devouring zombies.

The languages geek within me loves the fact that a good portion of the show switches between Spanish and English, and you’re definitely in for a treat if you like boats.  The Walking Dead’s zombie lore is well observed, though Fear The Walking Dead does rely a great deal on the fact that smearing yourself with dead people’s bodily mush disguises to zombies that you are still alive.  It’s a bit too easy.

Zombie-based dramas trump a lot of other themes, simply because any and all of the characters can die at any minute.  It might sound macabre to enjoy this, but what else can consistently provide such strong human drama?  In murder mysteries, the victim is already dead, lying there cold and inert in a chilly morgue.  In Fear The Walking Dead, the victims of death stalk the earth having a lot more fun (and doing that sort of breathy growling they enjoy so much).  Just don’t watch it straight before bed as you will be too tense to sleep, unless you have finally numbed all your emotions by watching too much of this sort of thing.

Bob's Burgers

While some TV show episodes drag into eternity, others are over all too quickly.  From Bob’s Burgers’ jaunty opening sequence to its production company’s endframe, every moment of viewing is just right.  I find myself sitting there expecting more quality entertainment, when all that follows are adverts or an awkward silence.

Whenever I meet someone else who watches Bob’s Burgers, I immediately try and launch into a conversation with them where we can compare our favourite quotations from the show.  But then I always get stuck on the fact I can’t remember any of them.  Yet, every time I watch it, I think to myself how clever and funny each line is.  But this might just be the beauty of the show.  Unlike a lot of animated series, it hasn’t had to rely on stock expressions to engage its audience.  Instead, it has built up individual characters over time.

As a fan of the Simpsons and Family Guy, it makes sense I would enjoy Bob’s Burgers, but I can’t remember at all how I first came across it.  As ever, it took a couple of series of dodgier animation and rougher voice recordings for it to find its feet, but now each episode is a mini masterpiece.  Most recently, it seemed to appear in my Sky Plus on Saturday mornings (assuming it’s getting recording late on Friday evenings) and it makes the perfect viewing accompaniment for me when I am eating porridge and scrambling eggs and drinking a mug of coffee after training.

Family is at the heart of the show, so I have ranked the Belcher family below in order of funniness, and, consequently, their place in my estimations.

Linda

She’s the matriarch of the brood, but probably the least sensible.  More easily swayed by doing what seems fun than by doing what seems important, it’s often her whims that launch the family into its adventures.  That said, she loves her ‘babies’ and her ‘Bobby’ almost as much as she loves dancing in front of an audience and drinking wine.  Everything she says is funny.

Tina

One of the perviest characters ever to grace animation, Tina is what my mum would call ‘boy mad’.  Unfortunate for her, then, that she is stuck in the awkwardness of pubescence.  Her romantic dreams are almost always hopeless, but we root for her because we have all been that weirdo teen.  Her strong moral compass is often at odds with Linda’s shenanigans, but Tina has incredible throwaway lines that pepper the show with an undercurrent of darkness.

Louise

An amazing character if only for the amazing voice of Kristen Schaal.  Louise never takes off her bunny ears (perhaps her one weakness) and takes a small-time gangster approach to most things.  Her cynicism and relentless drive give way only very rarely to the more tender feelings we would expect from a small girl.  Adults beware.  In fact, everyone beware.

Bob

Long-suffering, yes, but innocent, no.  Bob indulges just as much of his own childishness as any of the other Belchers.  The difference is that he is the slightly downtrodden father figure with a flair for fine burgers.  Voiced by H. Jon Benjamin (which will make Archer sound like Bob and Bob sound like Archer, depending on which show you start with), his voice of reason is easily ignored, which is great, as it would only get in the way of the comedy.

Gene

Is it wrong that I like Gene the least?  His voice is wild, his roll malleable.  He is the disgusting boy, but both his sisters can be more extreme without even trying.  Again, he is a champion of throwaway comments and the driving force behind the show’s semi-musical nature.

There’s also Aunt Gayle.  If I could add her into the main nuclear family, she’d be in third place.  This is not only because she is literally me in ten years’ time (lonely old cat lady) but also because her selfishness is exceeded only by her delusion – a recurring theme in many of my favourite comic characters (see Nighty Night).  In addition to both of these points, she is also voiced by Megan Mullally.  This lady could read out anything and it would sound funny.

As the show has grown, however, so has the cast of characters.  Indeed, their unnamed Long Island town is populated with a host of outlandish, yet strangely realistic, individuals: Marshmallow, the transgender sex worker, Speedo Guy, who skates around in a pink pair of pants and nothing else, Mr Ambrose, the sour librarian (also me now – see The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt) and Jocelyn, the high school girl whose pronunciation is the most fun you can have with your mouth, or ears, or both.  I have to admit that I cannot abide Teddy.  His whole schtick is that he is desperate to be part of the family, but my skin just crawls each time he speaks, even though he is really a sweetheart.

Threaded through each episode is a touch of musicality, often driven by Gene’s attachment to his fart noise-producing keyboard.  Our closing credits are always accompanied by a reprise of whichever original song has been brought to life in the episode and a skit in the restaurant’s grill kitchen.  I’m always sad the episode is over.  But then, I can just watch another one.

Geordie Shore

Before I lived in a Sky household, this show was completely out of reach to me, yet I knew straightaway on its launch in 2011 that I would love it.  A UK version of Jersey Shore that had out-blowjobbed its predecessor by episode one.  These were young people who went out, and I was a young person who went out.  I finally found myself with access to MTV in 2013 and quickly caught up on old series while devouring the new one.  The cast were like better versions of me – in better shape, wearing better clothes, followed by a film crew (while nobody is interested in what I do).  The drama, the relationships, the epic nights out: its scandal was surpassed only by its entertainment factor.

As series 15 airs (despite multiple locations and switch ups to keep things fresh), I think I am slowly falling out of love with Geordie Shore.

It now seems so cyclical and repetitive that its charms are no longer working for me.  Each episode and series are made up of concentric plot circles that go along the following lines:

1.       Everyone gets excited about getting drunk, drinks drinks to get drunk, is drunk, drinks more drinks, is too drunk, loses all inhibitions to the extent that they ruin the night, wakes up the next day with remorse

2.       Everyone gets excited about going out, the girls spend ages doing eye make-up and making sure every part of their body is ready, often sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of mirrors to do this, emerging from a room that is an absolute bombsite looking pneumatically put together for the sole purpose of partying, the boys iron a t shirt and pop on some concealer, everyone has some pre-drinks downstairs in that weird house, everyone cheerses, Gary says get in the two minivans that have come to fetch them, they walk into their VIP area in the club and if you look carefully at the people in the background you can see the pure hatred/envy on their faces, rapidly edited shots show silly dancing and drink downing accompanied by housemate voiceover describing the drinks as ‘flowing’, the tunes as ‘banging’ and the whole night as being ‘great’.  Once things have gone too far, it’s Gary again who rounds them up and back into the minivans (the fact they don’t always vomit on the way home still baffles me – this actually only happens occasionally), before they are filmed jumping out of the minivans and storming into the house, with some of the girls weeing outside.  Of course.  Then the group devours all sorts of takeaway (I have no idea who supplies this to them but a full feast always seems to be waiting), throws some of the takeaway at each other and then starts drifting off to bed, subject to whichever argument has broken out.  Invariably, some attempt sexual intercourse which either fails due to drunkenness, vomiting or arguments, or succeeds, leading to footage of duvet twitching that is about as erotic as someone inserting their index finger into the other hand’s curled finger as part of the international symbol of shagging

3.       Boy meets girl.  Boy wants to sleep with girl.  Boy pursues aggressive policy of being flirty with girl.  Girl convinces self that she quite likes boy.  Boy is clear to girl that this is nothing serious.  Girl convinces self that she is fine just to be casual with boy.  Boy seals deal with girl.  Girl continues to tell herself that she is fine with this being a casual arrangement, as that’s what boy wants, after all.  Boy tashes on with another woman while out with girl.  Girl goes mental and realises she has caught feelings for boy.  Boy continues to mug girl off with cruel emotional manipulation until, three to four series later, girl has stopped hurting and only occasionally cries when boy flirts with other girls in front of her

4.       Cast member has incredible underlying rage issue that bubbles away unnoticed until an accumulation of any of the above triggers a huge outburst that results either in damage to private property (punched taxi window, kicked-in household phonebox door etc) or damage to other cast member

At the heart of the narrative tension for many series was the love story between Gary and Charlotte (see point 3 above).  Along with Tim and Dawn in The Office, I believe this is one of only two accurate portrayals on TV of real-life love.  Somehow meant for each other, their courtship was a series of missed opportunities and stung emotions.  But, when together, their chemistry shone through.  When Charlotte stayed at Gary’s one series and surprised herself with a fart during sex, she then laughed so hard so wet herself.  Throughout, all Gary could do was laugh too.  This is what I think true love is: being charmed by another’s (lack of control over their) bodily functions.

In fact, it’s the adjustments to the cast that have altered the show’s structure.  Geordies come and go, but Gary seems to be there for life (129 episodes and counting).  But because the show is filmed in advance, it feels like it’s not keeping up with the instant nature of celebrity that social media enables in this day and age.  Relationships portrayed in the show are known to be over by the time it airs.  And when cast members are axed due to bad behaviour, there is only rumour as to what they have done, rather than a full explanation which makes an example of them to the impressionable young viewers this is aimed at.  Questions abound: why don’t they have mobiles?  What’s the deal with pretending they are working for a business?  In fact, who is Anna and why on earth would she still take part?  Why aren’t there enough bedrooms?  Do they clean their teeth after eating takeaway before going to bed?  What’s happened to Now magazine, as they seemed to be involved in the early series, didn’t they?

Anyway, there’s something about these Geordie gasbags I can’t get enough of.  I can't wait for the carnage each time we roll their intros in the opening credits, which often cause me the following thoughts:

Sophie: “I could talk the back legs off a donkey.”

I don’t know what’s worse: the fact she has been given this to say, or that she is performing some 70s disco move while doing it.  Either way, I love her, and getting shoved out of the way by her in the VIP section of the Isle of MTV in Malta this year was a highlight of my pointless life.

Chloe: “I’m totally crackers me, like.”

This is a very accurate description of everything about Chloe.

Gary: “I [pause] should have a degree [pause] in pulling women.”

He should be chancellor of the university of pulling women, saddling young people with a lifetime of crippling student debt just for wanting to learn how to tash on.

Holly: “I’m fit, I’m flirty and I’ve got double FFs.”

I’m sure the producers have had nightmares trying to match Holly’s varying hair colours to the opening credits over the years.

James: “The hardest graft I’ve ever done is doing me hair.”

Such a lad thing to say.  James left the show a few seasons back after a very good run.  Like me, he got bored of the repetition and grew up a bit.

Now I’m no longer a young person who goes out, but an older person who barely drinks and can’t stay up past 10pm, my interaction with Geordie Shore’s drunken scenes has altered.  From identifying with them, I moved to a phase of living vicariously through them.  I could bask in the camaraderie offered by the fallout of a big night going out out.  But now I am in a phase where it appals me.  It’s not the behaviour, it’s the repetition.  A new bunch of girls are getting themselves mugged off.  A new bunch of boys are mugging them off.  And I’m wasting an hour a week mugging myself off by continuing to watch it.  And yet, I cannot stop.

The Crown

There was a month when this show was the talk of the office, which always puts me off slightly when it comes to delving into a new boxset.  However, one evening, my housemate’s girlfriend suggested she might like to watch it.  As chief user of the TV, I was very happy to grant this wish so I could alleviate my guilt at being the remote controller dictator (this cropped up when discussing Mr Robot here).  As a dual viewing occasion, it seemed like the perfect show that couples can watch together (something which we simulated for this experience by the simple fact we were one man and one woman and in no other ways a couple).  For her, there’s romance and dresses and jewels and that.  For him, there are important historical facts and jingoistic nostalgia for a bygone empire. But it’s 2017 and we are beyond telling people what they will like about a programme based on their gender, so please delete the last two sentences from your eyes.  I can’t believe I even typed them out.  Maybe they reflect a 2007 version of this country that still persists in certain regions outside of my central London media bubble.

The Crown is ambitious, to say the very least.  Each scene is formed from piles and piles of money.  Shot on location, the producers seem to think nothing of having countless extras and vehicles appear to pad out our sense of place (for example, Kenya), only for them to be in shot for just a few seconds before we drill down into the drama, normally behind some closed doors in the corner somewhere.  In this golden age of TV, Hollywood-level budgets reflect the increased quality of all other elements: concepts, scripts, cast etc.  The viewing experience is therefore sumptuous and we can luxuriate in it as if we were members of the royal family ourselves.

For that matter, The Crown isn’t simply Queen Liz: The Early Years, a blow by blow historical account of the world’s longest reigning monarch (who is also still alive; awkward).  If we remove the fact that it’s loosely based on real events, potentially even imagining that Great Britain is some mythical kingdom (just as we so willingly do with Westeros), then the tightly woven plot of power plays, intrigue and familial tension is enough to grip and never let go as we watch a young woman come to terms with the death of her father and the foisting upon her of an office greater than any individual could possibly be.  Once you add in the fact that these are all household names, you’re on to an absolute winner.  And think how this feels to older generations who remember these events for realsies.  I had to Google to check that some of the Princess Margaret stuff really happened, as it just seemed so implausible that it could have been only decades ago.

Even though these are real people, the cast’s portrayals are so much deeper than mere impersonation.  John Lithgow’s Winston Churchill seems at first to be cantankerous caricature, but as we journey into each layer of this profoundly complex being, he palpably comes to life and elicits inordinate sympathy.  The royals themselves seem enormous fun to play – you can see the knowing sparkles in Claire Foy’s eyes as she puts down Matt Smith’s Prince Philip (who is the best use of Matt Smith’s face I have ever seen).  Just to be able to deliver so many lines in such a plummy accent is surely every actor’s dream.

Needless to say, my housemate’s girlfriend raced through the series, but I saved them for Sunday evenings to fill the Downton Abbey void in my life.  A word of warning is that the episodes vary in length.  This is Netflix, so there is no slot in a commissioner’s schedule to stick to – the content can be as long as it needs to be.  Sometimes it’s over an hour, sometimes it’s under, but either way, The Crown is near perfect telly.

Nighty Night

After so many American boxsets, I really want to focus on a good old piece of BBC comedy.  And in high contrast to the whitened straightened teeth and sunny scenes of Hollywood’s finest comedies and dramas, Nighty Night’s darker-than-dark humour and parade of grotesque imagination is the perfect antidote.  No other show has inspired so many in-jokes or turns of phrase among groups of my friends.  Both series aired between 2004 and 2005, before I hammered the DVDs into obliteration following their home entertainment release.

But why is one obscure BBC sitcom so significant?  There must be many reasons, but I can’t really put my finger on any of them.  Instead, I will tit about with the things about it that I like, because I can do whatever I want.  Firstly, the setting.  Nighty Night is set in the worst place imaginable: a suburban British cul-de-sac.  Statistics I have made up show that over half of all middle-class Brits start their lives in these sorts of soulless wastelands, with the other half aiming to move into these sorts of soulless wastelands at a later point in their life journey.  So close to home was Nighty Night’s setting, that some of the outdoor scenes were recognisably filmed in Dorking, a crap town down the road from my own, Leatherhead, rated the crappest of all towns.  Take that, New York and other such glamorous locations.  Places I have been in have been on telly.

Secondly, the lead character is evil.  It’s normally hard to root for a baddie, but this one has a West Country accent.  Therefore, even the shadiest statements sound cheery and reasonable.  Julia Davis, who also created and wrote the show, plays Jill Tyrell.  You might recognise Julia from the background of loads of different British comedies, which is really bad as I only like it when she is at the front.  She was even in Gavin And Stacey (which I have never watched, purely because everyone used to watch it and that put me off, when normally it makes me want to watching something).  While the rest of us ignore or suppress our selfish side, Jill embraces hers.  So much so that, when new neighbours Cath and Don arrive, she wastes no time in making Cath’s life hell in order to live out her fantasy of seducing Don (or any of their sons; she’s not that picky).  I should point out that Cath has MS and is in a wheelchair.  I should also point out that Jill removes her own husband from the scene by checking him into a hospice for the terminally ill, despite him being fighting fit.  Nothing can deter Jill from her goal.  In fact, Cath’s inability to stop being British and polite is what allows Jill to walk all over her. 

And not just walk all over her, but drive her around until she vomits after hearing she gets travel sick, put on a meaty buffet despite knowing Cath is vegetarian, slam a door in Cath’s face leaving her alone in the garden while pretending someone has called her back in the house, “Pardon?”, have her dog jump all over her after finding out she had a run in with an Alsatian as a girl.  There is simply so much that going through it all here, while hilarious, would not do it any justice.  The main life teaching from this is that if someone lets you take advantage of them, then go for your life.  It’s their own stupid fault.

Finally, the supporting characters are worth their weight in gold.  From Ruth Jones’s asthmatic Linda, to an awkward Angus Deayton as loverat Don himself, not to mention Mark Gatiss as the repulsive Glen.  Jill horrifically manipulates each and every one of them in the cruellest way and in the vilest scenes, but somehow watching it is pure bliss.

Do not watch this if you are easily offended.  Do watch this if you need to cut loose from beautiful people in beautiful situations.  Do watch this is you can laugh at anything and live with the guilt, or better yet, not experience the guilt at all.  Do watch it if you want to be reminded of how risky the BBC used to be with its comedy.  My only warning for those that do watch it is not to do with the offensive content, but the fact that, after the dating agency scene, you will never be able to say “thank you” the same way ever again.