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…