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.