This Country

Now that Just One More Episode is approaching 4,000 reads, it’s time to start acting like the major media platform that this has become.  Like all media, it needs to tap into current trends, desperately trying to second-guess what people want rather than staying true to any real values.  I’ve therefore decided people want to know about This Country, as this unassuming sitcom has come from nowhere to be the talk of the office.  Anyone who’s anyone is declaring for all and sundry to hear which episode they are up to, before entering into best line riff offs in order to prove their viewership.  And there was me, silently hoping nobody would ask me if I had ever seen it and force me to reveal I had never even heard of the show.  How had I missed this one?  I’m supposed to be a guiding light in the field of boxset navigation, and there was me, wondering why everyone was doing West Country accents and chuckling so much.

But how would I catch up quickly enough?  There are two series (with a third due next year) and I’d already spread myself very thinly with shows on Netflix and Amazon.  I spend weekends at friends’ weddings and weekdays avoiding grinding poverty by doing emails and that in a grown-up office.  When would I fit in another show?  Luckily, it’s a BBC production.  This means it’s on iPlayer.  iPlayer is an app on my phone.  I spend a lot of time on buses.  I normally read books on buses.  But I had run out of library books.  And due to the emails and that in the grown-up office, I’ve not snuck out to Camden Library at lunchtime (don’t tell them I live in Lambeth) to restock.  So I got organised and downloaded the first few episodes to watch at 6.15am on board my beloved 137 while it stops at Sacred Heart House to deposit old people who like to be out and about early.

This Country is like a cross between The Office and Nighty Night.  Regular readers of this blog will know that I love both, so it’s no surprise that I’m going to recommend This Country with some hearty emphasis.  Like The Office, it’s a mockumentary.  Like Nighty Night, the regional accents of the Cotswolds and beyond provide a lot of the comedy.  The documentary side of things is set up and contrived as a study into deprivation among the young in rural communities.  Statistics about issues in the countryside (such as loneliness, unemployment, lack of opportunities) flash up on screen accompanied by nothing more than birds tweeting.  The episode then sets about showing how this affects the mock element of the equation, rooted in the characters of the Mucklowe cousins.

First, there’s Kurtan Mucklowe.  His style goals seem to have been generated by The Office’s Gareth Keenan if the hair is anything to go by, but any similarities in his personality fade away as we get deeper into his character.  His maintenance of a close friendship with cousin Kerry is something Gareth would never have managed.  Kerry Mucklowe is exactly the type of girl you have seen while driving through regional towns, sauntering along a pavement in an unflattering football top and baggy trousers.  They come as a pair as there is nothing else to do in their village but hang out with each other, whether this is in a bus shelter, in the woods, Kerry’s mum’s kitchen or in Kerry’s brilliantly observed bedroom (nailing the tragedy of an adult inhabiting their childhood room).  Their dynamic adjusts throughout the series, with the role of the rational one switching between the two, though typically each is always as bad as the other.

Around them is a village cast with a right bunch of countryside characters.  There’s the well-meaning vicar whose patience they test.  There’s Mandy, a local hard-woman who’s not to be messed with.  There’s their pal Slugs who they actively try to avoid.  Kerry’s parents take the biscuit for the most gruesome creations.  Her dad avoids her around the village, prioritising his new family or, more accurately, himself, but this doesn’t stop Kerry dropping everything to play on his flight simulator with him.  Her mum never seems to leave her bedroom upstairs (“Kerry!”, “What?”), but this doesn’t stop her shouting down the stairs to join in any conversation she fancies.

There’s a bittersweetness to Kerry and Kurt.  We root for them, but they’re terrible people.  It’s not their fault, but they could make a bit more effort to get on.  They’ve got nothing going on for themselves, but somehow they’re charming and you love following them around with the camera crew.  They’re at their best when revealing embarrassing secrets about each other to the never-seen documentary makers, and below is a list of my top ten obscure references that revel in the show’s Britishness (or British experience of imported American culture) and the fact the characters of This Country actually live in the same country as us:

1. The Queen’s Nose
2. Computers for Schools vouchers
3. The leftover Bounties in a box of Celebrations
4. Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen
5. Emmerdale continuity errors
6. Dr Barnados
7. Throwing plums at someone’s house
8. Uncle Fester
9. Papa Roach
10. GiffGaff

I’d always thought my sister and I are pretty funny when we get together, but we’ve seemingly got nothing on Daisy May and Charlie Cooper, the sibling creators, writers and stars of This Country.  Not only have they brought us something deliciously entertaining and uniquely British, but they have crafted it to deliver just the right amount of acerbic punch to reflect the hopelessness of being a young person in rural Britain today.  Issues-based comedy?  Surely it’ll save this country.

The Office

“I couldn’t watch it because my dad wanted to watch The Office.”  It was 2002.  I remember it exactly.  I had asked a friend whether they had seen something on TV, something that was essential viewing in those days (though I can’t remember at all what it was now).  We were on our way to Scouts, because that was a perfectly acceptable thing to be doing at the age of 17 in Surrey.  “Well”, I thought to myself, “what a parent-y and adult-y thing to want to watch.  I’ll never be like that.”

Sixteen years later, I’m writing a blogpost about why The Office is one of the most significant works of comedy I have ever seen.  I may not be a parent, but I’m definitely an adult.  Last week I asked someone to let me finish a cup of tea before I would do anything else.  I think about coffee a lot of the time.  I wake naturally just after 5am.  These are all things I never thought would happen to me.  The other thing I failed to consider becoming a part of my everyday life, but which has in fact defined it for the last eleven years, is office work.  So let’s begin this discourse by acknowledging the irony.  Not only am I unable to remember the other show I loved so much when I was younger, while scoffing at grown-ups watching boring programmes about their places of work, but I have self-fulfilled the prophecy: my adult life has been spent as an office drone.

I eventually first watched The Office while still in education.  Too many friends were quoting it to me for me to be able to bear missing out.  It portrayed an alien world, mostly because full-time working life is so much worse than school.  I remember afternoons dragging till the bell went at 3.30pm, but now I’m rooted to a desk till 5.30pm at the earliest.  School terms were punctuated by lengthy holidays, but time off as an adult comes in the form of just a handful of weeks.  Unless punished with detention, school enforced breaks and full lunch hours.  I now shove food in my face while trying to stay on top of emails (occasionally carving out time to write this stupid blog).  So now, that alien world is my life, but it’s actually made each subsequent re-watching of The Office all the more artful in how it captures what we are sadly destined to become, as our schoolchild dreams slowly die one by one.

And this is exactly what happens to two of the main characters in the show.  Dawn has given up on becoming an illustrator and Tim has forgotten that he was going to do something else besides sell paper.  The Office celebrates so much that is familiar about British workplaces: the cheap shirts tucked badly into a pair of itchy smart trousers, being at your desk while it’s dark outside (half the year, roughly), not knowing where the line lies between banter and offence.  But then it champions the human spirit in spite of the fate that befalls millions of us (and I recognise that there are worse fates than earning your crust in an industrial park.  You could be murdered, for example).  Over the two series and the Christmas special, the chemistry between Tim and Dawn builds with brutal realism, carving out potentially the most real-life love story I have ever seen (as I mentioned when talking about Geordie Shore).  Their final moment at the office party to the sounds of Alison Moyet’s Only You (a song associated with enduring my dad’s poor music taste while he taxied me around) is a vital moment of hope that takes place between photocopiers and computer monitors.

Let’s move on from this emotional depth with some rape jokes.  Never really appropriate, I suppose, but this reference, from the series one episode, Training, still makes me smile.  Not because it trivialises an unforgiveable crime, but because of all the circumstances that lead to it.  But this is exactly the legacy of The Office.  Get the tone wrong at work (quoting a joke from the office that uses rape as a comedic device) and you enter into gaff territory, becoming your very own David Brent.  I freely admit to Brenting out all over the show with my teams in the office.  I do this so much, I have to own the situation by irreverently claiming to be a “chilled-out entertainer” while hoping nobody notices.  I never got the goatee beard, but the topknot that lasted two years came pretty close.  Oh well.

What else can I add to all the appreciation out there already for The Office?  Not much.  But I do want to dissect the mockumentary style some more, as this really enabled the banality of the show’s subject matter to be cast in a new light.  Characters were given pieces to camera, enabling them to dig even deeper holes.  They could also make eyes and faces at the audience at any point, joining us in on the jokes all the more closely, or making us aware of the artificiality of the situation, as embodied by the handyman that just stops in his tracks at the sight of the cameras.  Best of all are the interstitial shots that chop up each episode.  We see paper sheets going through the copier feed.  We see workers staring into space at their desks.  We see a whole load of nothing happening.

But somehow, it’s this nothingness that makes The Office all the more cherishable.  Its very scarcity, at least in the UK version, is its strength, as we will always want more than we will ever be given.  The perfect volume of things happen, because office life is characterised by its monotony.  The show’s style has seen its influence spread far and wide, with shows like Parks & Recreation.  It changed the game for what a comedy expects from an intelligent audience and, sixteen years later, I’m still talking about it.

Parks & Recreation

The stages of boxset viewing are often likened to a relationship, normally an unsuccessful one.  I’ve tried to avoid that analogy throughout this blog, as it’s not really something I’ve ever experienced.  Then I watched Parks & Recreation and now I feel like a jilted lover.  But this isn’t because I let myself get into it and spent hours of my life watching it only for the quality to fall away or for the storylines to frustrate me so that I had to abandon it, never to get back the time I spent sitting through it.  This is how a lot of fans currently feel about The Walking Dead (when they should really just be hitting up Fear The Walking Dead, whose third series I’ve just binged the life out of and thoroughly fanboyed), but I guarantee that, if you are of sound mind and sound constitution, you will not feel this way about Parks & Recreation.

However, you will experience a profound emotional response as you work your way through the seven series that exist of what could be the cutest show ever to be available to stream on Amazon Prime.  The first series feels a bit like the cusp of something great, but is not great in and of itself.  In fact, I tested out the first episode a long time ago and couldn’t help feeling like someone had ripped off The Office: a mockumentary set in a workplace interspersed with pieces to camera.  I moved on with my life, convinced it wasn’t for me, and probably started watching some utter trash, such as another series of Geordie Shore.  I look back on those times with regret.  I could have been getting stuck into the shenanigans of local government employees in Pawnee, Indiana.  It was wasted time.  Geordie Shore’s cast was downgraded with the addition of Love Island rejects and I had to give it up forever (a bit like the unsuccessful relationship I was trying to make an allusion to all the way back in the introduction; you probably don’t remember it now but I’m trying to create some semblance of structure here).

But then I found myself offering it a second chance.  I needed a sub-30-minute show on the go, something to put in front of my face while I’m quickly putting food inside my face.  Too often, I was embarking on a meal with a spot of entertainment and finding myself still sat there an hour later.  The first series gave way to the second, and some cast members that weren’t really working out gave their places away to some better ones, and suddenly I was in love.

It all begins with a giant hole in the ground.  Someone falls in, their girlfriend complains to the parks and recreation department of the city council, the team spring into action to turn the hole into a park and thus ensues the storyline for the whole first series.  A whole series about a hole.  By series two, the whole hole has been wholly forgotten, to a certain extent.  Instead, each episode is at liberty to jump about poking fun at small-town America, large-town America, all forms of government and people in general.  But the poking is gentle, with no effing and jeffing (except when it’s bleeped out for hilarity) and just enough sexual innuendo to provide a bit of blue for the dads.  While a series will crescendo in an event or crisis, it’s individual (and ridiculous) occasions that mark each episode, announced in the first few seconds with someone announcing “in Pawnee, every year, we celebrate…”

The reason the plotline isn’t as crucial as it might be with other boxsets?  The characters.  Pawnee, and its department of parks and recreation, is populated by individuals who develop to be so dense and rich in their personalities, that their average working day, and all its farcical undertakings, draws you into a fascinatingly and hilariously entertaining world.  I’ll acknowledge they seem like caricatures at first, but let them mature, I say, and you will reap the rewards.  You’ll want to be their friends.  I began to miss them when several days passed without me delving into a new episode.  I began to question my career choices and started to wonder if I wanted to work with them.  I began to love them.  And when you love, you get hurt.  But more on that later.

So who are these people?  I shall tell you.  But be warned, this is just a long series of me gushing about each one, adding little to no value along the way.  Read on!

Leslie Knope

Knope is the part of you that seeps out when you have zero chill.  She adores her job, adores working for her community despite her community being full of cretins, and she adores her colleagues, who she can only view as lifelong friends.  Ask for her help and she’ll stay up all night producing a ring binder of everything she could possibly do for you, no matter the subject.  While she loves parks, she also hates libraries.  While she wants her town to be healthier, she loves waffles covered in whipped cream.  While she loves making occasions out of any obscure anniversary in any relationship in order to shower friends with deeply personal gifts, she doesn’t expect anything in return.  We should all be more Knope, though I actually like libraries.

Ron Swanson

The name says it all – an uncomplicated man.  Deeply set in his ways as a breakfast food-loving carnivore, Swanson’s journey over the series is among the most touching.  His view that the government should stay out of his life is at odds with his job in the, er, government, but it’s this conflict that lands him in so many absurd situations.  It’s his unorthodox relationship with ideological opposite Knope that proves that anyone can get along with anyone.  He also has the best and most surprising girlish giggle when things tickle him in just the right way.

Tom Haverford

Statistically, this character has caused me the most laughs out loud.  His approach to dating is straight out of a hip hop video.  He’s a grown man that whines like a child at any injury.  He is a committed consumer who places huge value in the quality of material possessions.  But he’s at his best when smiling at the camera because something has just gone his way, and that’s when I crease up at his delightful little face.

April Ludgate

Beginning her career as the department intern, Ludgate takes teen angst into adult years with a sardonic comment for every situation.  When it’s too hard to adult, Ludgate is the one that calls it out.

Andy Dwyer

Now I’m torn; I’ve also LOLled at this manchild probably just as often as I’ve chuckled my socks off at Tom Haverford.  Chris Pratt might now be a galaxy-guarding dinosaur-whisperer, but his comedic performance is on the money – timing, expressions, energy.  General face, in fact.

Jerry Gergich

Enter the office punching bag.  Jerry is actually the nicest guy around, but his accident-prone antics earn him the wrath of the others.  The play at his expense sometimes does seem to victimise him, but rest assured that later series treat him with the affection he deserves.  He also helps bring an element of fart humour into proceedings when things get too highbrow (which is actually never).  Sometimes, there is nothing funnier than watching an overweight man fall over while passing wind.  Apart from maybe Andy Dwyer.

Donna Meagle

Barely allowed to speak in early series, this character never ceases to surprise.  A throwaway comment about Ginuwine being her cousin eventually culminates in a recurring guest role for him.  This has to be commended.  She’s an enigma who doesn’t care what her colleagues think about her or what she does.  Personal favourite moment: when she bursts into a meeting room to join in with Ann Perkins trying to force April Ludgate to sing Time After Time with her.

Ann Perkins

Ann Perkins begins life as the lady who lives next to the hole, but soon Knope creates a touching best friendship out of her.  She’s often the least comedic of the characters, but her uncoolness in certain situations make her more believable, as well as her ability to bear the intensity that a Knope best friendship (obsession) entails.

Ben Wyatt

I just like it whenever Haverford bullies him for being a geek.  Also, Cones of Dunshire.

Chris Traeger

Rob Lowe as an insecure, health and fitness obsessed, incredibly energetic boss that wants everyone to like him?  Chris Traeger!

Well, that was a lot to get through and I kind of gave up by the end, but yeah, I love these guys.  I was going to make a comment about them each being a facet of my personality.  And now I just have.  They are all me.  And they are all you.  Watch them.

But wait, there’s more.  The rest of Pawnee is filled (a bit like Springfield or Quahog) with minor characters that keep coming back for more.  Swanson’s ex-wife Tammy, local douche Jean-Ralphio (who RnB sings anything contentious he has to say) and his sister Mona-Lisa, local media stars Perd Hapley and Joan Callamezzo, Lil Sebastian: just some of my favourites.  I could go into paragraphs and paragraphs explaining why they are funny and why I therefore love them.

Finally, there’s also Treat Yourself Day.  It’s a day of consumer excess when Tom and Donna hit the mall together and buy whatever they want, including fine leather goods.  Fine.  Leather.  Goods.

To recap: I have a lot of love for this show.  So why did it hurt me?  Because I finished it.  With each series I completed, I got a bit closer to the final end (the last episode went out in 2015).  Once I hit series seven, I had to ration them carefully.  Then I saw series seven was shorter and different to the others.  And then I couldn’t cope.  I had been shown what happens to the characters in the end.  There was music evoking memories from the other series (Bye Bye Lil Sebastian).  I felt I had lived through something great and that I would never have it again.  Was it worth it?  Yes.  Will I do it again?  Yes.  But that’s just how boxsets go sometimes.

Westworld

Sometimes you want a TV show to make you ponder the very essence of what it means to be a human.  And sometimes you just want something with plenty of sex and violence.  Maybe these two things aren’t that separate after all, as Westworld manages to deliver both, and all in a cheeky cowboy hat.  Let’s be honest, sex and violence are, after all, key parts of the human experience.  According to Westworld, they are definitely key parts of the cowboy experience too.

Billed, as with all big new shows, as something that would fill the Game Of Thrones hole in our lives, I let the first series of Westworld pass me by.  It was everywhere on my Sky EPG, posters followed me on my commute and trailers constantly rolled on every screen I went near.  It all made me lose interest, especially as nobody in the office seemed to be talking about it.  Could this big-budget western be a major dud?  But then, looking for a new show to start, and giving careful consideration to what should be covered on Just One More Episode, I consulted IMDB’s top rated TV shows: a list of 250 programmes that viewers have rewarded with up to ten stars.  Once I filtered out all the really old stuff and nature documentaries, Westworld (currently at #36) was the highest ranked entity I thought I could bear to watch.

My final barrier to overcome was that Westworld was also the name of a hip hop clothing shop at university and one particular friend used to dress in their attire from head to toe after watching You Got Served.  We all experiment with style when we’re young, but I should emphasise there is no age limit to enjoying a film produced as a streetdance vehicle for B2K.

From the cowboy chat so far, it should be clear that Westworld is a western, of sorts.  Not the kind of western made in the fifties that they repeat on TCM and your dad still watches during the daytime even though it’s sunny outside.  The western world of Westworld is actually a theme park.  Rather than queuing up at Thorpe Park to lose your lunch on a roller coaster though, the visitors to Westworld inhabit a near-future USA where technology has advanced enough to create artificial beings tasked with bringing history to life.  The wealthy book passage to this resurrected era, dressed for the period (a bit like those weird photo booths that actually are a part of normal theme parks), arriving by steam train at a frontier town.  Have they hired impoverished actors to flesh out the illusion?  No; these are, essentially, robots.

Right then, so it’s robots and cowboys – together at last.  Of all the historic periods you could create using animatronics, I’m still not sure I would go for cowboys.  What about all the courtly intrigue of Tudor England, or the licentious lifestyles of the Romans?  That might just be me.  Either way, the cowboy theme allows the paying visitors to shoot guns and whore about (literally) with little concern for the consequences.  Only the hosts can be killed, as they are programmed not to hurt humans.  Their purpose of existence is solely to fulfil their storylines in order to entertain.  But, such is their sophistication as pieces of tech, the ultimate tension comes from the slowly revealed truth that the hardware is starting to get emotional.  Cue a glacially paced and artfully crafted build up through series one to the inevitable pay off of the lunatics taking over the asylum.

With sinister grandpa Anthony Hopkins as the park’s founder and the hosts’ co-inventor, Dr Robert Ford, it’s all a bit Jurassic Park.  But that’s a huge part of the fun.  Let’s just say the future doesn’t look great for theme parks.  However, it does look good for A-list actors, as the cast is a roll call of household names, or at least names where you recognise the faces and can get distracted agonising over trying to remember where you saw them last.  They’re all enjoying themselves immensely, from James Marsden providing the cheekbones and jawline of the handsome cowboy hero, to Thandie Newton having the time of her life running the whorehouse as a tart with not just a heart, but a very complicated backstory.

And that’s the beauty of it.  The hosts play out storylines where they die, but then they are picked up by staff, tidied up, wiped and rebooted and sent out to play again in an endless cycle of suffering.  What if the memories start to come back?  Saying more isn’t possible without reeling off spoilers, so let’s instead focus on some questions that I always ask myself while watching.

Why do they have to be naked when they are getting serviced?

When a host is in for repair, they sit in glass rooms in the nude, while human technicians re-programme them using fancy tablets.  Not only is it unrealistic that the tech hooks up every time (the wifi never disconnects temperamentally) and nobody suggests turning it off and then turning it on again, but you’d think someone could afford the poor hosts something for their modesty.  Instead, their exposure further emphasises their abuse by the humans that run them.  Luckily, Newton’s character Maeve does finally get her own back in the second series, almost recognising the show’s surplus of wrinkly willies with one more wrinkly willy.

What’s up with the way the hosts die?

They’re robots, but they seem to have circulatory systems.  When shot with guns, blood spurts forth.  It’s not enough that they mimic humans in every way, they have this further facet of realism to provide.  Is the hardware designed so that injuries are categorised into fatal and non-fatal so the tech knows exactly when to shut down in order to maintain the storyline?  It’s kind of philosophical really.  Nevertheless, they’re back in the park the next day to do it all again.  They also never run out of battery, whereas my iPhone needs two charges a day just to keep up with Whatsapp.

Where is this place?

For the concept to be believed, we need to accept that somewhere there is a massive expanse of land that can be given over to leisure.  Our view of the outside world is, at first, limited, so we are as blinkered as the hosts to life beyond Westworld.  By the second season, characters suddenly start referring to an island, which curiously has never come up before, so I am wondering if they are now writing themselves out of a hole.

All of these niggles are just part and parcel of creating something so ambitious.  The scope of the show is as enormous as the park needs to be.  The first series takes it time letting you into Westworld and then works through twists that shatter your understanding.  Don’t get impatient, as repetition is used to show the farcical nature of the hosts’ lives.  I do admit that I have fallen asleep in almost every single episode, but don’t let that put you off.  It’s something that I have been watching late at night when I invariably start to reason that I can watch the last part with my eyes closed and then wake up to find it’s all over.  I’ve therefore had to re-watch some sequences a few times.  It’s better when you’re awake, or you won’t understand what’s going on.  The one time I didn’t fall asleep, I was ironing shirts at the same time as watching, so that kept me up luckily.

The complete first series is available on Sky Boxsets, while the second season is in the middle of premiering as I type.  This means I have gone from being able to hit up an episode each evening of series one to having to wait for my weekly instalment like some historical artefact.  Maybe this is how cowboys had to view boxsets before on-demand platforms existed.  I hope I remember what’s going on, but this enforced rationing should ensure more time to contemplate Westworld’s inner philosophical debate.  After all, what does define human consciousness?  I shall give it a good think while my eyes are glued mindlessly to the screen, trying to stay awake, watching naked people shoot each other on the telly.