Gavin & Stacey

Regular readers of the blog (of which there are about five) will know that I’m constantly torn between wanting to be ahead of the curve at discovering new boxsets (The Handmaid’s Tale), and shirking popular choices by not watching landmark shows until they are years past their prime (The Wire).  And so it is with great pleasure that I have finally made my way through all three series of Gavin & Stacey eleven years after it first broadcast and eight years since its final episode (though IMDB has a question mark over the possibility of a fourth season).  Every charming minute of this comedy-drama is available on BBC iPlayer, which meant I could binge myself silly via my phone while travelling all around London as part of my urban drone lifestyle (though I did also watch some on flights to and from Dublin).

This did sometimes mean that everything was chopped up into small segments, depending on how long each journey was.  There was also a lot of pausing where the Victoria line was too loud for me to hear properly what was going on through my pathetic earphones.  There’s a stretch between Pimlico and Victoria where the train whines on its tracks, drowning out Nessa’s sardonic harsh truths or Uncle Bryn’s awkward intentions, but luckily the iPlayer app always shifts you back a few seconds whenever you press play after a pause, so please rest assured that I didn’t miss a minute and am therefore fully qualified to prattle on here with my thoughts on this timeless piece of British comedy.

Let’s take it back to series one, episode one, where the premise of the whole thing is set up.  Gavin, at work in Essex, has been talking at length over the phone (an actual landline, everybody) with supplier, Stacey, at work in South Wales.  We join them as they put the final touches to their arrangements finally to meet in person for the first time.  Nerves abound for our long-distance lovers, and, I have to be honest, they abounded for me too.  What if I didn’t like this show?  What if I couldn’t join in with nostalgic praise of this BBC classic?  Would I be chalking up something else on the list of things that don’t live up to their hype, such as Barry’s Bootcamp and espresso martinis?

But like our Gavin and our Stacey, I was in love almost straightaway.  Though it’s not all perfect.  The truism of this couple’s love for each other is a constant throughout the show, but there’s never really much explanation of what they like about each other.  And, given their wholehearted embracing of noughties’ fashion choices (for some reason lads wore cardigans a lot; I know I did), it can be hard for the viewer to deduce this too.  But offering great contrast to this is the complicated tryst between the best friends of the show’s namesakes.  Nessa and Smithy’s repulsion at one another is never far from true affection, especially after any quantity of alcohol.  James Corden and Ruth Jones’s performances perfectly capture the characters’ conflicting emotions with greater subtlety than we see from our central pair, but, as the show’s writers, they have clearly given themselves the opportunities to have the most fun with it.  I’d do the same.

Trumping all this, though, as my favourite relationship, is the adorable marriage of Mick and Pam, Gavin’s mum and dad.  They are the parents everyone wants, loving nothing more than their idolised son’s friends using their home as a hotel and restaurant, welcoming Stacey’s extended family in under any circumstance and generally always up for a drink and some sausage rolls (with vegetarian options for those that want).  Contrasted with the acidic (and very recognisable) spikiness of their dear friends, Dawn and Pete, we can instantly believe in Mick and Pam’s decades of happy marriage.  A new life goal is to be able to saunter in through their French window at the back and to have Pam (played by the delicious Alison Steadman) call out “Hello dullin’” before offering me all manner of refreshments.  I don’t even mind if Dawn and Pete are there, as Dawn is played by a lifetime hero of mine, Julia Davis (whose Nighty Night you should go and watch immediately if you haven’t already).

Now I’ve joined the ranks of those that love this show, I ought to put my finger on what lies behind its charm.  For me, it’s the accuracy of all things British, things we take for granted but that actually define our little British existences: wet pavements, rubbish makes of car, depressing seaside resorts.  Nothing is sexed up to make it more entertaining and so it all feels beautifully plausible, though I wonder if the Shipman and West neighbours in Billericay and Barry mind the fact that every vehicle’s arrival is heralded with horn tooting – the kind of dramatic behaviour that guarantees you tuts and curtain twitches.

The storylines gently tinker along, with the odd cliff hanger, but this doesn’t stop the narrative from dwelling on patches of dialogue that act almost as prolonged comedy sketches.  We’ll spend just as much time delving into why Nessa and Smithy don’t share food (amen) or hearing about Doris’s sexual escapades (complete with geriatric potty mouth, as there’s nothing funnier than an OAP saying twat) as we will exploring Stacey’s insecurities about moving to Essex.  I can’t say if it’s a show about love or Anglo-Welsh relations or growing up or popular culture or all of the above and more.  It doesn’t really matter, as it’s all lovely.  And by the final series, ten million of us were tuning in to bask in that loveliness.

So, yeah, I may have missed out on office chat circa 2009 when everyone wanted to discuss the new series of Gavin & Stacey premiering.  But, in 2018, come at me if you want to discuss this worthy entry into British television’s hall of fame.  I’m only sorry I’m so late.

Wild Wild Country

If you hover over a show for too long on Netflix, the trailer automatically starts playing before you know what you’ve done with your fat fingers.  If it’s something they’ve bought in, you get an odd array of clips with some incongruous music.  However, Netflix’s own shows have lovingly crafted pieces that leave you in no doubt that your life is now not worth living till you’ve seen every series of the programme in question.  This was how I felt about Wild Wild Country after its sudden appearance in the Recently Added menu.  It had conflict, mystery and maybe some nudity – and it really happened.  On it went, along with a million other things, to the watchlist.  Then, someone at work went and described it as unmissable.  Being easily swayed, it got bumped up the list.  I’ve now sat through all six episodes (just over an hour long each) and now I can write down what I thought about it in this silly little blog.  Let’s read on.  Everyone.  Please.

If, like me, you’re a mid-eighties baby, you might not have heard of the Rajneeshees.  This is the name for followers of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, an Indian spiritual leader whose approach to meditation and rolling around naked with pals and strangers garnered him an international set of followers.  They’re easy to spot in the documentary as they only wear clothes in shades of red, though some daringly branch out into purples, pinks and oranges.  His movement carries on to this day with books, communes and meditation retreats, but back in the early eighties, the organisation acquired land in rural Oregon to found, build and run a whole utopian city based on his teachings.  Now, the only bit of Oregon I’ve been to is Portland, a very liberal city with posters for vegan breastfeeding in its hipster grocery stores, but parts of the state are more conservative and rural.  And they don’t seem to like red clothes.  Thus Wild Wild Country opens by taking us on the journey of how Rajneesh’s movement came to be and how the neighbours responded when thousands of it followers rocked up in smalltown USA.

From then on, we weave our way through a whiplash-inducing storyline of the conflict between the government and the Rajneeshees.  Should they be allowed to overrun the nearby town of Antelope in order to dominate local elections?  Is it ok to build a city in the middle of disused land if you don’t have all the planning permissions?  What do you expect retired conservatives to think about a group of people who have an open-minded (and maybe open-legged) policy to marriage?  The neighbourly love soon runs out, with both sides hunkering down to outstay the other.  But this is very much the beauty of the documentary: you’ll change sides over and over again.  Like Making A Murderer, you’ll never be certain who’s wrong and who’s right.  Part of this comes down to not knowing which side is worse than the other, especially as things get more and more curious with weapons hoarding and alleged food poisoning attacks.  The narrative deliberately creates sympathy with one faction before taking it away and placing it with the other.

This is because the key contributors to the piece are those that lived through it most closely.  Events are told through the eyes of devoted Rajneeshees who themselves rose to the ranks of the organisation’s leadership.  Ma Anand Sheela today comes across like the cheeky grandma who tells it like it is at family events, but in her youth she was a bouffanted hardcase.  As Bhagwan’s personal secretary, she defended her people with devotion.  Despite admiring her fluency in English, you can really enjoy her use of idioms where she skips out the odd the or a, masking the real danger she posed with a bit of cuteness.  It’s through Jane Stork (Ma Shanti Bhadra) and Philip Toelkes (Swami Prem Niren) that you really get a palpable sense of the movement’s power over the individual.  Perhaps these core players’ experiences could have been complemented with perspectives from more incidental contemporaries.  Reams of stock footage show the thousands of followers – who were they and what are they doing now?  In particular, what of the street people who were bussed in from US cities to boost numbers?

Either way, there is a lot of footage of them.  These people seemed to film everything that the news cameras weren’t already covering.  Imagine how annoying their Instagram accounts would be today!  I was incredulous that so much footage could exist of something I’ve never heard of, (but then I’ve never watched Sky Sports and I’m told there’s literally non-stop team ball action on there), and I suspect that some of it has been made to look older to fit in with the sinister tone the documentary sets throughout (almost everything has a distortion line near the top), but plenty of it is a bit creepy in its own right, and not just because of the ill-advised eighties haircuts.

Most creepily portrayed is Bhagwan himself.  He only has himself to blame: he almost never blinks, he matches an array of tinsel-like woolly hats with Star Trek-esque tunics and he insists on sitting on this reclining throne with his legs crossed, making him look like someone’s dad watching daytime telly.  His sleepy and heavily accented speech (his Ts are drawn out more than you’d expect) emphasises the effect.  Either way, it’s clear he had a profound effect on his followers’ lives.  As someone who was born and raised heathen, I’ve never understood the need for organised religion.  If you can’t work out right and wrong for yourself, then there’s really no hope.  Deep.

But, after all, these people obviously needed something in their lives that he provided.  A lot of them really did have bad haircuts, so we can easily imagine the suffering.  Therefore, I urge you, take the journey with this show.  While the narrative avoids some specifics, such as exact dates and times, and numbers of followers and inhabitants, it does artfully cover the movement’s rise to be a focus for international news.  Rather than one individual crisis and crescendo, there are multiple steps in this horrid saga.  When it’s all over, you’ll feel both vindication and sympathy.  Sometimes real life can create the strangest boxset of all.

The Alienist

Right, I’m boring myself now with these tedious anecdotes about how I come to watch each of these shows.  It’s getting tedious, isn’t it?  Let’s just say the genesis of this one was some panicked mutual viewing when we had to find something we could both agree on and this seemed like it would do.  Someone somewhere had apparently told someone else that The Alienist was supposed to be quite good.  With episode one done, the perfectionist in me then had to pursue the remaining nine alone.

And now here we are, ready to see what snide remarks I can make about this piece of content, then.

I could begin by explaining the name, but each instalment opens with a solemn reminder that an alienist is a nineteenth century term for a psychiatrist/psychologist (not actually sure on the difference) sort of person.  There is nothing in this to do with extra-terrestrials; let’s just get that clear.  So who is this alienist doing all of the alien-ing?  Dr Laszlo Kreizler is our main character, played by Daniel Brühl (whose performance in Good Bye, Lenin! I’ve watched over and over in a former life as a student of German).  He’s a New York maverick, rebelling against many a public institution as he explores the human mind.  This somehow also means he does crime solving too, so when mutilated bodies start to appear, he leaps to centre stage.

But these aren’t just bodies.  They are the bodies of young boys.  And these aren’t just young boys, they are underage prostitutes.  And these aren’t just underage prostitutes, these are cross-dressing sex workers.  I’ll allow you a moment to recover from the shock on shock on shock while I ask: what is our obsession with killing prostitutes?  Every best-selling book and ratings-winning drama on normal telly seems to be about solving the crime of who offed all these local ladies of the night.  The Alienist has the added twists of being set in 1896 and purveying a special flavour of prostitute: anatomically male, young and gender-fluid.  This element compounds the already dark undertones of the drama’s gothic qualities, but it can also lead to quizzical looks from your housemates if they come into the room and the scene on the screen at that exact moment is underage boys in dresses seducing a grown man on a bed.  How do you answer those questions?

Everything is very period, though, so you’ve no chance of forgetting the historical setting.  Each scene is punctuated with a horse and carriage drawing up somewhere.  There are even chases exclusively on equine transport, which manage to feel a bit awkward.  The screen is constantly filled with hundreds of extras, painstakingly costumed and carefully doing things from the past, like walking along or pretending to have dialogue.  Not a single exchange of dialogue takes place without someone walking past a window in a hat, or a street urchin lurching into view.  You’ll ask yourself where all these extras come from.  I imagine TNT Studios is awash in hundreds of people ready to bring to life any tableau.  Some of these background artists look like they’ve wandered in from The Crown or Peaky Blinders.

But while the backdrop to The Alienist is exquisite, what’s happening just by the camera at the front there is sometimes a bit painful.  The main characters are all thoroughly humourless, only becoming more earnest in their humourlessness when something dramatic happens.  This lack of light to the constant shade can feel overbearing.  Add to that the fact that they’ve all felt the need to talk in strange accents, aspirating the wh in what and why (so they sound like Stewie Griffin saying cool whip in Family Guy) and slowly placing emphasis on everything.  Dakota Fanning, as Sara Howard, seems especially keen on maintaining this almost hypnotic approach to each line.  It’s best just to look at her hats, as she has one for every occasion: looking for bodies, chasing baddies, struggling to make buddies.  Her cruel treatment by the male employees of the NYPD feels under-explored as she blazes a trail for women who want to solve why people keep murdering prostitutes.  At least she is more interesting than Kreizler.

So, is this good content, or is it as boring as the introductory paragraph to one of my blogposts?  Well, it’s very well done.  Every effort has been made to impress on screen.  But, as with Netflix’s Altered Carbon, they appear to have tried to impress things on too much screen.  I know that sentence doesn’t even work, but I’m leaving it in anyway.  The story feels like it could be over in maybe three episodes, like a BBC or ITV drama special.  By drawing things out into this longer season, the pace is slowed, unnecessary detail is added in, diluting the effect of crucial detail, and the plot is lost among lots of padding, just like the characters are lost under layers of their own costumes.  If you love the gothic and the macabre, then this is a fine addition to that genre, but for it to break out as the next Netflix star, The Alienist could do with a bit more charm.  Maybe aliens really will land in series two.

Love Island

So, here we go; this is the big one.  No pressure, but there probably isn’t a bigger show out there right now.  I’ve got to get this right.  It’s an island, yeah, and there’s love on it.  Any questions?  I’m glad I started blogging about TV as now I get to put all sorts of pressure on myself to do justice to my favourite shows.  Love Island is so significant to 16-34s (TV buying language for young people) that, for the first time, I’m a bit worried that Just One More Episode might fall short of the mark.  Every other post has been sublime, as the very consistent read counts show (detect the sarcasm), so I’ve given myself a stiff talking to and on we shall crack.

In marketing (the broadest term for the industry where I’ve spent ten years making up the answers to questions), the year is divided up into Christmas and non-Christmas.  This is because December 25^th is the biggest cultural event in our calendar (in a world where cultural means commercial).  But now there is a second coming, catching up with the birth of baby Jesus at an alarming rate: Love Island.  Series four has just exploded across our summer screens like a bottle of sun cream where you didn’t realise so much was going to come out and now you’ve got an embarrassing surplus of white liquid on you and you’re trying to rub it in before anyone notices the mess you’ve made but everyone’s already seen and you’re trying but failing to style it out.  Clients started asking about hooking up with Love Island as soon as 2018 began.  Where people go, brands will follow.  So, join me, as we journey through the series that have led us to this moment.  Then we will investigate the emotions you experience in an average episode.  Then we will all just be, like, bonding over our love of Love Island.

2005 and 2006

Everyone has an embarrassing progenitor.  I have two (love ya, mum and dad).  And so does Love Island.  There were two series of the old format, which cast only celebrities in the contest to form couples in the sun or face deportation.  For some reason, I didn’t watch any of it.  I think I was living abroad.  It doesn’t matter, most of the contestants have since appeared on Celebrity Big Brother (still the most-read post on this entire blog, surprisingly), so I don’t think I missed out on anything.  The format then lay fallow over at ITV Studios for the best part of a decade, until…

2015

ITV2, one of the cheekiest channels in the UK, filled its summer schedule with a reboot of fondly remembered Love Island.  Gone were the washed-up celebs.  In strolled normal, real people.  You know, impossibly attractive characters that, if you came across them in real life, you’d stop and stare, just like people do at you and me, all the time.  Around half a million of us tuned into each of the 29 episodes, watching Caroline Flack look slightly embarrassed to be sorting through 23 different islanders until the winners finally emerged (with one ending up on Ex On The Beach, so winning can’t be everything then).  Everything just worked.  It was reality TV, but with beautiful people.  The tension was generated by the simple concept: get in a couple or get out.  Its Majorcan setting was like an ersatz-holiday.  The islanders felt like your friends, only better looking.  The casting was so careful that, instead of drunkenly duvet twitching like in Geordie Shore, there was a charm and classiness to the awkward dating and cracking on (before it led to duvet twitching).  I felt like I was the only viewer, as nobody talked about it.  My housemates at the time wouldn’t even let me watch it, so I caught up a day behind on Sky Go, hoping someone at Sky HQ would remember to upload the previous episode, which they didn’t always.

2016

Summer came back, and 26 islanders jetted back and forth to the same villa in Majorca.  I remember being surprised about how many young people smoke (though this is banned for 2018), but it must be stressful holding your tummy in for days on end.  The villa left nowhere to hide, with a sun-drenched terrace, outdoor kitchen (which we all want) and a very large pool.  Sadly, no ginger contestants could take part due to the risk of sun burning in the shade-free grounds.  This didn’t stop an additional million viewers per episode tuning in, with extra weeks tagged on before the finale.  Again, the casting was genius, with the bikini and swimming short-clad specimens achieving just as much in the field of personality as they had achieved in the field of making your body look banging for Instagram.  Your enjoyment of their relationships was only slightly dampened by how awful you are as a human mess in comparison.  Series two also finely tuned the regular tasks and twists to stress-test all the coupling up in order to surface the drama we had all gathered round to view.  There was even a same-sex pairing, a small baby step in Love Island’s journey to any diversity at all.  A handful of my office chums and I sniffed each other out to discuss each evening’s goings-on.  It was now our secret.  Apart from the one time at the gym when I ended up in a conversation with Henry Cavill and someone asked if he had seen Love Island.  He hadn’t.

2017

This is when we implemented the policy of don’t even come into the office if you haven’t watched last night’s Love Island yet.  Some people called it agile working and said it was a response to us running out of seats, but I know it was all down to the Flack.  Viewing figures had now almost doubled, with 2.5m of us tuning in.  You had to have an opinion on every argument.  You had to be able to quote every expression the show was contributing to the English language (“100% my type on paper”).  Luckily, you didn’t have to look like the islanders, as there were free donuts in the office and we needed some sugar to numb the pain of our worthless lives.  The show came into its own with a new villa (allegedly the old villa’s neighbours had had enough of the constant noise and mugging off) and this was even supplemented with a secret second villa.  I know now that Love Island’s production crew shack up in a sweaty cabin in between, planning when to drop bombs in order to set off fireworks among the budding romances and bromances.  Through work, I was lucky enough to attend a Q&A with the show’s producers.  I won’t go as far as to call this a career highlight, but nothing else I have achieved even matters.  I even won a Love Island water bottle with my name on, because I knew the answer to a trivia question was Tyne-Lexy.  I’ll assume you’re impressed.  Either way, the awkward stalking continued when I had a wee next to Theo.  Most of the 2017 islanders were at the ITV Gala that winter.  Trying to find my team at the hotel bar we had arranged to meet in, I accidentally found myself in a room where everyone was ridiculously good looking.  I was a steaming troll somewhere I didn’t belong.  I then realised this was the holding room for the Love Island cast and scurried away to find the normos.

2018

I left work early on Monday to make sure no transport issues could scupper my chances of getting home in time for the 9pm kick off of series four.  I was home by 5, so that was fine, but better to be safe than sorry.  It felt like Christmas Eve.  Whatsapp discussion groups crackled with hilarious observations.  The islanders completed their first pairing up.  The drama began.  We’re still in the early stage where the cast is too excited about being on the show to calm down properly and stand a chance of forming a relationship.  But, patience, we must allow this fine wine to mature.  Should be ok by Friday.

So there’s my blow-by-blow account of the series so far.  But what’s it like to watch an episode?  Let’s find out.  I’ve picked out some of the most common sentiments you’ll come across in your viewing.

Why would the sponsor have such bad idents?

Nobody knows why.  Superdrug have hung on the property since series two, after Match.com picked up the first.  The 2016 series remains a best-in-class about how to annoy viewers with irritating ident casting and then how to compound that by having them on a frequency of about a million.

The voiceover seems to hate everyone.  What is he doing?

He’s just enjoying himself.  Iain Stirling is the main instrument Love Island has in preventing everything from being taken too seriously.  You can tell it’s all from an affectionate place, and that he isn’t actually really fed up that series two’s Zara couldn’t stop mentioning that she’s Miss Great Britain or that Marcel from series three used to be in the Blazin’ Squad, innit, but don’t tell anyone.  It’s all a bit of fun, especially when some of the contestants are too young to remember Blazin’ Squad.

I should go to the gym more.

You probably should.  Islanders must do little else once they find out they’re on the show, with most of them carrying on with the calisthenics and curls at the in-villa gym.  Yet you’re still on your sofa just watching them.

They all seem like such good pals.

This is one of the best parts of the show.  The friendships.  Best known of these was the de facto civil partnership of Kem and Chris from last year.  Matching outfits, inside jokes, rapping together: this is what pals do nowadays.  Love Island lets you feel like you’re part of the friendship to such an extent that, when the series is over, you suddenly feel like your social life has contracted.  The reality is that it really has, as you’ve been sacking off real-life social engagements in order to watch it.

I’m cynical about whether they really are in love.

Well yes, you root for the ones that seem to belong together, or just for Camilla from last year to stop crying, but it’s worth bearing in mind that, for most of the day, they’ve got nothing else to do but work on their relationships.  The show has to construct situations where romance is accelerated so you can reach the arguing stage of being a couple as quickly as possible.  Arguing equals entertainment and we must be satisfied.

Why are people using hashtags in their texts?

I don’t know.

I want to go on holiday.

Yes, but you won’t look as good as an islander when you get there, so stay in your living room and view the show under cover of darkness.

I don’t think I could sleep in one big bedroom with all my friends, especially with people doing bits.

Another reason why you’re not on the show, then, and can just enjoy the experience vicariously through your screen.  Sleeping in that room is a small price to pay for the chance to front your own Boohoo.com collection once you’re out the house.

I like the look of the new ones they are going to add in.

Somehow, we still haven’t used up all the good-looking people in the UK, and there are yet more that can be brought into the villa to stir things up.  The show carefully trails these additions with gratuitous body shots so the perv in you can plan your viewing more precisely.

So there we have it, a bumper post, but this show is everything.  For an hour each evening (apart from Saturdays when you get fobbed off with a best of from the week before and, accordingly, nobody watches) you can be young, gorgeous, single and on holiday with all your new pals.  You’ll forget that tomorrow the alarm will go off and you’ll find yourself at your day job, but at least you’ll have Love Island to talk about. All together now: “I’ve got a text!”

Posts you will also like:

Geordie Shore
Bromans
Shipwrecked
Survival Of The Fittest
Keeping Up With The Kardashians