Gossip Girl

A lot of people have been asking me recently how I choose what to write about next.  And by a lot of people, I actually mean nobody – I’m just using an Instagram trope here.  Friends tend to look away sheepishly if I ever ask them directly about reading my blog.  If I wander over to a conversation about boxsets in the office, silence suddenly descends as people fear I’ll try and promote my writing and opinions.  Sure, everyone wants to tell me what to review, so now I’ve got a list of shows I’ll never get through, but then people only read if they like the programme I’m rinsing.  But no, each one of these is a gem, so please read them all.  If you don’t like the show, there’s enough rambling about me as a person to counter that.  And this week is no different.

Currently bogged down in some big old boxsets, I’m raiding the archives again.  Two things have brought Gossip Girl to the top of the list.  One is the return of colder weather to London after the inhumanity of July’s heatwave.  As a sweaty adult, I couldn’t be happier.  Winter is coming, and everyone knows back to school is the best time of year.  You can get a new pencil case, some fresh pens, and you’re another year up in school, which increases teenage coolness no end.  However, I’m thirty-three and I work in an office.  Rather than returning from the summer hols reinvented, I’ve not been off since April (though that was for a trip to Japan, so, you know…) and we don’t have pencil cases at work due to the clear desk policy and the replacement of pen and paper by laptops.  But no, it’s colder and I love it.  And if there was ever a show for giving you winter coat inspiration, just take a look at any episode of Gossip Girl.  Every character, even those on supposedly limited incomes, has an endless supply of on-fleek winterwear.  This might give you some pointers on the quality of Gossip Girl’s drama, the fact that coats are the first thing that comes to mind when I think about the show.

The second reason is that I recently passed the ten-year mark in the job I so freely berate in these posts.  In June 2008, at my final interview, I talked about Gossip Girl in answer to an important question.  In those days, the department I was entering mostly only did TV sponsorships.  My two interviewers were asking me which I had seen on telly myself.  Let’s set the scene.  I had cycled across a boiling London from my hellish old job, so I was sweaty (recurring theme) and dishevelled, with uncontrollable helmet hair.  I also had an eye infection, thanks to the effect of general London dirt on my Home Counties eyes.  So my contact lenses had been abandoned for the NHS specs I only wear behind closed doors.  On the thirteenth floor of a Holborn office block, the sun was shining directly in my face, optimising the sweat-fest conditions so much so that I had to rub the perspiration repeatedly from my clammy forehead.  Don’t worry, I totally got the job obviously, and my new colleagues later told me they got a Harry Potter vibe from me due to all the conditions of my appearance I have just described.

So what TV sponsorship should they realistically expect a twenty-three-year-old lad to talk about?  Maybe some sort of football or other ball sport?  No, I was happy to make a banging first impression by talking about Gossip Girl.  If you’re going to enjoy TV aimed at teenage girls, you might as well get that out in the open as a first step.  In those days, a combination of graduate poverty and historic media technology meant that TV could only be consumed as per the TV guide.  ITV2 seemed only to schedule Gossip Girl at 10.35pm every third Thursday as long as the moon was blue and pigs were flying.  Didn’t stop me though.  I never missed an episode, complete with Guerlain sponsorship idents for a sickly-sweet perfume aimed at teenage girls (like me) with olfactory challenges (not like me).  Cue me bossing the question with epic insights into why the brand and the programme were the perfect convergent fit.  Cue my future employers hiring me because I reminded them of Harry Potter.

After 750 words, then, I should probably tell you what the show is about.  The premise focuses on an exclusive Manhattan school for wealthy kids.  Enter via bridge or tunnel Dan Humphrey, a scholarship-endowed chap with curious side-burns, played by an actor named after a brand of tennis ball (Penn Badgley).  His crush on Serena van der Woodsen (a charmingly ingenue Blake Lively, but with a chequered past when it suited the plot) generated the tension of the first series, if I remember rightly, but luckily this was all stretched out for six series of 121 episodes.  Little bit of Mean Girls, little bit of Cruel Intentions, little bit of anything that’s ever been set in New York: this was Gossip Girl.

Well, that was the whole point: which of the main characters was actually Gossip Girl?  I never finished watching the show, so I don’t really know myself.  It doesn’t matter as I can’t be sure I ever understood what this concept was supposed to be anyway.  These were the days before smartphones and 4G.  Using the internet away from your ethernet cable was limited to noticing your ancient mobile had accidentally switched on WAP and imagining an extortionate bill on your Orange tariff.  This didn’t stop Blair Waldorf or Chuck Bass in their conniving ways, using this nebulous platform to drop dirt on friends and frenemies alike, setting us viewers up for a roller coaster of crossing, double crossing and back crossing until seeing the end credits came as a welcome release.  Each instalment would culminate in some sort of catered event: a birthday party, some welcome drinks, basically anything.  In the run up, boyfriends and girlfriends would need to betray each other in the best interests of each other (I think), resulting in a climactic unearthing of the truth on Gossip Girl, heralded by simultaneous mobile bleeping as the blast came through and the action kicked off.  I say action, but the boys were restricted to conveying emotion through smoulder only, and the girls similarly limited to pouting, so the whole thing resulted in the kind of face porn that makes you disappointed to leave the comfort of your own home and see an ugly person.  Or there might have been one in the actual house with you, which was all the more shocking due to its proximity to Nate Archibald or Vanessa Abrams.

In 2012, Gossip Girl bid us XOXO for the last time, inspiring a Beyoncé classic, but leaving a glamorous teen drama-shaped hole in all of our viewing lives.  I’m none the wiser about who ended up with whom, but the Upper East Side must be awash with genetically blessed babies by now.  A reboot wouldn’t know what to do with itself.  Gossip Girl would have to go multi-platform, with accounts on SnapChat, Tinder, Insta and probably LinkedIn.  I just hope Dorota is on more than minimum wage and that Eric van der Woodsen no longer has a centre parting.  So, to all those a lot of people who have been asking me what’s getting covered next, just chill out and keep reading yeah?  At the rate this thing is growing, you’ll be able to claim early adopter status by 2020.

The Inbetweeners

Growing up a Brit can sometimes be a bit shit, but it’s also hilarious as a result.  Until The Inbetweeners came along in 2008, no show had captured this accurately.  We British teens were forced to try and translate our lives into American high schools, as that’s all there was available at the time.  The people on screen were too attractive.  They didn’t wear uniforms.  The climate looked reliably sunny.  They were played by people in their thirties.  They didn’t talk like us and so on and so forth.  I should point out this didn’t stop me watching this stuff, but then The Inbetweeners showed up and highlighted the stark contrast between US TV and UK real life: with all its ugly people, school uniforms, drizzle, awkward young people and British banter.  Sure, we only managed three series of six 30-minute episodes (plus two successful films) but that’s really what passes for a season in the UK (rather than 22 hours of mind-boggling plots that cost you the will to live).

This programme still has a special place in all of our hearts.  Not a week goes by in my adult life when someone is described as a wanker for liking something.  They might say they like hummus and get called a hummus wanker, or tell everyone what a great weekend they had in Ibiza and get called an Ibiza wanker.  Nor is an opportunity ever missed to tell someone they are being feisty in the famous structure of “Feisty one, you are.”  It applies to all adjectives – try it next time you cuss someone important at work: “Boring one, you are.”  Or “Tedious one, you are.”  The Inbetweeners’ cultural impact was huge because it represented a culture that nobody had managed to bring to screen before: the age of being in between.

At seventeen, you can just about drive.  You’re ready for adult life, but you’re probably at the same school you’ve been at since the age of eleven, when puberty might just have been a rumour that went around the changing rooms after football.  Now, adolescence is a driving force making you want to do all of the adult things (apart from work nine to five, pay taxes, talk about mortgages and get excited about mattress discussions with colleagues).  But one enormous pillar of adult life is denied to you: the legal right to buy alcohol.  Thus, you are trapped in between adulthood and childhood (and not in that Noel Clarke film, Kidulthood).  And you’re not only trapped there, you’re trapped in Britain.

The Inbetweeners revelled in such ridiculous Britishness that it almost dared itself not to get syndicated abroad (despite over 20 other countries broadcasting this glorious nonsense).  It was based in a sixth form college, after all.  Its humour came from the differences between private schools and state schools.  There was work experience.  There were Home Counties boys venturing into London.  There was detailed knowledge of British law around the sale of alcohol (including mead) to minors.  There was the college fashion show.  There was the trip to a potential university campus.  There was even the motherchuffing Duke of Edinburgh Award.  I hope that Americans went “wait, what?” just as much as we do when we hear words like valedictorian and sophomore.

Britishest of all was the humour of teenage boys.  Nobody seemed to have realised that the way we/they talk to each other is disgusting.  I’ve left the pronoun undetermined as I still do this with most of my male friends.  And most of the female ones.  And colleagues.  Especially colleagues, actually.  Anything could be laughed about.  Any insult could be brushed off.  It was only once things had really gone too far that you could finally see you had crossed the line, though you couldn’t in fact see the line as it was about hundred miles behind you.  Let’s look at some of the most disgusting things that were said and revel in the fact that, no matter what we claim, we’re still amused by potty mouths and toilet humour.  My dad, for example, still believes there is nothing funnier than a fart.  Any passing wind in any form of media (and, sadly, real life) will guarantee a LOL from my father.  Why resist it?  Life’s too hard not to laugh at nonsense:

Jay’s dead hand

Jay hears that if you cut off the blood to your own hand by sitting on it, you can trick yourself into thinking a third party’s hand is tugging you off when you are, in fact, masturbating.  However, it’s not ideal if you need to slam your laptop shut when your family barge in and porn moans are being broadcast at full volume into your room…

Any time Jay talks about female physiology

Up to your nuts in guts just conjures such powerful imagery.

Simon talking dirty

Everything he did was beyond cringe, mostly as it was visually punctuated by the most dated gelled quiff ever seen on TV, but no dirty talk for me has ever surpassed “I’m going to fuck your fucking fanny off, you twat.”

Simon’s London shoes

We’ve all been turned away from a terrible nightclub for wearing trainers, but how many of us have paid a tramp to swap shoes with us?  Simon lost £20 but gained a pair of urine-drenched shoes that got him in, but ensured no girl would come near him.  It reminded me of a time a friend was sick in my trainer overnight on a camping trip and I had to travel back to London from rural Wales the next day with only a plastic bag between my sock and chunks of his half-digested burger and chips.  Yes, I really was an inbetweener.  Incidentally, it was a toss-up between this and Simon’s testicle hanging out at the fashion show.

Will’s first exam

He poos his pants.  Tee hee.

It’s this comedy gold that saw the viewership of The Inbetweeners grow from around 400,000 in the first series to a peak of 3.72m for the third – not bad for e4’s first UK commission.  Clearly, word of mouth spread amongst “fwends” that this wasn’t to be missed.  But the gross-outs were complemented by more subtle observations, such as Simon’s hatred for his parents, even though they were totally chilled about everything he wanted to do, or Jay’s genuinely hurt feelings each time his dad bullied him.  Even now, I cannot resist a re-run if I’m ever left with ten spare minutes before bed time.  I always forget how much I can’t abide the headmaster, Mr Gilbert, but then I’m always happy to be reminded of the music of Kate Nash, whose song Foundations seems to score almost every scene transition in series one.

Ah, sixth form.  Don’t take me back.

Arrested Development

Right, say this name: Bob Loblaw.

Ok, now say it again, but in an American accent: Bob Loblaw.

Now say it a few times at speed in the same accent.  Congratulations, you’re just sitting there saying “blah blah blah” over and over.

But, isn’t that clever?  I certainly thought it was back at university when we were flicking through the TV channels in a friend’s room.  It must have been around 2006, back in the days when digital TV was still new and people were excited to have a handful of extra channels on offer.  The word digibox was seen as futuristic and progressive, whereas it was obscure and redundant within years.  In those days, this was at odds with the actual age of my friend’s room, which dated back to the fourteenth century.  My final-year room was just next door, both in a part of our college called the Buttery, though its relation to any sort of dairy produce seemed to have vanished with the evenness of its floors and ceilings many years prior.  Her open-door policy gave the rest of us free reign to use her illegal microwave (which college authorities demanded be moved to a kitchen and we happily ignored for the whole year) and to park ourselves on the cheap old sofa for a bit of telly.  Coming from a household that revolved around TV screens, university had seen me go cold turkey on television.  Mostly.

I’ve already mentioned the time we gathered for the last-ever episode of Friends, and then there were of course the kindred spirits I found to watch Big Brother with (which I haven’t actually covered yet so let’s just hyperlink Celebrity Big Brother again).  By final year, though, I felt more adult and sophisticated and better able to handle my time, surviving with greater ease an average week of two thousand words of essay and four translations every which way between English and French and English and German.  Despite the need to be studying at all times, we found the odd moment after dinner in hall to sit through thirty minutes of Hollyoaks, despite being unable to identify with any character that wasn’t studying at all times.  Then, one evening, scrolling the channels, we stumbled across an episode of Arrested Development on BBC2.

The cameras were shaky. The characters were numerous.  The dialogue was almost faster than we could think.  The jokes poured in one after the other, playing on words, playing on visuals, playing on anything.  And, in the midst of it, this odd family were discussing a lawyer called Bob Loblaw, mentioning the name so speedily that everything simply descended into blah blah blah.  I was deeply impressed.  This felt like clever stuff.  Finally, a sitcom for smart people!

Years later, I managed to make my way through the first three series, potentially renting the DVDs off Lovefilm.  I don’t need to recap the story for anyone, as the opening credits explain everything, but nothing else will make sense if I don’t, so, I actually do.  It’s all about the Bluth family: a wealthy bunch of Californians up to no good in the property market.  The development that is being arrested, I assume, is that of their son Michael, as he is the only sensible hard-working one, so they all rely on him while carrying on with terrible behaviour.  He just wants to get his son, George Michael (I know), away from their clutches, and this is thwarted repeatedly.  You’ve got Ron Howard narrating, as there’s a lot to keep up with, and each episode is beautifully structured around a climactic misunderstanding or assumption whose complexity makes you raise your eyebrows at the final reveal.  On the way, you’ll chuckle at the plays on words as the characters’ foibles develop.  I began to assume that the writers literally thought of something ridiculous and then worked back from it to contrive its occurrence.  It’s all about setting up: reams of dialogue go into letting one character say something that is at once outrageous, yet perfectly, plausibly innocent in regard to the plot, such as the famous Tobias line: “I blue/blew myself.”

Earning a cult status, the show naturally got the shit cancelled out of it.  About a decade later, Netflix resuscitated it.  All the actors were too busy and important to make time for filming, so a fourth series was teased out in a way that didn’t require them all to be together.  Then everybody said that was silly and the scenes were remixed into a better version, which is the one that I watched.  While the first three series roll along joyfully, I found this fourth a poor echo.  It’s probably me, at capacity for whimsical homonym abuse, or maybe the main characters, worn from over usage (apart from Buster, who has a million miles left), just had nowhere interesting left to go.  But finishing that season, and the fifth, has recently been a right old chore, just so I could write this post safe in the knowledge I had consumed the full body of work in order to type snarky shots about it.  I would begin each episode determined to pay attention and keep up.  But, without fail, I would find myself desperately scrolling anything on my phone rather than following the action on the TV.  The tone just felt constantly the same.  It’s entirely my loss, but it also indicates something wasn’t right with the show.

In fact, it was the peripheral characters that provided the most entertainment, so let’s run through some top picks:

Lucille 2

Liza Minnelli with vertigo.  It’s been great to have the chance to look at her face and hear her voice, because she’s such a bundle of enthusiastic energy.  Her attempts to seduce any of the Bluth boys have rendered me scared of apartment building corridors.

Steve Holt

Steve Holt!

Kitty Sanchez

A secretary who aggressively lifts up her own shirt as a form of attack.  Deeply disturbing.

Ann Veal

George Michael’s girlfriend who is so boring that everyone forgets her all the time.

Tony Wonder

Ben Stiller as a crap magician (still better than Gob, though I maintain that all magicians are crap), always on hand in a puff of smoke asking if someone said wonder, which nobody did.

So yeah, I’m being kind of meh about one of the cleverest and most critically acclaimed pieces of TV out there, on a tiny blog that only my Facebook pals can find.  I don’t think I mean to be.  Try this show out.  Come for the quotable one-liners.  Look great at dinner parties.  Freak yourself out that Michael Cera at once doesn’t age and does age, and you’ll be terribly distracted trying to work out which.  But that’s the point – don’t watch this show with any distractions.  It needs your full attention, because it’s smarter than you and it’s smarter than me.  Miss a moment and the rest of the plot falls apart as if a tiny screw is loose.  And then, it just feels like you’re watching a load of blah blah blah…

Footballers’ Wives

I have no idea why I’m doing a show from 2002, but it seems to have been a classic year for vintage TV.  In addition, the Desperate Housewives post whipped up a storm of reads, so I’ve decided that wives is a popular theme, and this show is about wives as well (clue’s in the title).  Then, I’m amplifying that with the power of nostalgia, after the Buffy The Vampire Slayer post drew more attention than I was prepared for: turns out we like to relive our memories of shows from when we were younger and less jaded, safely in the EU and certain of an economically prosperous future.

The next uninteresting detail I will talk you through at length is the orthography of the show’s name itself.  After some soul searching, I’ve decided to go with Footballers’ Wives, as you’ll see from the header on the post.  This is significant because at any one time I am devoting 20% of my life’s energy to grammatical pedantry.  Even at the age of 17, when this week’s programme was first broadcast, my teenage self was appalled at the lack of plural possessive apostrophe concluding the opening credits: Footballers Wives.  You’re only young once, so I’m glad I spent that time obsessing about punctuation.  Otherwise, how on earth are you supposed to know that the wives belong to the footballers?  It just looks like a strange, unconnected list.  But then, matters were made worse once I reminded myself how things really appeared: footballers wive$.  I won’t unpick why this is an abomination in my eyes (and if you don’t know why, then get out now please), but it does serve handily to illustrate the level of class on offer in this show.  In short, there was none.  Let’s crack on, then.

But first, it’s 2018, so let’s dispel the myth that wives are the property of their husbands (with or without the appropriate apostrophe to indicate this possession).  Yes, in this day and age, people can’t wait to rush up the aisle in order to spend thousands of pounds on flowers that nobody will remember and to secure a sofa buddy for future series of The Crown, but vows tend to be more about an equal partnership rather than referring to any duty of obedience.  But this was the beauty of Footballers’ Wives – the ladies wore the trousers.  Everything about the menfolk was incidental.  There were merely possessions to trade.  Even their footballing prowess was limited to a couple of lines in the script – almost no actual match footage ever appealed.  For someone with better things to do than sit through any sort of ballsport (such as watching reruns of dinnerladies) this only added to the programme’s appeal.

Let’s look at Tanya Turner, the ur-WAG.  Throughout the five series (yes, five!) she ended up in all manner of relationships, working through around half of the Earls Park FC first team, a proportion of the support staff and anyone else who just happened to be passing for that matter.  This wasn’t a search for love, though, but a quest to keep herself in acrylic nails and extraordinarily tacky outfit choices with no expense spared.  Once ex-captain Jason was dispatched, she fought for a place in new signing Conrad Gates’ bed (despite his straightened hair), dallied with sports agent/chairwoman Hazel Bailey and even found the time to get herself astride Frank Laslett, the overweight, over-age chairman of the club, specifically with the intention of shagging him to death.  Imagine talking about that storyline in the office the next day.  But the combination of cocaine, booze and vigorous love making did the job – our Tanya got what she wanted out of each chap (or chapette, in the case of Hazel) and then moved on to the next one.  Played with bags of aplomb by Zöe Lucker (whom I don’t seem to spot on TV these days, but ought to be a national treasure), Tanya was a popular creation, rooted for by an audience that was fully entertained by her outrageous behaviour.

In fact, the show suffered whenever she was absent.  IMDB tells me that Gillian Taylforth (Cathy from Eastenders, everyone) appeared in the most episodes, playing Jackie Pascoe, the overbearing pushy mother.  Yet, my most memorable character is Nurse Dunkley.  The name in itself is a comic moniker for someone you’re never going to take seriously.  But her arc was as sinister as they come: caring for Frank Laslett during his coma (obviously) she went from an apparently incidental background artist to front-of-camera abuser, pursuing a physical relationship with the unconscious man in her care, while whispering sweet nothings to him in her simpleton-sounding northern accent.  Her spectacles practically steaming up with lust is an image that still haunts me to this day.

But this was what we all tuned in for: far-fetched melodrama.  But you can watch that in most soap operas, so the attraction is better qualified as: far-fetched melodrama involving wealthy, mostly attractive people in glamorous settings.  Which is loads better.  Babies were swapped.  Boob implants caught fire.  Murders were attempted and completed.  Sex videos were leaked.  Joan Collins popped in.  Peter Stringfellow popped in.  This was the level of Footballers’ Wives.  As a result, it was wickedly fun.  I’m not ashamed to admit I also really enjoyed the foul language and frequent nudity – seeing someone being told to f*** off when their boobs are peaking over the duvet is oddly gratifying when you’re a teenager with punctuation-related anxiety.

Sadly, the show ended in 2006; it may well have been shagged to death itself to be honest.  I don’t even know if there’s any way to watch it these days, shy of trawling car boots for the old DVDs and then squinting at the appalling image quality with your HD-accustomed eyeballs, before realising things look appalling due to the noughties fashions the show so willingly embraced.  In fact, I don’t even recommend re-watching; times have changed, and the old show’s website still exists here, reminding you how crude the old internet was.  Have a click around and think of times past.  This is the trash that brought millions to ITV’s peak schedule.  At least now we have Love Island, eh?