Big Brother

Back in 2000, I still lived with my parents (as I was only 15) and I was therefore subject to their media choices.  As a printer, my dad had access to a lot of newspapers.  In fact, Honeywood men had printed newspapers for generations, until I came along and expediated the demise of print by booking advertising money into digital formats.  Every day, the Daily Express and the Daily Telegraph would appear in the household.  As a precocious adolescent, I would flick through both, seeing what was going on in the world instead of sniffing glue in the woods on Bookham Common.  Their alarmist headlines and woe-betide-our-glorious-nation editorials were taking their toll on my ability to enjoy life, especially as everything was apparently perfect in the fifties.  One particularly salacious event, covered in both titles with similarly outraged prudishness, was the launch of Big Brother on our UK shores.  What was this kinky Dutch format doing on British households’ tellies?  It was political correctness gone mad.  We didn’t have it in the fifties and we were fine then!  Let’s blame Labour etc.  I didn’t really see the appeal in the show.  I could watch real people by sitting on a bench in Leatherhead’s Swan Centre (once voted Britain’s worst High Street) but that didn’t offer entertainment to anyone.

Days later, both the Express and the Telegraph’s indignance was compounded.  Not only had these normal people had the audacity to go on TV looking for attention, not only had people exercised their freedom of choice by deciding to watch the footage, but these amoral housemates had deemed it acceptable to strip themselves naked, cover themselves in modelling clay, and imprint their naked body parts on the Big Brother house’s interior, fixtures and fittings.  I immediately knew that I had to watch it.

If you don’t recognise the format, then get out, but let’s just run through for people that might claim to have no idea because they’re too cool.  In short, it’s competitive flatmating.  A bunch of people are confined to one property, severed from the outside world.  Each week, they must complete tasks to determine their food budget, while all other things are shared: bedroom, kitchen, toilet, er, hot tub.  The population is then whittled down through nominating, where each housemate secretly names two other contestants they want to evict, giving full and valid reasons for that nomination (she’s missing her kids doesn’t count anymore).  The public then votes to eliminate one of the nominated housemates, until a batch of fifteen or so becomes a handful of characters, popular both in and out of the show.  Then we all vote for the winner and they get a cash prize.  Everyone else has just wasted weeks of their life when they could have been out and about.  Big Brother is the sinister, unseen force that governs everything in the house, unelected and unanswerable (like Tezza May).  Cameras and mics capture everything, which is then edited overnight into a one-hour show each evening on the previous day’s highlights, with viewers guided through by a narrator with a strong North-East accent.  There’s a Diary Room where contestants can talk directly into a camera while sitting on a novelty chair.  The Geordie narration makes Diary Room sound more like Dairy Room, so I like to imagine a milkmaid and maybe some cow teats in a buttery churning situation.  With the odd tweak, the core format has remained unchanged.  Because it’s great.

Eighteen years, and hundreds, literally hundreds, of hours later, Big Brother is still very much part of my life.  Regular readers of Just One More Episode will recall I’ve already extolled the virtues of Celebrity Big Brother (still, oddly, my most read post, so please ensure you’ve read that before carrying on thanks).  But there’s even more to say about Big Brother.  Firstly, people are quick to dismiss the whole concept of trash TV (even though there’s nothing wrong with a bit of trash: see Love Island and Geordie Shore posts).  Sure, the entertainment factor comes from people compromising their dignity in public (Kinga and the wine bottle in series 6) but this is because it reflects reality.  Earlier iterations emphasised more heavily that Big Brother was a social experiment: what would happen if a load of strangers were isolated and forced to live together?  Let’s film it and find out.  The show is unique in bringing together walks of British life that might never interact for a sustained period, unless you count one being vilified in a right-wing newspaper and the other one reading about it and casting judgment.  To this end, who wins and the task success rate become secondary to the raw human stories that play out.  I grant you that the earlier weeks are mired in competitive attention seeking, but I would like to posit four key stages to any cycle:

Phase 1: Oh my god oh my god oh my god I’m in Big Brother

After a time in hiding, the housemates burst in one by one, cheered or booed by a baying crowd on the way in, dressed up for maximum impact.  Overwhelmed to be on telly, everyone is too excitable to develop meaningful relationships, mostly because they are shrieking.  And jumping up and down till their boobs nearly tumble out of their tacky outfits.  Falseness reigns as first impressions count, yet nobody can contain their excitement when the garden opens or the beds are chosen or literally anything happens.  This is painful viewing.

Phase 2: In the battle of the personalities, volume is king

Settling into a routine, the biggest characters dominate airtime with all their showing off.  They jump in the hot tub with their clothes on.  They make noise in the bedroom at night.  They have arguments because they’re real and they can’t help being them and you better just deal with it because that’s who they are.  They get nominated.  They get evicted.  We forget them.

Phase 3: I’ve forgotten my real life and these relationships are all I know

The quieter characters emerge from under the radar.  By this point, their level of comfort and familiarity with each other engenders a calmer household.  They have private jokes that you want to join in on.  Their opinions have been challenged. 

Phase 4: I’ve been stuck here so long with people I hate that I really don’t know how I feel about them anymore

That person they hated stops being an issue because they literally can’t escape them, so they’ve had to find a way of living with them.  In normal life, you can avoid people who grind your gears.  In Big Brother, you share a bedroom with them.  Everyone starts having paranoid dreams about winning and describes it as the best thing that’s ever happened to them, inadvertently cussing the spouse they married or the children whose dates of birth pale into insignificance to being on TV.

Secondly, people disparage the casting, claiming it’s just freaks that want to be famous despite having no talent (I’m still listing things people don’t like about the show by the way).  It doesn’t matter who goes in and how annoying they are, the process eventually breaks everyone down into their raw components.  Most public figures have no discernible talent, and our culture revolves around instant reward for no work, so this criticism is pointless and unfair.

Thirdly, people claim it’s a tired old format.  How can something be sustained for so many years, especially when adaptations of its premise have come and gone in between.  Firstly, I’d just like to point out that Two And A Half Men ran for 262 episodes, and that Coronation Street has been going for 58 years, so viewers seem to love nothing more than tired old formats that weren’t even good in the first place.

Let’s go through each series in turn.  No, really:

Series 1, 2000

Oh, how unprepared we were.  There was outrage when Nasty Nick cheated, but many forget the constant lies he told, such as claiming to be in the Territorial Army while falling off some monkey bars with the athleticism of undercooked chicken.  Sexual activity peaked with Mel kissing two different boys on the lips and being treated like some Jezebel as a result.  Caggy’s raucous laugh caused irritation, yet it was her mate Nichola who released a single on exit.  I can still picture her little shaved head bobbing about on T4 while she sang The Game, her enthusiasm matched only by Vernon Kay’s embarrassment.  I was gutted for runner-up Anna, the former nun from Ireland.  Her wittier sense of humour lost out to the public’s sympathy for Craig, the first of many bodybuilders in the show, who had pledged the prize fund to charity.  He was frequently nominated by housemates, calling a meeting in an effort to understand their gripes, though none could bring themselves to say it was due to him being Scouse.  For the final week, only three housemates knocked about the gaff – gloriously tedious.

Series 2, 2001

I remember the housemates arriving in groups, dragging their wheelie cases behind them, but told not to speak till they got inside.  One of them, Elizabeth, looked so out of place just then and throughout, as if she had got off the wrong train and ended up trapped for the summer in a reality TV show.  Being terribly British, she made the most of it and threw herself into proceedings.  Obvious winner, Brian, went on to have a career presenting late-night TV gambling, but few recall his show bestie, Narinder.  Even fewer, including Brian and Narinder themselves, recall housemate Penny who, while first to be evicted, imagined she had formed some sort of trio with the other two, grabbing them both at the final as Brian’s fireworks went off and forcibly sharing in the glory.  Nice one, Penny.

Series 3, 2002

Considered by many a fine vintage, this series gave us many household names, including Jade Goody (RIP) and Kate Lawler, not to mention the rich house, poor house format shake up.  It was banging, giving the British public everything they needed in an excessively long TV show.  From many favourite moments, I am going for dour old Lynne from Scotland, who was up for eviction in week one and booted out by her housemates’ own decision, as they chose to save our Jade.  Lynne’s response to their concerned fussing as she packed her bags was an epic: “Please can you just f*ck off out my space?”

Series 4, 2003

After the previous year’s explosive arguments, a new crop of wannabes vowed to be nice, uncontroversial and non-dramatic.  Thus, Big Brother Bore came into existence, which not even an exchange with Big Brother Africa could make interesting.  Nothing happened.  One of the highlights was Steph, who came fourth, vacuuming the Diary Room.  Chinless Scottish virgin, Cameron, clinched the title, clad in a top from Next that friends inadvertently bought me for a birthday.  It took me years to forgive them.

Series 5, 2004

I can’t hold back chuckles just at the thought of this series.  Just, everything.  It blew away Big Brother Bore.  I have friends who still quote Marco’s exclamation of, “Big Brother, you’re so tristed [sic].”  There was the infamous Fight Night, there was Michelle’s beckoning of Stuart, her chicken from Team Handsome, under the table for some toe curling, there was Nadia’s response to no cigarettes and so much more.  A lasting image is winner, Nadia, clutching house enemy and runner up, Jason, as her victory was announced, a watershed moment in transgender acceptance trumping angry steroid men.

Series 6, 2005

Can you get pregnant in a jacuzzi?  Probably.  This was the harsh reality facing Makosi after a steamy session with series champion, Anthony.  This lad was indeed popular, with the unrequited love for him of best mate, Craig, created agonising drama.  But good triumphed over evil, with Saskia and Maxwell rejected by the public as house bullies, especially when a divide formed in the house along racial lines.  Hilarity, though, came in many forms, whether it was Eugene speaking in Morse Code, Lesley claiming she and her nan had the biggest boobs in Huddersfield, or the 900 Ofcom complaints received that year.

Series 7, 2006

People claim I came back from my year abroad early in order to watch this, but they can’t prove anything.  And it was worth it.  Housemates came and went throughout the series, with a bumper crop taking up residence.  I’ll resort to predictability and cite Nikki as my lasting, memorable individual.  I still sometimes look up her antics on YouTube to cheer myself up at work, as her tantrums edited into a montage multiplies their absurdity.  You’ll never tell someone which bed’s yours in the same way again: “That’s MY bed.”

Series 8, 2007

For a bit of a change, the original housemates in this series were all women.  It didn’t really help, as the arguments soon exploded everywhere.  Queen of the arguments was Charley, who spat such vitriol in confrontation, despite being a South-East London it girl (which isn’t a thing).  I want to give a special mention to Carole, twenty years older than most of her housemates, but getting everything out of the experience with the best of them.  First evictee, Shabnam, was later seen on reception in my old office, so the show really does lead to bigger and better things.

Series 9, 2008

Early days were marked with ejections for behaviour, one for threatening language and one for spitting, but things soon picked up with a lively household.  Cheerful throughout was Kathreya, a lady from Thailand who was obsessed with cookies.  Sadly, the nicest (and dullest) housemate, Rachel, won, proving normal people were still watching the show, whereas today’s fans go with the contestant who’s had the biggest journey.  Fun fact: I once spotted Rex and Mohamed at the Notting Hill Carnival.

Series 10, 2009

Channel 4’s tenth go on Big Brother was arguably the most savage affair.  Contestants arrived without housemate status and had to battle it out to attain this, getting this off to a desperate start.  Two of them were willing to change their names by deed poll to achieve this, with Oxford grad Freddie becoming (and suiting) Halfwit, and glamour model Sophie becoming Dogface.  Over time, I came to love the name Dogface, and so did Sophie.  She just owned it and didn’t care.  And then she won anyway.

Series 11, 2010

The last series on Channel 4 was won by West Country girl next door, Josie, who went on to lose all the weight and get permanently tanned, but who had bags of personality earning her the title.  I also remember a chap in a baseball cap called John James.  Beyond that, reading the Wikipedia page isn’t bringing much back for me, despite the huge population of housemates taking part.  Josie went on to walk from Ultimate Big Brother, a kind of greatest hits format that happened straight after, coming out after 11 weeks only to go back in again and watch series 5’s Nadia break down.

Series 12, 2011

Channel 5 cemented itself as the home of other channel’s unwanted shows by rehousing Big Brother.  I’m pretty sure I started watching and then suddenly fell out of love.  And then I stopped watching.  I think we can all agree I have an aggressive need to complete things (see post on Altered Carbon) but I gave myself the privilege of abandoning the show.  However, I think I came back for the end, as some of the cast look familiar.  How funny.

Series 13, 2012

I don’t really recall anything about this series either, but am 75% sure I watched.

Series 14, 2013

This year had a more charming cast, and was more focused on twists with a Secrets & Lies theme.  A mother and daughter entered for the first time, which was pleasantly awkward, and there was another set of twins, though Jack and Joe were the kind of people you were glad to be separated from by a TV screen.  They weren’t bad people, just pedestrian ones.

Series 15, 2014

Here we went again.  And lo, by the law of averages, someone I had known in real life appeared in the cast.  You got the feeling that the producers were giving in to serial auditionees, running out of applicants in the pool of wannabe contestants.  That said, winner Helen, who received nomination immunity at an early stage, was hilarious in her self-deprecation.  Her gravelly northern voice became oddly comforting.

Series 16, 2015

I’m relying on Wikipedia again, but I honestly watched this.  It looks like the rules got complicated and previous series’ contestants reappeared.  There was an Irish chap called Marc who began the line of housemates who enjoy creating discord for their own entertainment, but I only vaguely recall the winner, Chloe, and that she won mostly because he was horrible to her.

Series 17, 2016

Drawing a blank here a bit too.  But have managed to suss out that this was the one with the Other House.  Eventual winner, burly Jason, who teamed blazers and shirts with pale denim, was shocked to find his obsessed ex, Charlie, hiding in the Other House.  That was fun.  Otherwise, a classic blend of crackpots thanks.  You’ll get the impression I regret doing a paragraph on each series, and that’s because I’m boring even myself now to be honest.

Series 18, 2017

This was quite a good series.  By this point, lots of the contestants had skirted around other reality shows, so the classification of this being the normo version feels less and less apt.  I’m loath to mention him, but I do recall Joe being a particularly vile character, playing the role of the aged slaphead who seemed on the verge of twatting other housemates at all times.  At least Gemma Collins turned up for a bit.

Series 19, 2018

So here we are.  It feels like the producers just finally gave in and let all the reject applicants from over the years raid the house.  Yet I can’t stop watching.  Curious, though, that my memory of shows from further back in the past is crystal clear when I can’t recall the last few.  I’m getting old, and maybe it is time the show took a rest after all.  Luckily, then, this is the final series.  I wouldn’t be so sure though – it’s bound to get picked up further down the EPG.

Now I’m going to build the nostalgia with a list of things from old series that we just don’t have anymore:

Davina McCall, the live shows’ first host, was constantly incubating foetuses in the noughties, so it was the highlight of our lives when she appeared in a t-shirt emblazoned with Big Mutha in spangly letters

You could watch live footage from the house on e4 in the daytime, but if the housemates swore or slandered, the sound would be cut to a mic that sounded like it was in a bird sanctuary.  There was something therapeutic about bird tweeting replacing improvised dialogue

The current house is built so that evictions and in-victions (not a word) play out well on camera, but earlier houses simply had a long awkward walk to and from the front door

Big Brother was a back to basics experience, so they used to keep chickens – can you imagine?  There was also a flipping mangle for clothes laundering.  It never really caught on

Housemates with names that are other things: Bubble, Spiral, Science, Kitten.  Tells you all you need to know about a person who isn’t a famous rapper before they even open their mouths

So, we’ve got a lot of history here.  While my friends are birthing babies and planning weddings, I am churning out thousands of words about a commonly derided reality TV format.  This is because Big Brother has been there in the background of our lives for a long time.  In recent times, I have been able to Sky Plus each episode, catching up in disgraceful binges if I’ve been on holiday during a run, or fast forwarding the eviction interviews I don’t care about.  But I can recall watching earlier series, recorded on a VCR I bought from John Lewis with my Waitrose weekend job money, wall-mounted in my childhood bedroom with my flatscreen, deep-back telly, setting the timer better than my dad ever could to watch it while sitting on my futon after going to the pub with the Venture Scouts, sweating everywhere due to summer heat and shut windows, my one safeguard against the midges that plagued my childhood (because I grew up next to a pond yeah).

Big Brother is now older than I was when I first started watching it.  My parents have spurned the Express, as have thousands of other readers, but the Telegraph’s nonsense still comes on a daily basis (not that I touch it).  They don’t watch Big Brother (my mum said she wouldn’t even come to my eviction if I went on it, which I wouldn’t), so I can’t pretend the show has opened their minds, but I like to think that, over the years, a now-tacky reality format has challenged millions of viewers’ perceptions.  Through voyeurism, they’ve been able to observe an element of truth about another Brit who would otherwise have remained a misunderstood entity.  Even if that truth is an argument about the washing up.

House Of Cards

In about two months’ time, the sixth and final series of House Of Cards will lurch into in everyone’s Netflix algorithms, bringing to a close one of the most Netflix-iest of Netflix-s shows.  I never really knew what House Of Cards was for quite a long time.  People would obsess over the latest instalments, binge-watching recently-appeared seasons like mammoth chores in order to be able to keep up with dinner party discussions.  I would stare blankly ahead waiting for people to finish talking, like I do whenever someone mentions a football, or any other sport.  The odd glimpse I had caught always looked grey and serious, full of older people in suits being stern.  My attention was always tempted away by the likes of Love Island.

But then all this news emerged about my good old pal Kevin Spacey, and the salacious scandal-hunter within me wanted to know what all the fuss was about.  Honestly, it’s political correctness gone mad if a show or film can’t be made in Hollywood without everyone getting goosed and groped and made to feel powerless at the hands of those who exploit their power within a system that protects them from the scorn of the public eye.  It was time for me to judge for myself.

I say old pal, but I really only met Kevin once, about ten years ago.  He was old even then, especially up close.  I used to have a personality that couldn’t get enough of going out.  It was some winter weekend during my earlier days in London, way past midnight, and we were stomping the streets of the East End: myself, a friend visiting from Germany, assorted school pals and a flatmate I knew from university.  There was no special occasion, other than it being Saturday and we being young and alcohol being available in exchange for cash.  Whichever bars we had haunted were closing for the night, but someone knew someone who worked in theatre and was linked to a house party we could join.  These days, if any evening event involves more than one location, I will invariably ghost so hard during the changeover that I’ll be on the sofa in my pyjamas watching Parks & Recreation before the group has arrived at the second venue.  In those days, I was happy to traipse through the rain and cold with only a vague promise of more good times to come.

On arriving, I remember two things.  There was a room in which a lot of young actors were jumping about on a bed dancing to Britney Spears songs.  I didn’t go inside.  Then, in the living room, I recall us passing around Peruvian wine bowls.  This was because a friend of a friend had recently taken part in the BBC3 series Last Man Standing, travelling the world to compete in tribal games and bringing back their cultural heritage to London young professionals for appropriation.  My German friend was smoking out of the window when someone said “Kevin Spacey’s here.”  It sounded as ludicrous then as it does now.  It couldn’t be true.  Yet, staggering down the hall to the toilet, I passed a Hollywood legend, face hidden beneath a baseball cap, small dog at his feet, making a 3am arrival among a crowd under half his age.

My approach to celebrities has always been, for some reason, to pretend not to know who they are.  So, later, when I was sipping from the Peruvian wine bowl and a figure appeared in front of me saying “Hi, I’m Kevin,” my immediate response was to introduce myself casually and ask who he knew at the party.  Some of the boys were work friends, apparently.  My tally of drinks by that point should have had my synapses completely fudged, enough that all inhibitions should have been overrun and I should immediately have gushed that I knew who he was and I had seen him in American Beauty and what was he doing in this dirty flat bringing his face off the big screen to a real-life situation directly in front of me?  Instead, I asked if he wanted some wine and proffered him the Peruvian bowl.  He sipped without hesitation and asked where it was from.  I pointed at the friend who had been on the telly show wrestling Mongolian nomads and, bam, Kevin had beelined for him.  Ladies and gents, this other lad was better looking than me.  Happily cast aside, I knew then that I had a dinner party story that would last the ages: Kevin Spacey had chatted me up.  So, in 2013 when the first series appeared, I could smugly counter House Of Cards discussion with a true story about its star.  Kind of gives you the measure of my life’s value in the grand scheme of things really.

Years later, clicking play on season one, chapter one, there was that face again.  And it was speaking directly to me once more.  For an opening episode, House Of Card’s destruction of the fourth wall in the case of its main character(s) drew me in and on board within moments.  Despite my lack of knowledge about American politics (what is a caucus?), the Underwoods knew they could count on my vote pretty early on.  Kevin Spacey plays Francis Underwood, a congressman in the first series, whose ruthless ambition sees him stop at nothing to get on the seat that Trump occupies today.  And ruthless is a dramatic understatement.  He hasn’t just lost his ruth; he has willingly had it removed, murdered and the body incinerated, with someone else blamed for the crime.  And this is just the sort of Underwood efficiency and ambition I found myself getting on board with.

Wife, Claire, played by an effortless Robin Wright, whose face never moves and yet conveys the most perfect responses at all times, is a fellow Frank fan.  They’ve taken the part of their vows about forsaking all others very literally.  Their pact is to pursue only their mutual advancement, no matter the casualties, as long as they are outside their marriage.  To be honest, this is how most couples look to me.  To keep the drama up, cracks eventually start to break through in series three, but these are ruptured by a very American act, one I can’t even allude to without betraying massive twists of the plot.  When not conniving, Claire is often seen getting into and out of bed, and quite rightly, because she has wonderful pyjamas.  She works late; he works late, and they’re both always immaculately dressed.  I can’t do anything productive past 6pm and can barely keen my chinos on long enough to make it home of an evening.  They both have terrible rowing techniques.  At breakfast, Claire holds coffee with incredible smugness, while Francis cuts an apple into slices, which he then eats from a plate, proving to everyone that he is a psychopath.  They are both awful, but their exploitation of those around them is the fault of those around them that enable it, so you’ll join me in Team Underwood.

However, the Underwoods’ progression becomes rapid and you wonder if they couldn’t have drawn it out more to prevent things seeming so far-fetched.  But, at any point, you can check our political reality and realise that anything can, and does, happen.  Other characters come and go, as nobody is safe.  House Of Cards is not afraid to off anyone.  While some swirl around our power couple with nebulous roles like Jane Davis and Aidan Macallan, others loyally sign up as underlings.  You’ll feel sorry in two different ways for Edward Meechum, but it’s Doug Stamper I find most troubling, a part performed with painful rawness by Michael Kelly.  He is Francis’s Chief of Staff and never has anyone been striving harder for a positive end of year review.  Stamper has sacrificed his health, his relationships and his happiness in order to exceed expectations within his role.  There’s nothing he won’t do.  Taken for granted and never able to enjoy his salary, he must hate fun more than he hates the Underwoods’ enemies.

Roll on, then, November.  I’ll be clearing my diary to find out the Underwood’s final fate, though I will have to ration this to a single episode per evening, as it’s bleaker than an unexpected item in your bagging area and laugh-out-loud moments come at the rate of zero per episode.  Either way, it’s remained solid proof of Netflix’s storytelling chops, but I won’t miss Washington once it’s all over.  That place is dangerous.  See ya Kevin!

Come Fly With Me

Ten blogposts later, I find myself drawn to Walliams and Lucas again.  This wasn’t planned.  I’m literally episodes away from finishing five series of Netflix’s first big boxset.  Celebrity Big Brother is back on and has, again, given drama more incredible than any scriptwriter could contrive.  We’ve even got more Great British Bake Off on the box.  But suddenly, I saw Come Fly With Me on the Netflix menu and, before I knew it, I had clicked play, devoured a whole episode, enjoyed it more than anything else in recent times, let the next one autoplay, and then, over the next few nights, raced through all six instalments.  Do I have any regrets?  No.  This is exactly how I pictured adult life: feeling guilty about not doing something more interesting while watching old sketch shows I have already seen before.

Come Fly With Me was brought out with huge fuss onto BBC1’s primetime schedule in 2010.  Little Britain had, as I have previously blogged (keep up!), become a cultural phenomenon.  Today, we might know David Walliams as Roald Dahl 2.0, dominating the top ten children’s books on Amazon, allowing me to delight my niece by reading her stories about grandmas that fart and grandads that fart as well (because toilet humour sells), and we might see Matt Lucas…  well, I know he was in Bridesmaids and that was funny.  In fact, the last time I saw him was in a café in central London.  He was wearing quite an interesting hat.  Seated nearby with friends I hadn’t seen for ages, I made sure to be as loud and funny as possible, expecting him to rush over and offer me my own broadcast platform for my incredible comedy.  He actually just rushed past, even though we had left our bags in the way as obstacles for him in a ridiculous attempt to increase our chances of attracting his attention.  Sorry Matt.  But yes, how do you follow up Little Britain?  Well, you basically can’t.

And you especially can’t if, in 2010, you choose to parody a show that was last culturally significant in 2005 (the BBC documentary, Airport).  Sure, airports are lame no matter what the year, but coming along with a mockumentary treatment five years later was never going to get the appreciation it deserved.  But now, with a bit of time and distance, we can look at things differently (even though we will still be outraged by some of the hair and make-up choices used to create the pair’s non-white characters).  The fact is: airports are ridiculous.  You just go there to wait to go somewhere else.  It’s either a work trip you don’t want to be on or a holiday where you can’t wait to get away.  It’s one queue after the other while you haemorrhage cash in a way you never would in real life.  This is because you have entered vacation mode, where Monopoly money flows freely and treats must be procured because you deserve immediate gratification (or you can charge it to expenses).  I’m particularly fond of how panicked my parents’ generation get about going through security, convinced a half-used packet of paracetamol will land them on Indonesia’s death row.  I always like to see how much liquid I sneak into my hand luggage, just to check the scanners.

In conclusion, all this nonsense makes for a great documentary.  There is no worse race in the world than British people abroad, so Airport’s mix of put-upon staff and dreadful, dreadful customers was a winning formula.  All Walliams and Lucas needed to do was make a few tweaks to bring Come Fly With Me to life.  People probably just thought it was a real documentary, what with characters like Jeremy Spake making himself a household name in the original.  I can still hear him urging me to go down to my local Euronics centre, yet I, to this day, have no idea what a local Euronics centre is.  His wide, goateed face would dash about the terminals solving problems and whipping out an impressive command of the Russian language to get stuff done.

Cue Moses Deacon, a Walliams character who surely owes Spake for his genesis.  Instead of being effective, however, he is useless and selfish, if you’ll pardon the pun (because one of his main jokes is asking viewers to pardon puns he hasn’t actually made).  Prancing down a staircase, collecting money for his charity WishWings (of which his gaycations are the main beneficiary) or getting taken for a ride by an elderly lady falsely claiming she has never flown before (Matt Lucas in epic prosthetics), this character deftly brings us into the world of Come Fly With Me’s busy airport.  And that world is nothing if not richly imagined.  And by richly imagined, I mean they have literally come up with three fake airlines that might remind you of real ones:

FlyLo

Garish colours.  Low-cost fares.  Appalling service.  Run by a foreign chap.  Could it be any more easyJet?  There’s Taaj in the ground crew who qualifies each sentence by asking “isn’t it?” and uses the in-terminal transport to try and pick up bitches.  A highlight for me is Liverpudlian Keeley on check in (“Hello, checchh in; Keeley speacchhing”), whose passive aggressive rivalry with Melody never stops either of them taking delight in telling passengers they are too fat to fly or explaining that FlyLo’s Barcelona route in fact lands in Barcelona Shannon, requiring ferry and coach transfers from Ireland to reach Spain, but all in good time for your evening meal, even if that meal is in a few days’ time.  The planes even have pay-as-you-go life jackets.

Our Lady Air

Ryanair doesn’t come away unscathed either.  We meet Fearghal, fulfilling all the air steward stereotypes, not to mention his nine gay brothers (although Finbar is bi).  Willing to give an allergic man peanuts, simply so he can increase his chances of winning Steward of the Year by saving his life, he also has a staunch approach to faiths that aren’t Catholic.

Great British Air

One of the main jokes here is Penny, the snobby first class stewardess who thinks that people in economy are scum.  Having frequently travelled economy, I can confirm this.  Having also travelled in business (not quite first class, and only because I was on standby thanks to a friend) I can also confirm that the staff are snobby.  There’s also the well-observed married couple, Simon and Jackie Trent, who happily let the underlying hatred within their marriage spill out over the in-flight comms system.

Away from the airlines, Peter and Judith Surname are among the best passengers, frequently experiencing holidays from hell which they recount with vivid imagery.  Unfortunate to suffer the disasters that befall them, it’s their plucky British approach to making the best of things that strikes a chord, even if this does lead Judith to BBQ Peter’s leg for sustenance after they survive a plane crash in the Andes.  Even though they are rescued within half an hour.

So, yeah, it will feel dated.  You’ll cringe at characters like Precious Little and the Japanese fans of Martin Clunes.  But for a mindless brain massage after a full day’s rat racing, you can’t beat the minimal attention requirements of a sketch show, particularly one that has layers and layers of familiarity.  You’ll recognise your own awful holiday behaviour.  And, worst of all, you’ll want to book yourself a holiday and perpetuate the cycle of airports being rubbish, and people making shows about them, and then people writing blogposts about them.

Haters Back Off!

Thanks to the unique way this blog is funded (it makes no money whatsoever) I’m able to dedicate hours of my life to watching things on Netflix so that others don’t have to.  Whereas sensible folk will switch something off halfway through the first episode, I’ll push through to the end so that I can write a snarky post about it (see Altered Carbon).  You’ll be glad to know I have now done this with Haters Back Off!  Subsequently, I can tell you whether you should plan your time to take in the sixteen thirty-minute episodes that make up its two series, or whether you should fill your precious fleeting existence on this planet with something that will offer you greater enrichment.  Such as watching traffic pass on a moderately busy road.

Let’s look at the ingredients that led me to click watch whilst scrolling the depths of the Netflix menus, drowning in unnavigable options and pledging my life away deciding there were too many things I simply must watch.  Haters Back Off! is about someone who’s really bad at singing.  Not only am I really bad at singing myself, but I love nothing more than hearing someone sing who thinks they’re really good at singing but actually isn’t.  And this is our protagonist, Miranda, all over.  There’s a certain tone of voice, off-key, off-pitch and off its face, that acts to me as both a brown noise and an immediate joy producer.  For those that don’t know, brown noises are sounds that have the ability to cause humans to evacuate their bowels.  Seeing as this is something I have no trouble with at the best of times, it’s a miracle the sofa has come away unsoiled from my viewings of this show.  Despite the risk, this is what reeled me in when the trailer auto-played at me, unasked, one day.  Hearing Christina Aguilera’s breakthrough hit, Genie In A Bottle, turned into a cacophonic wail told me everything I needed to know about Haters Back Off!

Miranda takes popular songs and records videos of herself murdering them.  We’ve covered the bad singing, but she also makes dreadful expressions and gesticulations at the camera that plumb a depth of self-unawareness we have never seen before.  In an age where everyone wants to get rich quick as a YouTube influencer, there’s a brutal realism to Miranda’s appalling uploads.  Her bids to find fame and fortune run aground as the internet trolls gather to leave their comments.  What she lacks in talent, she makes up for in determination.  As a spoiled, home-schooled teen, she expertly burdens the rest of her family with her mission, and they spinelessly tag along.

And this is my second ingredient for success.  Bad singing?  Check.  Ruthless female lead who is awful to everyone but who cannot be blamed just because others are enabling her awfulness (like Jill Tyrell in Nighty Night)?  Check. Beyond this, though, the show rarely gets into gear to soar like it should.  This is the Napoleon Dynamite end of America – depressing and humdrum.  The family home is expertly crammed with the most banal clutter.  While this is a great touch in evoking Miranda’s natural environment, you’ll want to crack the vacuum out and get the cheesy puff dust out of the carpet.  In addition, whenever she’s outside, it’s normally just rained.  The sight of wet tarmac is curiously crushing to the soul.  It’s the perfect accompaniment to Miranda’s tattered dreams of fame, but maybe it’s too close to home for me as a suburban Brit who has been damp from rain for approximately 75% of his life.  Overall, the tone is gently disgusting, helped along by the vile Uncle Jim’s dodgy installation ability with regards to septic tanks, or watching Miranda shove a Froze Toes in her mouth.  But if you’re looking to roll on the floor laughing, just so you can use the acronym ROFL when whatsapping your pals, then you’re going to come away disappointed.  I can’t decide if the supporting cast are deeply complex, or ill-defined enough that their behaviour is easily moulded to fit each storyline.

It was only later I learned that Miranda Sings was originally a hugely successful YouTube character in real life (9.6 million subscribers).  Which means the whole show is the sitcom translation, getting all meta on us by showing us the same character’s attempts to become successful on YouTube, when she is already successful on YouTube.  Lacking any of my own success in either YouTube or TV programmes, it’s not for me to tell you all that this doesn’t really work, but let’s just say Netflix haven’t taken up the option for a third series. 

Unlike being in or out of tune, comedy is subjective.  Colleen Ballinger has created a memorable anti-heroine who perfectly apes so many of the dreadful idiosyncratic clichés our YouTubers love to use: “Hey you guys!”  When performing as Miranda, you can see that she is embodying her alter-ego with every corporal resource available to her.  And a lot of red lipstick.  The whole thing just needs a few more jokes, otherwise it’s a bit like watching traffic on a moderately busy road, only not quite as enriching.