Peep Show

I’ve just undergone a rather major lifestyle choice shift, going from someone who doesn’t watch Peep Show, to someone who’s nailed all nine series on Netflix in a matter of weeks.  For years, I found the concept of the show really off-putting, despite countless recommendations in the office that it was right up my street.  From what I could see, it was about two losers.  British folk love an underdog, they say, but I think I chase success like a wasp hounds a picnic of jam sandwiches.  If our heroes were unsuccessful, then surely I would root for the bad guys, proving to everyone that I was an evil psychopath after all.  Say what you like about bad folk, they’ve got the ambition, drive and get-up-and-go to crack on with those bad acts in the first place.  The two men at the heart of Peep Show, from the trailers I’d seen, seemed to whinge about things not going their way and then do little to take matters into their own hands.

What, then, possessed me to dive into a show 15 years after its debut, selecting it from a Netflix menu that I’ve all but given up hope of ever completing?  Truth be told, my current flatshare doesn’t have access to much TV beyond Netflix (how I miss the old Sky Plus) so my options are limited.  In addition, I’ve made my way through a high volume of glossy American drama in recent times (from House Of Cards to Chilling Adventures Of Sabrina).  I wanted something British.  And not just a bit British, with just our silly accents and some rain.  No, I wanted filthy British.  I wanted humour that was inaccessible to other parts of the world.  I wanted character actors in lead roles.  I wanted locations so banal I wouldn’t even notice if I had walked past them hundreds of times.  I wanted to be depressed by our soggy island, but then I wanted to chuckle at clever British writers exposing its ridiculousness.

Suddenly, everything that had put me off was part of its appeal.  And appeal it did do.  It did it loads.  Transported back to a 2003 world of clamshell phones and actual CDs, I was immediately charmed.  For those that don’t know (which was me until recently) Peep Show focuses on two flatmates who waste their lives while going about most things the wrong way, with most things usually being trying to get girls to go out with them.  So astoundingly relatable are the two protagonists, that I firmly believe that the whole population of the world can be split into Mark Corrigans and Jeremy Usbournes.  If you ever feel uptight, paralysed by indecision and the modern world constantly disappoints, then you’re a Mark, bulging at the eyes in frustration and disgust until such a chance arises that you can hide inside with some red wine, a book on Byzantine history, and the heating on 21 degrees (and not higher).  If you’re a Jez, then you’ll sort things out later, you’re working on your art so someone else can take care of the boring stuff, you enjoy errant sexual pursuits and the modern world constantly disappoints.  In fact, if you’re a Jez, then you haven’t even read this far.

At once universal and disgusting, each episode builds up our false hope that Jez and Mark might just get themselves sorted, before unleashing sploshing disappointment, while each series of six episodes follows a more complicated, longer-term arc, that ultimately always lands them back just where they started.  The cumulative effect of working through their lives from 2003 to the final series in 2015 is that they go from young people who can’t be expected to know better, to chaps nudging into their forties who still don’t know any better.  Drug binges and orgies are replaced (or added to) by childcare and soft play, yet the disappointment of the modern world somehow hasn’t dampened everything.  Jez’s free spirit still hopes to crack the music scene, and Mark yearns to pen the definitive tome on the Byzantine church.

If you’ve ever done some growing up in the UK, then you’ll recognise yourself.  Cue cult status, compounded by the script’s relentless quotability: “I’m the Wolf of Wall Street. Look out, Boots! I’m going to buy 100 meal deals and eat them off a prossie in the nude.”  But Peep Show immerses you further in the sticky surfaces of its action by using point of view shots.  Mark and Jez both talk directly to the camera, making you, the viewer, the recipient of the line.  You then switch to be the other, which is why it’s easy to think of yourself as both of them.  You can get lost in David Mitchell’s dark dark eyes before alighting at his crooked lower teeth, or you can slide about on Robert Webb’s smug mug until, again, you arrive at the teeth and get a bit distracted.  I love them both and I love their teeth.  At first, I thought only core characters had their point of view used in this way, but it can happen to anyone, however incidental.  But we only hear Jez and Mark’s inner monologues, and this is the factor that drives the most proximity for me.

Throughout, a bevvy (horrendous word) of equally accurate female characters come and go as foils to the boys’ lechery, affection and dreams.  From Sophie, played deliciously by Olivia Colman (clearly enjoying herself – roll on her appearance in The Crown), to Big Suze, Dobby, Nancy and poor poor April.  It’s clear that nobody is doing great at life, despite first impressions.  You root for Jez and Mark to pair up happily with any of them, and yet you scream at the girls to run for their lives.  Inevitably, the only partnership that stands the test of time is Mark and Jez’s.  Some people say that the wrong friends can hold you back, but it’s more like Jez can hold you back.  Mark can never succeed, because Jez is there to drag him back.  But it’s more fun for us that way, and maybe more fun for Mark too.  There’s always someone worse, though, and we have Super Hans (about whom there is literally nothing super) to keep Jez from ever progressing to true adulthood.

So I hereby make this blog’s first apology.  I mean, probably, I haven’t checked if I’ve done one before.  Sorry to all those people who urged me to watched Peep Show.  All they got from me were sneers and scoffs.  They were right all along.  But I too was justified in waiting all this time.  I needed a bit of distance and only recently was the time right for me.  I’m fully ready now to confirm my status as a fan of Peep Show, ready to champion the cult classic to all comers.  I’m probably more of a Mark than a Jez, but I do have my Jez moments.  One of them was bingeing all nine series and not feeling guilty about it.  Just say you never met me.

True Blood

I’m serving up second week of vampire goodness, following on from my last post about The Vampire Diaries, as I’ve decided that vampires are the opposite of Christmas.  Even though the big day might now be in the past, anything I can do to accelerate its rapid disappearance in the rear-view mirror is to be commended.  And while The Vampire Diaries’ PG-rated light snogging and minimal gore might have felt (deliberately) unseasonal, True Blood’s definitive shag-fest and graphic blood-splurging should be the nail in the coffin (as it were) of this festive period.

We’re all clear on the fact that anything supernatural is a trigger theme for me.  But True Blood laced its vampires in with so much more that it was by and large a foregone conclusion that I would work my way into this boxset and swiftly devour all seven seasons.  I’m not sure where it was broadcast in the UK (and I’m too lazy to check) but I made my way through the various DVD discs as and when they came from Lovefilm, back in the day when Netflix was just a thing you thought that wouldn’t take off because internet connections weren’t fast enough.

True Blood’s true charm comes from its Southern setting.  And not just the Deep South, but deepest Louisiana.  We’re talking down by the bayou here.  Strangely, it seems like a great place for vampires, with the voodoo and Cajun influences making hokey pokey all that more realistic.  Perhaps if you’re used to looking out for alligators in the dark, then checking around for one additional cold-blooded predator isn’t too much of a reach.  The first season even had a Cajun-accented character as its antagonist (spoiler alert) and as a languages geek I couldn’t get enough.  That said, I would cite accents as one of the show’s weaker points.  While all our visual cues vividly bring to life the swamp mist and superstition of rural Louisiana, the international cast have varying levels of success in wrapping their chops credibly around the dialect.  Leading lady, Anna Paquin, never quite convinces as Sookie Stackhouse’s southern belle, while Stephen Moyer, a native of Essex, chewed his way around Bill Compton’s confederate gent (an oxymoron of course).  Throw in an Australian as Sookie’s brother and you’ll be unable to do anything but cringe each time one of them mentions the name of the town at the heart of True Blood’s goings on: Bon Temps.  Thing is, you’re saying it wrong as well.  Probably.

Fairly unique in its setting, then, (at least in my boxset experience), True Blood gained itself greater suspension of disbelief when it whipped out its key premise in episode one: vampires have always lived among us, but events have finally unfolded in a way that allows them to come out (of the coffin, arf arf) and live in the open.  A synthetic form of their fave tipple, Tru Blood, means they no longer have to prey on human arteries.  Therefore, the integration of this centuries-old myth into modern society comes along like just another tale of a minority group looking for the same rights as the majority.  And we all know that the Southern states of the US aren’t the best place for this.  Cue dramatic tension on all levels, from inter-family up to full societal.  True Blood seems to ape everything: rights activists, religious zealots, politicians, local law enforcement, pressure groups, lobbyists and anything else that’s been a bit shonky.

But, as we all know, the struggle between man and vampire isn’t enough (see previous posts on Buffy, Teen Wolf etc).  Before long, we’ve got werewolves, witches, shape-shifters and various other demons, giving many of the sprawling ensemble cast further reasons to get involved in the action and, more often than not, take their clothes off.  Funniest of all, there are faeries (whose clothes also get popped off).  And this is because, no matter what supernatural heritage a particular character may or may not have, True Blood hammers home the universal truth that people are horny bastards, drenching its camp action in oodles of sex.  It’s clear everyone has taken their role preparation seriously by smashing the gym hard in advance, so it’s not half bad to look at and also occasionally has things to do with the actual plot.  Sure, there’s body positivity in a range of shapes and sizes, but the sex positivity is mostly displayed by those who’ve been off the carbs.

It’s a show whose opening credits prepare you perfectly for what’s about to come: it’s a sexy mess that veers on being a danger wank, but you can’t stop looking.  Based on some books I’ve never read, True Blood is coming at you this Christmas with a firm recommendation.  It’s highly sexed, highly stylised, and highly entertaining.  If you like your humour dark and bloody, you characters feisty and spunky, and your vampires shackled down by politicking bureaucracy, True Blood will arouse your emotions in a fistful of different ways with every episode you subject your eyes to.  It’s going to do bad things to you.

The Vampire Diaries

Right, well it’s been 37 posts since we’ve had anything about vampires, so I thought I might as well chuck the old classic show Vampire Diaries into the mix.  I haven’t finished a boxset in a while, and it seems readers can’t get enough of teen fodder from our younger years (I’m looking at you, everyone who read about Gossip Girl), so why not?  Let me, as a 33-year-old man, write about a show aimed at teenage girls, that I mostly watched when I was a 20-something-year-old man.  And then you can read it and, together, we can all take a quick break from the monstrous season that is Christmas time.  If, like me, you’ve looked on in disgust while office co-workers shovel a month’s worth of advent chocolate into their gobs on a single day, or you’ve had to restrain someone physically from cracking out the festive playlist on Spotify before the end of November, then really ‘tis the season for the bloodsucking undead as an antidote to empty yuletide greetings at the end of every email.

On paper, Vampire Diaries is an exercise in ticking almost every box regarding my preferred televisual themes.  It’s set in an American high school, so all the characters get to hang out in front of lines of lockers on an impossibly glamorous campus, in stark contrast to my old school, the misleadingly posh-monikered Howard of Effingham, where lesson changeovers were characterised by bundles, high-up banister daredevilry and acne.  So far, so much escapism.  Secondly, we have the supernatural.  As if the pressures of growing up in this day and age weren’t enough, imagine having to cope in the midst of budding relationships with vampires.  Gripping plotlines ensue as we join the main characters in navigating such pitfalls as: being allergic to the sun, being thirsty for blood, and, of course, being evil.  Ah, them teenage years.

My cursory research reveals that we have eight series of this show to enjoy, but I really don’t think for a minute I got too far past season six.  Back in 2009, I probably made appointments to view the show at obscure hours on ITV2, but then I also recall various DVDs arriving on my Lovefilm subscription.  Sure, the initial premise of the opening series was gripping.  High-schooler Elena falls for handsome classmate Stefan Salvatore, only to find out he’s a vampire.  We’ve all done it, right?  Luckily, he has a conscience to balance out his murderous tendencies, but his cheeky brother, our Damon (played by a chap who was offed in the first series of Lost), is not burdened by such inconveniences.  His every crack is so wise that his dialogue eventually makes your skin crawl.  And wait, both brothers are so handsome that even after they’ve murdered you, you’ll still get lost in their eyes.  I assume the high school purged all of its students with below average looks in a public burning.  You can’t blame them.  Each episode seemed to culminate in an event in the beleaguered town of Mystic Falls (should have guessed, really) a bit like The OC, only the tension came not from social faux pas caused by the intermingling of the classes, but from the unleashing of bloody hell when some demon or rascal attacks the town and, mostly, the school.

Of course, to give the whole thing legs, the vampires were soon joined by other creatures.  Elena’s bestie gets into witchcraft.  You’ve got some werewolves in there, some hunters, some original vampires (cue spinoff) and many more.  Buffy The Vampire Slayer, anyone?  But then, a few series in, we flesh out plot contrivance to a whole new level with the arrival of the doppelgängers.  Suddenly, we don’t know if we’re dealing with lovely Elena, or Katherine, her naughty naughty twin.  Then we start swapping back and forth between which brother has a conscience and which brother is evil.  The plots wind themselves up more tightly until all the cast can do is frown in order to understand them.  As with Teen Wolf, complexity is mistaken for intrigue and the sheer volume of storyline becomes overwhelming.  And I don’t remember seeing a diary at any point beyond the first few episodes either, but Elena must have had her hands full diddling about with both brothers.  So I dialled out.

That’s not to say I don’t regret my decision.  This was a sexy show and, for a time, it filled an inexplicable need of mine to be consuming some sort of vampire content.  But ain’t nobody got time for plots that tie themselves in too many knots.  The Vampire Diaries only finished in early 2017 and who knows how it ended.  Maybe the doppelgängers got their own twins and inflicted triplegängers on a confused audience (this happened) or the leading lady was absent for whole series (this also happened).  Either way, I still have unrealistic expectations that vampires will enter my day-to-day life.  I’ll keep a beady eye out at the office for sure, but chances are it will be too busy casting withering glances at my Christmas-enjoying colleagues to spot the real bloodsuckers.

Archer

“Have you seen Archer?” a friend asked.  I hadn’t.  I had no idea what they were talking about.  It was my worst fear come true: someone trying to engage in conversation about a piece of content pivotal to modern culture and there’s me, oblivious and unable to take part.  “You’d love Archer,” they went on.  Things had escalated.  Now this thing I had never heard of was actually being recommended to me!  I gave the only response possible at the time: nodding silently while my mouth slowly opened and closed.  But I don’t think I got away with it, as the same friend then insisted on showing me the programme while I was visiting him in Beijing.  (This was the same dear friend who first recommended the Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt to me, so he has a strong track record).

Let’s relive my first thoughts during that initial viewing, as this will help to bring the show to life for readers.

“So, it’s some sort of spy agency?”

Yes, it is.

“Wow, this is a work of art.”

Firstly, it’s adult animation.  This doesn’t mean it’s a cartoon of explicit jiggery and pokery for lonely men to watch with boxes of tissues.  It means it’s something for grown-ups that just happens to be produced from moving illustrations, like BoJack Horseman or Rick & Morty.  But everything in Archer is drawn to look like artwork by Roy Lichtenstein.  The characters are pneumatic in their attractiveness (though this still isn’t aimed at the hand-over-fist crowd).  The backgrounds too add to the overall high quality, while sixties lines and styling give everything a slight Mad Men feel.  I feasted my eyes.

“Isn’t that Bob from Bob’s Burgers?”

Following the overload in the eyeballs, my ears attuned to the aural assault.  Lead character, Stirling Archer, is voiced by H. Jon Benjamin, who plays Bob in Bob’s Burgers.  While Archer isn’t exactly supposed to be a successful spy, it’s hard to forget the images of a bumbling family man who flips burgers when Archer is seducing beautiful ladies or rolling about on covert missions.

“Why is everyone shouting?”

The characters pursue all dialogue at a certain heightened pitch.  It’s the tone you use in a conversation where each exchange elevates the previous sentence’s sarcasm, irony or sardonic tone.  It has nowhere to go but shouting, which means that everything can feel a bit ranty, jokes (though funny) don’t stand out and we end up with one level to the whole thing.

“But yes, this is quite funny.”

Once you overcome the scream at which lines are delivered, you can appreciate the humour that laces everything.  Jokes reoccur and harken back to former statements, layering on themselves over and over till you can’t help but chuckle or groan.

“Oh, so it really is only these characters then.”

We more or less stick to the world of ISIS, the spy agency where Archer works.  Fun fact: it’s run by his mother, Malory (voiced, well, shouted by Jessica Walter from Arrested Development), so his relationship with her is the source of about 60% of the humour because it’s funny and silly to work for your mum as a spy.  Around eight characters feature in practically every episode, no matter what, which starts to feel close and closed off across the nine seasons.  Yes, nine.  Occasional relief comes from guest roles, for which some sort of Hollywood comedy actor is always found, like a bit of an inside joke, so you can have a great time trying to place the voice before giving in, checking IMDB and seeing that it was Janice off Friends.

In short, this is a good man-show.  I don’t want to be gendering things as we move into 2019, but the humour can be schoolboy, Archer lives consequence-free and I’m fairly certain the female characters only serve as garnish in order to bait or foil (all while shouting of course).  Nevertheless, nine series is good going, so let’s go through how things have been padded out and what my bodily responses were for each one:

Series one

Still getting to grips with the style, characters and tone, we have an episodic approach with each instalment more or less resolving itself.  There’s an airship, among other retro elements, with most conflict coming from a rival agency (and between Archer and Malory).

Series two

More office management japes creep in, but the episodes climax in Archer searching for the true identity of his father.  We get into our stride here a bit more.

Series three

Things get joyfully further and further fetched, with more action in the animation (versus perennial standing around posturing) and more diverse settings.  Robots appear, as does a mission to space.  Enjoyment peaks.

Series four

Just more classic Archer, with a hilarious Bob’s Burgers crossover.

Series five

This is Archer: Vice.  We depart from the old office and the whole staff end up in South America trying to offload cocaine.  Comedy comes from Pam doing most of the cocaine most of the time.

Series six

Back to nearly normal with more global travel.  Some of the characters’ backgrounds are fleshed out.

Series seven

Archers goes all Hollywood.  I didn’t really get what was going on.

Series eight

This whole series is a dream.  No, really, it’s called Archer: Dreamland and takes place in Archer’s mind during a coma.  It’s a shame he can’t dream up some new main characters.

Series nine

Completely clapped out, the whole thing moves to 1938.  I lost the plot.  I didn’t have a mental health episode, I simply was unable to find any narrative to follow.

After the quick intro in Beijing, I’ve limped my way through this show, possibly repeating series three, or, in fact, missing out whole chunks of episodes altogether.  Because of its constant tone, I find myself easily distracted, even though each instalment is short.  As such, in an effort to make it finally to the last episode (which wasn’t helped by series nine dropping when I was knee deep in series six) it has become a background show I put on whenever I am doing something else.  Many a work email has been bashed out on the old laptop while Archer and Lana scream at Figgis, or while Pam runs around naked eating snacks and taking drugs.  Maybe a close-knit colleague collective of inept spies can only go so far, yet Archer still feels unique in both the worlds of comedy and animation.  Within its overwhelming volume, there are hilarious gems.  So, if you live life terrified of being caught out by someone asking if you’ve seen Archer (and it’s only happened to me twice more and both times I could respond confidently with a big fat yes) try a couple of episodes.  If you hate it, then stop it and do something else.  And if you like it, then enjoy; you’re welcome.

Dark Tourist

Continuing with the recent flurry of travel-based posts (Jack Whitehall: Travels With My Father and I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here), I’ve succumbed to the constant appearance of Dark Tourist in my Netflix menu.  It was sat there at the top every time I logged in, promising subversion, alternative lifestyles and the ability to brag about having been to really trendy tourist destinations for optimum office one-upmanship.  For instance, I was just showing off to a colleague about the fact I have been to Portland, Oregon, but I didn’t manage to shoehorn into the conversation I have also visited Austin, Texas, which, together, place me as a hipster traveller, despite the fact that I just made everyone sitting near me listen to Fleur East’s Sax (still a party banger, no matter what anyone says).  But, Dark Tourist is not about food trucks and cool urban scenes.  It’s about going to places you wouldn’t normally associate with Instagram fodder.

However, this seems to be even more hipster than the vegan plastic-free breastfeeding collectives of Portland.  Dark Tourist follows David Farrier, a New Zealand journalist who has always been attracted to death and destruction.  However, in his accent, this sounds more like “dith end distriction”.  He’s a hipster: too cool for a haircut, practical eyewear, non-ironed t-shirts.  Somehow, he’s convinced Netflix to fund his holidays to places that are sad, scary or both.  The people he comes across on these journeys, whether they’re touring the Fukushima radioactive area in Japan or cycling about Alexandra township in Johannesburg, ache with their own coolness about shunning package holidays to the beach in favour of seeing the more disturbing side of human life.

So, dark tourism and normal tourism have something in common: both cause inordinate smugness.  I’ve given some thought as to whether I have ever been a dark tourist.  There was the German exchange when I was fourteen; we made the obligatory visit to Dachau.  Going on to pursue this language all the way through university, I’ve read my fair share of World War II literature, but, at the time, the gravity of the place didn’t register as deeply as I now know it should have.  What I do remember, though, is a very enthusiastic guide taking us to the crematoria and then being slightly appalled by the rest of the class clamouring to take pictures of the ovens which thankfully were never completed in time to be used.  What exactly were they going to do with those images?  Enjoy them at a later date (remembering that this was many years before Facebook, let alone digital cameras)?  More recently, embracing the dark tourist mantra of being open to danger, I recall sitting on my cousin’s veranda in KwaZulu Natal while her son ran off into the bushes with a gun to investigate the sounds of potential intruders.  I just sipped my coffee because, as everyone knows, on holiday you’re immortal.  Especially if you’re a plucky Brit.  Right?

Chances are, we’ve all been dark tourists.  If you’ve ever been to a museum or a memorial or a battlefield, then the sights you’re seeing are rooted in some form of human suffering.  Farrier takes a muted approach to this: he’s not overly deferential or crudely exploitative.  He acknowledges his interest while also trying to understand it.  Nevertheless, it’s uncomfortable viewing, whether you’re witnessing voodoo animal slaughter in Benin, or, closer to home, coming to terms with the fact that England is very much on the list for dark tourism.  But our contribution is not necessarily the site of a transgression, but a museum that makes an exhibit of many: Littledean.  We can never quite make our mind up about the proprietor, but suspending judgment is part of the fascination.  Why else can’t we help watching Making A Murderer, if not for the constant challenges to our certainty about guilt and innocence?

Dark Tourist is at its best when breaking into a closed state or authoritarian regime.  The segments that cover Turkmenistan and Myanmar are particularly gripping.  For me, it’s handy that Farrier is investigating these places that I’ll probably never go to, taking risks and breaking into forbidden territory, whether this is due to free radicals or ethnic tensions.  But it all boils down to the ultimate means by which we justify anything we pursue in our leisure time: it’s entertaining.  We go on holiday to look, point and experience because it’s a diversion from daily life.  Watching a TV show that allows us to do this in shonkier locations but with no risk to ourselves is therefore highly entertaining, all pleasantly hosted by a southern hemisphere Louis-Theroux-alike.  It’s left me wanting to know more about all the subjects covered, precisely because Dark Tourist’s premise is to understand why people want to go there, rather than needing to go into the detail of what actually happened.  Booking details don’t follow each report and there’s no suntanned Judith Chalmers sipping a cocktail and having a jolly nice time, but there’s a curiously inspirational bent to the show: you’ll want to go and be a braver, darker tourist yourself.  I can’t explain why, buy you’ll wish you were there, all whilst being glad you’re not.