Killing Eve

When it came to thinking about what careers to do as the end of my education approached, there was one line of work that nobody appeared to be pushing: assassinations.  Given their predominance as the subject matter for various programmes, films and video games (not to mention their recent return to fashion as a Muscovite approach to dealing with awkward political characters), you’d think we would know of them more often in our daily lives.  Friends say they’re in property or banking or medicine, but nobody ever rocks up at birthday drinks telling tales of the various murders they’ve committed while the rest of us were deleting emails without reading them or hiding from senior office bods in order to eschew their yet-to-be-delegated tasks.  (I’m of course excluding the deaths our actions lead to through inadvertent pursuits: that homeless person you stepped over on a freezing day or that Third World miner that perished sourcing a bit of metal for your iPhone etc.)  As such, Killing Eve was, for me, as sort of induction video into a new employment possibility, but did it make me want to swap my status calls for sniper rifles and update my LinkedIn to say “a seasoned, cold-blooded murderer, stimulated by new challenges, with a solutions-orientated approach to others’ deaths via contract killings”?  Let’s read on and find out.

The assassin at the heart of Killing Eve is Villanelle.  Her background and training in order to break into the industry, as the series uncovers, were both bleak.  I think I’m guilty of preferring my Cub-Scouting childhood in suburban Surrey over Soviet prisons and brutalisation.  But maybe I have the character traits.  Villanelle is known for her dark sense of humour, takes almost nothing that seriously and takes time to be playful with every task she undertakes.  This could be me all over.  I’ve talked of my need for silliness in my post on Miranda, so maybe Villanelle and I could be work BFFs (especially as most of mine have left me over the years).  But, according to Phoebe Waller-Bridge, human goddess and creator of Fleabag, who adapted Killing Eve from the Codename Villanelle novella series, our hero assassin’s genesis lies in the ethos “What would you do if you weren’t afraid?”  So that rules me out.  Now older, my fear of my own mortality shocks me every time I cross a busy road, and if someone barges in front of me on the Tube, I spend the rest of the day obsessing about it.

But maybe all the foreign travel would be a boon.  Villanelle jets around Europe as only someone who’s smugly parted with £4.99 for Speedy Boarding really can.  Her multilingualism knows no bounds (though her Mandarin needs work).  Does that mean I’m a shoe-in?  Again, doubt besets me.  Any travelling I undertake with work is met with groaning and a mad panic about saving my M&S receipts for all my train treats in order to expense a week’s worth of high-value cashew nuts.  I don’t even like the journey to the office (see previous comment about Tube barging repercussions).  As for languages, I might have paid off the £24k of debt my French and German degree cost me, but I could barely compose an email to a colleague in our Hamburg office because it went beyond the GCSE fare of telling someone how many brothers and sister I have (eine Schwester) but I have at least brain-retained all the four-digit codes you need to make the diacritics appear (the little dots and such you can have on a ü) so it wasn’t a complete waste of money.

Finally, there’s the actual killing of humans.  On purpose.  In person.  Villanelle feels nothing with each life she extinguishes, cashing her pay to return to the lap of luxury her beautiful apartment and fridge full of Champagne offer her.  I just don’t think I could do it.  I once ran over a squirrel when learning to drive and it took years for that horrific crunch of tiny bones to stop haunting me.  I then cycled over a toad near a beach in Germany, struggling to steer my bike (one of those European jobbies where you have to pedal backwards to break), and unlocked a whole new spiral of shame.  I would be really good at quipping witty remarks after a spot of fisticuffs, but squeezing the trigger while my victim begged for mercy would see my annual appraisals at the assassin company descend into performance management.  Success as a contract killer, then, must be fairly binary.

Right, I’ll stick to media as a career, with an unpopular blog as my side hustle.  Instead, Killing Eve can be a window into another job I’m never going to do, just like Line Of Duty is into being a bent copper or Narcos is into, er, being a narco.  Besides, Villanelle is pretty good at it, just as Jodie Comer is pretty good at acting.  And by pretty good, I mean outstanding.  I completely buy her as a confused, psychopathic girl who just doesn’t want to be lonely anymore.  And then there’s this Eve that she’s trying to kill, played by Sandra Oh.  I’ve never seen Grey’s Anatomy so my only real exposure to her has been a Family Guy joke about the size of her face.  So yeah, she has a lot of face, and a lot of hair, but she can have as much of anything as she likes, because she’s wonderful: the perfect vehicle for our burning curiosity in solving the mysteries of Villanelle.  Oh calls bullsh*t, has a voice I can’t get enough of (a bit like Sarah Koenig from the podcast Serial) and delivers excruciating British awkwardness like no other American – watching her microwave shepherd’s pie and serve it out of Tupperware is a delight.  And third in our trinity of strong women is poise herself: Fiona Shaw.  As Eve’s MI6 boss, Shaw relishes every moment where she gets to steal the best line.  Which is all of the moments.  Also, special mention for the addition of David Haig as Bill, who, thanks to his role in The Thin Blue Line in 1995 I keep expecting to erupt about people fannying about.

So, watch Killing Eve.  It is murderous joy, with moments of darkness so unnecessary you’d expect it to disappear up its own arse.  But you’d be wrong, as it’s been Waller-Bridged.  We have humour throughout, with characters as equally capable of tracking an assassin across Europe as they are of squabbling over sharing croissants.  A bassline of banality allows its farfetchedness to seem more plausible, while the tension and the action will glue you to seat with the affirmation that you’re going to watch just one more episode (sure).  For me, it falls down as a prospectus for careers in assassination, but maybe series two, now airing in the US, will finally do the trick and persuade me.  You have been warned.

Tidying Up With Marie Kondo

When this show first appeared on Netflix, I was drawn to its trailer, teasing emotional reveals, personality transformations and an all-round better approach to living life.  However, I held off diving straight in, as it was all about tidying your own home, and I still didn’t have one.  The room I rent is large enough that I can leave socks on the floor and not come across them again for another week, allowing me to pursue the feast and famine approach to tidiness I cultivated during my year abroad in Germany, when renting an even larger room meant that possessions would go unnoticed for months at a time, as long as I could walk around them.  But the days of renting are soon to be behind me, with the purchase of my first flat progressing as fast as the dusty legal staff of a conveyancer up north can process my contracts (ie not very).  Next month, then, I will be a homeowner.  The socks I leave on the floor will be on my own actual floor.  My binary approach to tidying might in fact give way to fastidious house-pride.  With the torture of waiting to move almost over, I decided it was time for a tiny little Japanese lady to tell me how to put my socks away.

So, in Tidying Up With Marie Kondo, Netflix have taken on a best-selling author (our Marie) and given her a show (building on last week’s point about people who make telly probably making their next bit of telly on Netflix (Lunatics) – now people who do other things will be doing their next thing on… you guessed it, Netflix).  TV has a long heritage in telling us what to do.  BBC News coverage has focused in recent times on giving platforms to right-wing politicians.  We had the Supernanny, telling various spoiled brats that their behaviour was “not ’cceptable” when it was their weak parents she should have been punishing.  There was How Clean Is Your House?, hosted by Kim and Aggie as they sniffed people’s grease traps and got elbow deep in their u-bends (leading on to the seminal moment where Kim told someone on Celebrity Big Brother that she “wouldn’t sh*t on [them] if [they] were on fire.”)  And who can forget You Are What You Eat, where “Dr” Gillian McKeith had the audacity to tell people (in a Scottish accent) that they had produced “a poor excuse for a poo” while holding Tupperware filled with their crap.  But once we’ve cleaned our house, made the dinner and raised the bastard kids, who’s going to help us tidy up?  Enter Kondo.

The premise of the show is that Marie goes around a diverse array of American households (mostly within driving distance of LA) to help families whose possessions have begun to posses them.  From empty nesters to expectant parents, new couples transitioning to adulthood or a widow faced daily with her dead husband’s shirts, Marie shows them how to let go of the past and take with them into their future only what they need.  If you’re thinking this sounds like a trashy piece of daytime TV you might find on a channel aimed at women down the bottom of the EPG, then you’d be right.  It is.  But, somehow, with the Netflix name attached, it’s become essential viewing for conversation as an office drone.  Fair play to Kondo, though: without even bothering to learn English, she’s getting herself wheeled out to show us how to organise, fold and store the things we need to live life.

Each of the eight episodes (of surprisingly inconsistent length) unfolds along a certain formula.  Marie Kondo is depositing by a black people-mover in a neighbourhood, gasping whimsically as if she’s never seen a bloody house or pavement before, before trotting up to ring the bell.  Scurrying after her is her translator, Marie Iida.  Each time the door is opened to them, the Maries erupt into high-pitched exclaiming, that I assume is some sort of greeting, which the nervous families then mirror, resulting in the bulk of each show being made of grown adults squealing in doorways and hugging or shaking hands awkwardly.  But that bit somehow never gets tiring, and it’s always edited so you can’t really tell if Marie Iida has been completely ignored again, or if people have bothered to acknowledge the poor dear as an actual human being (with sick language skills).

Desperate for her help, everyone shows Marie Kondo round each nook and cranny of every closet and cupboard so she can judge their mess.  The worse it is, the more she squeaks.  She quite likes to climb in things too, and it’s at these moments you wonder if she isn’t really just taking the piss.  Things then get serious again as she goes through her house-greeting ceremony.  For someone quite jittery and polite, this attention-seeking rigmarole of kneeling on the floor with her eyes closed while everyone wonders how much stranger things will get seems oddly grand.  It’s most powerful when the families join in and realise that the homes whose mess is making their lives a misery are also abodes of fond memories, where they have raised kids and lived through happiness.  You may be touched.

And then off we go, getting out all the clothes (all of them!) to make a mountain of crap tops on a bed.  Marie tells her students to go through them one by one, thanking the ones they are letting go of, and keeping only those that spark joy.  Hopefully they don’t find themselves throwing out all their underpants, but we don’t see this bit as Marie skips off and leaves us all wondering if the family will ever be able to sleep now that their beds are covered in everything they’ve ever (or never) worn.  But I do like this bit – there is something to be said for purging clothes.  Not much is made of where everything ends up – are we talking a landfill, a public burning, or, as some episodes indicate, goodwill?  I’ve been known to go through all my clothes and get rid of anything I’ve not worn between moves, as this means I’m simply packing and unpacking something that serves no purpose.  I do feel guilty for the people in Age UK on Clapham High Street taking my poor style choices, but they have since sent handy emails telling me my unflattering chunky knits have netted £8.33 to stop an old lady from freezing to a switched-off radiator this winter.  Talk about sparking joy!

Over a few weeks, the families tackle everything in their homes, taken through each grouped stage by Marie’s regular visits.  They sort books, categorise papers and toss out toys.  One of the best lessons is number 4: Kimono.  I’m not sure why Japanese dressing gowns get their own category, but that doesn’t stop Marie.  In various interstitials, she talks us through her logic, and we read the subtitles while she whips out the Japanese, but I end up getting distracted when I consider how many syllables it takes to utter the ground-breaking tidying up tip: put things in boxes.  Just when you think a sentence is finished, about ten to twelve more spare vowel sounds tumble out from beneath her rigid fringe.

We crescendo into the reveal scenes at the end.  It’s not always easy to make a tidy wardrobe look like a massive transformation, but the show does its absolute best, all while Marie’s apprentices wax lyrical about their new approach to life.  The slip into hoarderhood is slow and gradual, and everyone seems grateful to have tidied their way out of it, with renewed focus on keeping things spic and span.  If I’m honest, I’ve always enjoyed folding clothes.  An old housemate once accused me of working in a shop while watching me fold my t-shirts, and I have in fact looked on enviously during ill-advised trips to Primark where various assistants wheel round mobile folding platforms to return civilisation to stacks of sweatshop-sewn sweaters that have been disordered by low-income rummaging and perhaps ravaging.  I don’t know; I don’t go in Primark anymore because I’m not a tourist visiting London.  But I do have a recurring dream that involves me putting my folded clothes back in drawers and hanging up shirts.  To dream is to be freed from every restriction that reality imposes, yet I can imagine that it’s only Marie and I whose brains take this liberty and use it to act out banal chores.

I’ll conclude by heroing the real star of the show: Marie Iida.  I’ve already touched on how awkwardly she is edited out, but when it comes to voicing over Marie’s recommendations, Iida’s disembodied vocals are what communicate the KonMari method to us.  Her robotic tone gives everything a stilted and tentative approach to the instructions, but, luckily, these are Americans, and their enthusiasm for not drowning in old crap (as well as their impeccable manners) means there is little forceful resistance to either of the Maries and their lessons.  It remains only for me to say that, yes, if this is how Netflix wants me to tidy my home, then, once I own my home, I will be obeying.  With every penny tied up in fees and the deposit, there won’t be many possessions to tidy, but I’m fairly sure I’ll be sparking joy all over the place.

Lunatics

If you’re a person who makes telly, and you’re going to make some more telly, the chances are that the new bit of telly you make will be on Netflix.  Everyone’s heading over there it seems.  Even Sir David Attenborough (and the tumbling walruses) of Our Planet.  What if my new obsession and national treasure, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, gets on the Flix with a follow-up to Fleabag?  Well, that would be fine, actually, as I have acceptable access to Netflix so consuming anything she ever does again won’t be a problem.  Though I have no idea what’s she doing next, but fingers crossed it involves being my best friend.  Anyway, this week, we are talking about Chris Lilley.  You’ll remember a popular blogpost of mine about Summer Heights High.  A lot of you read that one.  Sometimes barely anyone cares to hear my witterings (Disenchantment, 90210), sometimes everyone piles in (Shipwrecked, Love Island) and sometimes it’s somewhere in between, but then suddenly there are weird bursts of reading months or years later which I cannot account for (Bo’ Selecta!, F Is For Family).  What I’m getting around to saying is that my post about him seemed to gratify my constant need for attention, so let’s look at his new Netflix Original series as well (maybe it will get lots of life-affirming reads).

Weak as we know I am, the minute I spotted Lunatics I abandoned all prior commitments and dived into a world I hoped would be built from sick humour and spot-on human observations.  Let’s meet each lunatic in turn, noting that there is almost nothing linking them together (whereas the characters of Summer Heights High all attended or worked at the same hilarious school).  We are going in ascending order, from my least favourite to my most chucklesome.

Gavin McGregor

This lad is a monstrosity at the age of 12, but it’s clear his awful personality and paunch are both the results of spoiling by his parents.  Raised by YouTube and Instagram, he can speak only in social media phraseology, with most things being dope as f*ck.  Gavin has delusions of his current and future grandeur, trying to initiate sexual conquests with most females as a result of behaviour he is aping.  As a creation, he’s a damning indictment, and therefore unpleasant to watch.  His story arc is even less appealing, transported to England from Australia, where he is groomed by relatives to become the next Earl of Gayford (not a real place, not even a funny place) while corrupting his cousins.  I was distracted by trying to work out whether this was filmed on location in actual England, or just a wet, green bit of Australia.  I began to suspect accent inconsistency whilst working out if the grass looked Antipodean or not.

Keith Dick

Donning a goatee and horrible old-man pony, Lilley becomes Keith, a long-serving department store worker who opens his own fashion emporium.  While the business initially falters, Keith’s self-obsession prevents reality from dawning, as does his sexual preclusion for objects.  A vacuum cleaner and a cash register both come in for his unique love making, but you’ve got to admire his openness about his preferences.

Quentin Cook

I’m sensing a theme where each character is based on two jokes.  The first about Quentin is that he, and all the men in his family, have massive arses.  This is puerile, but that’s fine by me, especially when his bottom knocks things over.  He is a tacky real estate agent who, like Keith and Dick, is deluded about his talents in other areas, and I mean any other areas: art, music, DJing.  His parents’ blind support and favouritism add a subtler dimension, while you can enjoy the two actors playing his brothers adlibbing.  His rivalry with Harrison, an employee who is better than Quentin at everything, also sizzles well.

Jana Melhoopen-Jonks

Cue the jokes: she is Zimbabwean, she is a lesbian whose love for her assistant is unrequited, she is a pet psychic.  Only one of these, though, is a ridiculous thing to be.  Potentially the most fun to play, she lets Lilley laugh at the pretentions of those who provide pointless services to the stupidly wealthy, becoming stupidly wealthy in the process.  She also harbours all the character traits of humans who are obsessed with dogs, something I’ll never understand (note to other Tube users: get your hound’s wet nose off my fresh trainers).

Joyce Jeffries

The mock-ups of Chris Lilley as an adult film actress on the covers of Joyce’s VHSs are almost funny enough in their own right.  Joyce, in later life, has become a hoarder.  Her anguish at the loss of her father (and potentially at the hands of the porn industry) causes her struggle to deal with reality, using a whiteboard to illustrate other friends in her home that only she can see.  She is overall the most richly imagined, and we seem only to scratch the surface, but, deeper down, she is Chris Lilley rolling around and showing off in women’s clothes while we watch.  We can all enjoy that.

Becky Douglas

There are two things that made me love this character.  She becomes a YouTuber, specialising in craft: pointless, ghastly craftwork voiced over with excessive enthusiasm.  Having watched hours of CookieSwirlC unboxing LOL Dolls with my niece, I believe there is a special place in aural hell for these people, and Lilley captures their inanity perfectly.  Secondly, she pursues boys with clearly no interest in her.  Lilley plays the fawning, hair-twirling, hint-ignoring determination with full dexterity.  And this is no mean feat when Becky’s biggest quirk is her big legs, causing her to be seven foot three and get her hair stuck in ceiling fans.

It’s a motley crew, then.  Do we root for them, or are we laughing at their misfortune?  It’s called Lunatics, though: a pejorative term of the past denoting those with mental health issues.  For some of the episodes, the humour veers dangerously close to mocking others’ emotional and physical differences.  As Joyce’s eviction looms, her panic’s urgency piques and elicits genuine sympathy, yet each moment is still played for laughs.

Criticism of Lunatics has compared it to a cheap freakshow that redeems itself only inasmuch as a token effort requires, with a final episode of relatively happy endings.  I, for one, am torn.  An awakening is occurring in how we treat those whose brains work differently to ours.  While my department is predominantly jazz-handsing attention seekers, we are actively recruiting for brain diversity.  In wider society, we are welcoming open conversations about mental health, rather than pointing, laughing and locking away.  In this context, then, these character creations feel at times insensitive.  I’m all for bad taste and believe humour can genuinely be found in anything, but my view would be that Lilley is capable of more than simple cruelty.  We just shouldn’t have to look so hard for it.

Make your own mind up.  I’m taking it in the vein of what he is known for: dressing up in silly costumes, letting the cameras roll and showing off.  To borrow the improper term, each lunatic is simply looking to be accepted for who they are.  And this makes us all lunatics.

Disenchantment

It’s happened again: I’ve succumbed to a cartoon on Netflix.  Though this wasn’t that recent.  A few months back, I found myself clicking play on episode after episode of Disenchantment.  But I can hear my dear reader(s) asking: why am I talking about it now?  Well, it’s vaguely linked to fantasy-based medieval kingdoms with dragons and that.  For a blog about TV shows, the fact that I’ve not really mentioned the highlight of our televisual lives so far can’t have gone unnoticed (unless you’re just dipping in for the shows you actually watch and not indulging my ramblings about things you haven’t seen – the requirement is that you read everything).  I had mighty plans for Game Of Thrones, let me tell you.  Breaking with precedent (93 posts and counting) I was going to cover each series individually, giving me the perfect excuse to re-watch all seven existing seasons (which would be my third time doing this – cool).  Alas, I am no longer in a Sky household however, so each Monday while series eight premiers is characterised by me rushing around London trying to get invited round to friends’ houses to avail myself of their Now TV or (ideally HD) Sky packages.  Today I took four different buses to Fulham and back.

I was supposed to be in my own flat by this point.  I had dreams of returning to Westeros on a massive sofa in front of a 55” telly, but I’ve not moved into My First Newbuild yet, as lawyers are not only doing nothing, they are doing it at their contractually glacial pace.  So, while I’m still in my final rental, with nothing but somebody else’s Netflix account for company while I save my final pennies for furniture, cutlery and a washing machine, I might as well cash in on Thrones fever by talking this week about something that is a bit to do with it.

Disenchantment is to fantasy what The Simpsons were to real life and what Futurama was to science fiction: animated irreverence.  Uniting all three is my hero and the owner of a surname I’m still not really sure how to pronounce: Matt Groening.  Whether he’d have wanted to or not, this man had a hand in my upbringing, such was the influence of his humour on me at an impressionable age (0 to 34).  Luckily, he didn’t have an effect on my appearance, as so many of his characters have horrendous overbites.  That said, I did require orthodontics to fix my own overbite, but this was never horrendous.  It was initially grotesque and now it is nearly moderate.

Instead of Westeros, then, we have Dreamland, a ye olde fantastical kingdom, ruled by a king in a castle.  Through the eyes of our heroine, we join a complex network of political structures.  But while treaties with neighbouring kingdoms or giants might be inconsistent and rocky at best, Princess Bean’s sure-fire ability to make a hash of most things is a very reliable way to create the perfect plot device, ensuring hilarity ensues in each episode.  Voiced by my beloved Abbi Jacobson of Broad City, Bean prefers drinking to all other princess-ly duties.  Goading her in this misdemeanour is a black cat-like demon whose possession of her spirit signifies a sort of adolescent willingness to do the wrong thing.  Funnier than him, though, is Elfo, a little green elf who is picked up into the trinity of pals along the way, and voiced by Nat Faxon of Friends From College.  As the elfin punching bag for all punchlines and physical comedy alike, Elfo’s interminable cheeriness proves a worthy foil to the constant fantasy peril in which our three leads find themselves.

Each instalment is a standalone adventure, though there does seem to be progression towards various landmarks in Bean’s life and Dreamland’s existence.  The realisation of a fantasy world varies, seeming at points incredibly rich such as when they voyage to the damp realms of Dankmire, and at other junctures shallow and only serving a purpose of pay-off for some joke or other.  Similarly, there are moments of animation touched by true artfulness, such as every establishing shot of King Zøg’s castle, and others which look like the creative direction was running out of time.

The misadventure, however, plods along from mildly amusing to oh-so-clever.  Untapped reserves for future mining spring up everywhere, from the various elves of Elfo’s home village, such as Kissy (who kisses), and the fact that Bonnie Prince Derek, Bean’s half-brother, is completely emo.  This is because the territory is fecund and therefore ripe for parody, mostly through shooting fish in a barrel rather than needing to do anything truly original.  Either way, it adds up to a pretty smart watch, leading me to the conclusion that you probably can’t go wrong with a cartoon on Netflix.  There are so many more stages in animation when compared to filming live action; I imagine that this means there are more opportunities for someone to decide the whole thing is bollocks and stop or improve the production.  A second, longer series is greenlit and the security of that acceptance should provoke bolder humour and bring the seminal achievements of Groening’s other canon within closer grasp.  It won’t fill any Game Of Thrones holes in your life, but you may well enjoy a couple of funnies while your beloved characters are brutally killed off.