You’ve Been Framed

So here we are, getting into the second century of posts on Just One More Episode.  Sadly, we’re not able to celebrate the storming success of the historic hundredth post last week (Dark) because hardly a badger has read it.  Whether people are put off by it being in German or if they’ve simply had enough of me talking about myself, we’ll never know.  But it does give us a chance to search our souls in order to understand the purpose of this loose collection of prosaic ramblings.  Mostly, it’s to tell people about good telly that I think they should watch (apart from when I accidentally watched all of Altered Carbon and slagged it off).  Navigating the world of boxsets requires confidence and peer permission, so I’m prepared to go boldly and check these episodes are worth your limited viewing time.  But sometimes, we stop off to indulge ourselves in the shared experience of a culturally significant programme, despite there being no special occasion to warrant it any additional relevance (leading to the suspicion I just choose shows at random – I mostly do).  I’ve discussed Friends and University Challenge at times when, like now, everyone is watching Love Island, so if you’re looking for method to this madness, you’ll only leave disappointed.  However, if what you need is an irreverent rundown of a hilarious home video show that’s been on our screens since 1990, then let’s get started.  Readers, I give you You’ve Been Framed.

“But, why now?” I hear nobody asking.  I’ll admit to the occasional moment of telly switch-on (typically a weeknight after aggressively commuting home, swapping work clothes for slacks, plating up enough food for a family of four that I intend to eat alone, and sinking into the sofa) and, before I can hit the Netflix button that my duty as a Millennial compels me to do, I end up catching a few moments of ITV2.  If I’ve made it to zone 2 early enough (and we can judge this by the trail of dead bodies I have left in my wake on the Victoria Line), I might just catch a repeat of You’ve Been Framed.  It feels dirty: the grainy picture quality, the low-cost format, the canned audience chortle.  But, without fail, I will laugh out loud.  Recently, we tested this theory in the office.  A debate on the show’s various presenters preceded my department’s captain YouTubing some clips from YBF’s 1998 vintage.  It may have been the giddiness of impending first-time fatherhood, but more likely it was the joyous silliness of people taking leave of their common sense on videotape that had him howling with hysterics and encouraging the rest of us to gather round and share in the mirth.  People really just are a bit stupid.  I’ve talked before of the importance of silliness (Miranda) but while its consequences can be dangerous (proven by things such as Brexit, the climate crisis and Boris Johnson), they can also be harmless and entertaining.

Let’s revisit some of the top categories of human silliness that You’ve Been Framed celebrates so successfully in this non-exhaustive list of the things we can expect to see:

Fat person doing something they oughtn’t

In order to cope with the elephant in the room (which is normally them) fat people don’t like their obesity to be mentioned constantly.  But this can sometimes lead to a denial of the basic laws of physics.  Oh I’ll just balance on this plastic bench despite being 25 stone.  Oh I’ll just hang off this rope swing despite my 48 inch waste.  Oh I’ll just try out this child’s bike despite wearing size XXXL jeans.  By the dictates of gravity, they as an object exert a force on the item onto which they have heaved their hulking mass.  Cue snapping materials and the payoff of a bouncy bouncy landing.

Geriatric about to stack it on a wedding dancefloor

Let’s continue this tirade against marginalised groups, moving from the overweight to the elderly.  There’s Aunty Pat giving it some swing at Steve and Beverley’s reception, shaking her skirts and shimmying out of time to generic Disco Dave fodder.  She’s pulling faces to the camera, really going for it with the showing off.  But the parquet flooring has just been polished and her slingbacks’ grip has worn down.  Over she goes, comedically obliterating her hip in the name of a good time.  Bonus points for pulling a tablecloth down with her, or for her dentures flying out.

Child-based collisions

They have so much energy, racing about the garden chasing dogs or riding bikes, until, bam, they’ve smashed into any available obstacle.  Luckily, these children all seem to have rubbery qualities, which is just as well as their care-givers normally can’t do much else but laugh at them.  My dad, too, always seemed especially enamoured by children falling over.

Awful American brats

Bolstering the British public’s lack of hilarious content (and the fact that even £250 cash can’t overcome our reservation about looking like a silly sausage on national TV) the USA has produced enough home video howlers in our mother tongue that we can mix in seamlessly.  A highlight is always toddler Brandon, overshadowed by a mountain of Christmas gifts, telling his poor mugs of parents that he didn’t want whatever plastic tat they have lavished on him.  Sadly, though, this isn’t an acerbic comment on consumerism from our Brandon, but a damning indictment concerning the inhumanity of spoiling your children.

I could go on, but I’m sure we’ve all got our own favourite categories.  What I need to leave time for is the special ingredient that could make or break an episode of You’ve Been Framed: the host.  For the first seven years, early nineties TV darling Jeremy Beadle was our introduction to thematically linked montages of people’s pratfalls.  Bizarrely, a studio audience gathered to witness a man show them videos, which must have resulted in many disappointed coach trip passengers voyaging up to that there London for some culture.  But these were more innocent times, and this was must-watch telly.  But it was, if I remember correctly, broadcast too late on a Sunday evening for me at the young ages of five, six and so on.  Besides, Sunday night in our household was hair-wash night.  Mum would get the bucket (the same one that was fetched if either of us threatened to vomit due to illness) and deftly wash the Johnson’s Baby Shampoo off us while we grew up in a household that hadn’t yet been able to afford installing a shower.  I would cry, whether or not my eyes stung, simply because I wanted to watch a goateed man introduce funny videos, occasionally escalating my protest to weeing in the bath, knowing full well my older sister would be up for her hair wash next and using the same water.

Beadle (RIP) retired from VHS duties in 1997 (though I know Beadle’s About had been another vehicle for his comedy – too young to understand the concept, I thought the joke was that he simply hid from people while having their cars vandalised).  The show’s producers needed a new anchor and, naturally, got in Mandy Dingle off of Emmerdale.  Our opening credits now showed a moo-moo-clad Lisa Riley greeting CGI video cassettes like they were her pals before reeling off scripted intros while everyone just waited for the clips to play.  Things felt tired, and this failed to change when Jonathan Wilkes took the helm in 2003.  Yes, I know we had all forgotten about him.  He was brought into the public eye because he was Robbie Williams’ pal and that was enough for a music/media career in those days.  He seemed like a nice bloke, but I have literally no recollection of any of his output.  Sadly, we are reminded of Robbie Williams much more regularly.

In 2004, someone had a stroke of genius.  They got rid of the studio audience and the links between the clips, as these got in the way of the clips themselves.  Instead, the videos were enhanced by irreverent voiceover, specifically, the imaginative stylings of Harry Hill.  Much less annoying without his visual of big collar and wide eyes, Harry’s tone leant itself well to everything, and suddenly the most mundane video moments were elevated by his hatred of white plastic garden furniture, or by referring to every fat man as John Prescott and every fat woman as Anne Widdecombe.  It was a magic formula: a higher density of money shots, with the set up to each improved with humour that was a touch more intelligent than the slapstick we tune in for.  Fifteen years later, we still can’t get enough.

Granted, nobody bursts into the office demanding: “Did anyone watch You’ve Been Framed last night?”  They’d be laughed out of their skinny jeans.  But it does indeed remain a show to unite the family.  My niece can squeal at the cute animals, while my dad can indulge his adoration of Child-Based Collisions.  The pointing and laughing are guilt-free, as each clip nets someone £250, so we can assume they’ve volunteered to share their mishap with the nation.  YBF allows my parents to indulge their love of considering everyone but themselves to be idiots (which, regular readers will notice, especially this week, that that’s an apple that hasn’t fallen far from the tree), and my mum will look up from the ironing to issue a caustic “silly arse” if she considers anyone’s potential life-changing injury to be self-inflicted.  It’s not a glossy boxset with A-list actors, nor is it some hidden gem that will earn you kudos among the office intelligentsia.  But let’s take a moment to laugh at people falling over, as long as Harry Hill provides the commentary.  I defy you to watch an episode and not laugh out loud.  And we could all use more laughs, couldn’t we?

Dark (Dunkel)

Yes, everybody, here we are: the hundredth post of Just One More Episode.  When I started this blogging business about two years ago, I had high hopes for the unprecedented and life-changing success it would bring me.  My content would be syndicated on national news sites, I’d be an in-demand podcast guest, maybe even a talking head on some sort of Channel 5 schedule-filling tat about the top 50 moments on TV when someone fell over.  Needless to say, none of that has happened.  I’m still a professional email-typer and open-plan office-dweller.  People do shout at me now across the vestibule occasionally though, proclaiming to like my blog while walking off in the other direction.  More often than not, they talk of having seen my promotion of the blog and take pains to tell me they haven’t read it.  So that’s good.  At least the half-hearted Instagram account has eight followers.  And there was the lady in New Zealand who really like my tweets about Bromans.  Even my life hasn’t changed that much – still an eternal renter while I await a completion date on my (a lot of) Help To Buy newbuild flat.  My solicitors are busy being ineffective.  But this isn’t about the banal details of my actual life (it mostly is), but about good telly.  So, what show merits the accolade of taking this blog into triple digits?  Dark.

Dark has probably haunted your Netflix menu persistently over the years.  Its lead image, a yellow-cagouled figure disappearing into a verdant cave, promises mystery and intrigue, but its position among so much else competing for your attention makes it a hard choice to pursue.  I chose to watch it because it’s in German and, I don’t know if I’ve mentioned, but my education culminated in me achieving near-native fluency in that language (as well as a passable ability to understand the odd word in French rap songs).  That reason is also significant enough in my life that I’ve picked this programme to occupy the position of blogpost number 100.  I don’t suppose this has been an appealing factor for a lot of you, especially as Dark seems, at first glance, to be a synthesis of many other shows.  The motif of a brightly coloured item of clothing brings to mind Jean’s anorak in fellow European fare, The Rain.  Making a wet and rainy climate look cinematic places it broadly in a league with The End Of The F***ing World.  The setting of a single town gripped by strangeness reminded me of The Returned (Les Revenants).  And finally, that strangeness of course draws comparison with Stranger Things.

Question: is Dark just a German Stranger Things?  Answer: a little bit, but it’s more than that.  I’ve recently been taking pains to point out to my intermittent readers that Just One More Episode doesn’t reveal any spoilers.  I’m careful not to let slip anything more than can be seen in a show’s trailer or basic synopsis in a TV guide.  There’s always enough inanity that you can share in the pure joy of my self-indulgent prose, even if you’ve had better things to do with your time than watch, for example, Riverdale or Jack Whitehall: Travels With My Father.  What becomes clear very early on is that Winden has a problem with missing children (a bit like Hawkins in Stranger Things). Episode one is a triumph in weaving together a cast of characters big enough to populate a whole town (because it’s basically the whole town), giving you enough about their past and present relationships to hook you in, and then setting up the jeopardy that starts us off from one riddle to the next.

Accompanying the furrowed brows of all these actors is a soundtrack that chimes in specifically to heighten the tension.  It has the rhythm of stomach rumbles, reminding you to concentrate on what’s unfolding before you: something important is about to be unearthed.  You can tell what type of thriller this is by whether people say thanks and goodbye at the end of phone calls.  They don’t.  A real-life chat typically concludes with a series of byes and see yous but, in Dark, the receiver simply drops from the actor’s face, while their expression conveys contemplation and mystery as they stare into the middle distance.  You might find yourself looking similarly vacant when a whole new cast appears in episode three.  A crucial element of Dark’s ambition (without giving away anything about its story) is that the action unfolds on three temporal planes, with the third instalment taking us to 1986 for the first time (cue nostalgia satisfaction for Stranger Things fans then…)

But let’s move on from that, before I inadvertently reveal more than I ought.  Each time the world of Winden expands, the quality of the drama prevents any dilution of your commitment.  Any ultimate resolution to Dark’s mysteries only ever seems further away, with each step towards it unlocking further nuggets to solve, yet there is no frustration, just intrigue.  You might, however, wonder why it rains so often and so heavily.  The cast are almost always soaked.  Maybe it’s to do with the imposing presence of the town’s nuclear power plant.  For fans of GCSE German among you, enjoy yourselves listening out for mentions of the Atomkraftwerk, essential vocabulary from the environment chapter of any language textbook memorised by people in their early thirties now, as part of a curriculum-bending effort to stop pollution by knowing how to talk about it in a foreign language.  Not sure that’s worked then, as the sea is full of your crisp packets (Blue Planet II) and the climate crisis rages (Our Planet).  Either way, pray the planet lasts until June 21^st when series two of Dark is promised to us by our Netflix overlords.  Don’t worry about the rising oceans giving you damp socks though; catch up on series one now and the whole thing will feel like an interactive experience as you view each rain-drenched scene with your own wet ankles.

Years And Years

Sometimes watching TV can be torture.  Granted, it often comes with the accompanying sentiment that you could be doing something better with your time: connecting with family members, perhaps, or making a difference in your community by volunteering to help those in need.  Once you’ve quashed those feelings by persuading yourself that you’ve worked hard enough all week and you’re perfectly entitled to exist inertly on the sofa while images are beamed into your head for the purpose of entertainment though, it’s the content on that hypnotising and paralysing screen that can cause untold pain.  Whether it’s the bodies on Love Island that you will never have, or the bright young things who are already better than you on University Challenge, the sought-after escapism can sometimes give way to unavoidable introspection, leading to an analysis of your reality that makes you feel worse than you did when you popped the telly on.  Enter, then, Years And Years.

An evening peak drama of course has the artistic license to fabricate a world where things happen that are more interesting than daily life.  Downton Abbey mixed ye olde moral compass with the foibles of servant management.  Line Of Duty poses the question: what if all those coppers are bent?  Either way, they offer distance from our humdrum existences, making the characters’ often terrible experience seem exciting and diverting.  Conversely, Years And Years can only fill its audience with dread.  Its narrative device?  It’s set a little bit in the future.  Not quite the virtual reality-dominated future of Black Mirror where attaching little metallic discs to your temple is all you need to enter wholly into an alternative reality.  No, we’re talking a few months’ away.  Things that might happen next year, and the year after, and then, as a result, a few years after that as well.

Why would this be so terrifying?  Two things: not actually knowing what will happen and fearing that the worst-case scenario will win out over the best.  And it’s so near that it’s not a single future that’s been imagined and will affect subsequent generations.  It’s what we ourselves might have to go through as our lives progress.  2019 headlines veer from climate crisis to Brexit farce via alt-right resurgence, neoliberal inequality and the rejection of truth in favour of malleable feeling.  Our future is not looking bright, it’s looking orange (if there’s more Trump and that).  Weathering this onslaught of one thing after the other, our everyman Lyons family boldly goes where a pessimistic media has long predicted we will all end up.

But the Lyons aren’t like most families.  This is because they talk on the phone in group chats all the time.  My own family mostly communicates by a Whatsapp group I set up a few years back.  In it, my sister and parents coordinate my niece’s schedule of educational and extra-curricular activities, my niece herself hijacks the group to use all the emojis at once or to leave voicenotes of her wailing comically, and my mum plumbs new depths of autocorrect mayhem that I am now expert at deciphering.  Conversely, the Lyons, who are split into the five constituent units of four adult siblings and their grandmother, chat through their latest news, pass comment on the world around them and pursue passive-aggressive banter.  In the first example of future technological advancement, they do all this through the voice-activated Signor service, a kind of Alexa-type gadget that actually seems to serve a purpose.

Now, if you thought I was going to make a comment on the family’s diversity, you can get off now.  The Lyons’ ticking of every box in this area might be a socially conscious casting director’s wet dream, but each Lyon is so much more than an exercise in representation, even though their very visibility on screen is significant to communities that don’t always see themselves reflected in their own entertainment.  If, along the way, even some viewers move beyond seeing people as categories and instead view them as individuals, then it can’t hurt for Years And Years to avail itself of the full spectrum of human potential.  So, who are these Lyons onto whom the near future is projected?

Our grand-matriarch comes in the form of Anne Reid (a favourite from dinnerladies), providing a lens on the encroaching of the future into family life that has both the confusion and the liberal attitude of old age.  Rory Kinnear is Stephen Lyons, the settled wealthier son, husband and dad of two, contrasting with his sister, Edith, who has been off around the world on moral missions (played by Jessica Hynes, whose amazing performance as Cheryl in The Royle Family I am currently reliving to great joy).  Feisty younger sister Rosie, meanwhile, succumbs to a more reflexive response to the events that engulf the family, while Danny Lyons, played by Russell Tovey (who should be in more, if not all, things) has a more idealistic approach to the ensuing calamity.

And calamity is what does ensue.  Each episode is interspersed with a number of montages that take us through the course of time, showcasing the family birthdays that mark each passing year as we journey into 2020 and the decade beyond.  Sound-tracked by a choir singing, this change of pace propels us into disaster each time – so much so, in fact, that you begin to dread its every appearance.  I now have a phobia of choirs singing, as they herald bad things.  Inhumane legislation creeps in, international tensions escalate, environments are plundered and, throughout, the British media and public make multiple catastrophic decisions.  Punctuating each of these current affairs round-ups is Emma Thompson (as if the cast weren’t already strong enough), having the time of her life as Vivienne Rook, some sort of Lady Farage (yet, here’s a lie) whose emergent and morally ambiguous political party gradually grows from a fringe movement to a mainstream force for wrong (ring any bells?).

Not only is there the human drama of the Lyons, then, with arguments, infidelity and deep-rooted resentment, but this is compounded by the consequences of the future’s news.  And the nature of compounding, is that it happens over and over (like in The Mandibles by Lionel Shriver).  Each montage screws them more than the one before, and in every area of their lives: employment, freedom, healthcare, housing, human rights etc.  Very occasionally, the relation of this back to the storyline is a touch wedged: some clunking lines swing in overhead to set out the wider political context.  Parts of the technological advancement also tip things unnecessarily from thought-provoking drama to science fiction fantasy, but there’s no reason a TV show can’t be both.  Whatever this is, it’s wildly entertaining, if you can stand the torture.  We’re not yet through all six episodes, but you always know something bad is going to happen, just like with the future in real life.  I’m pinned into my sofa at each viewing on BBC iPlayer and almost crumble under the tension of every time-accelerating montage – here we go again… to oblivion.  It really is potluck who will make it through each episode.  Just like it’s potluck who’ll make it through our real future.

The Royle Family

After so many posts harping on about national treasures in the world of telly (Fleabag, Nighty Night, Chewing Gum), I’m prompted this week to consider the national treasures we have lost.  British summer seems at last to have remembered that it’s June and, judging by my back sweat as I sit on this Sunday morning train home to London from an idyllic seaside wedding in Kent, this better weather may indeed seem at odds with the somewhat hibernal nature of the show in the title of this week’s offering.  But indulge me the lack of seasonality; we’ve covered nearly a hundred shows here so perfect alignment to the cultural calendar isn’t always possible or interesting (to me).  In fact, continuing with the theme of writing more about myself than the shows in question, it’s the loss of a personal treasure that has influenced me here.  But don’t worry: it would be fairly uncharacteristic of me to display genuine emotion, so you’ll just need to bear with me as I segue clunkily from a death in the family to irreverent commentary on a sitcom from a few years back.  I mean, yes, even that sentence was clunky, wasn’t it?

We’ll start with the theme tune.  For us in our late twenties and early thirties, Oasis sound-tracked our coming of age.  In fact, last night’s wedding culminated in the bride and groom held aloft on the shoulders of pals, Don’t Look Back In Anger blaring out from the booth of a DJ only slightly disgruntled that a drunken pal had spilled drinks on one of his lights (which he then mopped up with a cushion) and with raucously caterwauled backing vocals provided by a choir of prosecco-fuelled Millennials playing at being adults, a moment as aspirationally instagrammable as it was beautiful in real life.  But beyond this band’s best-known hits, Half The World Away sticks out, not for being any less anthemic, but for its subtle pain teamed with muted comfort.  And thus, Noel Gallagher’s voice brings us each episode into the world of the Royles of Manchester.

I am bound to confess that my household missed out on The Royle Family during its initial broadcasts on BBC2 in 1998.  As northern as gravy on everything, the show failed to appeal to my southern clan’s Surrey ways.  These people were unemployed, so what interest could we have in their lives?  While their working classness was there to be celebrated, my parents had striven all their lives to project middle class temperaments at every encounter: for example, I wasn’t supposed to watch Grange Hill in case I picked up on their examples of poor speech.  It was only during my year abroad that a dear friend sourced and shared the DVDs.  I’ve previously talked of how, at the time, daily viewings of dinnerladies provided an essential link back to Blighty (before it was an embarrassing place to be from when in Europe), but once we had completed both series, it was The Royle Family that stepped up to offer us respite from all the Vollkornbrot posturing and Umsteigemöglichkeiten announcements.

Our premise is a family sitting on their sofas watching TV.  In many ways, then, an accurate reflection of my own family’s time spent together.  But while we literally ate crumpets for Sunday tea while watching (and bloody loving) Just William, the Royles seem to sit around watching any old thing.  But unlike the showing off of Gogglebox, these viewers’ charm came from their subtlety.  Instead of sweeping statements for shock value, or trying to look good with a pre-practised opinion, the Royles gave us a rawer realism, a more honest reflection of life on the British settee: flatulence, bickering about who makes the tea, gossiping about neighbours and selfish channel-hopping.  Yet, through that, the affection was irresistible, and its identifiability therefore transcended all factors of class and region.

The highs and lows, and the overall below averageness of the Royles made us fall in love with them, accepting them and all their unwashed clothing, nose-picking and toilet talk.  Patriarch Jim of course had the best seat in the house, selected for its unbeatable view of the small screen: a policy repeated in lounges the country over.  Meanwhile, at his side, Sue Johnston’s scrunchy-wearing Barbara perfectly captured that classic mum behaviour of getting very tired after doing what always seemed like not very much (at least to us as kids – I now know that all adult life is peerlessly exhausting), reclining deep in the sofa’s cushioning, her neck barely supporting the weight of her own head, while making sure every visitor had had their tea.  Coming and going was awkward teen our Antony, sent unfairly to the shop for any errand, before growing into a driven young man, much to the surprise of his own parents.

Propelling gentle plots forwards was eldest daughter Denise, played by the show’s creator and writer, national treasure Caroline Aherne.  Her relationship with, then engagement to long-term collaborator Craig Cash as Dave, who goes on to become her husband and the father of her children, generated the drama, if any.  From their spats to the eventual wedding, and in particular, the birth of their first child, crescendoing in a post-broken waters bathroom scene between father and daughter that I esteem to be one of the most accurate portrayals of British parental love ever committed to TV (much like Tim and Dawn’s romance in The Office is the most accurate portrayal of romantic love).  Fair enough, Denise does go on to display a lean-back approach to parenting and later claims that Christmas isn’t really for kids, but you wouldn’t expect much else from someone whose idea of dinner is Dairylea on toast.  And, more importantly, Baby David (or, rather, Dabry Babid) joins a family that love him no matter what.

Sadly, we lost Aherne in 2016.  From her first appearances in The Fast Show, declaring the weather to be scorchio or commenting on customers’ shopping as a garrulous checkout girl, her contribution to national comedy celebrated with laser-sharp observation the silliest things about us.  In addition, The Royle Family featured another lost national treasure.  Liz Smith inhabited the role of Nana Royle as comfortably as she sank into the cushions of her family’s well-used and well-worn sofa, a crafty foil to son-in-law Jim, but a source of grandmaternal comfort to all who sat beside her in that front room.  I could bawl now just thinking of the episode where Nana Royle passes away.  The loss was so touching in its normality that it felt all the more painful.  Understandably, the nation mourned again when Smith retired from the comedy of life at the age of 95, also in 2016.

And so, back to me, everybody.  A matter of days short of ninety, my mum’s last, yet much older, sister died peacefully in hospital.  She hadn’t been out of her nursing home bed in six years and never had any teeth in the whole 34 years during which I had the pleasure of knowing her, yet she was always cheerful and would never say no to a Jelly Baby (in fact, she would actively request them).  Steering clear of an excessive bout of sentiment, I won’t dwell on the grief of losing a personal treasure.  For the first time, I no longer have an elderly relative who needs visiting in an old people’s home, which means my sister and I will have to give up one of our favourite hobbies: speculating on the origins of brown stains on the ceilings (my sister: “that’s not coffee”).  This blog isn’t going to make a huge contribution to how we process grief, but whether it’s your Auntie Yvonne or Nana Royle, cherishing happy memories will always bring more than lamenting loss.  I don’t have a sitcom I can re-watch to reconnect with my aunt as I can with Aherne and Smith, but I can replay recollections of her telling me I had grown bigger, despite me being over 30.  And the smile that brings will have to be enough.