Green Wing

This week, I’m returning to work after two weeks on holiday.  While being on vacation is moderately preferable to sitting in an office, I’m counting my blessings that I’m not going down some terrible coal mine or making thousands of flat whites as a barista.  Sitting and typing emails isn’t really that taxing, so I’ve no need to dread my return to corporate life.  But I’m sparing a thought for my friends that have trained in medicine.  I’ve heard many of their tales of junior doctor shifts, seen them uprooted across the country with each rotation and laughed and cried while reading Adam Kay’s This Is Going To Hurt.  Now the NHS is being smashed and grabbed over as befits the run-up to any British election.  On holiday in the US, my hotel TVs (in between impeachment proceedings) were filled with vile ads for various niche drugs and their side effects.  Which has all got me thinking about hospitals.  But, as we can’t take anything seriously here, we’re hitting up a fantastic comedy whose two seasons (starting back in 2004) have always made me smile: Green Wing.

I had planned to go through each of the main characters, but Wikipedia lists 13 of these, plus some key recurring roles, and I’m running out of time before Seven Worlds, One Planet.  So, instead, I’m going to pick out my favourites from the madcap population that staffs East Hampton Hospital.

Harriet Schulenberg

Played by Olivia Colman (who’s now sporting the crown in The, er, Crown) Harriet is a bastion of the HR department whose every day of attendance is a miracle in spite of her four kids and unhappy marriage, to say nothing of her actual performance when finally seated at her desk.  Colman perfectly captures the chaos that can ensue when lots of small, dirty children are involved: cardigans constantly slipping off, school projects being crafted while ferrying offspring around extra-curriculars.  I never cease to be impressed by the parents in my office who, after each day, raise little people in their homes while I just lie on the sofa, only to be kept up by these same precious mites when they have the sniffles or start vomiting.  Yet they often manage to come in the next day fully composed.  Harriet is so cleverly observed and amplified that she has a universal quality in reflecting the edge of madness where working parents exist.  It’s not all bad though: you can leave the office at any time just by saying you have to pick your kids up.  I often pop off, claiming to be fetching children from somewhere, and nobody is allowed to question me.  But, secretly, I don’t have any offspring.

Sue White

East Hampton’s staff liaison officer demonstrates demonic behaviour in every scene, whether alone in her office up to no good, or torturing the staff whose concerns she is meant to soothe.  This was another occasion when I fell in love with Michelle Gomez (last seen in Chilling Adventures Of Sabrina) who clearly enjoys the madcap glint in her eye she is able to maintain throughout.  Of note is her ability to prevent all protest at her treatment of others, relying on British politeness and surprise at ill-behaviour in a way that’s similar to my hero, Jill Tyrell, in Nighty Night.

Guy Secretan

Stephen Mangan now performs 99% of all TV advert voiceover work, but his performance of the supercilious anaesthesiologist, always second fiddle to the much cooler Mac, made him a household favourite.  Every workplace needs a gaffman, and Dr Guy Secretan’s belief in his own half-Swiss importance can outgaff the gaffiest of them.

Caroline Todd

The newcomer through whom we navigate the sketch-show-esque world of East Hampton, Caroline is our everyman at an asylum full of medical professionals.  While she’s as neurotic as the rest of us, her foibles pale in comparison to those around her.  You can’t help but love Tamsin Greig throughout, even when she is having a strong adverse reaction to Angela Hunter.  There’s a GIF of Caroline typing wildly that I still use in work presentations most weeks, so she’s a gift (a GIF-t – get it?) that keeps on giving.

Angela Hunter

Sarah Alexander again nearly flies under the radar here (a perennially underappreciated national treasure of comedy acting), but this character is always one of the most enjoyable.  Excessively cheery and seemingly perfect, her colleagues’ response to her is always reassuring, including Caroline Todd’s irrational dislike.

Joanna Clore

I could go through the whole of the HR department here, but my final mention is for its head, played by Pippa Haywood.  A woman of a certain age, she doesn’t care what others might make of her brusque attitude and major mood swings.  You can’t beat an angry senior woman at work.  Senior men rightly cower from them leaving everyone else the chance to get on with stuff.

There are too many more to mention.  Even the deliciously named Martin Dear hasn’t made my list (despite his name encapsulating everything about his character perfectly).  I’ll stop once to mention Alan Statham though.  I have to confess that he was my least favourite and I never looked forward to his scenes coming around.  He is just so snivelling and conniving that my skin crawls every time I even think of him.  But one out of 13 ain’t bad, especially as there’s a great deal else to love about this sketch show-cum-sitcom-cum-comedy drama-cum-hospital show.  And that’s a lot of cums in this genre-splicing format.  Green Wing will forever remain welcome in our homes – we just need a political party to pledge in their manifesto that they are committed to bringing it back (and not shafting the actual NHS).

Seven Worlds, One Planet

Attenborough is back, and the BBC’s decision to schedule him in that Sunday evening slot makes drawing viewers as easy as shooting fish in a barrel.  However, shooting fish in a barrel is unethical and, probably, environmentally unsound, which means I am already making bad choices with metaphors and it’s only the second sentence of this week’s post.  If I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here can get with the times and acknowledge that insects shouldn’t be eaten alive for our entertainment, especially when the people eating them haven’t had proper telly careers for ages, then I can at least show our planet the respect that Seven Worlds, One Planet is very clear it deserves.  And by very clear, I mean smacking you in the face with it over and over throughout a single hour of television.  We’re at the height, here, of what TV can achieve.  Combining wildlife photography that easily stuns even the most soporific post-roast Sunday-evening eyeball into wholeheartedly acknowledging that everything ever on Earth is a miracle with undeniable demonstration of humans’ denigration of those miracles for our own gain, surely this programme will deliver the watershed moment where mankind stops it and tidies up?  (It being environmental naughtiness).

We all know something needs to happen, but our every subsequent action betrays a compromise of that truth.  I’m currently crawling through Connecticut on a train to Boston.  To reach the US, I generated a load of carbon emissions, but I’ll need to cross the Atlantic again by air to get back, so I already know I’ll be adding some more emissions.  I’m sorry.  Today’s been light on the old single-use plastics, yet I do have a bundle of garbage (American for rubbish) to throw in the trashcan (American for bin) when I reach my destination.  I’m sorry.  I stayed with a pal in New York whose building centrally regulates the heat for all apartments (American for flat).  The heating was therefore on too high and couldn’t be adjusted, but, no worries, the air conditioning kicked in to cool things down, burning energy at both ends in order to find the most energy-inefficient way to achieve room temp comfort.  We’re sorry.  So, can we rely on Sir David Attenborough to save the planet from climate change and plastic pollution?  The fact is, we shouldn’t have to.

Nevertheless, each episode of Seven Worlds, One Planet focuses on a different continent, detailing its unique and fragile ecological systems, so let’s review the story so far.

Antarctica

Penguins, seals and whales, with a backdrop of dramatically melting ice.  The guilt is woven in throughout, setting the tone for some uncomfortable viewing, but pulling no punches with the message that action is needed now.  We have facts and figures on population numbers that have dwindled or resurged at the hands of human activity, but there is retribution from Mother Nature when we see how seasick the production crew get as they sail to reach South Georgia.

Asia

Finally, a continent I have actually been to, though I am now of course racked with guilt at my carbon footprint following separate trips to China, Japan and South Korea.  This episode features the harrowing footage previously discussed on this blog from Netflix’s Our Planet: walruses falling to their deaths from Siberian cliffs.  Their plight is no less shocking this time around, though hopefully the BBC’s broader audience should draw greater attention to the living collateral damage my trips to the Far East have caused.  You’ll also weep for the orang-utan, both because this close cousin’s habitat is being destroyed so Iceland can make ads about it (I think) and because you’ll never pronounce the name of this animal correctly as it changes every few years.

South America

Never been here either, but we of course take time for the decades-old narrative about the disappearing rainforests.  This is chat that’s been in the media for such a long time that it’s become as easy to ignore as that rough-sleeper you walk past every morning on the way to work.  If, like me, the total number of hectares of virgin forest you have cleared personally in your lifetime is zero and you think that exculpates you, then you’re missing the point, you big silly.  But what do we do with the powerlessness we feel about the change we want to see?  This episode also delivers real novelty with animal behaviour never filmed before: pumas hunting guanacos.  I didn’t even know what guanacos were when the episode began, and now I am obsessed with them.

I’ll be catching up on Australasia once home, plus big player Africa is still to drop in the series.  I might confess early to expecting to be underwhelmed by Europe (the continent, not the political union we all want to stay in forever) as I’m not sure we can stretch foxes and squirrels out for an hour, but they might have found wilder cast members away from English suburbia.  Either way, this is the type of landmark content that makes me eager to pay my license fee (even if the BBC News app uses biased language to favour right-wing politics).  We can’t let down dear old David by carrying on as we have been doing.  I’m switching to Bulb, voting Green, shopping more at Co-op and haven’t put my heating on so far this year (mostly as I can’t work the new-fangled thermostat in my fancy newbuild) but these are drops in the plastic-filled ocean while New York is still giving out single-use plastic bags and I, ever the Millennial, jet about on fossil-fuelled aeroplanes.  Someone needs to stop me.  Someone needs to stop us.  Over to you, David.  We’ll do whatever you say.

Friday Night Lights

In life, it’s important to have goals.  I’ve only set very few over the years so I can focus on each in turn.  The first was to go to Oxford – something I decided at the age of about eight apparently.  Once that was achieved (it was expensive, and they still email me asking for money that I am never going to give them), the next was to become a published writer.  Still haven’t managed that, but I think one out of two in my 34 years is a pretty decent strike weight.  A completion rate of 50% is better than 0%.  So, while number two eludes me, other interim goals crop up.  One was to buy a flat, and that dominated the last ten years before this summer’s eventual Help To Buy transaction, and another was to watch all five series of Friday Night Lights.  And now, everybody, I have finally delivered that goal.  So let’s all read my blogpost about it.

First things first, I should declare my lifelong aversion to team ball sports.  I grew up in a household where football wasn’t a thing.  My dad’s only sporting interest involved filling our home with the bone-chilling screech of Formula 1 tires and Murray Walker’s whiny exclamations every Sunday, with many a roast dinner soundtracked by what became two of my least favourite sounds.  With nobody realising I was short-sighted till my teens and my appalling hypermobility-linked proprioception, taking part in any sort of PE involved me not only being unable to see any balls that were launched at me, but also an inability to position my limbs to intercept them successfully.  My adult life therefore is an extension of my childhood home: sport is not a thing.  I save hours every night by not having to watch soccer matches, and I replace the office chat I see pursued around me about whose team beat whose and which players will lift what cups by having an actual personality.  However, I love dramas about sport.  It’s a theme for good narrative tension, like zombies (see The Walking Dead) and prisons (see Prison Break).  Let’s be honest, I’ve written fondly about Footballers’ Wives, and probably repeated most of those points here, so Friday Night Lights falls into that category.

The show is based on a book that had already become a film.  I’d loved the film, so I remember adding the first series to my Lovefilm list back in the dark ages when DVDs were sent back and forth in the post.  I got through the first two series and then, pow, I couldn’t for the life of me get hold of the subsequent instalments up to and including the final fifth season.  This caused years of discontent, as everything about the show was brilliant and I was desperate to see what happened to the characters I so dearly loved.  The later series were available on a friend’s Amazon Prime account, but you had to pay for each one.  As a Millennial, paying for content is a cause of great internal conflict, so I kept my pennies and my anxieties about what becomes of the Dillon Panthers football team.  Finding out became a lifelong ambition.  But, with the new flat came the decision to get my own Amazon Prime and by this point all series were included in the monthly subscription.  I could finally complete my task and achieve my goal.  And the outcome?  This amazing piece of writing for all seven of my regular readers.

Let’s cover what the show’s all about.  We are talking American football here.  Set in the state of Texas, where this sport is a religion, the end-of-week evening illuminations in the show’s title refer to the significance of high school football matches in small-town America.  I’ve only been to Austin in Texas, so this is sadly not something I’ve experienced first-hand, but this can go on the list of lifelong goals now.  Our heroes are Coach Eric Taylor (the cracking Kyle Chandler) and his wife Tami Taylor (the equally cracking Connie Britton) – these wonderful characters are the heart of our show.  I might be in my mid-thirties, but I am available for adoption to these two.  With the whole town holding its breath for football wins each Friday, the sporting fixtures in their own right generate gripping drama.  But this is then compounded by the human stories around the sport, from the ever-evolving dynamic between Coach and Tami, to the players, their families and their friends.  The whole town of Dillon feels tangibly brought to life.

A word of warning: the whole thing is filmed in wobbly cam.  It’s as if the camera operator was trying to bat away flies throughout each shoot.  This gives an intimacy to the portrayals which is heightened by the quality of the performances throughout.  The show launched the careers of Taylor Kitsch and Michael B. Jordan, but you’ll recognise faces from an array of your favourite US dramas.  I’m going to focus on some of the peripheral characters whose actors’ names never make the emotive opening credits but whose work lifts the whole thing.  There’s Brad Leland as Buddy Garrity, a role that initially irritates before elevating itself to favourite position.  I also finished the show with a deep appreciation of Stacey Oristano as Mindy Collette.  There are too many more to mention, but the quality is consistent.  Sadly, one other element of consistency is the Taylors’ daughter, Julie.  She is annoying and stupid throughout.

On my part, I’ve also maintained the consistent approach of never understanding the rules of American football.  So much of the drama can hinge around things like who is the quarterback or how many yards are left, but not knowing what these really mean is no barrier to the show’s power.  Most remarkably of all, though, is each season’s ability to build on the previous while still finding a fresh direction.  Somehow, over the years, I ended up watching the third series twice, but it’s the perfect shift between the very different dynamics (which I won’t actually describe here as that would be giving spoilers) of the beginning and end of the programme’s lifespan.  I do remember thinking the finale to the third season was the whitest thing I had ever seen (and I grew up in semirural Surrey), but the subsequent series shift in focus to reflect and include a more holistic view of American culture.  And then, either way, your heart breaks as everything draws to a close and your life must continue without any news episodes.

So I’ll chalk up Friday Night Lights as another chapter in my love affair with America.  I’m even writing this from a Chinatown hotel room in New York, wondering why the US hasn’t got the memo about waste as plastic bags are given out freely here still and the entire hotel breakfast was an exercise in plastic landfill generation (disposable crockery and cutlery…).  But I’ll also chalk it up as an exemplary contribution to the canon of quality boxsets.  Intense drama, plausible characters, a subject matter that isn’t overdone and, even though I’m conflicted about this as I wanted more, it ends before it runs out of steam.  No matter the day of the week or the time of the day, I cannot recommend Friday Night Lights enough.

Misfits

I’ve never really bought superheroes.  People wang on about the latest addition to the interminable Marvel Character Universe and I seem to zone out immediately.  What we can bear to watch comes down to what we can buy as a reality in which a story can play out.  My own mother can’t abide anything supernatural as it’s simply not realistic enough.  As a result, she cheerfully refuses to engage with the entire wizarding world of Harry Potter.  Sometimes I can’t work out why I’ll buy the things I’ll buy and reject the others.  Zombies?  Count me in no matter what (The Walking Dead and Kingdom).  Vampires?  Excuse me while I reminisce about loving True Blood.  I even sat through every season of Lost, long after I’d lost all hope of ever working out what I was actually buying.  But, typically, I’ll reject anything to do with costumed heroes.  So why, then, am I covering Misfits this week?

Well the truth is that I am behind with my boxset consumption and haven’t polished off anything new in a while.  But my viewing experience’s loss is your blog-reading pleasure’s gain, as I know we all love to trawl the archives.  I’ve cast my mind back to a show that did in fact deal with the real-life consequences of developing superpowers: Misfits.  The premise was not only a great excuse for orange jumpsuits, but also a sure-fire way to ponder the age-old question of just how much great power comes with which sort of great responsibility.  The premise was thus: some pesky youths on community service get caught up in a mysterious storm.  Superhuman new abilities ensue, with our drama served up by two sources: our characters coming to terms with their new faculties and the same characters coming across other individuals who enhanced their natural gifts in the storm’s rage.

Whenever I think what power I would have if I were a superhero, I always arrive at the conclusion that I can’t be improved.  I’ve occasionally thought it would be nice to be a bit taller, but I don’t think Slightly Taller Man would be a welcome addition to the Avengers when they’re next doing some of their assembling.  But don’t worry, the kids in Misfits got a good helping of powers each.  My favourite, regardless of power, was Kelly played by Lauren Socha.  At one point she was all over TV and I can’t fathom why this hasn’t continued.  Her voice had a quality to me that was pure entertainment and I just wanted her to say every line.  I’d have taken Misfits as a one-woman show if I’m honest.  Nathan Stewart-Jarrett (Curtis) appeared in a few things afterward, based on the strong vest-wearing he did in the show.  He once came to a party I was forced to attend as part of a work campaign (Primal Scream were playing but I just wanted to go home as I had no idea who they were) and I saw him in our VIP area.  “Yeah,” I thought, “there’s that man off the telly.”  Robert Sheehan provided impish charm with a hearty overegging of every scene as the very annoying Nathan.  He later appeared in Fortitude, which remains my least read blog (so click on it), and showed quite a different side to himself (and his private parts).  On the whole, though, everyone did a fantastic job in their parts.  Well done.  But some of those jobs got so over the top that I didn’t stick with things all the way to 2013’s fifth series.  It was the arrival of Rudy, played by Joseph Gilgun, in season three that started to wear me out.  I don’t like it when actors’ enjoyment of their own performances visibly outweighs the believability of their own performance.  You don’t see me at my office desk having a great time.

What made things really work was the gritty British urban setting of the whole thing.  Concrete wasteland is somehow a very plausible place for some inclement weather to dish out superhuman abilities.  But the greatest element of its own realism came from Misfits’ use of irreverent humour.  Sure coping with time-rewinding power and telepathy was deep stuff, but it also led to some LOLs.  This is why traditional hero fare always loses me.  At some point, our protagonist dons some sort of skin-tight outfit and begins posturing about the place as if we can take them seriously now they’ve got a uniform and a generic moniker that indicates their power.  I always think of Bananaman.  And I always hated him for being patronising.  The Misfits’ powers were buyable - probably just manifestations of the things we have about ourselves that make us think we are different to everyone.  I’ll confess here to my own hero creation: Bubble Boy.  Don’t worry; I didn’t think of the name.  My niece came up with that.  As an adult, imagination play is incredibly embarrassing.  I can spend hours building LEGO or playing board games with my sister’s daughter, but anything involving pretending goes beyond my comfort zone.  I was obliged to spend half the summer in the garden with her enacting superhero battles.  She was something to do with a ladybird.  Each battle starts with your pose.  It can be holding aloft a weapon or assuming some sort of proactive position.  Bubble Boy, whose name isn’t actually linked to any of my own digestive problems, draws a bubble with his hands.  Because, yes, he has the awesome power of bubbles.  Be afraid.  Don’t worry, I don’t proceed to assault a ten-year-old girl, as we are normally too busy laughing at our own posing to unleash any real violence.  Which just goes to show we British can’t take anything seriously.  I mean, just look at Brexit.

But if you want silly camp costumes, then Strictly Come Dancing is on every year.  Otherwise, dig out the old Misfits boxset for a masterclass in good British telly.  Nobody stands on a rooftop in Lycra with their hands on their hips.  They scowl while wearing dirty jumpsuits, before making some sort of quip about the whole situation.  The next time you see some disaffected youths, don’t forget that they might just have some superpowers you just don’t know about.