Sally4ever

One of the most-read posts on Just One More Episode has been my piece on Nighty Night, a slightly obscure and incredibly offensive sitcom from fifteen years ago.  It remains one of my favourite shows of all time and its creator and star, Julia Davis, has long held hero status among a group of friends and me who live our lives by the teachings and best lines of this comedy.  Whenever Julia is involved in anything else, I am there.  She’s known for playing the perennial sourpuss Dawn Sutcliffe in Gavin & Stacey (whose recent Christmas special was the best thing about the festive season this year), while her 2016 series, Camping, pleased fans with its trademarks of Davis’s brand of comedy: inordinate social awkwardness caused by politeness forcing others to tolerate unacceptable behaviour and the sexually predatory jezebel.  I’ve also watched a series of Hunderby, a period black comedy that again explores many of the same tropes.  While the BBC was Nighty Night’s home, all subsequent vehicles have operated within the empire of Sky, and 2018’s Sally4ever is no exception.  Lacking a subscription during its debut and subsequent BAFTA win, I’ve only just caught up on my Julia Davis fix.  So, journey with me as we turn my ill-thought-out responses into another one of these posts.

Firstly, I’ve been able to assuage some of my Julia Davis withdrawals through the medium of podcast.  Dear Joan And Jericha sees Davis team up with Vicki Pepperdine (who steals the show in Camping) as a pair of local radio agony aunts responding to listeners’ letters about relationship and anatomy woes.  Rather than sympathy, they deal out female-hating judgement while criticising graphic accompanying photos and dispensing appalling advice.  All the while, their own ludicrous backstories are fleshed out, cementing the view that they are in no position to be telling anybody else what to do with their life.  Either way, its first series was a joyous listen (if you enjoy turning heads on the bus by laughing out loud uncontrollably) and the second delivered more of the same.  In fact, I was lucky enough (through work) to go to the launch party of the sophomore season.  So, er, yeah, I got to see Julia Davis in the flesh.  And by see, I mean stand as close as possible to her while my eyes bored into her face and she (hopefully) was unable to detect my fandom.  I was offered the chance to meet her (and two thirds of My Dad Wrote A Porno) but I don’t cope well with celebrities (see post on House Of Cards) so I scarpered off into the night, colliding with Cardinal Burns’ Seb Cardinal on the way out (more on this later).

With that distance from its creator, then, allow me to crack on with my unsolicited views.  Let’s organise them into the three best things about the show and then we can look at the three worst things.  It’s important to be balanced in your arguments, as we all learned doing our GCSE essays, alongside the holy rule of always read the question.

First best thing about it

Sally.  It’s not called Sally4ever for nothing.  Sally is played by Catherine Shepherd who you’ll recognise as one of Mark’s girlfriends from Peep Show.  As the programme’s name suggests, people get obsessed with Sally.  The funniest part is that it’s very difficult to see why.  Shepherd’s performance perfectly captures the mousey blandness of this sort of non-character, making everyone else’s fixations all the more alarming.  Her outfits are all impractical flowy cardigans and such.  She is terrible at thinking up reasons to say no to things, relying on “I’m really tired actually” or “I need the toilet” when it’s already too late.  It’s equally charming and infuriating.  Her ineffectiveness sees her in a loveless relationship with skin-crawling David (Alex Macqueen – Neil’s “gay” dad from The Inbetweeners and not his first collaboration with Davis) and his terrible bump, before getting inexplicably smitten by Davis’s own character, Emma.  Its Emma’s self-serving manipulation of Sally that propels us through the seven half-hour instalments, duly escalating beyond all repair thanks to Sally’s overruled protests.  She’s all of us lost in our thirties with out-of-control lives.

Second best thing about it

Felicity Montagu is here for another great character turn with Davis, this time as Elanor, the personification of the annoying office swot.  Using her mobility chair for sympathy and privilege, Elanor’s every line is a condescending drawl that will irk you senseless before you can muster the ability to start chuckling.  From her fluffy-topped stationery to her infatuation with Nigel (Julian Barratt as the office’s most desirable chap, and that’s scraping the barrel), she’s a joy to behold, particularly when she is aiming her wonderful passive-aggression at Sally, who can barely stick up for herself.

Third best thing about it

It’s Julia Davis all over.  If you loved Nighty Night, you’ll love this.  Because it’s nearly the same thing.  Which leads me on to the negatives.

First worst thing about it

It’s the same as Nighty Night.  Instead of Jill Tyrrell chasing Angus Deayton, you’ve got Emma ruining Sally’s life.  There’s the same gentle mocking of Christianity (easy target, though), obsession with toilet humour (especially poo), delusions of sexiness, cuckolded hideous lover and many other Davis-isms, right down to the self-entitlement around fancy hot drinks, graduating from Nighty Night’s “It would be nice if someone got me a cappuccino” to Sally4ever’s “I’m just waiting for that cortado.”  Don’t get me wrong, I’ll continue to campaign for Davis’s national treasure status.  As a fan of anything she does, I’ll celebrate that Sally4ever is similar to Nighty Night and lap up every moment, spurning more populist trash like The Apprentice and Gogglebox.  But that enjoyment is all sadly tinged with a slight concern that this is all we’ll ever get.  But, who am I to criticise?  I currently have zero successful sitcoms against my name, and just one unsuccessful blog, so I’ll try not to be some sort of angry internet troll.  I still lolled through most of Sally4ever.

Second worst thing about it

It does sort of bumble along.  Well, why shouldn’t it?  Let’s just leave Julia alone – she’s a goddess.  Episode one sets up all the business of Sally’s dreadful relationship with David, her terrible job and ineffective performance at it (under batsh*t boss Deborah) and initial encounter with the exotic sexy promise of Emma’s alternative lifestyle.  But then episode two is just more of this.  Luckily things pick up with the introduction in the third part of Sally’s old friends who invite the new couple to dinner, throwing into contrast Sally’s meandering approach to life against the settled-down-with-kids routine.  In conclusion, neither seem very happy.  Cast as the dissatisfied husband is Seb Cardinal (from paragraph two of this very blogpost).  Clearly having too much fun playing the dad who doesn’t want to grow up, his character is easily corrupted by Emma, culminating in her sliming into a film he’s directing with an ill-gotten background role.  What unfolds on set is toe-curling in its cringeability, but what happens in the trailer afterwards will have you question everything about this production.  Well done Seb, though.  He also coped really well with my fanboying over him when I bumped into him when leaving the podcast party.  “You’re Seb Cardinal,” I said, as if pointing out useful information, “I’m a massive fan.”  Cue awkward pause before he mentioned texting Julia about getting the access code for the party and I die inside about not being cool, talented and famous.  He had liked my tweet promoting my blogpost on Cardinal Burns that very week but going into that would have just been too painful, so I’ll write about it on the internet here instead.

Third worst thing about it

I have to be honest: I would love Julia Davis to have had a West Country accent in this.  Why not just be exactly like Nighty Night?  It’s basic of me to want this, and there are plenty of funny voices to go around in Sally4ever.  It’s my issue that all I want is a third series of Nighty Night and I’ll just have to live with that.

Anyway, let’s conclude by saying that Sally4ever is one for the fans, and everyone should be a fan of Julia Davis.  But not everyone can take the unique brand of humour.  If you don’t think it’s funny to watch a graphic lesbian sex scene (played for laughs, mind you) that culminates in a soiled sanitary product being flung across a room (with no hands) then maybe you should stay in your lane.  I’m here to celebrate a strong woman in comedy, known for her creativity with language (frothy might be one of her favourite words), her casting of wonderful actors (I’ve not even gone into Pepperdine’s classic turn as nonsense therapist, Belinda) and her ability to capture perfectly our paralysis by manners.  The next time someone’s mugging you off, have a word with yourself, or you’ll end up in a situation you can’t get out of.  JuliaDavis4ever.

Chernobyl

The Sky man finally came a week ago.  I had planned to live without Sky in my new home, resolving not to line the Murdochs’ pockets.  But two things compounded me to sacrifice my values and change my mind.  The option of a life where I can take more control of what adverts I am forced to see was one of them, as ranted about in my post on Gogglebox.  Secondly, we’ve got the next Love Island around the corner and you can apparently only get ITV2 HD on Sky.  With all the access to boxsets my package promised me, I was buzzing to re-watch Game Of Thrones for treatment on here.  But no, that show doesn’t seem to be available at the moment.  Next on my list was something people had bleated on about in May when I was in full first-time buyer meltdown: Chernobyl.  Dealing with a meltdown of a different time, this miniseries dramatization of the 1986 disaster was held aloft as the best thing that anyone had ever seen, now ranked at number 5 in the IMDB list of Top Rated TV Shows (9.4).  With high hopes, I downloaded the first HD episode on my Sky Q.

I also drew the curtains (John Lewis, obviously) and put my phone out of reach, preparing to give the apparently untold quality of the drama my undivided attention.  Sadly, though, there were still about three minutes of adverts to wade through, but I was able to fast forward these immediately, once I finally worked out which button was which on my new remote in the darkened living room.  A week later, after limiting myself to no more than one episode per night of the five that make up this series, I have completed the boxset.  And I hereby attest to the incomparable greatness of Chernobyl – the TV programme, not the nuclear explosion.  The former made me punch the air and shout “worth it” at the inordinate expense of my OLED fifty-five incher, while the latter spread life-threatening levels of radioactivity of thousands of European square kilometres.  Let’s not confuse the two.

My attempts here to do any sort of justice to Chernobyl will fall short, but I’ll crack on with running through what makes this programme so remarkable all the same.  You’re already in the third paragraph so please don’t pretend you’ve got anything better to read.  Now, I was never that arsed by chemistry or physics at school, but you will come away from Chernobyl with quite a thorough understanding of nuclear fission.  I now know my boron rod from my graphite tip, but this isn’t down to my child-wonder levels of intelligence.  Thanks to Craig Mazin’s script (Craig a-Mazin, more like) multiple scenes contrive to see expert characters illuminate others on what’s gone wrong.  These happen in layers so that, once you’ve built a foundation of basic comprehension, you’re able to get your head around the sequence of events in greater detail.  It’s no mean feat: just as fission generates electricity as if from nothing, Chernobyl generates drama from our understanding of what should and shouldn’t happen in a nuclear reactor.  It would be worth watching for the educational benefits alone.

Linked to the above is the constant threat of radiation.  As if the explosion itself doesn’t build up enough tension, the action plays out against varying backdrops of radioactivity.  I don’t want to reveal spoilers, but one of my questions before watching was whether our main narrative was the build up to the disaster itself, or the consequences that followed its occurrence.  Through its dynamic and intelligent structure, the answer is that Chernobyl is both.  This allows a single event to be played for multiple crescendos of suspense so strong you’ll suddenly realise you’re hovering metres above your sofa rather snuggling into your scatter cushions.  Between these peaks, though, we have background radiation to prevent anyone from ever relaxing.  The erratic ticks of the Geiger counter begin to haunt you.  While this invisible threat is actually a very cost-effective form of horror when it comes to production budgets, depictions of its effects are disturbingly graphic.  This is not a relaxing watch.

But we’re not done.  Slathered over these layers of tense action is the amplifying factor of our Soviet setting.  Gilead-like in its control of every waking minute, this further threat to human survival rears its head several times, whether it’s Communist Party credibility getting in the way of the population’s best interests or the intense exchanges with head of the KGB (a spine-chilling performance from Alan Williams).  At odds with this workers’ and peasants’ utopia, which is already looking a little tired around edges and at odds with eighties fashion before the incident, is the fact that the all-powerful regime can draft in hundreds of thousands of expendable human conscripts to clear up its messes.  Chernobyl is able to relay the disaster’s impact at every level; whether a scene shows the evacuation of thousands or bristling dialogue between our heroes leading the clean-up, each detail is artfully executed and captured, from the constant smoking, the ill-fitting suits and the tacky interior designs to the suspicious glances, overuse of the word comrade and the suffocating lack of freedom under the state.

To recap, the subject matter, the writing, the setting and the production all give us top-quality drama, but the penultimate piece in our puzzle is the acting.  It’s very good (said in a British luvvie commenting at the theatre sort of voice).  Emily Watson displays why she is the sort of actor who makes any line sound like a masterpiece in her composite role as a key scientist risking her own safety to help solve Chernobyl.  Alongside her, Jared Harris (known best to me as the least sexy partner in Mad Men) commands our support as the individual who has to make the USSR realise the extent of the problem, Valery Legasov.  Each cigarette he lights is a manifestation of another realm of human exhaustion.  We’ve also got a Skarsgård (Stellan) doing his best gravelly-voiced military old man routine, completing the trinity of our three central parts.  Alongside them, a retinue of faces you’ll recognise from all sorts of places bring to life the rest of Soviet society on the Belarussian-Ukrainian border and in Moscow.

Finally, the structure.  To build on my earlier point, this is a masterclass in drawing from a singular horrific moment to drag us to the edge of our seats and beyond for five hour-long episodes.  This is TV-making at its best.  Sure, maybe it could have been rushed through as a feature film, but I’d only have fallen asleep (though I made it through Blue Story and everyone needs to see that too).  We’re able to take our time building up not just the setting, the period and the tension, but our longer format allows a depth of detail that enhances the whole drama.  An earnest review is a rare occurrence on this blog, but I wouldn’t be lying if I said that I’m in two minds about indulging in a second viewing altogether, such was the level to which Chernobyl impressed me.  Though, perhaps impressed is the wrong word.  It chilled me: a nightmarish scenario that comes into being when a nation has the wrong leaders.

The League Of Gentlemen

The dark humour of this cult classic sitcom-cum-sketchshow used to scare me slightly.  Its first TV series appeared back in 1999 when I was still a rather sheltered Surrey schoolboy.  I was known for things like having the most housepoints in the year and being good at drawing.  Subversive comedy seemed unnecessary: how could you laugh when something was horrible?  This is probably why I harboured such a soft spot for Keeping Up Appearances.  Nevertheless, I was drawn to The League Of Gentlemen.  The characters were inordinately quotable, and many a playground conversation consequently descended into recitations of the episodes’ scripts.  I could therefore seek solace in recognising the key players from the village of Royston Vasey.  For example, Tubbs and Edward were vile, but also ridiculous.  Once they started talking about local shops for local people, there was safety in the catchphrase, allowing me to overlook the brief references to burning bodies on the moor, to the fact that nobody ever left Royston Vasey… alive.

But as each would-be customer of their Local Shop slowly arrived at the realisation that they had set foot in a terrible place, chills would shiver down my spine.  And that’s why I have chosen The League Of Gentlemen this week.  I am that unsuspecting stranger, hoping for the best (or at least not fearing the worst).  And England is that Local Shop.  I’ve finally seen its grotesque nature for what it is, and all too late in the day.  Trapped and doomed, I await my grisly fate.  But hey, that’s enough election chat for this post – I don’t want to make things too political at the expense of being silly!

For those that don’t know this classic contribution to our horrendous nation’s comedy canon, The League Of Gentlemen is a series of interlinked sketches set in a fictional northern settlement.  Everything about it is sinister, and only those that live there can in any way tolerate its ways.  These ways can sometimes get pretty fantastical, but its thanks to the performances and the writing of the actual gentlemen in this league that they are as believable as they are sickening and entertaining.  My tastes in adult life have caught up with their subversion, so let’s take a Top Trumps moment to go through these not-so-gentle men (in no particular order):

Reece Shearsmith

Best character:  Credit has to be given for Edward (of Tubbs and Edward fame).  While his sister-wife channels a Skeksis-like degree of naïve mischief (see post on The Dark Crystal), Edward’s more plausible stance as your recognisable local bigot is almost therefore the straight man to her easier laughs (counting to twelvty and touching her precious things).  His distrust of outsiders makes him the perfect parochial Tory.

Close second:  Bitterly lampooning the class-sensitive wives of middle earners, Judee Levinson’s spot-on believability is a triumph in its own right.  But contrasted with working-class cleaner, Iris Krell, then this lady-on-help passive-aggression reaches new levels of acid tongue.

Steve Pemberton

Best character:  Everyone has ended up a third party to some awful couple’s petty arguments.  Pemberton plays Charlie Hull, husband of Stella, and together they turn any location into a theatre of war for the years of resentment their marriage has given them.  While anyone would prescribe a divorce, the Hulls can turn any environment into a tense hotbed of angry grudges.

Close second:  Running the Royston Vasey Jobcentre with as much efficacy as Little Britain’s Marjorie Dawes runs her Fat Fighters branch, Pauline Campbell-Jones has a terrifying universality to her.  Patronising yet clueless herself, we’ve all worked with a Pauline.  The lipstick alone makes me want to wash my face.

Mark Gatiss

Best character:  Clad in Val Denton’s lank long hair, Gatiss’s mumsy mannerisms and ability to make far-fetched lines sound totally humdrum result in a subtly gruesome creation.  Along with husband Harvey, and creepy twin daughters Chloe and Radclyffe, the Dentons’ household is every unusual family visit you’ve ever been forced to endure.  From the toad fascination to Harvey’s masturbation obsession, and not forgetting the first Monday of every month (nude day – something we all suspect our neighbours of doing), we share their nephew Benjamin’s terror that he may never be able to leave.

Close second:  Hilary Briss, the local butcher famed for his special stuff, was probably the hardest character for my young mind to stomach.  Even the name causes me shudders now.  Briss.  Urgh.

Jeremy Dyson

Best character:  He doesn’t play any of them – he just writes with the others.  Well done him.  I wouldn’t be able to resist dressing up and getting on camera, but that’s just me.

I could go on for ages, reminiscing of my favourites, but we’ve got lives to lead.  You’ll have to resurrect your own memories of Papa Lazarou, Herr Lipp or Legz Akimbo (put yourself in a child), or maybe seek out this classic if you’ve never seen it before, but there’s one final sketch I have to fuss over, simply as it remains one of my most quoted pieces of comedy and yet still makes me laugh.  Enter stage right, Pamela Doove.  Another Shearsmith performance, this budding actress just needs to nail some diction challenges to hit the big time, as exemplified in this orange juice advert audition.  While the joke is obvious, even Jed Hunter’s small-time director is just one of the many subtler creations that enhance Royston Vasey’s realism.  Strangely prescient, then, that this British settlement should seem so normal and acceptable on the surface.  Scratch beneath and it is truly grotesque by its very nature.  Unlike Europe, we can never leave.

Gogglebox

It’s time to acknowledge something that’s been painfully clear in all of these posts: I’m pretty sure I’m addicted to TV.  Things came to a head in these last few weeks of I’m A Celebrity.  Until the Sky man comes next weekend (so that I have ITV2 HD in time for Love Island – always set and achieve your life goals), I’m in a household without any decent way of recording off my massive OLED telly.  Unable to stomach a nightly hour-long show complete with adverts (especially at Christmas, the most odious time of the year) I decided to watch the show catching up a day behind on ITV Hub.  However, this VoD service has the picture quality of peering through a steamed shower panel, the ads are all still there but at higher frequency and it loses your programme coming out of each break with a cheeky Whoops! message that infuriates more than it sympathises.  Realising it would only be a matter of time before my remote was smashed through my LG 55” screen, I reluctantly switched back to live viewing.  Suddenly, we were back in HD, and I could tell which one was Ant and which one was Dec again.  The dreaded ad breaks became three-minute chunks during which I would find other things to do, banal things like wash up, clean the kitchen, Whatsapp pals or stare into space – each preferable to watching supermarkets argue about who can provide the most magical Christmas.  The bigger drawback, though, was that I became a slave to the appointment to view.

Every evening was a countdown to 9pm, lest I miss the opening link.  Before the I’m A Celeb final, the nightly show was running longer till 10.30, cutting thirty minutes into my sacred bedtime and making the 5.30am alarm the next morning for Crossfit all the more devastating.  It was hell.  I’m relieved it’s over, despite loving the show.  My point is, keeping up with my favourites and devouring new boxsets in order to keep this blog interesting is starting to dominate my evening life.  I’m ending up watching hours each night, normally too exhausted from the early morning and full day of work to do anything productive (first-world problem – it warrants no sympathy).  Once my bum hits the sofa, that’s it.  I’m supposed to be furnishing a new flat, but now that the TV den part of the living room is up and running, I’ve a bad feeling we’re going to be stalled here for some time before there’s any further progress.  I have become a couch potato.  I have become my father.

It’s only fitting, then, that this week I should take a look at another set of people who while away their time on this fascinating planet sedentary on DFS furniture staring at a telly screen (though my sofa is from Heal’s everybody).  So, let’s do Gogglebox.  But, before we go any further, I should confess that this is a programme I don’t watch.  Don’t worry, though, that’s never stopped me throwing in my two pennies’ worth before (see posts on The Apprentice and Keeping Up With The Kardashians).  I’ve channel-surfed on enough Friday evenings to catch sufficient chunks of it to have the measure of the format and its cast.  Please read on while I oscillate wildly between tearing it asunder and extolling its charm.

And I do have some bones to pick with Gogglebox.  For the unaware, it’s a TV programme about people watching TV programmes.  It’s a real-life The Royle Family.  Up and down Britain, we mutually view selected televisual highlights with a cast of actual non-famous normos.  That’s right – we watch people watch telly.  Despite all of the above making it clear I’m wasting my life away, this format is the very definition to me of wasted time, and it’s for this reason I never make any effort to watch it.  Additionally, it shows you all the must-see moments of the week just gone which I rightly suspect would have the effect of making me want to watch even more TV.  This would benefit no-one.  But what I didn’t realise about the filming process was that the cast of Gogglebox know what they’re going to watch – they have scheduled filming sessions.  The production team pick the shows, put them on and then sit down to shoot the reactions.  When I realised this, I was very disappointed.  I thought we had more of a Big Brother vibe: families sign up to a camera being in the living room, go about their viewing lives as normal, and then the best bits are picked up and edited together.  This, I always felt, would be a fairer reflection of what we really watch and how we really react.  It’s excessive and impractical, but that’s just where my imagination goes to first.

Linked to this first fallacy and the fact that the participants know they are being filmed we have the following consequence: their responses aren’t that natural.  It’s an artificial set up.  I therefore can’t escape the feeling they’re all showing off.  Don’t get me wrong, I love showing off.  I do it constantly and enjoy it in others if they are entertaining me.  But Gogglebox acts like it’s a sneak peek behind closed doors to a more humdrum evening, with interstitial shots of household façades leading to cosy living-room set-ups, allowing we privileged few to glimpse real truth from unaware subjects.  But no, it’s just regional accents trying to think of the funniest thing to say about that week’s news or the John Lewis advert.  And it’s at that point I stop caring.

Everyone talks about their favourite Goggleboxers, but I don’t really know who’s who beyond those that have appeared in other reality shows (looking at you, Celebrity Big Brother).  What I do love is the diversity.  We have all points of the UK compass covered here: a wide array of family structures, lifestyle choices, ethnic backgrounds, cultural values, political persuasions, incomes, faiths, genders, ages, sexualities etc – basically every flavour of Brit you can shove out of the way on a crowded train.  What unites them all is a need to redecorate their living rooms.  It’s a bit like Come Dine With Me when you see that someone’s kitchen is a bit natty in comparison to all the show kitchens you see on cookery shows.  That said, given how many of them have hundreds of dogs sprawled across their soft furnishings, rubbing their worms into the fabric and wafting their canine farts over the cushions, there’d be no point updating any of the interiors.  You can sometimes smell the dog breath through the screen.  But it doesn’t matter what I think: what’s touching is the genuine love and affection these family members and friends have for each other.  That, at least, is always reassuringly genuine, if sprinkled with dog hair.

So, who on earth do I think I am talking disparagingly about Gogglebox simply because the people on it watch TV and do showing off?  This whole blog is based around the exact same concept: I watch too much TV and then show off about it, desperately seeking attention for my musings, awaiting offers of global syndication and secretly beaming when friends compliment my writing in real life.  The difference, sadly for me, is that Gogglebox still has millions of viewers, whereas I’m only getting tens of thousands of reads here…

Mindhunter

Everyone was telling me to watch Mindhunter.  So I watched it and now we’re going to hear all about what I thought of it.  Only it wasn’t as simple as that.  The people in the office that were going on about it were easily ignored.  I’m well known for not really being a listener, so this was within character.  It was, in fact, a chance encounter with the Netflix trailer for season two that really sold me into the show.  I’ve talked before about how navigating the overwhelming choice on Netflix can be daunting, leading to a paralysed state where no real commitment can be made, and you end up spending your whole evening browsing.  Before you know it, you’ve got to get in the bed and set the alarm so you don’t forget to go back to your office for typing emails into a computer the next morning.

But if you hover a show for too long on Netflix, the trailer autoplays.  The alarming eruption of voices has often led me to suspect I am undergoing a home invasion, but I am now used to this and have finally agreed with London Metropolitan Police that we will leave each other alone.  In the case of the Mindhunter trailer, suspenseful music immediately filled my sparsely decorated new build living room.  The screen of my massive telly conveyed a past decade of American life.  All of this was soaked through with a quickly gripping sense of mystery: the story was clearly of a serial killer in late seventies, early eighties Atlanta targeting African-American children while the institutionally racist law enforcement, er, institutions ignored calls for them to investigate.  I’m not normally one for grisly crime investigations, but the added tension of strained race relations promised more intense drama (see post on Dear White People) so this, coupled with some clearly very high production values, saw me dive in.

But what started as a dive turned into a slow, uncomfortable, duty-bound crawl as Mindhunter shifted awkwardly under my expectations of what it would actually be.  Let’s get this out of the way first: the Atlanta murders are only really about 40% of the second series, and to get to that I had to get through the first series, where they are 0% of the content.  Don’t get me wrong; I’m not saying I can now only enjoy things that are to do with the Atlanta child murders, but I want to acknowledge that Netflix’s trailer mis-sold the show.  Nevertheless, I put my thumb-distracting smartphone in a different room and committed to the first few episodes.  But I couldn’t work out where things were going.  We had some FBI people forming an unlikely partnership, going around training local police, but then kind of starting to interview serial killers (before the term had been coined) in prisons and then sort of, you know, getting into running a whole study to understand more about the behaviour of violent criminals.  Mindhunter gets into a great stride, but it takes its time getting there.  This was competing in my TV-viewing time with masterpieces like Seven Worlds, One Planet and I’m A Celebrity (also obviously a masterpiece), so I found it harder and harder to prioritise such heavy-going fare.

After a bit of a gap, though, I found myself on lengthy plane and train journeys during my America trip and, with nothing else to do, was able to focus on subsequent episodes downloaded to my phone, finally hooking myself in to get totally mindhunted.  And that’s the first thing about Mindhunter: its terrible name.  The cast don’t actually go out hunting for minds.  A more apt title would be Crimesolver or Violentoffenderinterviewer, but both of those sound much naffer than Mindhunter.  But where there was a lack of effort in thinking up a title, there is an excess of doing a good job when it comes to most other elements of the production.  The period setting is executed masterfully – parts of it are slightly akin to a latter-day suburban Mad Men, and, like that show, the attitudes of the time are held true, rather than filtering history’s bigotry through a more palatable lens to make modern audiences feel good (I’m looking at you, Downton Abbey).  People smoke constantly, there is little to no airport security, and seatbelts look distinctly optional – ah, the good old days.

Let’s meet, then, the chap who I think is the actual Mindhunter: Holden Ford.  He’s played by Jonathan Groff and he speaks with the same pitch of voice at all times, which makes his lines hypnotic, but brings to life Ford’s untapped genius as he begins to realise the scope of what his work can achieve: if they learn to profile killers, they can solve murders before further victims fall.  The grumpy cop to his wide-eyed cop is Bill Tench and what unites them is they both have really bad shirts.  Our pair are joined by Dr Wendy Carr who seems to perform the role of some sort of line manager stroke unenthusiastic office-bound cheerleader, sending her chaps out to record interviews she can listen to.  All three are drawing on their experiences at a certain school of acting in their performances: the “I just smelled a fart” approach.  Indeed, each actor’s talent shines through as they create their characters, but the distasteful and serious nature of their conversations and relationships make it look like someone has just keffed in their airspace the whole time.  This extends to almost all the supporting cast, with the exception of the serial killers they meet in various jails.  There are some real household names that I won’t spoil, but you can tell each performer is having a smashing time in the role.

As we progress into series two, a lot starts to go on.  Story strands spread outwards like planets in an ever-expanding universe.  While everything that unfolds about the Atlanta child murders is compelling, we’re also getting deep into Tench’s own problems with his adopted son and very curly-haired wife (with in-marriage dialogue that perfectly captures how things can get so much worse when you only say the wrong thing to each other).  In addition, Carr’s relationship goes under the microscope in order to allow us a better understanding of her mode of operation (which is refreshingly unusual).  Mindhunter treats its viewers intelligently, allowing real focus on each area rather than jumping about like a dance video.  The whole pace can tend to luxuriate in its own quality, as if demanding we drink in the awesome settings, the American nostalgia and the faces of cast members who look like they’re trying to work out who just did that terrible fart.

Season two has left me wanting more and a new TV-viewing approach has evolved to keep up with historical references.  It’s called the Google-along and it’s something you might already have found yourself doing with The Crown.  Each time something comes up that you’ve never heard of, call upon your search engine of choice to cover the gaps in your historical context.  But don’t forget to look at the TV screen too, otherwise you’ll miss this unusual show as it defies your categorisations and expectations.  Focus on the mindhunting.