Kath & Kim

I thought I was getting really good at this working from home, but I’m now in the midst of a full-on spiral having finally bought a monitor and forked out for instant delivery, only to discover it doesn’t have an HDMI port.  So, back to straining my neck to look down at my dirty old laptop screen.  I don’t want to complain though – I’m having quite a nice pandemic.  Greatest current concerns: not having office AC in my flat and the fact that baking powder can’t be found in any nearby supermarket.  Either way, if I damage my eyesight writing this, I now know it’s within the rules to drive to a castle to test my vision.  If I crash into people and cause further deaths, then I’ll know something isn’t right.  Luckily for everyone, I don’t have a car, I’m not a bigoted Tory (bad-)advisor and I don’t hold the British public in contempt (only those that clap the NHS to assuage their own guilt at voting rightwing).  The point in, in these pandemical times, we’re looking for comfort.  And I’ve found a great deal of it in old sitcoms.  My full re-watch of Friends continues, I’m this close to another run through of dinnerladies and, days after I saw it appear in the Netflix menu, I’ve just devoured the four seasons of Kath & Kim that aired between 2002 and 2007.

Just One More Episode has previously extolled the delights of Australian comedy.  But unlike Summer Heights High and Lunatics, this show doesn’t include Chris Lilley.  There’s no way of recalling how I came across this show, but, until now, I had only ever seen the first season.  Nevertheless, its effect stayed with me for subsequent years.  I don’t know how familiar you are with the working-class speech patterns of suburban housewives from Melbourne, but it doesn’t even matter.  So much of this sitcom’s ability to spark joy comes from its use of language.  Sure, there are some Little Britain-esque catchphrases, but these are mere chunks in a rich creamy spread of the silly misuse of the ever-malleable, ever-unruly English idiom.  Achieving near-native fluency in English is nigh-on impossible for most foreign learners, yet Kath’s mishandlings of her mother tongue are persistently charming.  Her forthcoming wedding is referred to as her “connubials” while both she and daughter Kim lament anything that “gets up [their] goat.”  A quick swap of a preposition and suddenly the banal becomes delightfully silly.  More than any of this, though, it is their way of responding to anything they like in the world of (bad) fashion and beyond by saying “that’s nice, that’s different, that’s unusual” that stays with me.  Of course, I would get the order and word choices wrong whenever I tried to wield this phrase facetiously when asked to comment on a colleague’s online shopping (back when we were allowed in our offices) but I’ve worked with many a beloved Australian over the years who was only too happy to correct my language.

Let’s forgive this diversion while I pause to explain who indeed Kath and Kim are.  Played by actors of roughly the same age, Kath and Kim are a mother and daughter team.  Kath (Jane Turner) is the permed older lady, embracing her empty nest (she wishes) while keeping herself trim and indulging a love for shopping at the mall in Fountain Lakes.  Kim (Gina Riley) is her spoiled adult daughter who can’t stop eating Dippity Bix, abandons her marriage to long-suffering Brett at the drop of a hat, is too lazy to hold down a job but who maintains a deep love for shopping at the mall in Fountain Lakes.  Locked in a cycle of co-dependency (and numerous eggcornings of the English language) our story starts when Kim interrupts her mother’s blissful retirement and declares she’s moving back in, jeopardising Kath’s burgeoning romance with local purveyor of fine meats (a vile phrase if ever there was one) and manbag-fan, Kel Knight.

Kath and Kim are the mother-daughter combo that taste forgot, but you root for them as their turns of phrase continue to charm.  Further comedy comes from Kim’s second-best friend, Sharon, whose uninvited arrival at Kath’s is announced every time by the unmistakable squeak of her French windows being slid open.  Sharon is at her best when suffering visible skin complaints or arguing with Kim about eating the last Dippity Bix (“Well, I didn’t know, Kim!” – the classic self-defence of a scoffer), but her penchants for indoor cricket and netball also sparkle.  That’s pretty much it for four series.  There’s a reassuring polyester cheapness throughout, not a great deal happens, but their humdrum lives bumble along and veer between the ridiculous and the plausible.

Its specific style makes it a hard show to recommend to newcomers, and I have many a time played it to pals who have felt lukewarm at best.  But I will carry on regardless in my love for it.  Its creators are talented (not least because Gina Riley actually belts out the theme tune to the opening sequence, something I never once skipped on Netflix) and deserve their cult status.  Sure, they lampoon class, but they also go for the posher snobs – every time Prue and Trude appear (also played by Turner and Riley), sneering at Kath’s jumpers or Kim’s muffin top in their snooty store, I can’t help but smile at their obscene diphthongisations and frankly more disgraceful murder of the English language.  I’m sad each time an episode ends, but while the credits roll, we are treated to wine time, a single-take scene of Kath and Kim quaffing cardonnay [sic] in their garden while wittering on with their usual gubbins.  In lockdown, I can’t tell you what I wouldn’t give for a garden and a family member to drink bad wine with while talking nonsense.

So, join the cult.  Kylie Minogue, Shane Warne and Matt Lucas can’t be wrong.  If you find the idea of a lazy mother telling her newborn baby (Epponnee-Rae) to stop whingeing because it’s mummy’s turn to whinge funny, then you’ll be in the right place.  There’s always a joker in the pack, and that joker is Kath.  And Kim.

The Boys

Looking back, the last four weeks’ posts have all covered Netflix original productions, with the three weeks before that casting Just One More Episode side-eye on further programmes watched on that platform (including the pandemic’s breakout hit, Tiger King – another Netflix production).  So let’s balance things out with the revelation that I did actually watch something on Amazon Prime Video in recent times: The Boys.  Regular readers will know I am no real fan of superheroes: I’m yet to see a good explanation for the need to wear Lycra bodysuits, and by the inevitable climactic fisticuffs to save the world, I have totally lost interest.  But friends had raved about The Boys and it seemed only right I should give it a chance.  After all, it’s nice to be proven right.

I ended up particularly engaged with the launch marketing campaign way back whenever the show first got released, during a past age when we were allowed out of our houses to touch others at will.  My job in media meant I had been invited to watch an interview being recorded with Joel Dommett.  I’m convinced he’s my twin, even since seeing him on I’m A Celeb (though by listening to his podcast Teenage Mixtape I can see clearly that our music tastes are insurmountably divergent).  I had walked across a humid London with two grads from the office, slurped some complementary wine before enjoying Joel’s chat with Laura Whitmore (pre-Love Island, post-Survival Of The Fittest).  I was just stuffing my face afterwards with free ice cream when we were asked if we would stay for a second interview – turned out they were recording a sesh with Chace Crawford that night too.

Being young, carefree, spontaneous and loads of fun, I was happy to stay.  I jest: in reality I was itching to get back to my flat for some lean chicken, sweet potato and a bit of boxset.  But I had already fully sweated through my underpants on the walk over and self-destructed on my macro requirements with my scoops of triple chocolate.  So, there was Chace, him off Gossip Girl, metres away talking about his new show: The Boys.  Sounded decent.  Nevertheless, the evening ended in faux-pas as we made for the lifts during our exit.  One of the grads declared out loud that poor Chace “is much less good looking in real life” as our elevator arrived.  Little did he realise that Chace was standing right behind him but was too gracious to respond.  With that cringe in mind, I owed it to successful Hollywood actor Chace Crawford (who doesn’t care what media grads think about his face) to watch his new show.

Like Amazon’s other centrepiece, Mr Robot, The Boys has an epic pilot episode.  There is set up galore as we are shown a world where superheroes are a commodity as commercialised as any US sport, with merchandise and revenue streams beyond anyone’s wildest capitalist imagination.  What a fun slant to take on an overdone genre: looking at the business side of rescuing plebs from danger with x-ray vision and glowing yellow eyes.  I could gladly have just followed a fly-on-the-wall documentary on the inner workings of Vought International, the fictional corporation that has globally cornered the market in caped crusaders.  But because this is drama, we need to acknowledge that we are here to see the destruction of this proffered reality for which we have suspended our disbelief, so it’s no spoiler for me to tell you that the first season slowly edges us towards the demise of this morally corrupt business endeavour.

Sadly, so often, a great pilot can result in a huge drop off in following episodes.  Therefore, instalment two bored me and from then I was kind of done, sitting through the rest paying little attention and feeling even less.  Crawford himself is actually fairly marginal as The Deep, whose power rests in his abdominal gills.  He seemed to be there for comic relief, but without realising it.  And it wasn’t that funny, just weird.  Most of the character development had gone into his biceps.  Centre stage was, in fact, Karl Urban, as an anti-hero activist.  I don’t know what else he did as somewhere along the line the terrible decision was made for him to have a cockney accent.  Cue the worst apples-and-pears dialogue ever recorded.  Urban heads up a bunch of misfits taking on the big corp world – in fact, I think they are the titular boys, rather than the badly behaved celebrity heroes (who I kind of preferred).  If I could pinpoint the moment I turned off, it was sadly the arrival in episode two of Frenchie, a generic team member with the rebels who just left me cold with everything he did.  It’s derivative to call things derivative, but he was derivatively derivative (not the actor, the part).

Nevertheless, there’s plenty to enjoy: explosion-based action, wry wit, moral conundrums, romance, intrigue, a lens on our hero-worship of celebrity.  Just as the heroes care little for their fans and the great unwashed they rescue, I felt no real emotional investment in any of it.  I’m pretty sure it’s all based on some sort of book/comic source material.  There’s no way of knowing as I’m not prepared to google it – it’s better just to fire off an online rinsing, isn’t it really?  It’s reassuring to know I won’t need to watch a second season if there ever is one.  I’ll be too busy getting deep into Netflix’s much more user-friendly menu system, holding my breath for another season of Elite.

Unorthodox

Netflix has fast become my most cherished companion during these weeks of lockdown.  While discouraged from leaving the house (I think) by various unclear Tory waffles (not sure why I would take any form of instruction from people who have actively pursued something as stupid as Brexit), my TV has seen unprecedented (pandemic bingo!) levels of use.  It gets switched on while I make breakfast, a weekend brunch affair that has become a daily routine of slowly scrambling eggs and brewing coffee.  If I manage to grab a lunch break between video calls, I’ll treat myself to a quick episode then.  And finally, after work, rather than a rushed Tube commute with angry Londoners, I simply have to stumble from my laptop to the living room, leaving the never-ending avalanche of emails for another day, for a few hours of inert diversion (some of which time is spent wondering what I can do about my growing belly as it protrudes over the elasticated waistband of my tracksuit bottoms).  In all of the quotidian monotony, I’ve had a very good run of Netflix not only entertaining me, but gripping me to my seat: Tiger King, Last Chance U, Cheer and Elite awakened a compulsion in me not to stop until every episode had been devoured.

As the TV powers on, I can’t switch from linear broadcast to Netflix quickly enough.  The news that always seems to be on is, quite simply, the worst.  Blurry contributors garble on from their home studies while showing off their AirPods.  Some sort of Scottish minister holds forth about how corona is affecting Scotland (specifically and endlessly) while a nice deaf lady does sign language in the corner, her face betraying a preference to be doing any else but this.  Everybody speculates about what will happen next while invoking an unhelpful comparison with World War II.  That culminated in the Holocaust, so perhaps we can do a little better in 2020.  I’ve taken to re-watching Friends for comfort (even finding an episode of series one I had never seen – I know!) just to get away from the lazy journalism.  So, I clicked on Unorthodox.

I was immediately sucked in and raced through the four episodes while practically holding my breath.  I’ll be honest that my choice was partly informed by linguistic policy.  After so much Spanish, I was hopeful for something in German to help tune me back in for FaceTimes with friends in Hamburg.  Unorthodox came up in a search for German-language content, but it’s actually half in English and half in Yiddish, with a few other languages scattered across it.  Based on a 2012 book by Deborah Feldman about her real-life departure from an ultra-Orthodox Jewish community in New York, Unorthodox’s setting in a minority religious community was catnip to me as a compelling theme, so I shrugged that Yiddish was similar enough to German and cracked on.

Raised a heathen, the world of any sort of faith eludes me.  You can justify anything with faith.  I can punch you in the face and say it was faith and you can’t get mad.  I can make lifestyle choices based on spurious translations of millennia-old texts and then apply them to other people at will and they can’t get mad.  Unpacking what makes people cling to this sort of thing is fascinating.  I’ve always devoured documentaries about the Amish, while Wild Wild Country offered another view on how these things start and how communities respond.  I’d also seen the Netflix documentary One Of Us which had given me fair warning about how hard it is to leave not only your ultra-Orthodox community, but your friends, your family and your whole way of life.

Unorthodox is told in two concurrent narratives.  The first, sticking most faithfully to the book, follows our heroine, Esty Shapiro, as she prepares to leave her husband and flee the Williamsburg neighbourhood where she has lived her whole life.  The tension crackles as she secretively breaks free and you can’t help but will her to run away.  The second, which is more loosely only inspired by the book, follows her progress on arrival in Berlin – making new friends, wearing new clothes, eating ham.  Shira Haas blows my mind with her lead performance.  I’m still thinking about it now.  I am so convinced by her journey that I occasionally find myself wondering how Esty is getting on in Berlin.

As such, resisting just one more episode is impossible, as you’ll need to know if she makes it, how she makes it, why she escapes and what happens next, all at once.  This is multiplied by the privileged glimpse into a deeply religious world that is hidden from most of us; the wedding scene in particular is documentary-like in its setting out of customs for us to witness.  While voyeuristic, there isn’t a sense of condemning what we see.  We are simply able to view it, and the characters’ responses to it, in the frame of Unorthodox’s sociological storytelling.  Marriage is crucial in Esty’s community, as procreation is seen as its primary purpose, their drive to repopulate a historical hangover from the Holocaust (which I inadvertently foreshadowed in my self-pitying introduction).  Affection and sexual enjoyment are therefore fairly low down the marital agenda, far behind taking the bins out and weeing with the door open.

Meanwhile, in Berlin, Esty is confronted by the fact that the aftermath of genocide, rather than leading to a life-defining duty, is more practically incorporated into daily life as a part of history and geography.  The Berlin scenes rely slightly too much on happenstance to take Esty’s journey forward, her leeching on to a multinational group of idealistic young musicians being met with enthusiastic adoption when surely most people would ask a hanger on to get lost – maybe that’s just the London in me.

In conclusion, Unorthodox offers compelling drama and an eye-opening insight into a community and their practices that you might not know much about.  I now want all my dramas to be set in devout sects, for the hats alone.  But I warn you, set aside sufficient time to get through the whole thing, as you won’t be able to stop after just one episode.  This should be fine, though, as it’s not like we can go anywhere.  Maybe lockdown is our own orthodox lifestyle that we can’t escape from.

Elite (Élite)

Rarely do I start on a new boxset and then proceed to watch only that boxset until I have devoured every episode in existence.  Normally it’s a case of adding another show into the mix, alternating its position in my evening viewing schedule (it’s now the law to stay in) among some of my favourite themes for programming: post-apocalyptic shows featuring zombies (The Walking Dead, Kingdom), adult animation (South Park), offensive comedy (Nighty Night – now on iPlayer here) or things about sport that aren’t the same as actually watching sport (Last Chance U).  But from the very first minute of Elite, I couldn’t stop until I had devoured the whole lot.  Granted, it ticked one of my other favoured categories: things set in schools (Sex Education).  But it also seems to be striking out a new theme which is wreaking havoc with my paranoia about what my neighbours can see through my windows: shows with a whole lot of f*cking (a bit like Game Of Thrones roulette where naked body parts could be splayed all over the screen at a moment’s notice).  More on this later.

But first, what is Elite about?  Well, for starters it’s nothing to do with the liberal elite, ruining everyone’s lives by trying to create a society that’s fairer and better for everyone.  It’s about the privileged teenage children of wealthy Spaniards who enjoy the fanciest education that money can buy.  This all takes place at Las Encinas (which Google Translate reveals to mean holm oaks – no idea), a swanky, fee-paying school with its own bridge.  After three seasons, I’m fairly sure it’s in Madrid, but we can assume this is a generic Spanish town or city.  Characters do pop off to Asturias, which seems too far a jaunt from the capital.  Pupils avail themselves of its ample opportunities: swimming in its pool, arguing in its corridor, being disruptive in its one classroom, ogling its ugly trophy, calling its teachers by their first names, being very sexually active and occasionally murdering one another.

This would all be boring if we didn’t add some tension, so our first series opens with three scholarship kids entering Las Encinas for the first time, their new, improved educations funded as an act of charity after their old poor school fell down, on them.  They’re about to find out its not so easy rubbing shoulders academically with the rich and privileged.  But don’t worry, everyone is beautiful.

Each season’s arc builds to a climactic terrible crime but foreshadows this throughout with police procedural flash forwards in a way that, while narratively a little clunky, makes you unable to resist your desire to know immediately how it all ends.  Subsequent series also build on and compound their predecessors’ misdemeanours, lending the whole thing a perverse credibility that couldn’t be achieved if brand new adventures had to be dreamt up.  And there we have it: soap-operatic trashiness, elevated by tension you’ll be powerless to resist.  Each evening, when you log off working from home, you’ll be excited to return to Las Encinas.

And what a world it is.  Diversity is everything for these young people, with a head-on tackling of European society’s response to Islam.  Siblings Omar and Nadia struggle to balance their academic and romantic pursuits with their Palestinian parents’ expectations, which mostly involve worrying about who will staff their grocery shop.  Seeing as there almost never seems to be a customer in sight and most of the employee labour goes into rearranging the lemons one by one, they could probably chill out a bit.  Sexuality is also enthusiastically box-ticked from a diversity perspective, with fans of boy-on-boy loving richly rewarded, as well as frequent shout outs to the polyamory community.  Add in the straights, and you’ll see what I mean about a whole lot of f*cking, in all its available flavours.

For language fans, there’s every imaginable swear word, often in the same sentence.  No sooner has someone begun an exchange with “hola” than they are following up that statement with “joder puta madre coño” in such rapid succession that the subtitlists get overwhelmed and just put the F word the whole time.  But this reflects the extent to which this really is adult stuff.  Aged sixteen and seventeen, no known laws seem to prevent the Elite crew from getting up to all sorts: drug-dealing, clubbing, easy access to alcohol.  The Inbetweeners this ain’t.  Elite builds its own sexy mythology around axioms you will willingly accept: Glee Warbler school uniforms look sexy, it doesn’t matter that Samu is shorter than all his girlfriends, Las Encinas’ coursework is farcical at best.  The only idiosyncrasy that bothers me is that nobody seems to kiss with tongues, which makes the graphic love-making scenes fall somewhere flat when all the naked characters are only pecking each other on the lips.  That’s right: I’ll buy everything else Elite serves, but the illusion is shattered for me when they don’t kiss properly.  Now I can see why my neighbours might think I’m a pervert.

Having raced through Elite, I’m now bereft to return to a reality where I am no longer part of the gang, especially if this is a world where summer Love Island is cancelled.  While animosity between the characters dominates earlier episodes, our alumnos go through so much that new relationships form as they develop and change their prejudices, accommodating the new individuals injected into proceedings each season.  You’ll warm to them, even as they murder each other.  So, if you’ve got some lockdown nights to while away, and you’re confident your TV screen isn’t overlooked by minors or curtain twitchers, lose yourself in the world of Elite and join me in the impatient wait for a fourth season.  Joder.