The Fall

Yes, I’ve fallen.  Into The Fall.  There was a sudden urge in me for something gritty and British.  Something grittish.  On Netflix’s autoplay function, the clip of this show answered my specifications perfectly: dashboard-shot footage of an approach to a crime scene, greyness everywhere, probably some drizzle, Gillian Anderson looking a bit grumpy.  Right, I thought, this is going to be the perfect blend of Line Of Duty and Happy Valley – everyone says it’s supposed to be very good.

The grip came very early on and I was soon anxious to get through as much of the three series as quickly as I could.  But what were we dealing with?  First of all, there was a location that was pretty new for me.  The Fall plays out in Northern Ireland and, more specifically, Belfast.  Now, I appreciate that even me saying that this programme fulfilled my need for something British can be interpreted as political – the whole place has been hotly contested as either Irish or part of the UK since way before my conception in the mid-eighties.  The Troubles were rarely out of the news in my childhood, and we even revisited them at A-Level when someone thought we should look at the cold cold poetry of Seamus Heaney, but there’s been a peace process for ages now.  Some would say for too long, so it’s a good job people voted for Brexit and we can all hurry back in time at the earliest opportunity.  It’s not like the year has already been a bit of a state.  Nevertheless, as the murders played out, I found myself deciding I really ought to visit Belfast at some point.

Aye, murder.  Here we are again, fuelling another British obsession: the details of how young women are murdered.  They’re not prostitutes this time, but successful career brunettes, targeted carefully by our killer, haunted and taunted until dispatched by slow strangulation.  This part of the story, dominating the first series, is taut with tension, from police not believing claims of home invasion, to the sleight of hand used to home in on the next victim.  The Northern Irish police force are refusing to acknowledge that a string of murders could be linked, flying in our Gillian as London-based Stella Gibson to investigate how previous operations have failed to yield results.

Anderson is enjoying something of a renaissance as a very British actor, even though she’s proper American.  Her X Files days still plague my nightmares (not her, but that ghost going down the stairs in the opening credits), but she’s given us pure joy in Sex Education and is currently on Thatcher duties in the latest lavish season of The Crown (the Diana years).  The Netflix blurb described her character as an ice queen, but there’s more to Gibson than perfect hair and some nice flowy blouses.  She stands up to the men around her.  She owns her sexuality.  She’s focused on her career.  We know she’s sensitive because, you know, she has a dream journal and that, but she’s a captivating hero and we urge her to succeed.  She even sleeps at work and, by season three, this seems to be taking its toll, as her voice establishes a distracting rasp.

Uncomfortably, she finds herself drawn to the killer as much as he to her.  The obsession tests the bounds not just of her professionalism, but also affects his murderous ambitions.  I don’t want to spoil who our main suspect is, so I’ll just now start to talk about Jamie Dornan as part of a completely unrelated matter.  He remains inscrutable throughout.  While his torso is for spurious reasons shown in varying states of undress at any excuse, working out why he is the way he is remains a mystery, its illumination only really beginning as we build to the final series’ climax.  As Paul Spector, he’s a loving dad (to his daughter at least) but a neglectful husband.  He alternates between leading on and spurning poor wee Katie Benedetto.  He stands up to yet is cowed by the likes of James Tyler.  It’s fitting that we never know whether we can believe him, even when he gives a firm yes in police interviews (never a yeah).

But, once the chase of Gibson’s cat to his mouse is more or less over, things slow down and settle a bit, such that the lack of momentum drove me to distraction.  In this lull, I started and finished The Staircase before forcing myself to return to the story.  I’m glad I did but, looking back at the sum of its parts, there are elements to its sprawlingly ambitious web of narratives that I wish we’d returned to or gained more closure on.  Corruption in the police force from series one fades away.  Supporting officers in the investigation get a bit of interesting characterisation before relegation to the background.  Our focus grows tighter and more claustrophobic culminating quite literally in Spector-on-Gibson action.

Join me, then, in taking a fall into The Fall.  If your second lockdown isn’t harrowing enough, this will surely contain enough gruesome themes to keep you in the house.  Just make sure you pop out if you find your bra laid out on the bed.

The Staircase

Deep in a second lockdown, the last thing you need while trying to account for lost income and no gyms (thanks, Bozza) is a tense and paranoia-inducing documentary about murder, guilt, loss and the flaws in any justice system.  I know this now.  But I didn’t when I decided the time had finally come for me to consume Netflix’s well-known thirteen-part series: The Staircase.  Previously, it had proven easy enough to ignore in the algorithm, particularly with such distractions as the second series of The End Of The F***ing World, a Wales-based attempt at I’m A Celebrity (works quite well, actually) and, thank goodness, despite its dilution by social distancing, Strictly Come Dancing.  Don’t even ask me about season four of The Crown – that will just have to wait (plus it’s not like my enjoyment is at risk from spoilers).  But no, podcast after podcast had conspired to reference The Staircase in heated discussion, bringing out my worst fear: boxset omission.  Here I am carefully curating all my viewing so I can chime in with any conversation, and yet I had missed what sounded like a bit of a classic.  Not that I can interrupt people while podcasting.  I’ve tried that before and they can’t actually hear you so there’s no point.

Potentially a poor man’s Making A Murderer, The Staircase looks like it’s going to offer you the same sort of did-he-didn’t-he, blow-by-blow account of an American crime as examined through the American justice system.  Indeed, both shows err on the side of the subject’s pleas of innocence, highlighting how courthouses are vulnerable to corruption, bias and unfairness, but while the Steven Amery case focuses on a low-income family whose only wealth is in the form of dilapidated cars, the clan at the centre of our story, by the look of their North Carolina mansion, seem to be drenched in riches.

But, they do have an awkwardly poky staircase, and it’s this part of the interior that forms the point of dispute driving the whole series’ narrative.  At the bottom of it, the body of Kathleen Peterson is found in 2001, covered in blood.  Is her tragic death an accidental fall, or the result of murder by her husband, Michael Peterson?  Either way, it’s his frantic calls to 911 that open our story.  It’s a chilling beginning and one seemingly designed to arouse suspicion immediately.  As the trial proceeds and we learn more about the Petersons’ happy family home, containing well turned-out children from previous marriages as well as some adopted daughters, we can only look on as the state brings a case against Michael and appears willing to play every trick to clinch a conviction.  We’re going back twenty years, so attitudes towards sexuality highlight an excess of narrow-mindedness.  Juror response research even yields free admissions that experts with Chinese accents aren’t easy to trust.  The odds stack up against Michael who, out on bail, potters about his large home drinking cans of Diet Coke while his legal team strategise.  He brings to mind an early-season Caitlyn Jenner in Keeping Up With The Kardashians, bemused by the goings on of the young people in the home but ultimately happy in some jogging bottoms.

It’s hard to discuss much more about the case without spoiling the plot.  I was hoping for references to an owl theory that had played out centrally in the podcast discussions that had driven me to the programme, but, unless I blacked out at very specific moments, I totally missed this.  Instead, over the course of many years, we watch a middle-aged man grow very old and suffer, eliciting natural sympathy no matter the verdict.  This is contrasted with the burning hatred that Kathleen’s surviving sisters have for him, which grows only stronger with time, giving some indication of the impetus behind his prosecution.  There’s uneasy viewing throughout, from graphic depictions of Kathleen after her fall to deeply skin-crawling testimonies in the courtroom.

As we progress, you develop a sense of melancholy from all the waste.  All the time, money, energy and emotion that goes into something like this, only for it never truly to be over, highlights the human damage and hopelessness such a case leaves in its wake.  Nothing can bring Kathleen back and nothing can make clear what really happened.  Our perspective is only ever really that of the accused, so sympathies naturally develop there, but nobody really wins.

The episodes each pivot around a singular development in the case, but we could potentially have zipped through some of them a bit more quickly to tighten up the documentary’s intensity.  The shaky footage from the early 2000s is hardly going to stress out your HD telly, but this is more of an unputdownable story than a visual feast by any stretch of the imagination.  In addition, the camerawork improves as the episodes shift focus nearer to the present day, particularly in the three final editions added by Netflix.  You’ll come away feeling uneasy, knowing what a blow poke is and questioning who gets to decide guilt and innocence, but at least you’ll be about thirteen hours closer to the end of a lockdown.

Mock The Week

I’ve just done a quick check, and I don’t think we’ve done a panel show before.  Unless you count University Challenge as a panel show, and you shouldn’t, because it’s not one.  It’s actually a quiz.  It differs from panel shows because people are actually trying to give the right answers to difficult questions.  Though panel shows are also quizzes of sorts, it’s more important to give a hilarious answer instead of a correct one.  And the questions are easier.

The reason I’ve not talked about one here before, though, is because I don’t really watch them.  Like chat shows, they seem to be a bit of a waste of time.  Chat shows are just people plugging their new book with rehearsed anecdotes while a former comedian swoons over them – I can get this sort of content from podcasts without having to use my eyeballs.  In my millennial office life (and by office, I mean working from home) nobody ever makes an appointment to view a panel show.  Lots of them are broadcast on Friday nights when we’re all at after-work drinks (not me), and now we’re not allowed to do that anymore, we’re too deep in season two of The Boys (no thanks) or the end of Schitt’s Creek (already completed it) to tune in.  In short, panel shows aren’t the kind of boxsets you can show off to your friends with.

When I still lived at home, Have I Got News For You was a firm family favourite.  Little did we know we were choosing our future PM based on who was the most discombobulated panellist (well, I didn’t vote for him, but it was f***ing one of yas – dezguztan!).  My parents still relish how the show’s humour makes a farce of British politics, but for me the subject matter is already too much of a farce to be funny anymore.  I once spent a whole train journey to Cornwall for work (shout out Eden Project) watching Never Mind The Buzzcocks on my phone and laughing so loudly that fellow passengers worried for my sanity.  But will we ever get Simon Amstell back?  I may save this for a future edition, as is my plan with Celebrity Juice, so we’ll try and focus on the show in hand.

The reason I’m picking Mock The Week is that I’ve come to admit begrudgingly it’s actually rather good.  Of an evening, around 10pm, as I disconnect the telly from Netflix or Amazon Prime or Sky Boxsets, I’m hit with a brief glimpse into live terrestrial telly.  The channel is never set to BBC1 or ITV, as my life is too worth living ever to sit through either station’s ten o’clock news – I am not going to bed angry.  Invariably, it’s BBC2, which means, on a certain night of the week I have thus far not ascertained, Mock The Week is in full swing.  Whether it’s a repeat, or a more recent edition with fun-ruining plastic dividers and social distancing, I will typically lose between ten and twenty minutes of delicious sleep because I’ve become distracted by the hilarity on screen.  But it’s worth it.

The idea is to laugh at things that have happened in the last seven days.  That’s where the name comes from.  Mocking the week.  Got it?  Good.  And we all know we could do with a laugh these days.  Given my fractional viewing, I’m not too sure of the rest of the format.  Dara Ó Briain ably chairs proceedings, a characterful man who combines erudition with, my personal favourite, plenty of silliness.  He once called me a c**t at a live show in response to my answer to his question regarding what job I do.  So I consider him a close personal friend.

The two teams of three that make up the rest of the panel are a revolving retinue of comedians, all taking part willingly in the weekly mockery.  More recent episodes have seen a great big shift upwards in the diversity of backgrounds here and if this doesn’t excite you then please stop reading now.  I’m up for banning white men from all TV and politics for the next five years (especially me) and seeing how we get on.  What’s the worst that can happen?  Sadly, this would cost me some of my favourites: Ed Gamble and his dry delivery, James Acaster and his perpetual face of confusion (let’s all agree to watch his Netflix specials please) and Tom Allen, taking a break from slagging off cakes but in a charming way on Bake Off: Extra Slice.

Sometimes our panellists sit around, sometimes there’s a microphone on a stand that they have to dash towards from little raised platforms and it’s fun wondering if they’ll bump into each other.  Sometimes you wonder how people can be so quick-witted, sometimes you wonder if they’ve had time to prepare their best lines.  Either way, there are plenty of chuckles to go round for everyone and, of course, nobody cares who actually wins.  I couldn’t even tell you if scores are kept – that’s just how little research I do for these posts.  And so, Mock The Week, let us salute you as a pandemic hero – you’re making me want to watch you in spite of myself.

Atlanta

It was good while it lasted, but now we’re staying in again apparently.  I’m sure that will help.  Naturally, while rushing around seeing friends in the run up to everything closing again, talk turned, as it often does, to boxsets that could help pass the time while we wait for unelected government advisors to test their eyesight.  To anyone that will listen, I’ve been recommending Atlanta.  The show had long been on my list of things I must get round to, but it didn’t seem to be anywhere until its recent appearance on the BBC’s iPlayer.  Maybe it slipped on while they were busy making VTs about how this year’s series of Strictly is keeping to social distancing guidelines even though nobody cares anymore and just wants to watch some dancing.  Where I failed in my explanation though was in bringing to life the joys of Atlanta and why this is such a seminal show (it’s at number 124 currently on the IMDB list of top-rated shows, just behind Line Of Duty, which, when you think of how many TV programmes there are out in there in the world, is very good going).

I’ll just wheel out some clichés here about why Atlanta defies categorisation.  It breaks the mould.  It’s one of a kind.  It’s truly unique.  Ok, there we go.  Now let’s talk about Donald Glover.  Our Donnie G is the creative force behind the whole show.  This is what made me realise that I needed Atlanta in my life.  Ever since I finished all his episodes of Community (Troy and Abed in the morning) there’s been a Troy Barnes-shaped chasm in my soul.  But gone are the bright smiles and innocent confusion of that character.  Instead we have scowling, unkempt facial hair and almost everything going wrong.  In Atlanta, Glover plays Earn, our leading man who isn’t really leading anyone anywhere (and is remarkably generous about stepping back to let the other characters shine).  We learn that he’s had educational potential, but it’s not amounted to much, with him struggling to hold down jobs, find places to live, care for his daughter and girlfriend.  We see his mum barring him entry to the house.  Throughout all of this, though, we root for Earn, a well-meaning everyman who’s often tested by but mostly tolerates the nonsense and weirdness of those around him.  And they are:

Van

Initially a background figure under the heading of baby momma, it’s thanks to Zazie Beetz’s magnetism that we’re grateful to see Vanessa step forward into focus as the two seasons progress.  She’s always surprising, whether whipping out richtig gut German in Helen at a crazy Bavarian festival (making it clear that we white folk are whack), dealing with her wasted friends at a supposed Drake party in Champagne Papi or struggling with an imbalanced and outdated friendship in Value.  These female-led instalments have lower ratings than the others, but this is just one of life’s great injustices.  Van steals my heart each time she rolls her eyes at others’ Instagram behaviour, so may we ever get to see more of her.

Paper Boi

This is actually Alfred, Earn’s cousin and smalltime-going-on-bigtime rapper.  When he can’t get off the sofa due to laziness, we really believe it, but Brian Tyree Henry comes into his own when required to cold-hard stare at anyone spouting nonsense.  In Barbershop, his frustration while trying to get a fade is so palpable it led me to sack off trying to pin down a barber to cut my hair before lockdown.  His must-see moment, though, is in B.A.N. when he’s forced to answer for his views on a late-night panel show, ambushed at every turn by virtue-signalling wokeness while the awkwardness is interspersed with fake adverts for African Americans on this pastiche of a popular channel.  Spoof ads have always had a special place in my amusement chambers and this episode delivers multiple belly laughs as a result.

Darius

Mostly found in Alfred’s kitchen, Darius is never doing what you expect him to.  LaKeith Stanfield is perfect at all times, never more so than when dealing with Teddy Perkins in a Michael Jackson-alike episode.

The rest of Atlanta is populated by all manner of grotesques, offering acerbic commentary on how race in the US interplays with wealth, work, education, family life, music, social media and just about everything you can think of.  We have humour in the deadpan observations, but also heartbreak in how easy it is to recognise these inequalities as very very real.  Atlanta’s strength comes from making everything somehow universal so that you’re forced to identify with the action as it unfolds.  But it doesn’t care what you’re expecting, calling to mind an I May Destroy You approach of drawing focus to whatever is more interesting, not what necessarily seems best placed to come next.  As such, each episode creates a work of its own, setting its own mix of characters, locations and times.  The throwback to Earn and Alfred’s schooldays seems at first leftfield, but artfully grounds what follows.

The soundtrack doesn’t stint on bangers and there’s even joy to behold in the opening credits.  Atlanta appears somewhere on screen in its unmistakable font, but you need to keep your eyes peeled to spot it among the madness.  I found myself tingling each time with excitement at the prospect of finding it, but maybe I need to get out more.  But I can’t because I’m now government-mandated to stay in.  The pandemic doesn’t stop there: it’s delayed production on the third series, automatically giving any return of Atlanta the epithet long-awaited.  And I shall wait as long as it takes.