Grand Designs

I think we can all agree there are moments in life when you realise the way you feel about things has changed.  Never has this been truer than during the year we’ve just had.  The thought of running around London attending various meetings, squeezing on Tubes and touching everything, then staying out all evening shedding cash on food and drink with pals sounds quite frankly like a dream come true.  A year ago, I would much rather have been ensconced in my flat, dressed in slacks and watching trash on the big telly.  But after twelve months of that, I feel like a social butterfly ready to obliterate my chrysalis and say yes to doing anything, as long as it is outside of my flat.  I’ve even got myself vaccinated (childhood asthma on my GP records saw me texted early and taking the jab when offered seemed like the most straightforward path – if you don’t agree, I am happy to arrange to spit in your mouth in order to share immunity… pretty sure that’s how it works) and, in fact, leaving the house for that was a great day out.

In other changes, I never thought I would feel I wanted to watch Grand Designs.  Any programming about property was a huge turn off, mostly because I spent eleven years saving in order to own one of my, er, own.  During that time, I was at the mercy of the rentals market, from the highs of making new lifelong besties out of flatmates, to the lows of being asked to leave after six months by a woman who once took herself to A&E due to constipation.  The prospect of privileged boomers spending untold cash on their own gratification held no appeal.  But then, I finally got my own flat, and then it became my prison.  Sure, it’s filled very tastefully with an interior scheme that is half John Lewis, half too many houseplants and sure, it’s in zone two among all the things (that are shut), but, as the upstairs neighbours stamp and shriek literally while I type this (and who can blame them as they are stuck in too), I’ve been wondering about finding my way to more space, to something further away from other (stamping and shrieking) people.  And this led me to Grand Designs.  Maybe the time has come for some inspiration about my next house.

Let me just confess that, unlike most of shows these endless posts cover, I haven’t actually seen all of Grand Designs.  There’s nothing to stop me watching all 210 episodes, but all my rambling here is based on three full episodes from the latest series and then an array of snatched snippets when I’ve happened to catch a few moments of the programme over the last 21 years.  But I do know the format, and it’s exactly that which makes it a show you don’t really want to dip in and out of: it’s all set up, tease and big reveal.

First, we meet our grand designers.  They are wealthy.  Not to look at though, and often half the fun is wondering how Jerome and Valentina earned hundreds of thousands of pounds trading rare fur gilets in semirural Hertfordshire.  Either way, they’ve decided to abandon the rat race (or to move into a caravan when one of them is pregnant) and design and build their own house.  And they want us, the viewer, to watch them do it.  It’s the insta humble brag, but make it self-unaware.  Casting judgment on our behalf is Kevin McCloud.  His job is to be a man that knows about buildings and his opinions on them.  Jerome and Valentina tell him about their dreams and he tilts and manoeuvres his head to demonstrate that he is listening, giving the impression he can only process certain sounds if his ears are at certain corresponding angles.  Yet this doesn’t diminish his undeniable charm.  Even when he proceeds to be rude.  He tells them their dreams sound unrealistic.  Then he asks them how much.  It’s a great moment if your pastime is watching people with old money squirm, or people with new money froth at the chance to flash their cash.

Then we get an 3D CGI illustration of the plans.  This is the bit I always want more of.  We never find out more about the exact reasons behind each room.  We focus on one thing instead: it’s all about the light, the heating, the carbon neutrality.  Everything else is rushed past: and then here’s where all the bedrooms and bathrooms are but they haven’t got any floors or windows and there’s no time to explain.  And with that, off we go.  Handy dates on screen remind us that the show takes years to film and we settle into the portion about how they did the foundations.  This shouldn’t be interesting, but we’re all willing things to go wrong and they inevitably do.  Often, to save money, Jerome will pour his own concrete, despite wearing his helmet backwards, and it’s enjoyable to watch the workmen roll their eyes at him, his entitlement and his inexperience.  There’ll be drama that you can’t actually see: if the foundations crack then everything will be ruined and it will cost fifty grand.

The family waiting to move in are shivering in the drizzle under a tarpaulin round the back, but Jerome is standing proud not giving a fig while his vision becomes a reality.  Valentina waits until she can pick out the curtains.  We check in over the months, with Kevin sometimes popping along to tell them off for removing period features (if they are renovating an old building) or expressing disbelief that a heating system powered by Jerome and Valentina’s own sense of smugness will ever function properly (it bloody will).  You’ll marvel at Kevin’s outerwear – his whole house must be filled with sensible jackets.  Lots more stuff can go wrong and the schadenfreude is deeply satisfying.  The latest series has the added tension of us counting down until lockdown hits them, knowing what’s in store while they naively plan their progress.

Suddenly, though, we swing the windows into place (careful!) and everything is finished.  The rainy shell is gone.  We are looking at the actual home.  It’s behind schedule, but we go from pointing and laughing at the grand designers’ misfortune to seething envy that they get to live somewhere so cool.  I would observe that we see the “finished” item too soon after completion.  I want to see it two years later when the French windows are covered in the children’s greasy fingerprints and someone’s chipped the plasterwork with the vacuum cleaner.  Kevin marvels at the ingenuity, rinsing the thesaurus to find just the right words to sum up the achievement, before a final stab in the shape of asking how much it all cost then after all that.  Through clenched teeth, we’re told about the casual one hundred grand over budget that was spent, wondering where on earth this money came from (and what it went on).  How do you secure a loan from a bank when it’s to fund Valentina’s underground crystal craft cave?  Was it worth it that Jerome hand-tickled a million metro tiles to create an impractical kitchen?

You’re left feeling inspired, though.  If money were no object, which bits would you take to fashion your own dream abode?  Kevin admits they’ve triumphed and we kick ourselves that we don’t and never will earn enough.  I normally like to think about what else they could have spent the money on.  Being Brits of a certain age, most of them should probably have prioritised some orthodontics.  But what if they had scaled back the ambition just a touch?  What if a few hundred pounds were freed up?  What if Jerome, instead of gratifying himself with gold-plated bathtubs, got the silver-plated ones instead and funded a family’s broadband bill so they could alleviate disruption to disadvantaged children’s educations?  After all this, that’s the other thing we might be starting to feel differently about.

30 Rock

For the creators of amazing telly, it must be dispiriting to have their programme described as a background show.  Yet the concept is well worn, particularly when we are stuck at home all the time.  For me, the background show is ideally shorter than half an hour in length and, typically, a comedy.  It might seem like a fall from grace for something like Friends, going from must-see TV premiers in primetime to something we can put on for a bit of chatter to drown out our thoughts while our attention is half-taken by chopping up vegetables or watering the houseplants.  But, it’s either a new way of appreciating an old favourite, as my journey reacquainting myself with South Park proved in its unfolding, or a perfectly apt way of discovering a new show, as I did with Brooklyn Nine-Nine.  It’s even more impressive if a background show can make you laugh out loud, and this week’s subject, 30 Rock, certainly did that to me.

Interestingly, to nobody but me, 30 Rock straddled both of these categories.  I remember watching the first series in some former stage of my life, enjoying the fast pace of the gags on gags, the perpetual irrelevance and the abundance of very very silliness (hello to you, Miranda).  Nobody knows why, despite the best efforts of scholars, but I never got any further.  Cue 2020/1 and I’m working from home every day, trying to make lunch breaks a thing by popping on an episode of my current background show while treating myself to one of life’s few remaining comforts: food.  There, among all the Sky boxsets, was dear old 30 Rock.  Surely I could get through all seven seasons simply because I have nothing else to do, unless you count staring in the mirror and weeping.  I’m here to report that, yes, I really did achieve my goal of watching all of it.

Scant research, by me, has revealed that the concept of 30 Rock is loosely based around the writers’ room of famous American cultural thing Saturday Night Live.  We don’t get that in the UK.  Our live thing on Saturday night is Strictly Come Dancing and that doesn’t have a writers’ room because, like a lot of British telly, there aren’t actually enough writers to go round that every show can fill its own room with them.  I suppose it depends on the room, though, as we could just be talking about the downstairs cloak.  In short, SNL (for short) is a parody sketch show of that week’s events featuring a celebrity guest host and a retinue of regular cast.  Within 30 Rock, our version of this is The Girlie Show but, as each series unfolds, we see hardly any of it.  Half the joke is that it’s bad and unfunny, cobbled together at the last minute despite the ineptitude of its writers and producers, while the rest of the humour comes from the lives of the characters trying to make it happen in the first place.

Our hero is Liz Lemon, played by creator Tina Fey.  I’m doing things arse-backwards here as I’ve already banged on about my Tina love in a previous post on her later creation Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt.  Both shows have a lot in common, but one key difference is that Fey hardly appears in the latter.  Lemon, however, is our window into the TV sketch show production world, the only (relatively) normal and capable NBC employee trying to wrestle everyone else along to something approaching acceptable behaviour.  You’ll come to love her as much as you’ll love seeing her abused by co-workers, friends and family, often via flashbacks to her dweeby childhood and teenage years.  She’s all of us in later decades when we can’t be bothered to go out at night anymore (something I regret terribly now we’re not allowed to go out at all).

The pilot sets up her main foil, network executive Jack Donaghy.  Alec Baldwin has the time of his life as this right-wing conservative, sending up a variety of attitudes with charming affection and building over the series with Liz Lemon an almost perfectly symbiotic relationship.  Lemon, too, is thwarted by her cast.  Donaghy forces upon her Tracy Jordan, played by Tracy Morgan.  She must effectively parent this manchild and his entourage while keeping happy her best friend, Jenna Maroney, TGS’s original star whose nose is well and truly put out of joint by the arrival of Jordan.  At all times, Jane Krakowski’s performance is my favourite thing, as Maroney’s fame-hungry desperation, delusional attitude to ageing and uncompromising need for attention mark her out as a true kindred spirit, although I can’t sing and she can’t stop blurting out tunes at the slightest provocation.  The wider cast sets up constant jokes at the expense of various strata of American society, and then this is fleshed out to great effect by a steady stream of guest stars, from Mad Men’s Jon Hamm to Bojack Horseman’s Will Arnett.  I’m reserving special mentions for Rachel Dratch in various scene-stealing roles and for the character of Leo Spaceman, the world’s worst and therefore funniest medical professional.

And that’s the main conclusion to leave you with – this stuff is funny.  Some elements haven’t aged too well from 30 Rock’s 2006 beginnings, but we’ve had many intervening years to improve our society and so any reaction to bad taste simply shows you how far we’ve come.  The characters are strong, ridiculous and don’t even come close to running out of mileage.  The action is relentless and there’s never more than ten seconds without some sort of gag.  With even just half an eye on it while you move your mouse around on your laptop so it looks like you’re actively working from home, it can still guarantee you laughs.  So this still remains amazing telly, no matter what attention you’re paying it.

The Mandalorian

Hats off to anyone who has been managing to thrive in lockdown, but with one exception.  It’s a massive boo hiss boo for Jeff Bezos of Amazon (the company, not the rainforest) as he’s grown far too wealthy and everyone is jealous they haven’t got the same amount of cash to spend on all that cardboard his deliveries are overpackaged in.  With this in mind, and having stopped buying anything on Amazon a while back (they’re not even on the Avios online shop), I finally cancelled my Amazon Prime membership.  I wasn’t bothered about next-day delivery, but I did want to make sure I had watched the final series of Vikings.  But where did I stick my spare monthly seven quid or so instead?  Well, I don’t think The Walt Disney Company are that hard up (I assume it’s run like Succession), but I became the proud owner of a shiny new Disney+ account (via a points-busting special offer on the Avios online shop).  I wanted to catch up with everyone else and, in particular, the sixty-seventh best TV show according to current IMDb ratings (an Amazon company – whoops); the time had come to watch The Mandalorian.

Let’s firstly digress into my history with the world of Star Wars.  In short, I was never that arsed with it.  I even spent five early years of my career running all of the TV sponsorships for LEGO Star Wars and mostly spent that time wondering what a Mace Windu was.  With nothing else to do, I decided to test-drive the Disney+ experience with a film a night in chronological order (by storyline, not production date).  Well, what a roller coaster of nine evenings that was (plus another two sessions for the standalone films).  Turned out, of the three trilogies, I had seen about three films once and two many times, and the rest never at all.  And there was no way of knowing which was which as the names are all a bit similar, aren’t they?  Nevertheless, I came to treasure 7pm, fresh from my commute home (from the seat in my poxy home office corner over to the sofa on the other side of the same room I have been in alone the whole day) settling down to the rousing orchestral swelling of the theme music (that’s what she said), accompanied by the PowerPoint of the scrolling plot prompts, keeping me abreast of the latest trade route taxation disputes.  Disbelief suspended, I willingly bought into the richly imagined universe of a galaxy far far away.  I can’t be doing with superheroes, but I am happy to tolerate clone armies, light sabres and the Force being with people.  It’s a bit like Game Of Thrones, only make it super PG and throw in some crazy vehicles.  My further observations are below:

1. Health and safety doesn’t seem to be a concern for the Dark Side.  Every Imperial construction might look all shiny and new, but there’s nary a handrail in sight.  No wonder people are always falling over the edge of very high walkways.  With my vertigo, I’d be straight off the side.  I don’t suppose it matters as these are normally the settings where people are getting an arm chopped off anyway.

2. Talking of the Imperial forces, why is everyone so bad at shooting?  I’m assuming the Stormtroopers go through some basic training, but about 100% of each plot hinges on the fact they’re never on target.  It’s their only job.

3.Inconceivable technological advancements have made rapid interplanetary transport a reality for what looks like quite a low entry cost.  Yet most of the populations we see are eking out their livings as subsistence farmers.  Let’s live in poverty, but have automatic doors.

4. Those not languishing in barren deserts can be found in one of many daytime drinking establishments.  Always full to the brim with plenty of extra-terrestrial ne’er-do-wells (and spoilt for choice with live music options) it’s clear the costume department has had a field day imagining an array of impractical lifeforms.

5. While galactic diversity is celebrated, huge chunks of dialogue are conducted inexplicably in two languages.  Whether it’s a droid doing some beeping or a Wookiee gurgling, an English-speaking cast member will always reply in their own tongue, with nobody querying how they’ve deciphered complex instructions from what sounds like a fax machine coming online.

6. Whole planets have single habitats and people give locations in terms of the planet itself.  Imagine asking where something was and being told “Earth” only Earth is just one desert that all looks the same.  Well, that’s Star Wars.

7. The Stormtrooper outfits.  We all know single-use plastic is a bad thing, but their armour offers literally no blaster protection at all.  Even punching their helmets knocks them out.

8. This works out well for the fact that most shootouts happen in corridors, often with nooks and crannies to hide behind while someone strides out, blaster aloft, making the classic command, “Cover me.”  I don’t even know what that means.

But this is all part of the charm.  A slightly camp, family-friendly imagining of a futuristic society with a late seventies/early eighties perspective on technology results in a world where swords and cloaks mix with spaceships and robots, creating a compelling terrain on which good can battle evil and we can be really clear who we’re rooting for.

As a modern update, The Mandalorian gives us a bit more of a grey area.  I’m sure these Mandos have many beliefs, but their most central tenet is keeping their helmets on.  This means, throughout its two seasons, we see hardly any of our star, Pedro Pascal.  His ever-present voice lends some of his trademark charisma to proceedings (as seen in Narcos and Game Of Thrones (Season Four)) but he’s otherwise comfined to his armour, giving us more time to admire the Disney-est thing about the whole show: a little baby “Yoda”.  Perhaps the whole treatment started with a merchandising idea, but let’s just go for it.  Our Mando is a ruthless bounty hunter till he sets eyes on the cute one.  From then on, we’re basically viewing a multi-planet babysitters’ club, but it’s all great fun.

The fun is directly proportional to the budget, with everything looking very expensive.  Our hero’s ship, the Razor Crest, features heavily, even finally answering the question of whether these things have toilets on them.  Every time we set off, Mando must flick and click a great number of switches in his cockpit, perpetuating the legacy of Star Wars’ analogue origins.  If it were being imagined now, he’d just have an iPad in there.  Yet, sitting down each day at my home office desk, turning on all my various bits of gubbins, I too am able to imagine I am some sort of Star Wars pilot preparing my ship.  On goes the laptop, the big screen, the speakers, the lamp, the wireless mouse and keyboard.  I’m not taking on the Empire but some of my work emails are rather fiery.  Try it yourself.

But yes, back to the show.  It’s a big tick from me.  I had to come to terms with the fact that this is basically a western.  This Mandalorian is the most lonesome of rangers, with each episode featuring an almost self-contained micro-mission en route to the great big mission of the series finale.  I’m not normally a fan of moving from setting to setting, but each lush spectacle of a new planet is a further glimpse into the inner workings of the Star Wars world.  I wanted to stop and see what each person was doing.  I mean, where is everyone going in all those Empire corridors?  You can be certain of quality viewing, though.  All I could suggest to elevate things is some actual gore.  Let’s be clear, most of our adventures involve an absolute massacre of Stormtroopers, yet the violence can have a cartoonish quality.  At one point, I was reminded of Power Rangers, and nobody wants that.  I won’t suggest, however, that we investigate more intimate activities in pursuit of that adult rating, as I have already pointed out that fervent Mandalorians don’t take their helmets off, much less, I imagine, their breeches.  There’s plenty of other action to enjoy, and you’ve always got Bridgerton/Industry/Euphoria/Normal People if you need some rumpy pumpy.

Bridgerton

I don’t know how they do it, but Netflix always seem to know just what we need.  It’s Christmas Day 2020.  Everyone is coming to terms with substantial compromises to their celebrations, potentially stranded far from home by following the whiplashing advice from the old boys’ club running our government.  The weather is crap, the year is being wished over, and little do we know, the next one is going to be getting off to the most underwhelming of starts.  And pow, Netflix drops the most optimised dollop of delicious escapism right in front of our eyeballs.  That’s right, this week we’re doing Bridgerton.

Regular readers won’t be surprised to know that I was very late to this party.  Spirited away to my parents’ just before London was turned into an inescapable fortress, their loyalty to live TV had driven me away into my Louis Theroux documentaries.  Returning to my home and work (which have now been the same place for nearly a year – I can’t confirm if I will ever wear underpants again), everyone was talking about one thing: Bridgerton.  I resisted its call.  I didn’t need to follow the herd.  I was deep in other series (wondering if The Sopranos would ever end).  Its mania would pass.  But then, instead, it snowballed.  Every other Guardian article (I ignore all other news – no surprises there) was about its music or its fashion.  It was revealed as the most watched Netflix production.  My interest was piqued.  Then everyone chuckled at the explicit sexual content and, lo and behold, I was sold.

The eight episodes are based on the first in a series of novels that follow the fictional Bridgerton family.  Named alphabetically, they’re an A to Z (well, an Anthony to Hyacinth) of upper-class London society in 1813.  We’re with them for a social season, from the young ladies’ debuts through weeks and weeks of balls balls balls until a final climax that sees all the lords and such retire back to their country piles.  Here’s the first reason Bridgerton’s timing are spot on: all these well-attended events are spectacles we can only dream of.  Right now, a good day out is a mask-clad whiz round the supermarket.  A lavish night of dancing and drinking, dressed up to the nines, is as alien to us as most of the social conventions of nineteenth-century Britain, but it is so richly and colourfully brought to life on screen that it has the power to fill that part of our lives that is so sorely lacking.  There’s even a nod to our present day, with the string quartets treating us to classical interpretations of modern pop songs.

While we’re at it, the costumes are a second well-tuned route for vicarious living.  Most of us are now set in our leisurewear (please see earlier comment about underpants), but the lords and ladies of Bridgerton are never out of excuses to push the sartorial boat out.  Even the discomfort of very tight breeches or having your cleavage shoved up beyond your clavicle offers a welcome break to shuffling about our homes in slippers and hoodies, with the exception of the Featheringtons’ sickly colour palette.

Thirdly, the show is on the pulse of our enthusiasm for diversity, putting black Georgians front and centre.  No need to explain, no indulgence of anyone feeling threatened; it’s just a great time.  Any protest with reference to historical accuracy is farcical, and probably from the same people who wanted The Crown accompanied by trigger warnings.  Some people simply don’t deserve content this entertaining.

But lastly, it is just the story for the moment.  In a foreign world of ladies’ reputations, archaic courtship and primogeniture, there is a welcome frivolity to the various love stories.  Bosoms heave, sideburns protrude, and eyes are made across the ballroom, and we’re unable to resist caring about girls making a good match and marrying for love.  Some jeopardy is clunkily contrived, with Anthony Bridgerton (Jonathan Bailey – a key player from W1A and Crashing) going from key barrier to his sister’s happiness to someone without quite enough to do, and the endless speculation regarding the real identity of Lady Whistledown (Gossip Girl gone Georgian) lacking compelling consequence.  But once the love making starts, we’re miles away from the grit and realism of something like Normal People and drinking in every romantic thrust of some good old-fashioned shagging.  You don’t get that in Downton Abbey.  Yet the shenanigans don’t feel gratuitous – they’re just another layer of fun in all the stories.  More remarkable is the sheer size of the cast, with every peripheral player committing wholeheartedly from the start, gradually coming forward as fully formed characters as the episodes progress.

Sure, the script could have done with one more proof-read to tighten the lines beyond the point of simply aping how people probably spoke in the olden days, and maybe some of the cast are guilty of doing theatre acting with their shouting and enunciating, but there’s little to fault with Bridgerton if you’re looking for a hearty romp.  I would even go as far to prescribe this as self-care at a time when reasons to be cheerful may appear to be lacking.  Switch off the 5pm briefing when we get put into surprise tier 22 and take yourself off to the world created by Julia Quinn and realised by Shonda Rhimes (How To Get Away With Murder, among many other things).  It’s a treat we all deserve, and it’s come at just the right time.