The Fast Show

As we reach the end of Just One More Episode (and, in fact, there are just four more episodes to go of this nonsense) I wanted to dedicate some time to rambling about a very influential show that people don’t seem to talk about anymore.  I’ve mentioned before my passion for sketch shows, both the terrifying highs of jokes that come off well and the dizzying lows set ups that never really pay off (see post on Little Britain), so it’s only right that I touch on The Fast Show before bowing out.  I was recently assailed by an irresistible urge to revisit some of my beloved sketches and managed to track down a handful of episodes downloadable from Sky Comedy.  Sadly, given that series one appeared in 1994, some of the footage looks like it was filmed on Vaseline (but don’t worry, guys, as the adverts that are inserted everywhere are crystal clear HD) but the humour still shines through and I found myself laughing my head off all over again, despite having seen all of it many times before.

These days, my attention span is so much shorter than it used to be, ruined by years of little whatsapps and incoming office work on multiple fronts (emails, calls, instant messages, someone standing next to your desk coughing lightly back in the days of actually working from anywhere but home), so it stands to reason that The Fast Show’s delivery of its very name’s promise (it’s quite fast) has helped to ensure that I’ve only grown fonder of it with age.  Most sketches are fairly rapid, some are even a few seconds and a single sentence.  Perfect if you’re itching to get the next one without delay.  This results in a vast population of characters and scenarios that I could never do justice to here, but my recent viewing has yielded two conclusions.  Firstly, the writers and actors love silliness as much as I do, as each sketch plays out in a parallel universe of messing about.  Secondly, their target is always anything that takes itself too seriously.  Sign me up.

Let’s take, for example, Jazz Club.  I remember only ever waiting patiently for this one to end when I was a child.  The punchlines were buried and subtle and, probably, it was too similar to real programmes at the time.  But it’s proven a revelation this time around.  John Thomson’s compere is unflinchingly earnest in his curation of various jazz musicians’ backstories, delighting in their hilarious-yet-subtle made-up names (hello, Toast Of London), before throwing with real enthusiasm to the stage where something terrible always unfolds, yet with every artist believing they are a heaven-sent gift to the music scene and the world in general, all conveyed through the medium of the rest of the cast messing about.  There’s an interpretative dance where you can just see Caroline Aherne (princess of The Royle Family) having the time of her life, channelling every pretentious performer she’s probably had the displeasure of coming across.  It’s at this point there’s a great moment of self-reference when the amazing Tom Bola and Jack Pot waddle into shot with their creepy dance.  I think about them all the time and have recently taken to whatsapping friends a video of me laughing along to this without any preceding explanation.

The two first appear in a sketch from Chanel 9, the brightly coloured pastiche of foreign telly, set in the scorching hot Republicca Democratia Militaria.  While it feels a bit Brexit-y and jingoistic these days, the sleaze of the presenters, the chaotic unfathomable action of the shows and the superbly coined and indecipherable language are all so well observed that you really do have the impression of having switched on the TV in a Spanish hotel room.  The linguist in me immediately starts decoding to find units of meaning, relishing in each Chris Waddle as much as every sminky pinky.  The awards show must have busted the budget, but it’s the lottery numbers that take me to my favourite farcical territory, with the multisyllabic word for five pushing the very boundaries of credibility, yet still erring on the side of plausibility.

Call me simple, but sometimes the repeatability is exactly what the fragile mind needs in comedy.  I’m going to channel my inner Simon Day with a “someone’s sitting there, mate” at the next opportunity.  I still maintain that every one of Jessie’s Diets and Fashion Tips is superbly written, and brought to life as an individual and unique performance by Mark Williams.  I didn’t even realise my habit of saying “no offence” in a South African accent after something offensive is generated by an Arabella Weir character.  Inevitably, I do need to question how well everything has aged, as it mostly, and shoot me if I am wrong, seems ok.  Upper class superciliousness and affectation seem to be The Fast Show’s target for its most extensive ruthlessness.  A few other lines have become a bit dud as our attitudes have improved, but I think the things we now deem sexist were in fact highlighting our imbalanced expectations from women, from “does my bum look big in this?” to the competent female employees who turn into simpering idiots at the first sight of a man.

I have to mention Paul Whitehouse, even if just to make it clear that my sister and I still whisper to each other “you ain’t seen me, right?” and Charlie Higson as Johnny Nice Painter, because we two siblings still re-enact the moments he finally utters the word black and asks mother why we must stick pins in our eyes.  Even all those years ago, some of the humour is eerily prescient, with Sir Geoffrey Norman MP a spot-on rendering of today’s chinless Tory, refusing to accept any assessment of reality by simply shouting nooooo.  I’d like to end outrageously by claiming The Fast Show invented humour as I now know and love it.  From the crude, such as the couple who have to pause briefly to explain that they’ve “just come” in inopportune circumstances, to the uncanny depiction of my childhood, as shown in the sketch which I now know is called The Hurried Poor, where a family constantly run about with too much luggage while the dad shouts “come on!”, the breadth of The Fast Show is as much a part of its charm as each sketch’s brevity.  I laughed then, and I laugh now.  Which was nice.

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.

W1A

This week, nobody has been asking me the following question: what other hidden gems in the world of comedy have you uncovered since you wrote so passionately about Crashing?  Nevertheless, I do need to tell you that I have gone and done it again.  I’ve come across a show whose existence I was completely oblivious to and now I’m going to harp on about it like I invented it myself.  It was probably huge at the time and is therefore already beloved by millions, but this is my blog and I can do whatever I like.  Something else people never ask me is how I decide which shows to feature in my self-indulging prose.  Well, there is no method to this madness.  I do have a longlist of shows I ought to get around to and this week’s programme was in fact on there – something I didn’t even realise until I had finished the third and (hopefully not) final season.  Anyway, preamble aside, we’re doing W1A this week.

Now, regular readers will be aware of my increasing despair when it comes to how awful we British our proving ourselves to be.  The dangerous yearning to return to a post-war peak from 75 years ago threatens everyone’s present-day opportunities.  Nevertheless, alongside the sinister jingoistic gymnastics, there are British traits that, conversely, feel as comforting and familiar as saying sorry to a stranger who’s bumped into you.  One of these is always suspecting we will make a mess of things.  Our trains can’t run in the snow, our trains can’t run in the heat, our breweries have hosted poorly organised piss-ups.  Back when we won the 2012 Olympics, everyone rolled their eyes in anticipation of ensuing shambles (when it was actually a recent national peak, inequality riots aside, and I’m not just talking about me dancing in the closing ceremony…).  So little faith did London’s wonderful liberal elite have in the organising committee than an irreverent sitcom was conceived: Twenty Twelve played on our suspicions surrounding how petty office bureaucrats would arrange and execute so much sport.  Sadly, I never saw this show and can’t find it anywhere, but W1A is its successor, following on with the adventures of Ian Fletcher (that lovely Hugh Bonneville off that lovely Downton Abbey) as he takes up a new post at the BBC.

Aha, you say, another institution we can deride for being a bunch of silly sausages.  How dare they make pensioners pay for their licenses when they of course deserve everything for free?  How dare there allow two women to dance together on Strictly?  How dare they pay female staff less than men?  (Guess which of these three is my actual opinion).  But, this is a BBC production, brilliantly sending up itself and our perceptions of the pencil-pushers who make it tick.  Fletcher serves as our guide in this institutionalised institution, stumbling through Old and New Broadcasting House trying to make sense of how things are done as the new Head of Values while slowly coming to accept that everyone is either incompetent at what they do, or they don’t do anything at all.  It’s at this point I must stress that the whole thing is laugh-out-loud funny.  I giggled my socks off in every single episode, so let’s count down which comedy creations scored the most LOLs on my chuckle-o-meter:

One: David Wilkes, played by Rufus Jones

As a development exec responsible for evolving potential show formats into ratings winners, Wilkes channels a new level of incompetency.  In any meeting, he expertly absolves himself of blame for every action and inaction of his.  He’s there, behind the fridge door, ready to steal your idea and take all the credit.  He interrupts discussions to tell everyone he can’t believe it and prefixes the name of anyone they are talking about with the adjective lovely: “Lovely Izzy, lovely Lucy.”  He’s frequently told to shut up and this generates in me the purest of joy.

Two: Siobhan Sharp, played by Jessica Hynes (seen in The Royle Family)

Another overspill from Twenty Twelve, Sharp is the PR guru who is incapable of listening to anyone but herself.  She is soundbites, mixed metaphors and statement jewellery, the very definition of having nothing original or useful to say.  Her response to every crisis is to blow things up on Twitter.  Her voice is supremely smug and she’ll announce that she’s “good with that” despite nobody requiring her approval.  I get the sense that whoever created her had some axe to grind after spending one too many meetings with members of the PR industry.  I can’t think why.

Three: Will Humphries, played by Hugh Skinner (seen in Fleabag)

“Yeah, no, hi, ok cool.”  Like everyone else, Will rarely says what he means, but he doesn’t know what he means anyway so it doesn’t matter.  He’s the awkward intern who’s overstayed his internship, but Skinner’s facial expressions show the perfect perplexity as Will screws up the simplest of tasks.

Four: Anna Rampton, played by Sarah Parish

As Head of Output, Rampton’s inability to move her top lip marks her out as a serious woman in business.  By repeating “yes, exactly, yes” she falsely portrays an air of decisive action while never doing anything.  Her catchphrase wears out slightly in later series, but she is at her funniest early on refusing every requested refreshment that is brought to her: “No, I don’t want that.”

Five: Simon Harwood, played by Jason Watkins

Harwood is that colleague we all sadly have.  The saboteur who wanted your role.  Non-committal, but always prepare to play his hand as a self-claimed confidante of the Director General (with whom he might enjoy the odd morning muffin), Harwood’s passive-aggression can be seen from space.  He’s constantly telling people he has no idea how things work (because they should) and that they will know how they want to play things (because he’s sure as hell not helping), before emitting one of his frequent exclamations of “brilliant” no matter what’s been decided.

I could go on.  There’s the for-once palatable David Tennant narrating, inserting the odd word to render all action ridiculous (particularly the Ministry for Culture, Media and, also, Sport).  You’ve got Tracy Pritchard beginning every criticism with “I’m not being funny but…”  Ben and/or Jerry bring a surreal element to the incredible pacing of every Damage Limitation meeting.  Layer upon layer of farce is dolloped out in rich scoops, crescendoing into ill-fated launches.  But it’s almost too close to home.  Some of the meetings feel like they were taken directly out of my life.  The curious inability of each and every character to communicate clearly makes wondrous use of two of the English language’s most abused words: yes and no.  Never seen alone or with certainty, W1A is strewn with oodles of “yes no” and lashings of “no yes” and then further fleshed out with generous portions of “yes no yes” and “no yes no.”  Playing out in a corner of London where I’ve worked for the last ten years, I look for myself in the background of scenes were Fletchers cycles into the office on his terrible Brompton (which bikes’ super-naffness is played for miles as laughs).  I’ve even been in the offices of Siobhan Sharp’s Fun Media on many occasions.

Get on the sofa and consume this immediately.  And then tell me if I was right or wrong about its brilliance.  Fair play to the Beeb for being such a good sport, lampooning itself for comedy (though never mentioning its news coverage’s right-wing leanings).  It’s not perfect – some exasperation at increasing wokeness has dated slightly.  Characters start to repeat their catchphrases too much and the freshness of the surprise wears off.  There’s an inevitable love triangle involving Ian Fletcher that doesn’t ring true, while the relationship between Izzy and Will remains effortlessly more charming.  We might not be able to organise a Brexit (so let’s stay) or a pandemic, but we sure can organise a silly sitcom about people who can’t organise things.

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.

Keeping Up Appearances

This blog was going to be so cool and edgy.  I was going to uncover hidden gems on obscure platforms, curating them for readers’ viewing pleasure like some sort of Walter Presents, only with more hair and no glasses.  Highbrow people would come to me wondering what to watch.  This was clearly never going to happen for two reasons: firstly, I watch too much trash.  I’ve covered all the dross on here, from Geordie Shore to Ex On The Beach (broadly the same show) via Love Island and Bromans (which I still remember fondly yet it curiously doesn’t seem to be appearing for a second series).  Secondly, there aren’t enough hours in the day to get through all the TV.  I’m fairly vocal with anyone who’ll ask (nobody asks) that I have to be in bed by 10pm, which leaves a maximum of two telly-viewing hours of a weekday evening when I’ve dragged my heavily sweating body home from the office via a Tube, a bus and a quick walk.  With so many subsequent series of things like Peaky Blinders and Great British Bake Off taking up my schedule, my chances to uncover and share any gems, trashy or otherwise are limited.

So we’re back raiding the archives this week.  And what an old archive I’ve raided as I’ve gone all the way back to a sitcom that ran from 1990 to 1995.  I think I was searching for Cardinal Burns clips on YouTube for a previous unpopular post when I suddenly started getting served montages of this show, all in aid of promoting BritBox – seems to be some sort of platform for watching exactly the sort of old stuff I’m talking about this week.  Cunningly, though, another motivation to cover this is that aged British comedy that only just predates the internet gets the most reads.  Not straightaway, but I think eventually the searchbots crawl in and I end up being a leading authority on such classics as Bo’ Selecta! – now the most read post out of everything on Just One More Episode despite the clamouring apathy that greeted its initial publication.

And here we are, then, talking about Keeping Up Appearances.  Let’s begin with Patricia Routledge, a national treasure if ever there was one.  She had already proven she could hold her own, fully alone, in the outstanding Kitty monologues that featured in Victoria Wood’s As Seen On TV (something I immediately binged through when I spotted it on Netflix, but given my sycophantic piece on dinnerladies, I’ve saved posting about until another time).  As Hyacinth Bucket, she was given a wider world to expand into with her trademark impeccable character portrayal – not that any single line of Kitty’s lacked a complete visual rendering in the mind’s eye.

Hyacinth likes to keep up her appearances.  This is because her origins are distinctly lower class, so having scraped into the bottom rung of the middle class by acquiring a three-piece suite and (obsessively) cleaning her well-twitched net curtains, she exhibits the excruciatingly British trait of being agonisingly class-conscious.  Throughout the five series, she denies any association with her sisters: slovenly yet lovely Daisy and glorious maneater Rose, not to mention Daisy’s other half, Onslow, king of the slobs, played by the fondly remembered Geoffrey Hughes (also known as Twiggy in The Royle Family).  I’ll be honest though: as a Surrey schoolboy whose own parents’, shall we say, self-improvement naturally led to an element of snobbery, I was as appalled by Hyacinth’s family as she was.

In fact, as a child between the ages of five and ten when the show first broadcast, I couldn’t for a long time see what the joke was with our Hyacinth.  She had high standards, liked nice things and always wanted the best to happen – what wasn’t to like?  Her phone manner was clearly over the top, “The [bouquet] household; the lady of the house speaking,” but her candlelight suppers sounded like a hot invitation and she was always immaculately turned out (unless she had a tipple, in which case she became immediately dishevelled).  I could never understand why her neighbours, Elizabeth and Emmett, got so nervous about seeing her, though their anxiety rubbed off on me as I was always terrified of the impending moment one of them would be left with no choice but to smash their teacup on the floor in response to Hyacinth’s outbursts.  In conclusion, I really just thought this was a show about a nice lady, with lots of unexplained canned laughter.

Granted, despite the academic heights I later reached, some of the cleverer jokes were beyond me.  Whenever she quickly spelled her surname as B-U-C-K-E-T while insisting it be pronounced bouquet, I really had no idea what was going on, unable to match the spoken letters quickly enough to form the joke – all this despite the letters and spellings questions in University Challenge later being my top scorers.  Another regular recurring joke revolved around her phone number resembling that of a Chinese takeaway, which teed up many euphemisms about the availability of crispy prawn balls at the Bucket residence (low) due to misdials.  My own parents firmly believed that takeaways were for emergencies only and a clear sign of idleness on any other occasion.  To this day, I don’t use Deliveroo or Uber Eats, which does save me money and demonstrates a clear benefit to all the emotional scarring we’re unearthing here.  But this meant I had no idea that you used dish numbers when phoning a Chinese takeaway so I simply patiently waited for these scenes to end, safe in the knowledge something silly would happen eventually.  I remember we did once get a Domino’s as a family for some sort of treat, but this was of course served on our own crockery, with folded paper napkins, just in case anyone looked in through the window and thought we had a low household income.

Suffering through all of this we had Hyacinth’s husband Richard (a name she pronounced so wonderfully I can hear it ringing in my ears).  While driving, he would be told to mind the pedestrian, while gardening, he would be told to look like he was enjoying himself, lest people think a gardener beyond their budget, while rushing around at Hyacinth’s beck and call, she would hope he wouldn’t spoil things with lower middle-class humour.  Let’s face it, the man probably had clinical depression, which, added to her neighbours’ crippling anxiety, was just part of the show’s scathing social commentary around British snobbery.

Indeed, in real life, as a Daily Mail reader and probable Brexit voter, Hyacinth would be my natural enemy.  It’s hard to say how well the show has dated, but more valuable are my fond memories of crashing down the stairs to join my family in watching each episode in the early nineties.  This was all thanks to Routledge’s ability to create charm where there should be none.  Every line is a masterclass in delivery.  Every delivery is a masterclass in character.  Hyacinth Bucket remains as relevant as she ever was so we shall give her the last word, and the lifelong snob in me can’t help but agree with her sentiment: “If there's one thing I can't stand, it's snobbery and one-upmanship. People trying to pretend they're superior. Makes it so much harder for those of us who really are.”

This Time With Alan Partridge

I’ve been doing something a bit naughty recently.  I’ve been snorting on packed trains in various failed attempts to stem my chuckling at different comedy shows, holding my poxy iPhone (battery life of 20 minutes max) a hair’s breadth from my nose while peering into its fractured screen and the hilarity within (unless the sun is streaming through the window directly onto it, in which case I can’t see anything).  I’ve been doing this with Fleabag, but there’s a second prime piece of iPlayer content that’s been causing me to snigger into my keep-cup coffee on the painful Southern service to Angmering (where I’ve been spending weekends learning how to Sunday roast in my parents’ kitchen (not a euphemism)): This Time With Alan Partridge.  There was a lady next to me on the return jaunt to Clapham Junction who I caused to jolt awake with my rampant tittering at Partridge’s antics, but luckily that wasn’t the most annoying thing I did to her as I did also accidentally drop my whole jacket on her head when trying to get it out of the overhead rack without exposing too much of my soft, soft tummy flesh while reaching overhead.  So, why has this show been causing me to do so many laughs?

Firstly, let’s look at the character himself, as Alan’s been with us since 1991.  We’ll need to take this post as me ticking off sideswiping at all of his previous output, from Knowing Me Knowing You With Alan Partridge to I’m Alan Partridge.  Played so ably by Steve Coogan, Partridge’s character frontier has blurred into most performances by his co-creator, but this is more down to my tiny mind’s lack of capacity rather than Coogan’s abilities.  He still kills it in The Other Guys (watch now for immediate LOLs) and has a great time in Hamlet 2 (definitely a real film and definitely enjoyable).  Back in the nineties, Partridge parodied the kind of vile, middle-class, jingoistic, chauvinist chap who lounged across many of TV’s chat sofas, exaggerating delusions of grandeur and self-righteousness to comedic success.  But, in a subversive twist, as with House Of Cards, real life has plumbed depths deeper than writers’ darkest imagining of our dystopian day-to-day lives.  2019 is home to broadcasting men who shouldn’t be listened to whilst raving wildly in bus shelters with their trousers round their ankles, let alone telling people what to think about driving cars while wearing bad jeans (Jeremy Clarkson) or still on telly trolling minority groups after publishing fake Iraqi prisoner abuse photos in a national newspaper (Piers Morgan).

This blog isn’t really a place where I want to attack people, but Piers Morgan isn’t people: a slathering antique whose chinly ambiguity is surpassed only by the variation in distances between his beady eyes.  I firmly believe that there is a fourth type of matter in the universe in addition to solid, liquid and gas, and this is Piers Morgan’s chin.  What even is it?  Before I get worked up, I should land my point: in comparison, Partridge suddenly seems harmless, with just enough charm that you sympathise with his terrible ambition but not too much pathos that you can’t laugh your head off when it all inevitably goes wrong for him.

Secondly, then, This Time apes a much-loved staple of teatime telly so well that we really do need to ask ourselves some tough questions as a nation: why do people tolerate mindless twaddle like The One Show?  It’s just so broad that it’s dripping in blandness.  It’s nice enough, but, for a bastard like me, being nice is not enough.  The moment I hear the opening note of the theme tune, I get shivers down my spine.  Surely there is more to life.  I remember a family holiday to Menorca when my niece was still crawling.  My dad’s first priority when entering any room is to turn the TV on (guess where my love of telly comes from) and villas on Mediterranean holiday are islands are no exception to this rule.  There we were, free of the banality of UK weekday life, ready to kick back and relax, escaping the drizzle, when suddenly: “Ooooooone, do-do-do-do-do-do, ooooooone, do-do-do-do-do-do…”  We had come all this way, only to be subjected to VTs about dog-walking in Wales and a live interview with someone who once did something underwhelming.  I immediately jumped in the pool.  The only good thing to come of it is that my toddler niece learned to blow raspberries in tune to the music, demonstrating a precocious skillset in recognising tosh and, also, the performing arts.

A former flatmate of mine used to work on the production team, going out around the UK making VTs.  I was able to ask him who the people were behind the cameras sneering and jeering at the hosts, like some sort of rent-an-audience designed to make The One Show feel like more of an impromptu spectacle than a settee-based conversation slowly dying in front of a floor-to-ceiling window.  Often, on his way out the door after a day’s editing of features on Britain’s favourite paving slab, he would be intercepted by a manager, innocently asking why he wasn’t hanging around to watch the live show.  He’d then lose his evening to providing the in-studio atmosphere, understandably reluctant to stay late as you would be in any job, though instead of finishing a deck or bashing out emails, he was forced to pretend to enjoy The One Show, possibly seeing a Hollywood A-lister asked for their views on the sexualisation of pre-pubescent girls or witnessing a politician being pushed to provide a response to the question: what is your favourite owl?

At this point, I should probably mention This Time With Alan Partridge in some shape or form.  The premise is that there exists a live BBC magazine-format show (This Time) which desperately needs a step-in male host.  Cue the With Alan Partridge bit.  As viewers, we therefore revel in the live links as they are filmed, the downtime in the studio as they play out and some of the actual VTs themselves.  Alan is true to form, desperate to go to any length to make his appointment permanent, drawing the limelight back to his terrible chat but then getting annoyed when his moments to shine drown in misjudgement, mediocrity or disaster.  Not only is the fake show stolen from Partridge, but the actual televisual format this post is about is also stolen.  Susannah Fielding plays Jennie Gresham, the existing host who must slide up the sofa felt to make way for Partridge’s man-spread legs and scotch egg breath.  She goes beyond being spot on in convincing us she is a real host, arriving at some kind of comedy peak where her shocked responses and professional cover ups merit more praise than I can conjure with my by-comparison shoddy prose.

As ever, a warm welcome is extended by me to Felicity Montagu (loved for her work in Nighty Night) as Partridge’s suffering-addicted assistant, Lynn.  She shuffles onto set when the cameras are off, seeing to Partridge’s refreshment needs (“Glass of water!”) or to slut-shame Jennie Gresham passively aggressively in relation to her choice of blouse.  More Lynn would really only improve things, but there’s a steady stream of guests and contributors who bring vitality to the comedy, from Ruth Duggan’s refusal to agree with anything Partridge says, to Simon Denton’s inability to make his giant interactive social media screen work properly (which is gratifying in itself given that no programme ever has been improved by the inclusion of a tweet expressing the opinion of Dave from High Wycombe).

Despite all the praise I’ve heaped here, though, the main office conversation around This Time With Alan Partridge concerns itself with mixed reviews, dwindling audiences and no recommissioning (an ironic situation for Alan).  To borrow some of his own self-assurance, I would conclude that anyone that doesn’t get the humour in this Partridge vehicle is completely stupid.  The awkward flow is all part of the concept, with every second orchestrated to enhance its own ridiculousness.  If you can’t bear the cringe with each unexpected silence, then, by all means, watch the actual One Show, or Good Morning Britain with Piers Morgan, because you’ve truly found your level.  Meanwhile, I’ll go back to ruining public transport with my content consumption, which has now expanded beyond overloud staccato laughter while viewing the iPlayer into brandishing the dodgy cover photography of I, Partridge: We Need To Talk About Alan while I indulge in reading Partridge’s autobiography on the Tube.

Fleabag

It seems I’ve been going around handing out national treasure status to people willy nilly.  So let’s just recap those who have been adorned with this accolade so far on Just One More Episode.  I’m pretty sure I would have said this about Julia Davis for her work in Nighty Night (and Gavin & Stacey), plus there’s Michaela Coel from Chewing Gum.  Surely there were others, but I’m not about to read through eighty-something blogposts to check.  And it doesn’t even matter, anyway, as we are today adding another name to the list.  Step forward and wink at us cheekily, Phoebe Waller-Bridge.  There are three reasons she could be here.  The first is Killing Eve, but I haven’t actually watched that yet, as I kind of find assassins a bit unappealing (it’s a meh career, like being a surveyor) and, although it’s trapped in my iPhone on the iPlayer app (ha – two things starting with a little i) I just haven’t got around to it.  She also did Crashing, but I haven’t seen that either…  No, this week, we are doing Fleabag.

We’ll skip over my viewing’s genesis here (a friend literally asked if anyone had seen it, and I immediately died inside because I hadn’t), and get straight into why it’s great.  Fleabag is unflinchingly honest.  The opening scenes of episode one, series one revolve around our (anti-)heroine, Fleabag, actually called Kate, as she receives what is essentially a booty call.  She bends over backwards to accommodate her gentleman caller, rushing to get her body ready for his standards before finally opening the door and putting just as much trouble into pretending the whole preparation performance was no trouble at all.  I was floored by the honesty.  It felt ballsy and painful, laying bare the fact that, even in 2016, women were still busting a gut to perpetuate the myths men expect of them.  The issue was treated with even more transparency, thanks to Waller-Bridge’s pieces to camera.  That’s right, just like Miranda’s end-of-pier winks, Fleabag breaks the fourth wall and interacts directly with the viewer.  We are let in on her secrets, which in turn boosts her universality through intimacy and proximity.

But why is Kate called Fleabag?  It seems to be a mixture of her lack of self-esteem and her conviction that she probably isn’t a good person.  I don’t know about you, but I sometimes look at myself and conclude that I am a bit of a shit.  The other week, when returning from dinner with friends, a large man had collapsed in the street.  Some Chinese tourists seemed to be on the case with wrestling his gargantuan frame from the concrete and A&E was just around the corner.  My friends were desperate to stop and help, but I refused to break my stride (I wanted to go home and watch Netflix).  My pals were appalled at my assertions that it was probably the man’s own fault, the Chinese seemed to be coping and, as mentioned, A&E was just around the corner.  Well, like me, and like all of us, Fleabag seems to end up doing bad things.  The first series gradually reveals in flashback the poor choices she has made, costing her dearly and leading to her current predicament.

There’s laugh-out-loud comedy, driven by the awful characters that constitute her family.  But, because of the above, this is only ever a knife edge from being sliced into desperate sadness.  The show’s origins as a one-woman show blow my mind – what could have been packed into those ten minutes which Waller-Bridge first produced after a friend challenged her?  And now look!  She’s a few months younger than me but has achieved about 15 times as much.  Why haven’t my friends been challenging me?  Although, I suppose they challenged me to help that fallen man and I just ignored them.  But yes, it seems the one-woman show is a rich environment for narrative brilliance.  If you’ve never seen Luisa Omielan, please do so immediately.  Or Google Tiannah Viechweg’s Carnival Queen and get gut-punched by its strength.  I’ll wait.

Fleabag, though, is an ensemble.  Sian Clifford’s performance as her older sister, Claire, rings frighteningly true.  I’m reminded of so many people who confuse happiness with success and who conflate ambition with humanity.  Claire’s expressions are electric and her conflicts with Fleabag mirror the worst parts of sisterly relations in a way never seen before.  Meanwhile, having far too much fun as the self-centred godmother-cum-future stepmother is Olivia Colman.  I’m not sure why she’s only cropping up now and wasn’t in my initial list of national treasures (see her work in Peep Show and watch out for her coming to The Crown).  Sure, she’s got an Oscar now in her downstairs cloak, but she still knows where the good writing is (I mean, in the programme, Fleabag, right; not necessarily in this sentence of this blogpost…)

Series two has just begun (praise be) and I managed to catch its first episode on my phone while flying from Innsbruck to Gatwick.  Despite the lack of sleep on a boozy work ski jolly, despite the appalling Samsung J5 headphones I am forced to use, despite the tiny iPhone screen and despite wanting to be anywhere but on an economy flight, I’m going to bandy around words like masterpiece and genius.  We open on a family dinner, with most characters as yet unreconciled from the fallout of the previous season’s climax, some months ago.  Throughout the thirty minutes, we barely leave the restaurant, the claustrophobia and tension increasing with every additional pouring of wine (by the very enthusiastic waitress, with Waller-Bridge making even an incidental character hilarious, and tragic).  The sisters end up confronting each other in the loos; a bombshell is dropped and handled with such brutality that my gasping could be heard three rows back.

So, here’s me, staggered someone can produce such telly with such consistency.  This is the bleakest black humour, with raw truths I can barely handle, yet jam-packed with LOLs, cheekiness and bad human behaviour.  Phoebe Waller-Bridge, welcome to the hall of national treasures.

Miranda

Sometimes, you need to make sure you have enough silliness in your life.  I don’t mean harmful silliness, like dragging the UK out of the EU because economically inactive pensioners are scared of foreigners, or panicking about a handful of migrants crossing the Channel to be absorbed into a wealthy country of 66 million people.  I mean fun silliness, like being unable to resist the urge to gallop instead of walk down long empty corridors, or pulling rude faces at your colleagues when you spot them bored in glass meeting rooms.  You can probably tell that the silliness evident in these posts is also embraced in most areas of my life.  One environment that gets more than its fair share of my own personal brand of silliness is the office.  There’s something about such a grey, grown-up, corporate environment, all furious typing and professional profile raising, that makes me want to respond with laughter.  After a feral childhood, spending adult daytimes for the last 11 years in the UV-deficient glow of computer screens could have been crushing.  But, if enough silliness happens, the subsequent belly laughs are enough to stave off the threat of submitting to being a full worker drone.  Sadly, one of my closest partners in silliness recently fled our office home after many years of laughing till we cried.  I therefore found myself with a silliness deficit in my day-to-day existence.

But there, nestling among multimillion dollar new content on Netflix was the old BBC sitcom Miranda.  I was helpless, working through all three series in no time at all.  I hereby announce a new genre of TV: comfort telly.  In my friend’s absence, and in the face of other things in life I would describe as bad (Brexit, gluten, people who sit behind me on the bus at 6.30am after smoking so many cigarettes that I am unwillingly bathed in their tobacco-riddled breath, misplaced apostrophes throughout the media industry), watching Miranda brought cheer to some dreary January evenings.

Most importantly of all, I have to stress that my friend is nothing like Miranda.  They are polar opposites.  She has a high-powered career for which she has to wear roll necks, whereas Miranda pootles about in a joke shop she set up with some inheritance.  My friend has a top-notch husband, whereas the main joke about Miranda is her disastrous love life.  While Miranda’s idea of a good meal is to catch crumbled chocolate biscuits in her mouth while using a hair dryer to blow them off the table (biscuit blizzard), my friend has promised me one of her famous weekend roasts (not a euphemism).  I could go on.  The main point is that their only common trait is their love of silliness.

We’ll go into the exact ingredients of this silliness, but we should dwell for a moment on the polarising nature of this sitcom.  Most people’s responses to my evangelising about the joys of rewatching Miranda have been wailing indignation that I could subject myself to something so unfunny.  I’m happy to be told I’ve got bad taste, but I think Miranda’s perceived unfunniness is more complex than that.  I’ll grant you that you can see some punchlines coming a mile off, but it’s that predictable payoff, with Miranda Hart’s silly charm, that can be so reassuring and comforting.  The show came about at a time when comedy was moving away from the obvious sitcom (like The Office).  Conversely, Miranda embraced the format, adding to the presence of the live studio audience by ending each episode with the cast waving at the camera and dancing before their fans like an amateur village panto.  Two words: such fun.

Right then, here’s how Miranda is silly:

She is a show off

One of our hero’s celebrated foibles is her awkwardness in social situations, but her response to sensing a faux-pas is to behave worse and worse until the awkwardness is exacerbated beyond the human ability to cringe any further.  If a throwaway sentence stumbles into a song lyric, she’ll launch into the next verse and chorus, veering between shyness and attention seeking.

She looks at the camera

Perhaps the biggest sitcom crime of all, but the one that makes me laugh the most.  The knowing glances she shares with us when her mother, Penny, is being awful, or when she is quite pleased with how she has handled something elevate a standard joke to something much more hilarious.

She enjoys how words sound

Cusp.  Thrust.  Moist.  English has a vocabulary in the hundreds of thousands, so it’s inevitable that some of those words are more fun on the tongue than others.  Miranda will pause mid-argument to enjoy the repetition of such words, always finishing with a final flourish of saying it directly to the audience via the classic look to the camera.  Cue laughter from me which I am not sorry about.

She falls over

I laugh every time because it’s silly.  It’s not big, it’s not clever, but this is my level.  I also crack a smile every time she pushes best friend, Stevie, off a stool.

She breaks wind

See previous comment about my level of humour.  It’s not so much the parp that gets me, but her surprise at having done it.

She is posh

Posh people are silly – you just have to hang around a Waitrose to realise this.  And their expectations of each other are even sillier.  Miranda might never be able to escape her boarding school days, but it makes for a pleasant stream of nonsense.

She is from Surrey

I suppose this is linked to the above, but this county really is ridiculous, and I therefore glory in any lampooning of it in popular media.  Being so close to London (making Surrey the patio of England to Kent’s garden) the million people that occupy its four-bedroom homes are often overlooked in culture, but their silliness deserves the spotlight.

But her friends are sillier

We’ve mentioned Stevie, owner of the allure, the Heather Small cut-out and very diminutive proportions.  There’s soulmate Gary, whose own stupid inability to commit to Miranda contrives to give the various series some dramatic tension, as it can’t be all about falling over and accidentally farting.  Sally Phillips gets the best lines as Tilly, the boarding school pal who peppers her passive aggression by spicing up all her words with suffix flourishes that nobody needs, declaring things tremendulant or exclaiming about major disaster and his friend, colonel cock-up, all while demanding others “bear with” when reviewing text messages or ending conversation by declaring “c’est fini.”  See, if you had someone to make eyes at now, you’d be doing it.  So much of Miranda’s silliness comes from laughing at her friends’ behaviour.

So, hello to you, Miranda Hart, and kind regards thank you caller (this is a reference to in-show dialogue, not me padding out the words).  You are a champion of the many, those of us who know our real life can’t be filtered, so we might as well embrace its silliness.  I’ve loved her ever since I saw her cameo in Nighty Night (not a euphemism again) and having her back in my life as a vegeta-pal has been just the dose of silliness I have needed.