Crashing

A lot of people have been struggling in lockdown due to the absence of sufficient new comedy/drama from Phoebe Waller-Bridge.  I think we could all do with another series of Fleabag but, as we know, in the long tradition of quality British sitcoms, we will never have as much of it as we want.  It's been proven many times that the UK cannot have nice things (EU membership, competent government, peace in Northern Ireland).  I know there was another series of Killing Eve that I don't think I will watch after falling slightly out of love with things in the second series, and I also don't think Waller-Bridge is involved.  There's literally no way of checking though.  But then, what should I stumble across on Netflix, but an old Channel 4 sitcom from 2016 called Crashing?  Well, I thought to myself, this has been recommended to me several times as a great example of some of our Phoebe's earlier work and so, this week, I'll be telling you all about how smashing these six episodes really are.

We will just pause for a moment to dwell on my seething jealousy of Phoebe's exceptional achievements.  Not content with having two outstanding shows to her name and securing a very well deserved spot in my list of national treasures (alongside Michaela Coel of Chewing Gum and I May Destroy You, and my beloved Julia Davis of Nighty Night and Sally4ever), Waller-Bridge also has Crashing.  I innocently embarked upon the first episode expecting to see a new comic writer honing her craft, trying a few things out, and scoring some gentle laughs in the guise of a rough diamond with limited experience.  How crushed was I to unearth the fact that Crashing is one of the funniest things I have seen in a very long time?  And it's not just playing for laughs; the humour is clever, built around relatable and likeable characters, and it propels the very neat plot forwards.  Either way, I laughed out loud so loudly at some of these jokes that I was worried about disturbing my neighbours.  They may already think I am a madman.

The theme of the show is property guardianship.  There's nothing terribly sexy about this and, to the best of my knowledge, it's not an area that has been mined for comedy gold before now.  That's because there's nothing that funny about young-ish people who cannot afford London rents opting to squat-with-permission in dilapidated vacant buildings.  In this case we have a big old hospital, with the various wards serving as individuals housing units, and shelves falling off walls at inopportune moments.  But the setup is really just a tool to bring together our gang of main characters; it's the Central Perk to Crashing's Friends, only with more electrical hazards.  Our entry into their world is through the eyes of Lulu, played by Waller-Bridge, who has come down to London with her ukulele under the seemingly innocent ruse of catching up with platonic best pal, Anthony.  The will-they-won't-they saga between the two of them forms our central narrative, much to the irritation of Anthony's fiancée, Kate.  But around this there swirls further relationship complications that link the rest of the residents together.  From Melody's obsession with painting Colin to the intense bromance between Sam and Fred, each episode draws you in to a charming romp up and down the hospital stairs while these people make a hilarious mess of their lives.

Even beyond the world of the hospital, Waller-Bridge creates a richly observed comedic universe.  You will giggle at the silliness of the restaurant where Anthony works, We Don't Give A Fork, themed as it is around the concept of insisting that its diners eat without cutlery.  Lulu's stint as a receptionist at Kate’s office, Something Events, had me in stitches, particularly when it comes to the office flirt (see Cardinal Burns for details).  Every few minutes we are treated to a devastating line that sums up the pointlessness of millennial life – in turn, I think it a crying shame but this script isn't more widely quoted in real life.  This is a show that deserves to be lauded in its own right, but given what comes after it, it's testament to Waller-Bridge’s talent that it was so quickly eclipsed.  Nevertheless, this is one of the cutest British comedies you can treat yourself to on Netflix while wondering if the government will ever let you out of your own house again.  I don't mind staying in if I get to watch stuff like this.  In fact, I might wait in until they agree to make a second series.

Killing Eve

When it came to thinking about what careers to do as the end of my education approached, there was one line of work that nobody appeared to be pushing: assassinations.  Given their predominance as the subject matter for various programmes, films and video games (not to mention their recent return to fashion as a Muscovite approach to dealing with awkward political characters), you’d think we would know of them more often in our daily lives.  Friends say they’re in property or banking or medicine, but nobody ever rocks up at birthday drinks telling tales of the various murders they’ve committed while the rest of us were deleting emails without reading them or hiding from senior office bods in order to eschew their yet-to-be-delegated tasks.  (I’m of course excluding the deaths our actions lead to through inadvertent pursuits: that homeless person you stepped over on a freezing day or that Third World miner that perished sourcing a bit of metal for your iPhone etc.)  As such, Killing Eve was, for me, as sort of induction video into a new employment possibility, but did it make me want to swap my status calls for sniper rifles and update my LinkedIn to say “a seasoned, cold-blooded murderer, stimulated by new challenges, with a solutions-orientated approach to others’ deaths via contract killings”?  Let’s read on and find out.

The assassin at the heart of Killing Eve is Villanelle.  Her background and training in order to break into the industry, as the series uncovers, were both bleak.  I think I’m guilty of preferring my Cub-Scouting childhood in suburban Surrey over Soviet prisons and brutalisation.  But maybe I have the character traits.  Villanelle is known for her dark sense of humour, takes almost nothing that seriously and takes time to be playful with every task she undertakes.  This could be me all over.  I’ve talked of my need for silliness in my post on Miranda, so maybe Villanelle and I could be work BFFs (especially as most of mine have left me over the years).  But, according to Phoebe Waller-Bridge, human goddess and creator of Fleabag, who adapted Killing Eve from the Codename Villanelle novella series, our hero assassin’s genesis lies in the ethos “What would you do if you weren’t afraid?”  So that rules me out.  Now older, my fear of my own mortality shocks me every time I cross a busy road, and if someone barges in front of me on the Tube, I spend the rest of the day obsessing about it.

But maybe all the foreign travel would be a boon.  Villanelle jets around Europe as only someone who’s smugly parted with £4.99 for Speedy Boarding really can.  Her multilingualism knows no bounds (though her Mandarin needs work).  Does that mean I’m a shoe-in?  Again, doubt besets me.  Any travelling I undertake with work is met with groaning and a mad panic about saving my M&S receipts for all my train treats in order to expense a week’s worth of high-value cashew nuts.  I don’t even like the journey to the office (see previous comment about Tube barging repercussions).  As for languages, I might have paid off the £24k of debt my French and German degree cost me, but I could barely compose an email to a colleague in our Hamburg office because it went beyond the GCSE fare of telling someone how many brothers and sister I have (eine Schwester) but I have at least brain-retained all the four-digit codes you need to make the diacritics appear (the little dots and such you can have on a ü) so it wasn’t a complete waste of money.

Finally, there’s the actual killing of humans.  On purpose.  In person.  Villanelle feels nothing with each life she extinguishes, cashing her pay to return to the lap of luxury her beautiful apartment and fridge full of Champagne offer her.  I just don’t think I could do it.  I once ran over a squirrel when learning to drive and it took years for that horrific crunch of tiny bones to stop haunting me.  I then cycled over a toad near a beach in Germany, struggling to steer my bike (one of those European jobbies where you have to pedal backwards to break), and unlocked a whole new spiral of shame.  I would be really good at quipping witty remarks after a spot of fisticuffs, but squeezing the trigger while my victim begged for mercy would see my annual appraisals at the assassin company descend into performance management.  Success as a contract killer, then, must be fairly binary.

Right, I’ll stick to media as a career, with an unpopular blog as my side hustle.  Instead, Killing Eve can be a window into another job I’m never going to do, just like Line Of Duty is into being a bent copper or Narcos is into, er, being a narco.  Besides, Villanelle is pretty good at it, just as Jodie Comer is pretty good at acting.  And by pretty good, I mean outstanding.  I completely buy her as a confused, psychopathic girl who just doesn’t want to be lonely anymore.  And then there’s this Eve that she’s trying to kill, played by Sandra Oh.  I’ve never seen Grey’s Anatomy so my only real exposure to her has been a Family Guy joke about the size of her face.  So yeah, she has a lot of face, and a lot of hair, but she can have as much of anything as she likes, because she’s wonderful: the perfect vehicle for our burning curiosity in solving the mysteries of Villanelle.  Oh calls bullsh*t, has a voice I can’t get enough of (a bit like Sarah Koenig from the podcast Serial) and delivers excruciating British awkwardness like no other American – watching her microwave shepherd’s pie and serve it out of Tupperware is a delight.  And third in our trinity of strong women is poise herself: Fiona Shaw.  As Eve’s MI6 boss, Shaw relishes every moment where she gets to steal the best line.  Which is all of the moments.  Also, special mention for the addition of David Haig as Bill, who, thanks to his role in The Thin Blue Line in 1995 I keep expecting to erupt about people fannying about.

So, watch Killing Eve.  It is murderous joy, with moments of darkness so unnecessary you’d expect it to disappear up its own arse.  But you’d be wrong, as it’s been Waller-Bridged.  We have humour throughout, with characters as equally capable of tracking an assassin across Europe as they are of squabbling over sharing croissants.  A bassline of banality allows its farfetchedness to seem more plausible, while the tension and the action will glue you to seat with the affirmation that you’re going to watch just one more episode (sure).  For me, it falls down as a prospectus for careers in assassination, but maybe series two, now airing in the US, will finally do the trick and persuade me.  You have been warned.

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.