Sally4ever

One of the most-read posts on Just One More Episode has been my piece on Nighty Night, a slightly obscure and incredibly offensive sitcom from fifteen years ago.  It remains one of my favourite shows of all time and its creator and star, Julia Davis, has long held hero status among a group of friends and me who live our lives by the teachings and best lines of this comedy.  Whenever Julia is involved in anything else, I am there.  She’s known for playing the perennial sourpuss Dawn Sutcliffe in Gavin & Stacey (whose recent Christmas special was the best thing about the festive season this year), while her 2016 series, Camping, pleased fans with its trademarks of Davis’s brand of comedy: inordinate social awkwardness caused by politeness forcing others to tolerate unacceptable behaviour and the sexually predatory jezebel.  I’ve also watched a series of Hunderby, a period black comedy that again explores many of the same tropes.  While the BBC was Nighty Night’s home, all subsequent vehicles have operated within the empire of Sky, and 2018’s Sally4ever is no exception.  Lacking a subscription during its debut and subsequent BAFTA win, I’ve only just caught up on my Julia Davis fix.  So, journey with me as we turn my ill-thought-out responses into another one of these posts.

Firstly, I’ve been able to assuage some of my Julia Davis withdrawals through the medium of podcast.  Dear Joan And Jericha sees Davis team up with Vicki Pepperdine (who steals the show in Camping) as a pair of local radio agony aunts responding to listeners’ letters about relationship and anatomy woes.  Rather than sympathy, they deal out female-hating judgement while criticising graphic accompanying photos and dispensing appalling advice.  All the while, their own ludicrous backstories are fleshed out, cementing the view that they are in no position to be telling anybody else what to do with their life.  Either way, its first series was a joyous listen (if you enjoy turning heads on the bus by laughing out loud uncontrollably) and the second delivered more of the same.  In fact, I was lucky enough (through work) to go to the launch party of the sophomore season.  So, er, yeah, I got to see Julia Davis in the flesh.  And by see, I mean stand as close as possible to her while my eyes bored into her face and she (hopefully) was unable to detect my fandom.  I was offered the chance to meet her (and two thirds of My Dad Wrote A Porno) but I don’t cope well with celebrities (see post on House Of Cards) so I scarpered off into the night, colliding with Cardinal Burns’ Seb Cardinal on the way out (more on this later).

With that distance from its creator, then, allow me to crack on with my unsolicited views.  Let’s organise them into the three best things about the show and then we can look at the three worst things.  It’s important to be balanced in your arguments, as we all learned doing our GCSE essays, alongside the holy rule of always read the question.

First best thing about it

Sally.  It’s not called Sally4ever for nothing.  Sally is played by Catherine Shepherd who you’ll recognise as one of Mark’s girlfriends from Peep Show.  As the programme’s name suggests, people get obsessed with Sally.  The funniest part is that it’s very difficult to see why.  Shepherd’s performance perfectly captures the mousey blandness of this sort of non-character, making everyone else’s fixations all the more alarming.  Her outfits are all impractical flowy cardigans and such.  She is terrible at thinking up reasons to say no to things, relying on “I’m really tired actually” or “I need the toilet” when it’s already too late.  It’s equally charming and infuriating.  Her ineffectiveness sees her in a loveless relationship with skin-crawling David (Alex Macqueen – Neil’s “gay” dad from The Inbetweeners and not his first collaboration with Davis) and his terrible bump, before getting inexplicably smitten by Davis’s own character, Emma.  Its Emma’s self-serving manipulation of Sally that propels us through the seven half-hour instalments, duly escalating beyond all repair thanks to Sally’s overruled protests.  She’s all of us lost in our thirties with out-of-control lives.

Second best thing about it

Felicity Montagu is here for another great character turn with Davis, this time as Elanor, the personification of the annoying office swot.  Using her mobility chair for sympathy and privilege, Elanor’s every line is a condescending drawl that will irk you senseless before you can muster the ability to start chuckling.  From her fluffy-topped stationery to her infatuation with Nigel (Julian Barratt as the office’s most desirable chap, and that’s scraping the barrel), she’s a joy to behold, particularly when she is aiming her wonderful passive-aggression at Sally, who can barely stick up for herself.

Third best thing about it

It’s Julia Davis all over.  If you loved Nighty Night, you’ll love this.  Because it’s nearly the same thing.  Which leads me on to the negatives.

First worst thing about it

It’s the same as Nighty Night.  Instead of Jill Tyrrell chasing Angus Deayton, you’ve got Emma ruining Sally’s life.  There’s the same gentle mocking of Christianity (easy target, though), obsession with toilet humour (especially poo), delusions of sexiness, cuckolded hideous lover and many other Davis-isms, right down to the self-entitlement around fancy hot drinks, graduating from Nighty Night’s “It would be nice if someone got me a cappuccino” to Sally4ever’s “I’m just waiting for that cortado.”  Don’t get me wrong, I’ll continue to campaign for Davis’s national treasure status.  As a fan of anything she does, I’ll celebrate that Sally4ever is similar to Nighty Night and lap up every moment, spurning more populist trash like The Apprentice and Gogglebox.  But that enjoyment is all sadly tinged with a slight concern that this is all we’ll ever get.  But, who am I to criticise?  I currently have zero successful sitcoms against my name, and just one unsuccessful blog, so I’ll try not to be some sort of angry internet troll.  I still lolled through most of Sally4ever.

Second worst thing about it

It does sort of bumble along.  Well, why shouldn’t it?  Let’s just leave Julia alone – she’s a goddess.  Episode one sets up all the business of Sally’s dreadful relationship with David, her terrible job and ineffective performance at it (under batsh*t boss Deborah) and initial encounter with the exotic sexy promise of Emma’s alternative lifestyle.  But then episode two is just more of this.  Luckily things pick up with the introduction in the third part of Sally’s old friends who invite the new couple to dinner, throwing into contrast Sally’s meandering approach to life against the settled-down-with-kids routine.  In conclusion, neither seem very happy.  Cast as the dissatisfied husband is Seb Cardinal (from paragraph two of this very blogpost).  Clearly having too much fun playing the dad who doesn’t want to grow up, his character is easily corrupted by Emma, culminating in her sliming into a film he’s directing with an ill-gotten background role.  What unfolds on set is toe-curling in its cringeability, but what happens in the trailer afterwards will have you question everything about this production.  Well done Seb, though.  He also coped really well with my fanboying over him when I bumped into him when leaving the podcast party.  “You’re Seb Cardinal,” I said, as if pointing out useful information, “I’m a massive fan.”  Cue awkward pause before he mentioned texting Julia about getting the access code for the party and I die inside about not being cool, talented and famous.  He had liked my tweet promoting my blogpost on Cardinal Burns that very week but going into that would have just been too painful, so I’ll write about it on the internet here instead.

Third worst thing about it

I have to be honest: I would love Julia Davis to have had a West Country accent in this.  Why not just be exactly like Nighty Night?  It’s basic of me to want this, and there are plenty of funny voices to go around in Sally4ever.  It’s my issue that all I want is a third series of Nighty Night and I’ll just have to live with that.

Anyway, let’s conclude by saying that Sally4ever is one for the fans, and everyone should be a fan of Julia Davis.  But not everyone can take the unique brand of humour.  If you don’t think it’s funny to watch a graphic lesbian sex scene (played for laughs, mind you) that culminates in a soiled sanitary product being flung across a room (with no hands) then maybe you should stay in your lane.  I’m here to celebrate a strong woman in comedy, known for her creativity with language (frothy might be one of her favourite words), her casting of wonderful actors (I’ve not even gone into Pepperdine’s classic turn as nonsense therapist, Belinda) and her ability to capture perfectly our paralysis by manners.  The next time someone’s mugging you off, have a word with yourself, or you’ll end up in a situation you can’t get out of.  JuliaDavis4ever.

Gavin & Stacey

Regular readers of the blog (of which there are about five) will know that I’m constantly torn between wanting to be ahead of the curve at discovering new boxsets (The Handmaid’s Tale), and shirking popular choices by not watching landmark shows until they are years past their prime (The Wire).  And so it is with great pleasure that I have finally made my way through all three series of Gavin & Stacey eleven years after it first broadcast and eight years since its final episode (though IMDB has a question mark over the possibility of a fourth season).  Every charming minute of this comedy-drama is available on BBC iPlayer, which meant I could binge myself silly via my phone while travelling all around London as part of my urban drone lifestyle (though I did also watch some on flights to and from Dublin).

This did sometimes mean that everything was chopped up into small segments, depending on how long each journey was.  There was also a lot of pausing where the Victoria line was too loud for me to hear properly what was going on through my pathetic earphones.  There’s a stretch between Pimlico and Victoria where the train whines on its tracks, drowning out Nessa’s sardonic harsh truths or Uncle Bryn’s awkward intentions, but luckily the iPlayer app always shifts you back a few seconds whenever you press play after a pause, so please rest assured that I didn’t miss a minute and am therefore fully qualified to prattle on here with my thoughts on this timeless piece of British comedy.

Let’s take it back to series one, episode one, where the premise of the whole thing is set up.  Gavin, at work in Essex, has been talking at length over the phone (an actual landline, everybody) with supplier, Stacey, at work in South Wales.  We join them as they put the final touches to their arrangements finally to meet in person for the first time.  Nerves abound for our long-distance lovers, and, I have to be honest, they abounded for me too.  What if I didn’t like this show?  What if I couldn’t join in with nostalgic praise of this BBC classic?  Would I be chalking up something else on the list of things that don’t live up to their hype, such as Barry’s Bootcamp and espresso martinis?

But like our Gavin and our Stacey, I was in love almost straightaway.  Though it’s not all perfect.  The truism of this couple’s love for each other is a constant throughout the show, but there’s never really much explanation of what they like about each other.  And, given their wholehearted embracing of noughties’ fashion choices (for some reason lads wore cardigans a lot; I know I did), it can be hard for the viewer to deduce this too.  But offering great contrast to this is the complicated tryst between the best friends of the show’s namesakes.  Nessa and Smithy’s repulsion at one another is never far from true affection, especially after any quantity of alcohol.  James Corden and Ruth Jones’s performances perfectly capture the characters’ conflicting emotions with greater subtlety than we see from our central pair, but, as the show’s writers, they have clearly given themselves the opportunities to have the most fun with it.  I’d do the same.

Trumping all this, though, as my favourite relationship, is the adorable marriage of Mick and Pam, Gavin’s mum and dad.  They are the parents everyone wants, loving nothing more than their idolised son’s friends using their home as a hotel and restaurant, welcoming Stacey’s extended family in under any circumstance and generally always up for a drink and some sausage rolls (with vegetarian options for those that want).  Contrasted with the acidic (and very recognisable) spikiness of their dear friends, Dawn and Pete, we can instantly believe in Mick and Pam’s decades of happy marriage.  A new life goal is to be able to saunter in through their French window at the back and to have Pam (played by the delicious Alison Steadman) call out “Hello dullin’” before offering me all manner of refreshments.  I don’t even mind if Dawn and Pete are there, as Dawn is played by a lifetime hero of mine, Julia Davis (whose Nighty Night you should go and watch immediately if you haven’t already).

Now I’ve joined the ranks of those that love this show, I ought to put my finger on what lies behind its charm.  For me, it’s the accuracy of all things British, things we take for granted but that actually define our little British existences: wet pavements, rubbish makes of car, depressing seaside resorts.  Nothing is sexed up to make it more entertaining and so it all feels beautifully plausible, though I wonder if the Shipman and West neighbours in Billericay and Barry mind the fact that every vehicle’s arrival is heralded with horn tooting – the kind of dramatic behaviour that guarantees you tuts and curtain twitches.

The storylines gently tinker along, with the odd cliff hanger, but this doesn’t stop the narrative from dwelling on patches of dialogue that act almost as prolonged comedy sketches.  We’ll spend just as much time delving into why Nessa and Smithy don’t share food (amen) or hearing about Doris’s sexual escapades (complete with geriatric potty mouth, as there’s nothing funnier than an OAP saying twat) as we will exploring Stacey’s insecurities about moving to Essex.  I can’t say if it’s a show about love or Anglo-Welsh relations or growing up or popular culture or all of the above and more.  It doesn’t really matter, as it’s all lovely.  And by the final series, ten million of us were tuning in to bask in that loveliness.

So, yeah, I may have missed out on office chat circa 2009 when everyone wanted to discuss the new series of Gavin & Stacey premiering.  But, in 2018, come at me if you want to discuss this worthy entry into British television’s hall of fame.  I’m only sorry I’m so late.

Nighty Night

After so many American boxsets, I really want to focus on a good old piece of BBC comedy.  And in high contrast to the whitened straightened teeth and sunny scenes of Hollywood’s finest comedies and dramas, Nighty Night’s darker-than-dark humour and parade of grotesque imagination is the perfect antidote.  No other show has inspired so many in-jokes or turns of phrase among groups of my friends.  Both series aired between 2004 and 2005, before I hammered the DVDs into obliteration following their home entertainment release.

But why is one obscure BBC sitcom so significant?  There must be many reasons, but I can’t really put my finger on any of them.  Instead, I will tit about with the things about it that I like, because I can do whatever I want.  Firstly, the setting.  Nighty Night is set in the worst place imaginable: a suburban British cul-de-sac.  Statistics I have made up show that over half of all middle-class Brits start their lives in these sorts of soulless wastelands, with the other half aiming to move into these sorts of soulless wastelands at a later point in their life journey.  So close to home was Nighty Night’s setting, that some of the outdoor scenes were recognisably filmed in Dorking, a crap town down the road from my own, Leatherhead, rated the crappest of all towns.  Take that, New York and other such glamorous locations.  Places I have been in have been on telly.

Secondly, the lead character is evil.  It’s normally hard to root for a baddie, but this one has a West Country accent.  Therefore, even the shadiest statements sound cheery and reasonable.  Julia Davis, who also created and wrote the show, plays Jill Tyrell.  You might recognise Julia from the background of loads of different British comedies, which is really bad as I only like it when she is at the front.  She was even in Gavin And Stacey (which I have never watched, purely because everyone used to watch it and that put me off, when normally it makes me want to watching something).  While the rest of us ignore or suppress our selfish side, Jill embraces hers.  So much so that, when new neighbours Cath and Don arrive, she wastes no time in making Cath’s life hell in order to live out her fantasy of seducing Don (or any of their sons; she’s not that picky).  I should point out that Cath has MS and is in a wheelchair.  I should also point out that Jill removes her own husband from the scene by checking him into a hospice for the terminally ill, despite him being fighting fit.  Nothing can deter Jill from her goal.  In fact, Cath’s inability to stop being British and polite is what allows Jill to walk all over her. 

And not just walk all over her, but drive her around until she vomits after hearing she gets travel sick, put on a meaty buffet despite knowing Cath is vegetarian, slam a door in Cath’s face leaving her alone in the garden while pretending someone has called her back in the house, “Pardon?”, have her dog jump all over her after finding out she had a run in with an Alsatian as a girl.  There is simply so much that going through it all here, while hilarious, would not do it any justice.  The main life teaching from this is that if someone lets you take advantage of them, then go for your life.  It’s their own stupid fault.

Finally, the supporting characters are worth their weight in gold.  From Ruth Jones’s asthmatic Linda, to an awkward Angus Deayton as loverat Don himself, not to mention Mark Gatiss as the repulsive Glen.  Jill horrifically manipulates each and every one of them in the cruellest way and in the vilest scenes, but somehow watching it is pure bliss.

Do not watch this if you are easily offended.  Do watch this if you need to cut loose from beautiful people in beautiful situations.  Do watch this is you can laugh at anything and live with the guilt, or better yet, not experience the guilt at all.  Do watch it if you want to be reminded of how risky the BBC used to be with its comedy.  My only warning for those that do watch it is not to do with the offensive content, but the fact that, after the dating agency scene, you will never be able to say “thank you” the same way ever again.