Last Chance U: Basketball

We’ll begin this week with apologies to an unknown neighbour of mine.  The flat on the other side of the wall to which my big telly is mounted has occupants unknown to me.  They have a different entrance and we’re therefore mostly happy in our separate lives.  Sure, one of them has a very loud voice and spends most evenings playing video games while shrieking into a headset, but I just turn up my own boxset volume to drown at a grown man shouting at people to “Kill him, kill him, KILL HIM!”  But oh how the tables were turned this week as I made my way through the final episodes of Last Chance U: Basketball.  These ball games were recorded over a year ago; they’re being broadcast as part of a documentary.  Yet, the excitement of the matches, the odds at stake, the significance to the players and the closeness of some of the scores, all these things had me jumping up and down, yelling at the screen and even clapping each time points hit the scoreboard.

Such is the power of Last Chance U as a franchise.  I’ve already posted about its progenitor format, following junior college teams playing American football for their last chance (clue’s in the name) at college scholarships.  The fifth season’s appearance was a welcome lockdown drop, standing out for having a coach that actually seemed completely decent, yet sadly tailing off as the pandemic came along to ruin young lives.  Well, this is more of the same outstanding drama, but make it basketball.  I’ve covered my dalliance in this sport already, having been very pleasantly surprised by the triumphant The Last Dance a few months back.  I’m basically an NBA expert now.  And so here we are, at a college in East Los Angeles (ELAC) following their basketball team’s dreams to improve their game, come together as a unit, win state and bag scholarships to unlock futures otherwise denied to them as young African-American men.

If you’re a sporting imbecile like me, you’ll find basketball is a much easier follow than the defence-offence-special teams confusion of American football.  For those still needing help, there’s a basket at each end and you’ve got to put your ball in there to score.  It helps if you’re six foot heading on seven, as these baskets aren’t built with anyone of less-than-average stature in mind.  You also can’t just carry the ball, but you can bounce it as much as you like.  There are also sometimes fouls, but I don’t know why these happen.

At the heart of any Last Chance U is the head coach.  Step forward John Mosley, a man you’ll come away desperate to be friends with.  He gets it.  He knows the odds are stacked against his kids, so he pours everything into getting them what they need.  He’s in no way camera shy, acting out some dramatic tirades when the team aren’t following his instructions or trying hard enough.  And this man can preach, taking his fervent Christian beliefs out at the slightest provocation to deliver heartfelt sermons in the locker room that are guaranteed to have uptight Brits cringing.  His team aren’t always appreciative of how much he pushes them, yet some of the best arcs within this first season document how they come to realise his significance in their paths to progress.  And there’s affection in the tension too.  When not clapping and yelling, I was also laughing my head off during the team’s cohesion trip to the Californian countryside where one evening’s activity was competitive impressions of their exuberant coach.  Mosley took their spot-in impersonations in his stride.

Within the team itself, we are directed to focus on four key players.  Each will win your heart, from Joe Hampton’s palpable frustration at referee persecution to Deshaun Highler’s unrivalled grit and tenacity in getting where he needs to be in the face of personal tragedy.  Around this core, the rest of the team is just as engaging and you’ll find yourself wanting to know more about all of them. You’ll laugh along at team jokes like you’re a fellow player.  In fact, it’s a privilege to be able to have such a nose around in their lives and team dynamics, which leads me to the most apt term for Last Chance U’s style of observation: unflinching.  We look away from nothing.  From the captain spewing up his guts to various locker-punching tantrums, we’re with it all the way, even after we’d prefer not to be.  Signature to this series are long face-on shots of key characters, part-brooding, part-defiance, all haunting.  It breaks the otherwise sacrosanct rule of nobody looking directly down the lenses of the cameras that are thrust in their faces.  They see us, watching them.  This intensity elevates.  The only thing missing is the syncopated drumbeat of a typical Last Chance U opening sequence.

I’ve recommended Last Chance U: Basketball to anyone that will listen, and to even more people that won’t.  It will get you in its grip till you miss it when it’s over.  This series is perhaps one of the bittersweetest what with the 2019/20 season running into something just over a year ago that we’re still dealing with to this very day.  But, in time, you’ll remember the hope it has given you.  The next time you’re feeling sorry for yourself, ask yourself what the players of the East Los Angeles College basketball team would do.

Inside The World’s Toughest Prisons

Hi everyone and welcome to my insurance post.  Due to unforeseen apathy on my part, I’ve not managed to finish watching anything new in time to uncover a sexy boxset this week.  I’ve had lots of recommendations, and am halfway through a few things myself, but since riding high as an early adopter of Industry (you’re welcome) I’m having to raid my annals (not a euphemism) for something I consumed a while back and didn’t deem worthy of a post at the time.  Christmas might be on the way (or cancelled) but this week we’re swerving the single-use festivities in favour of going Inside The World’s Toughest Prisons.  Will loyal fans of the blog dismiss this as a show too obscure to warrant reading about, or will it turn out, as I suspect from this Netflix documentary’s appearance in the UK top ten when new episodes appeared earlier this year, that I’ll have a post worthy of rivalling some of my most-read musings (the top three in order: Love Island, Naked Attraction, Bo’ Selecta!)?

By now we’re familiar with my theory that prisons offer great narrative tension to any drama.  It elevated all the nonsensically earnest dialogue of Prison Break.  It created a sample population of wronged women among whom the lady fluff of Orange Is The New Black deftly metamorphosed into acerbic social commentary.  It even gave some much-needed edge to Archie Andrews in Riverdale.  But what of real-life prisons, I hear you ask.  And what about prisons abroad, I also hear you follow up with in order to help me segue effortlessly into our focus this week.  Well, Inside The World’s Toughest Prisons tells you all about them.  We’ve all seen headlines bemoaning the UK’s soft-touch criminal justice system, and of course Brexit will now allow those clamouring hardliners to enjoy sufficient sovereignty to purge individuals from society in whatever manner they see fit.  We have also heard tell of the horrors of third-world jails where many a Westerner has come a cropper for accidentally stumbling over a border after losing little packets of drugs up their bottoms.  How long must we wait to look inside them (the prisons, not the bottoms)?!

Finally, then, in 2016, Channel 5 were brave enough to send a film crew to four such hellholes, pushing ahead of them as a shield plucky journalist Paul Connolly who, under the documentary’s premise, would actually become an inmate at these institutions in order to get behind the bars and under the skin of what’s really going on.  From continent to continent, the findings are disturbingly similar: overcrowding, drug addiction, corruption, unsanitary conditions and violence.  A natural response is to swear off a life a crime, but luckily I hadn’t been planning one.  Two years later, Netflix launched a second series, bringing in the energy of Raphael Rowe for hosting duties, whizzing him round the world on a punishing sequence of gap years across a total of three further seasons.  Maybe Connolly didn’t fancy any more toughness, but it didn’t matter as Rowe outqualified him, having spent a decade imprisoned for crimes he didn’t commit.  Don’t worry if you don’t remember this bit as he’ll remind you at the start of every episode.

Bringing in real prison toughness, Rowe is all too eager to get among things.  Like his predecessor, he commits to the process of becoming a prisoner, undergoing humiliating strip searches on arrival.  As series progress, you start to twig that the guards aren’t that bothered about this and it’s in fact the production team insisting on a naked cavity search.  Rowe can’t pop his trousers off quick enough.  Once inside, we can have a proper look around.  It’s an extreme version of poverty porn.  In Paraguay, men rifle through rubbish or inject drugs in the open air.  In Belize, they trade in performative Christian faith against privileges.  In Papua New Guinea, the constant threat of violence is palpable.  But it’s not all doom and gloom, as we’re also granted access to some of the world’s least tough prisons and although this makes a lie of the show’s titles, it’s just as interesting to see how Germany focuses on therapy or Norway on preparation for normal life in order to prevent recidivism.

Whether Rowe really gets locked in overnight doesn’t really matter.  He absorbs enough exposure to draw conclusions that recognise the complexity of punishing criminal behaviour.  As a classic Brit abroad, his refusal ever to learn the native language (even a few more words of Spanish would help him in his South and Central American jaunts that dominate his schedule) poses no threat to his discussions with helpful inmates.  His questions are asked with childlike wonder, as if a slightly babyish voice and naïve frown can transcend Quechua.  Hats, and trousers, off to him though: he’s rarely fazed.  His greatest moment of worry seems to come in Lesotho where inmates suggest they might make a prison wife of him.  While it’s unlikely any wicked ways would have been had while the camera crew and production team watch on, Rowe has never moved as fast as he does when evading their friendly clutches.

Having had our nosey around, we feel safe in the knowledge we’ll never have to be confined to any of these places in real life.  It’s hard to feel optimistic about the UK as it self-destructs out of the EU, but at least there’s probably central heating in most of our prisons.  For now.  This show’s strength, therefore, comes from its ability to make our own lives seem less appalling, if only by comparison.  As we trip in and out of lockdowns, spending more time indoors than we ever thought possible, we may count our blessings that this isn’t in fact a day made up of 23 hours of isolation, but a great time to catch up on all sorts of Netflix documentaries.

The Last Dance

These days, retail is something that happens online while we’re sequestered indoors, leaving the UK’s shopping streets barren and foreboding (like our future outside the EU).  Back in retail’s nineties heyday, our greatest weekend treat was being taken to the Bentalls shopping centre in Kingston for a good old browse.  Of all the pointless branches on its many glistening floors, the enormous Warner Bros Studio Store lives on in my memory as the most extravagant of them all.  A whole shop dedicated solely to merchandise with Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck on it.  Looking for a leather jacket with the Tasmanian Devil on it?  They had it in three colours of course.  Among the shiny trinkets and branded apparel, whole displays dedicated to Space Jam loomed large.  My eleven-year-old self wondered what be this mysterious film?  The animated characters I knew, but my Surrey childhood meant that Michael Jordan was an unknown entity to me.  Fast forward twenty-four years to this summer and I still hadn’t seen Space Jam, but everyone at my gym was gushing on about a new Netflix documentary on a basketball dream team with a banging soundtrack.  Not being one for team ball sports, I waited patiently until conversation turned so we could speak about something else.  Months later, I saw that The Last Dance had an IMDb rating of 9.2 and decided I had to watch it, if only to guarantee to myself that I could consume a high-quality boxset after devouring Industry.

I admit that I initially felt some regret at my decision.  Not only was this clearly all about sport, but it was about some very specific things to do with that sport.  Luckily, these were glamorous American sports from abroad, not the endlessly ubiquitous soccer that constitutes half of all “news” in the UK (the other half being articles about why immigrants have ruined your life).  Basketball was even a sport I had seen in real life during a 2012 trip to New York when a beloved pal got us tickets to see the Knicks at Madison Square Gardens.  The oversize foam finger was just one of many highlights, with the speed of play, the high scores and the party atmosphere all making for a very entertaining spot of spectating.  But The Last Dance is all about the Chicago Bulls’ mid-nineties team and their ability to win successive NBA championships.  Our main narrative plays out around the 1998 season with our Bulls going for their sixth title (and second run of hattricks), but each of the ten episodes whizzes back and forth in time to fill in the backgrounds on different players’ careers, the team’s earlier fortunes and their overall approach to the championships they had previously won.  It’s a kind of lottery of early nineties years, but there’s a helpful graphic of a timeline by which to orientate yourself.

Instead of whiplash, though, I was gradually and irresistibly drawn in until I was powerless against a characteristic compulsion to get to the end.  What bolstered the intrigue?  Firstly, the multiple first-hand accounts from key players and onlookers involved at the time, told as pieces to camera with the frankness and the perspective only twentysomething years of intervening life can give you.  Secondly, the footage from the actual time, when a camera crew had unprecedented access to the Bulls’ legendary team, offered further unique insight, as if the whole programme was planned as a follow-up almost a quarter of a century later.  What’s more, for the non-sports fan, you’re excused the commitment of sitting through seasons and seasons of matches and simply shown montage after montage of breath-taking steals, assists, scores and slam dunks.  There’s no other valid response but to be impressed.

Of course, nobody thought to capture the nineties in HD, but the skills still shine through, and there’s some very strong nostalgia at play here.  It seems news readers were always filmed in very close frame, with lead images of their stories’ subjects selected solely for the extent to which they could be deemed unflattering.  Everybody chewed a great deal of gum (though this could be carrying on till now – I have no frame of reference) chomping away on great gobfuls.  Surely there were some bitten cheeks as the players careered up and down the court.  There’s a huge internet trend for people in their thirties to comment and post endlessly about how their lives and indeed the world peaked in the nineties.  The Last Dance corroborates this as I wistfully realised I had missed out on everything at the time.

The tension builds around the epic struggle to win that sixth championship, with my ignorance keeping me genuinely in the dark about what the outcome would be.  Even more captivating, though, is the incredible charismatic personality of Michael Jordan himself, outshone only by his sporting determination, work ethic and competitive spirit.  The Last Dance covers the team effort, but everything comes back to this one-man superstar whose global influence in a world before social media must have come with pressure beyond our imagining, and that’s before you factor in traumatic personal tragedy.  As we arrive at our poignant closing episode, the sense of time passing, of lost youths and changing lives, becomes almost unbearable and you wish that everything could just stand still.  Life is terrifying highs and dizzying lows, so how must it feel if your greatest peaks are in a bygone decade?  It’s moments like this that make you glad never to have achieved anything, as at least then you can write an irreverent weekly blog about other people’s successes and the documentaries that Netflix has made about them.

The Staircase

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cheer

After finishing Last Chance U and needing something to restore my faith in the good old USA while I endure lockdown and witness presidents recommend the direct injection of bleach to cure what ails you, it was only natural that my next step on Netflix would be to enter the world of Cheer.  From the same producers of a documentary whose drama and story telling rocked my viewing experience, Cheer would offer me more of the same, I reasoned.  However, at a time we’re potentially looking to avoid drama (when there is so much happening out there in the world just now that’s all too similar to the opening scenes of a science fiction film), what was I doing launching myself into six episodes of the most compounding drama and tension?  I was this close to requiring an emergency service to cope with it.  Given that our public service heroes are kind of stretched just now (and so many are busy clapping them in some misjudged gesture that really only makes the clapper feel less guilty) I’m wondering if Netflix could part-fund their own – something for people whose real lives are now so strange, that the effects of their programming’s drama are causing enhanced trauma and, er, excessive entertainment.

While the rhythm of drama in Last Chance U reflects an episodic cycle, with a game per match delivering each climactic beat to the storyline, the world of cheerleading Cheer is built around ladders up to one singular moment.  The pressure and the tension, therefore, ramp up episode by episode.  There are no real peaks and troughs, no post-gearshift respite before accelerating again.  We build and build and build until it all comes down (like a dropped top girl) to the final cheerleading routine of precisely two minutes and 15 seconds.  This isn’t just atmospheric pressure from above.  The team we follow in Cheer, from Navarro College in Corsicana, Texas, have pressure coming at them from every direction.

Firstly, they’ve won the National Cheerleading Championship many times before.  Umpteen times, to be precise, regularly topping the podium since the start of the 21^st century.  Each year, they enter the championships under a crushing weight of expectation, from their formidable head coach, Monica Aldama, from their passive-aggressive assistant coaches, from squad alumni, their own families and, to a lesser extent, the wider Corsicana community, who are somewhat oblivious to the breath-taking achievements in stunting, basketing and, well, cheering, going on in their local area.

As a Brit, I now feel the need to pause for some exposition.  Mostly because cheerleading is a very un-British thing.  It’s about being supportive, cheerful and optimistic.  Our sporting events are characterised by rainy downpours, with hooliganism for the commoner sports, and exclusive elitism for the more expensive ones.  But cheerleading has long been an American solution to their need to prevent women getting crushed underfoot in violent sports.  Girls can’t play the game, but they can console themselves by cheering along the boys from the side lines and helping to point out to the spectators that they ought to do this too.  I know this sounds cynical, but we must expect nothing less of me than to point out the farcical.  That said, cheerleading is still a key theme in my most beloved types of TV shows, mainly because it features heavily in one of my top tropes: dramas set in high school or equivalent higher education locations (and rarely in post-apocalyptic dystopian futures ideally including zombies).  I can’t quote Bring It On as accurately as I can Mean Girls, but a recent re-watching after Sky-Plussing it off Comedy Central saw me easily able to identify what scenes had been tampered with to suit its daytime schedule outing.

So, by way of exposition, this is real-life Bring It On.  As there is no professional career league for cheerleading careers as such (or should this be ca-cheers?), Cheer further accentuates the importance of these final championships.  For many, it’s their last cheer.  It’s certainly not going to get them a scholarship, we are told.  But, like Last Chance U, the time is taken to get to know the most compelling characters from the Navarro squad.  As always, the challenges in their background are teased through in ways that relate to their current actions.  The importance of cheerleading to them, as an escape, as a survival instinct, as a route to self-confidence, is abundantly clear.  And you’ll have no time for British scoffing at pom-pom-waving and bra-loads of pep.  This cheerleading is a discipline that is part floor gymnastics, part airborne gymnastics, laser-accurate choreography and a bucketload of incredible toughness.  As rehearsals ramp up, the physio tape is used up in bulk stitching back together the various significant injuries sustained by our athletes.  Whereas our football players would skip out games to recover, the cheerleaders run straight back onto the mats, ready to be tossed aloft or to perform dozens of somersaults in one of many full-out practices where the same energy is used as on competition day.  These kids really bring it.  Oh, it has already been broughten.

From the girls, we hear about familiar insecurities, such as online trolling, fitting in with groups and escaping parents who left you out in a trailer (really).  The bruised ribs, high altitude drops onto heads and dislocated elbows are the easy part.  Comic relief comes in the form of Gabi Butler’s parents playing themselves as the deliciously unaware pushy parents momaging their protégée.  The boys’ stories, balanced out so males don’t dominate the whole narrative, address head on their truths in being part of a sport traditionally considered to be for girls.  They don’t get airborne, but many have had to emerge from communities with unsupportive views on minority sexualities, only to land in a part of Texas where it’s clear folk don’t take too well to their kind round these here parts.  Progress is a bit slower in some corners of the world, but you can be buoyed by Monica Aldama’s response to anyone who comes for her boys.

Over our journey, we bond with the team just as they do with each other.  From Whatsapp group exclusions at the start, to insider handshakes, communal hair-volumising and excessively large bow-application by the end.  Such is their self-assurance with each other that we are shown scenes of athletes addressing their teammates with unprompted (and unwanted) feedback whenever it suits them.  Way to be direct, guys!  It goes without saying, then (so I’m not sure why I’ve laboured the point so heavily – let’s call it lazy writing), that the drama climaxes at the championships in the most heart-stopping, mouth-with-vomit-filling way, but it’s the friendships and the athletes’ journeys along the way that make everything about Cheer so compelling.  For example, after a good full-out run through, the team celebrate by breaking out into re-enactments of their favourite show, Bad Girls Club, faux-beating each other with handbags and tearing out pretend weaves.  As Monica finally joins in hesitantly, you feel the urge yourself to run onto the mat and act like you’re teaching a bitch a damn lesson, such is the strength of the sense of belonging.  Go team!

Last Chance U

After 83 weeks of lockdown, I’ve been finding myself on a roller coaster of emotions.  This hasn’t been due to any real pandemic-related stressors.  I’m grateful to be able to say that my new isolation life is only mildly irritating in the following ways: I miss the gym, I need a haircut, queuing for the supermarket is time-consuming but I always have a good podcast, I have the third biggest spot of my life at a time when I constantly have to look at my own face on endless Microsoft Teams calls.  It could always be worse – I’m lucky to be able to work from home.  Let’s be honest, I wouldn’t mind seeing friends and family, or being able to plan a trip in the future, but for now I’ll take the small comforts.  And one of those comforts is finding something to watch that gives you boundless entertainment and diversion.  This week, I will be talking about Last Chance U for this very reason.  But I will warn you now, the show combines enough of the world of documentary storytelling and the world of competitive sport to break your heart at the same time as making it race uncontrollably with dramatic tension.  If you can handle that emotional roller coaster, all while staying in, then this is one for you.

It's about American football

I’ve never seen a full match of American football, yet I find drama based around this sport incredibly compelling.  My earlier post on Friday Night Lights touched on this, but Last Chance U takes that drama and multiplies it by an emotional factor of 20 billion.  As a Brit, everything in the US is a bit more showbiz to me, and sport is no exception.  The structure of the game, with swaps between defence and offence, the battle to cover yards en route to your opponent’s end, the snaps that lead to touchdowns, lends itself almost too well to cinematic climaxes.  I still don’t think I know the rules, but I’ve gleaned the majority of it.  Each episode of Last Chance U ends in a crucial game for the team in question.  You care about each character individually (more on this later) so you’re truly invested in the game.  Your job, with each point, is to remember who’s in what uniform, keep an eye on the ball and, before long, you’re basically a sports fan spectating American Football (albeit matches that took place years ago and whose results you can look up online).  Live in the moment, act like it’s real and you could find yourself in the same position as me: leaping out of your sofa in excitement at a dreamlike touchdown or a heart-stopping fumble.

It's about junior college

So that’s the end of each episode covered.  We can now look at the rest, which follows the stories of staff and students at two different junior colleges.  The first two parts follow East Mississippi Community College and the second two focus on Independence Community College in Kansas.  If you thought American football rules were confusing, you won’t welcome a compounding of that with the addition of the structure of US higher education.  What we call university, they call college, or, in fact, school.  Either way, this is the U bit of Last Chance U.  Most universities offer four-year degrees, but a system of junior colleges handle two-year courses, with the option of transferring up to a big school at the end.  Junior colleges tend to have Community College in their names, which is a further complication still, a bit like British public schools being private schools (where private means fee-paying).  Another difference is that, while British uni students do degrees in singular subjects, the American version is to carry on taking an array of classes.  It also seems that your performance is constantly graded so you know exactly what you are passing and failing, as opposed to my educational experience of some exam results every couple of years.

It’s about last chances

And herein lies the jeopardy of the show.  High school American football stars get scholarships to study at universities.  They must maintain grades to be eligible to play.  On graduation, they can be drafted into the NFL for professional careers (picking teams on a national level), having played for free till this point as student athletes.  Imagine if Premier League footballers could only join a team and get paid after they got themselves a BA Hons in Business Management from Loughborough.  It might make for more articulate speech in post-match analysis interviews, but the boy wonders dreaming of making it professional would really need to knuckle down to their studies in order to continue playing at the highest levels.  Unthinkable to us, but it’s very much the structure in the US.

However, the stars of Last Chance U are the athletes who, for whatever reason, lose their spots on their teams and need another go to get scholarships to play football again.  This is where the heartbreak starts to set in: these young men have often had the most harrowing childhoods.  From mothers in prison and spells in the care system, to murdered relatives and drug-addicted fathers, we are filled in on the backgrounds that go some way to explaining the subsequent struggles to adjust to athletic and academic pressure.  For the most part, we are dealing with the poorest Americans here.  There almost seems to be an inverse proportion between the disadvantages of their origins and their potential on the football field.  Yet, their character shines through.  If, like me, you’re a white man from Surrey, you’ll need the subtitles to decipher some of the turns of phrases, with southern drawls compounded by African-American coinages.  My language learning as I worked through the episodes progressed to such an extent that I found myself unable to understand German anymore when friends in Europe FaceTimed me on my birthday.

Indeed, race looms heavily in all episodes.  Netflix helpfully flags the content’s potential to offend due to discrimination.  American football has long been one of the few ways for black men to improve their circumstances in the States’ poorest communities.  The alternative shown to us is a life of crime.  But, savagely, only a very small percentage ever go professional in the NFL, so we see a lot of time being spent convincing the boys to have back up plans when many see the only other options to football being death or prison.  Furthermore, the very real risk of debilitating injury underlines the precariousness of anyone’s chances of making their millions on the field.  Last Chance U even leaves you speculating that American football has almost become a form of gladiatorial combat that black men must pursue for the public’s viewing pleasure.

I want to flag, though, the academic support staff of the two junior colleges who must cajole and persuade on-field hotshots to maintain their grades, show up punctually to classes and consider their insurance options.  Brittany Wagner proves herself the goddess of EMCC in the first two parts, with Latonya Pinkard taking the baton, among others, in our ICC seasons, her passion for raising up these black men palpable in its emotional intensity.  The contrast with the coaching staff, the majority of whom are spectacularly overweight and potty-mouthed, is stark.  Head coaches seem prone to the pettiest egotism on the side lines, potentially taking their cue from certain world leaders, and the question of the example they set to their teams is artfully played out across the episodes.

When the teams win, your heart will soar.  When they are annihilated, you’ll be devastated.  When the young athletes (of whom there are too many star characters to name) get offers, you’re made up.  When their future plans don’t pan out, you are crushed.  Each series ends with a round up of what happens next, plus I recommend digging out the two where-are-they-now specials for completion, which brings with it the terrifying confrontation of dreams versus reality.

It’s taken me too long to start watching Last Chance U, but it’s highly recommended Netflix fare that guarantees gripping and thought-provoking entertainment at a time when we’re stuck home with our screens.  There’s modern ultra-Americana for those that love the cheerleading, padding-clad, budget-busting expense of the American approach to sport.  There’s tense drama in each match.  There’s emotional investment in its characters.  There’s even the chance for cynical Brits to scoff at the unrivalled value place on blind faith in Christianity.  The storytelling is artful and credible, and your feelings won’t be the same afterwards.  If there are more instalments in this roller coaster, I’ll be getting straight on.

Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem And Madness

Let’s discuss captivity.  It certainly seems like the right time for it.  The UK has been under lockdown since the start of this week, and I’ve been on enforced working from home for over a fortnight.  No gym, no haircuts, no socialising and no food in the supermarkets: welcome to my first pandemic.  But, in all this, perspective must remain a constant companion.  I have a job and a home I can do it from, so things could be much worse.  I live in a wealthy country with an infrastructure that might just about be able to cope (if we all stay in), which is more than can be said for billions of other people around the world.  All I must undergo is some temporary hardship.  I must confine myself to my brand-new new build.  I forego physical contact with all friends and family.  But thanks to the internet, I have unlimited entertainment and education at my fingertips.  I can and shall occupy myself while counting those blessings.  And it is indeed this same blessed internet (and its bedfellow, Netflix) that has brought something incredibly entertaining to the UK’s captive audience in recent weeks: Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Madness.

It's occupied our number one spot for some time now, so, like a rampant infection, it was only natural that I too should fall to its appeal.  In fact, those seven episodes formed something of an uncharacteristically irresistible binge for me.  I devoured them all in a matter of days.  I suppose I do have more spare time as I can’t go outside (beyond my single government-approved exercise window per day – thanks gammon-in-charge Bozza), but I just had to know what was going to happen next and what possible conclusion it could all draw to.  The colon in its title is a pointless adornment; they had me at Tiger King.  Big felines have long filled me with terror, despite being a flag-waving cat person from a cat family, with only indifference for dogs and mostly antipathy for their owners (with many exceptions).  As a child, I had a recurring nightmare of being trapped in Chessington World Of Adventures, desperate to drag my family away from the lion enclosure before they emitted deadly roars – yes, I was more scared of their barks than their bites.  A recent trip to South Africa saw me taken to a lion park by cousins I hadn’t seen for 27 years.  Rather than try and front a brave-man act as the pride chased our vehicle to the exit, I totally lost my cool and even refused to open my door (or take off my seatbelt) once we were all clear of the safety barrier.  I love wildlife, but will from now on only encounter the dangerous ones via a screen on Our Planet or Seven Worlds, One Planet.

However, I can’t resist the constant tension of some stupid human sitting next to a deadly tiger or lion without any protection beyond their own sense of ego.  It makes for a fascinating Louis Theroux documentary (2011’s America’s Most Dangerous Pets) which features scenes that still haunt me, mostly because Theroux was so visibly uncomfortable around dangerous animals.  And rightly so.  Here we are, years later, dealing with the same character at the heart of the same subject: Joe Exotic (Schreibvogel-Maldonado-Passage).  If the ever-present threat of a mauling isn’t compelling enough, our Joe has all the qualities that render any viewer physically incapable of wrestling their eyes from the screen.  Redneck and proud of it, Exotic boasts a peroxided mullet, cowboy tassels and a multitude of other adornments that scream attention-grabbing.  Some piercings dangle sadly, his middle-aged skin’s elasticity the victim of smoking, sunshine and drugs, yet we can only imagine the state of his Prince Albert as he takes us through his collection of weighty padlocks for attaching to it on an impromptu tour of his very untidy bedroom.  Part The Office’s David Brent (for the music videos alone), part S-Town’s John B. McLemore (only with a manifestly lower IQ), Exotic is the gun-totin’ ringmaster of an Oklahoma petting zoo.  Only these aren’t bunnies and ponies, these are lions and tigers (and their curious dual-heritage offspring, ligers).

Guests are protected by nothing more than Exotic’s own self-belief – and it’s powerful stuff.  It convinces him to run for state governorship and for president.  It guides his acoustic tastes – the only music he likes to listen to is his own.  It propels him to celebrate a three-man marriage in a very conservative state.  It renders him impervious to animal rights groups that advise that maybe you shouldn’t breed tiger cubs simply for sale as pets, or for stroking by punters until they’re too old to be cute and are euthanised, that you shouldn’t feed them out-of-date supermarket meat and roadkill, that you shouldn’t confine them to cages.  Thus arises the key narrative of the documentary series: Exotic’s primal rivalry with fellow big pussy fan and arch-nemesis, that lovely flower garland-wearing, slow-cycling Carole Baskin down in Florida (“Hey all you cool cats and kittens”).  She mandates that these animals shouldn’t be petted, or bred for petting, or kept in captivity at all.  Running a sanctuary for rescue animals, she inspires her social followers to join her in pressuring Exotic and his pals to right their wrongs.

She might sound angelic, but one of the most delicious parts of Tiger King is not knowing who’s worse.  Rumours circle Baskins like lions stalking prey.  What happened to her very wealthy first husband?  How and why did he disappear?  Why didn’t his family get anything?  Are the rumour true that she fed his body to her tigers?  Most evil of all, she runs her park using unpaid volunteers only (Exotic pays his in petty cash and trailer-park living) and masks her origins in captive cat breeding, though she is very open about her incredibly ironic cat allergies.  In her tit-for-tat conflict with Exotic, you sit there paralysed about who to root for.  The answer is neither.

Instead, you can dismiss them both on the quality that unites them: their complete lack of taste.  From leopard-print leggings (well, leopard-print everything) to neck tattoos, big cat people are drawn to anything tacky.  It evidences their pursuit of status: you can swing no bigger dick than having the king of the jungle as a house pet.  Most sinister of these egos is Bhagavan “Doc” Antle.  Proving correct the theory you should never trust a man who has a soul patch and a pony tail, polygamist Antle is not (yet, at least) directly embroiled in the feud-propelled crimes at the heart of Tiger King, merely commenting as an onlooking character witness.  Yet his passion for attention drives some of the best humour in this otherwise serious matter, directing the documentary team to feature him only in the most flattering of set-ups.  His ego is more fragile than the tigers’ natural habitats.

I’ll finish up by considering the most compelling moment in the whole thing.  I was going to focus on the footage of Exotic getting dragged around a cage by the foot after some cologne on his shoe prompts an aggressive reaction from one of his big cats.  In a split second, the underlying tension bursts to the surface and we are seconds from death.  Or there’s the moment his campaign manager witnesses a colleague die, with his reaction captured on CCTV.  This will chill you.  But the winning moment is in fact the footage of “businessman” James Garretson thinking he looks cool while doing water sports.  For some reason, there is nothing more compelling than a fat man with a bad haircut on a jetski.

Let’s be honest, Tiger King is fairly exploitative, delivering up white trash on a stick, but I couldn’t get enough of it.  Some more intriguing details are cruelly glanced over: what exactly happened to Saff’s arm, why does Exotic have a knee support, why is John Finlay topless for most of his interviews, what happened in Jeff Lowes’ Las Vegas petting van etc?  Instead, way is made for endless footage of big cats receiving questionable treatment, enough that you eventually feel almost disappointed that there aren’t more scenes of humans being attacked.  Not because you wish ill on any member of the public, but because these big cat people are clearly the most dangerous predators in the animal world.  Maybe it’s time for them to experience some of this captivity first hand.

Our Planet

You haven’t known true despair until you’ve seen a walrus inadvertently shuffle its immense mass to the sheer drop of a cliff edge, pause momentarily, eyes partially blind while out of the water, before helplessly shifting its weight an inch too far, beginning an unstoppable tumble down a hundred feet of rock face, fins pawing at thin air as its every bone crunches and cracks on solid boulders, its blubbery insulation unable to protect it as it lands crumpled and dead on the pebble beach below.  Those that don’t die instantly (or during one of the collisions as they plummet) lie paralysed in the freezing waves waiting for an end to their suffering.  Dear reader, I hear you crying out: why is this happening?  Well, the problem is us.  These walruses’ Arctic ice shelf has melted away so much on the Siberian coast that they’re forced to rest cramped in their hundreds of thousands on rocky outcrops.  Those escaping the deadly fighting that living cheek by jowl by tusk by 1,000kg body causes ascend coastal cliffs to find space.  But, they cannot see well enough out of water to get down safely, so they tumble, often to their deaths.

Filming this grisly and harrowing display is the Our Planet team from Netflix.  You might think that it’s only occasionally that a walrus slips off, or that the camera crew camped out for weeks to capture the moment, but this occurrence is common.  Never has the power of montage been used to such horrifying effect.  But, once that had passed, my next response was helplessness.  I was as helpless as those salty old souls careening down scree, all twitching whisker and beady, blinkered eye.  What could I do about the climate change that was melting their homes?  In fact, what can we do?  The screen you’re reading this on (thanks for reading, though, yeah) runs on from some sort of power source, and that power source probably has its roots in non-renewable energy.  So too, most likely, did the vehicles the film crew used to reach the walruses.  What can we do about their cruel fate when our entire way of living’s end result is this sort of dreadful circumstance?

Our Planet offers little by way of solutions, but its strength comes from forcing you to face up to the question: why do things have to be this way?  Just as Blue Planet II set the anti-plastic revolution in motion among the conscious classes, so too does Our Planet feel like the flame that might ignite explosive change for the better.  I promise I am doing my part: smugly parading around with my keep cup whenever I get coffee, shooting passive-aggressive glances at anyone still using disposable receptacles.  But this is the same look I give to any morbidly obese person chowing down on a donut or a litter bug throwing their fag end onto the streets of London, and, frankly, it doesn’t seem to be working: I still see more fat smokers each day than I ought to.  So maybe I am the problem.  I certainly was on the wrong end of the self-righteousness scale when my taxi back from a swanky media lunch was held up by congestion from the Extinction Rebellion troops currently occupying Oxford Circus.  But this blog has already firmly established the point that I am terrible.

But I don’t want David Attenborough telling me off.  That would be like having a very disappointed grandfather.  It’s one thing to want Ted Hastings wagging his anti-corruption superintendent finger at me as in some episode of Line Of Duty, but if Attenborough told me I was a twat, there wouldn’t be much bouncing back.  And this is Netflix’s strength, getting the ur-voice of natural history to do its animal programme.  He’s reminding us that this isn’t This Planet, or That Planet, or Some Practice Planet We’re Having A Go On, but that it’s Our Planet, and we’re titting it up.

Attenborough’s BBC shows typically wallowed in the majesty of the natural world before the environmental conscious sting was slipped between your ribs like a steely dagger in the last ten minutes, just before the exposition about cameraman Keith who hasn’t seen his family in six years while waiting for a nine-second shot of a snow leopard.  Our Planet’s finger wagging is woven throughout.  Here’s a lovely bird.  It’s dying out, because of you.  Here’s a rainforest.  It’s ruined, because of you.  Here’s a stunning coral reef that’s taken millennia to form.  It’s bleached, because you left that light on.  The panic really sets in during the quarter of the show taken up by showing ice caps melting.  Each time a million tonnes slips in the ocean, you’re convinced the ocean around you is rising.  I wanted to shout out for everything to stop.  Maybe I could rewind it and stick the ice back on and reverse the process by which we’ll drown ourselves.

In case you can’t tell, you need a certain resilience to cope with this show.  I had planned to ration myself to one episode a week, earmarking 9pm on Sundays for something relaxing to treat my eyes with before the final sleep preceding the return to the Monday through Friday strip-lit nonsense of office life, a sort of zoological Downton Abbey.  But it was becoming a sour full stop to my weekend.  In addition, the awesome visual feast of the photography left me unable to resist ploughing through multiple episodes.  I would just have to handle the guilt.

But is it entertaining?  Let’s be honest, this is competing with a glut of Netflix carbon-producing content.  Indeed, the first episode opened to slight disappointment.  Here, again, was a shoal of fish in the open sea, Attenborough wanging on about nutrients in the water as if someone has spilled their protein shake in the ocean, with dolphins herding the poor blighters to the surface and seabirds diving to pick off lunch and dinner until the whole lot is polished off.  Awe-inspiring, yet familiar to my jaded eyes.  But fear not, for shortly afterwards my senses were overloaded by more flamingos than I have ever conceived of, galivanting along salt plains in searing heat.  For the fair-weather viewer among you, there is plenty to enjoy and that you have never seen before.  You just need to feel guilty while you see it.

So, what can we do about that sense of helplessness?  I didn’t vote for Brexit, but it’s ruining my life.  I mustn’t use fossil fuels, but how else can I power my laptop on this crowded train?  Let’s face it, we are looking for a leader to overthrow the corporate interests that have trapped us in this consumption cycle destined for total depletion of resources.  It’s not going to be me, as snide remarks such as those I throw at TV shows here can only galvanise a people to so much action: perhaps a titter or a chortle, but not enough to overthrow governments.  Anyway, if that leader could step forward please, that would be great.  Either way, one principle will remain as true after the revolution as before it: David Attenborough’s is the only voice I can watch wildlife to.