Gogglebox

It’s time to acknowledge something that’s been painfully clear in all of these posts: I’m pretty sure I’m addicted to TV.  Things came to a head in these last few weeks of I’m A Celebrity.  Until the Sky man comes next weekend (so that I have ITV2 HD in time for Love Island – always set and achieve your life goals), I’m in a household without any decent way of recording off my massive OLED telly.  Unable to stomach a nightly hour-long show complete with adverts (especially at Christmas, the most odious time of the year) I decided to watch the show catching up a day behind on ITV Hub.  However, this VoD service has the picture quality of peering through a steamed shower panel, the ads are all still there but at higher frequency and it loses your programme coming out of each break with a cheeky Whoops! message that infuriates more than it sympathises.  Realising it would only be a matter of time before my remote was smashed through my LG 55” screen, I reluctantly switched back to live viewing.  Suddenly, we were back in HD, and I could tell which one was Ant and which one was Dec again.  The dreaded ad breaks became three-minute chunks during which I would find other things to do, banal things like wash up, clean the kitchen, Whatsapp pals or stare into space – each preferable to watching supermarkets argue about who can provide the most magical Christmas.  The bigger drawback, though, was that I became a slave to the appointment to view.

Every evening was a countdown to 9pm, lest I miss the opening link.  Before the I’m A Celeb final, the nightly show was running longer till 10.30, cutting thirty minutes into my sacred bedtime and making the 5.30am alarm the next morning for Crossfit all the more devastating.  It was hell.  I’m relieved it’s over, despite loving the show.  My point is, keeping up with my favourites and devouring new boxsets in order to keep this blog interesting is starting to dominate my evening life.  I’m ending up watching hours each night, normally too exhausted from the early morning and full day of work to do anything productive (first-world problem – it warrants no sympathy).  Once my bum hits the sofa, that’s it.  I’m supposed to be furnishing a new flat, but now that the TV den part of the living room is up and running, I’ve a bad feeling we’re going to be stalled here for some time before there’s any further progress.  I have become a couch potato.  I have become my father.

It’s only fitting, then, that this week I should take a look at another set of people who while away their time on this fascinating planet sedentary on DFS furniture staring at a telly screen (though my sofa is from Heal’s everybody).  So, let’s do Gogglebox.  But, before we go any further, I should confess that this is a programme I don’t watch.  Don’t worry, though, that’s never stopped me throwing in my two pennies’ worth before (see posts on The Apprentice and Keeping Up With The Kardashians).  I’ve channel-surfed on enough Friday evenings to catch sufficient chunks of it to have the measure of the format and its cast.  Please read on while I oscillate wildly between tearing it asunder and extolling its charm.

And I do have some bones to pick with Gogglebox.  For the unaware, it’s a TV programme about people watching TV programmes.  It’s a real-life The Royle Family.  Up and down Britain, we mutually view selected televisual highlights with a cast of actual non-famous normos.  That’s right – we watch people watch telly.  Despite all of the above making it clear I’m wasting my life away, this format is the very definition to me of wasted time, and it’s for this reason I never make any effort to watch it.  Additionally, it shows you all the must-see moments of the week just gone which I rightly suspect would have the effect of making me want to watch even more TV.  This would benefit no-one.  But what I didn’t realise about the filming process was that the cast of Gogglebox know what they’re going to watch – they have scheduled filming sessions.  The production team pick the shows, put them on and then sit down to shoot the reactions.  When I realised this, I was very disappointed.  I thought we had more of a Big Brother vibe: families sign up to a camera being in the living room, go about their viewing lives as normal, and then the best bits are picked up and edited together.  This, I always felt, would be a fairer reflection of what we really watch and how we really react.  It’s excessive and impractical, but that’s just where my imagination goes to first.

Linked to this first fallacy and the fact that the participants know they are being filmed we have the following consequence: their responses aren’t that natural.  It’s an artificial set up.  I therefore can’t escape the feeling they’re all showing off.  Don’t get me wrong, I love showing off.  I do it constantly and enjoy it in others if they are entertaining me.  But Gogglebox acts like it’s a sneak peek behind closed doors to a more humdrum evening, with interstitial shots of household façades leading to cosy living-room set-ups, allowing we privileged few to glimpse real truth from unaware subjects.  But no, it’s just regional accents trying to think of the funniest thing to say about that week’s news or the John Lewis advert.  And it’s at that point I stop caring.

Everyone talks about their favourite Goggleboxers, but I don’t really know who’s who beyond those that have appeared in other reality shows (looking at you, Celebrity Big Brother).  What I do love is the diversity.  We have all points of the UK compass covered here: a wide array of family structures, lifestyle choices, ethnic backgrounds, cultural values, political persuasions, incomes, faiths, genders, ages, sexualities etc – basically every flavour of Brit you can shove out of the way on a crowded train.  What unites them all is a need to redecorate their living rooms.  It’s a bit like Come Dine With Me when you see that someone’s kitchen is a bit natty in comparison to all the show kitchens you see on cookery shows.  That said, given how many of them have hundreds of dogs sprawled across their soft furnishings, rubbing their worms into the fabric and wafting their canine farts over the cushions, there’d be no point updating any of the interiors.  You can sometimes smell the dog breath through the screen.  But it doesn’t matter what I think: what’s touching is the genuine love and affection these family members and friends have for each other.  That, at least, is always reassuringly genuine, if sprinkled with dog hair.

So, who on earth do I think I am talking disparagingly about Gogglebox simply because the people on it watch TV and do showing off?  This whole blog is based around the exact same concept: I watch too much TV and then show off about it, desperately seeking attention for my musings, awaiting offers of global syndication and secretly beaming when friends compliment my writing in real life.  The difference, sadly for me, is that Gogglebox still has millions of viewers, whereas I’m only getting tens of thousands of reads here…

Archer

“Have you seen Archer?” a friend asked.  I hadn’t.  I had no idea what they were talking about.  It was my worst fear come true: someone trying to engage in conversation about a piece of content pivotal to modern culture and there’s me, oblivious and unable to take part.  “You’d love Archer,” they went on.  Things had escalated.  Now this thing I had never heard of was actually being recommended to me!  I gave the only response possible at the time: nodding silently while my mouth slowly opened and closed.  But I don’t think I got away with it, as the same friend then insisted on showing me the programme while I was visiting him in Beijing.  (This was the same dear friend who first recommended the Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt to me, so he has a strong track record).

Let’s relive my first thoughts during that initial viewing, as this will help to bring the show to life for readers.

“So, it’s some sort of spy agency?”

Yes, it is.

“Wow, this is a work of art.”

Firstly, it’s adult animation.  This doesn’t mean it’s a cartoon of explicit jiggery and pokery for lonely men to watch with boxes of tissues.  It means it’s something for grown-ups that just happens to be produced from moving illustrations, like BoJack Horseman or Rick & Morty.  But everything in Archer is drawn to look like artwork by Roy Lichtenstein.  The characters are pneumatic in their attractiveness (though this still isn’t aimed at the hand-over-fist crowd).  The backgrounds too add to the overall high quality, while sixties lines and styling give everything a slight Mad Men feel.  I feasted my eyes.

“Isn’t that Bob from Bob’s Burgers?”

Following the overload in the eyeballs, my ears attuned to the aural assault.  Lead character, Stirling Archer, is voiced by H. Jon Benjamin, who plays Bob in Bob’s Burgers.  While Archer isn’t exactly supposed to be a successful spy, it’s hard to forget the images of a bumbling family man who flips burgers when Archer is seducing beautiful ladies or rolling about on covert missions.

“Why is everyone shouting?”

The characters pursue all dialogue at a certain heightened pitch.  It’s the tone you use in a conversation where each exchange elevates the previous sentence’s sarcasm, irony or sardonic tone.  It has nowhere to go but shouting, which means that everything can feel a bit ranty, jokes (though funny) don’t stand out and we end up with one level to the whole thing.

“But yes, this is quite funny.”

Once you overcome the scream at which lines are delivered, you can appreciate the humour that laces everything.  Jokes reoccur and harken back to former statements, layering on themselves over and over till you can’t help but chuckle or groan.

“Oh, so it really is only these characters then.”

We more or less stick to the world of ISIS, the spy agency where Archer works.  Fun fact: it’s run by his mother, Malory (voiced, well, shouted by Jessica Walter from Arrested Development), so his relationship with her is the source of about 60% of the humour because it’s funny and silly to work for your mum as a spy.  Around eight characters feature in practically every episode, no matter what, which starts to feel close and closed off across the nine seasons.  Yes, nine.  Occasional relief comes from guest roles, for which some sort of Hollywood comedy actor is always found, like a bit of an inside joke, so you can have a great time trying to place the voice before giving in, checking IMDB and seeing that it was Janice off Friends.

In short, this is a good man-show.  I don’t want to be gendering things as we move into 2019, but the humour can be schoolboy, Archer lives consequence-free and I’m fairly certain the female characters only serve as garnish in order to bait or foil (all while shouting of course).  Nevertheless, nine series is good going, so let’s go through how things have been padded out and what my bodily responses were for each one:

Series one

Still getting to grips with the style, characters and tone, we have an episodic approach with each instalment more or less resolving itself.  There’s an airship, among other retro elements, with most conflict coming from a rival agency (and between Archer and Malory).

Series two

More office management japes creep in, but the episodes climax in Archer searching for the true identity of his father.  We get into our stride here a bit more.

Series three

Things get joyfully further and further fetched, with more action in the animation (versus perennial standing around posturing) and more diverse settings.  Robots appear, as does a mission to space.  Enjoyment peaks.

Series four

Just more classic Archer, with a hilarious Bob’s Burgers crossover.

Series five

This is Archer: Vice.  We depart from the old office and the whole staff end up in South America trying to offload cocaine.  Comedy comes from Pam doing most of the cocaine most of the time.

Series six

Back to nearly normal with more global travel.  Some of the characters’ backgrounds are fleshed out.

Series seven

Archers goes all Hollywood.  I didn’t really get what was going on.

Series eight

This whole series is a dream.  No, really, it’s called Archer: Dreamland and takes place in Archer’s mind during a coma.  It’s a shame he can’t dream up some new main characters.

Series nine

Completely clapped out, the whole thing moves to 1938.  I lost the plot.  I didn’t have a mental health episode, I simply was unable to find any narrative to follow.

After the quick intro in Beijing, I’ve limped my way through this show, possibly repeating series three, or, in fact, missing out whole chunks of episodes altogether.  Because of its constant tone, I find myself easily distracted, even though each instalment is short.  As such, in an effort to make it finally to the last episode (which wasn’t helped by series nine dropping when I was knee deep in series six) it has become a background show I put on whenever I am doing something else.  Many a work email has been bashed out on the old laptop while Archer and Lana scream at Figgis, or while Pam runs around naked eating snacks and taking drugs.  Maybe a close-knit colleague collective of inept spies can only go so far, yet Archer still feels unique in both the worlds of comedy and animation.  Within its overwhelming volume, there are hilarious gems.  So, if you live life terrified of being caught out by someone asking if you’ve seen Archer (and it’s only happened to me twice more and both times I could respond confidently with a big fat yes) try a couple of episodes.  If you hate it, then stop it and do something else.  And if you like it, then enjoy; you’re welcome.