The Voice UK

It’s never a good sign when a TV show’s name has to be suffixed with the name of the country it’s being shown in.  But such is the case with The Voice.  It’s our UK version, because there are literally hundreds of other ones going on all around the world, so we don’t want people getting confused and ending up watching The Wrong Voice (which sounds like an Aardman Aninmation).

Nevertheless, within a year of the Dutch format hitting airwaves in Europe, we welcomed series one to our BBC screens in 2012.  Now, series six is desperately trying to fill that Saturday night hole where X Factor used to be over on ITV.  Surely this is just the X Factor, though?  Of course not!  This is the X Factor, but with blindfolds.  Contestants cannot be seen at their first auditions as the judges’ chairs are all facing the wrong way, so they can only be assessed on their… voice.  Keeping up?  It’s a neat concept and actually the rest of the show is all downhill from this initial phase.  If one of the celebrity judges likes what they hear enough, they have a button to hit on their chair that turns them around to reveal who they’ve been listening to.  This adds great tension: will the singer totally nail it and get four chair spins, sending the crowd wild?  Or will a judge turn around and have to maintain a poker face when they see the contestant they’ve wasted a turn for is an absolute hogpig?

This whole part is best watched on fast forward, not least because its new home on ITV means there are more adverts than you could possibly use in your future purchasing decisions.  Naturally, each singer comes with their own sob story: I have a baby, I have to work in Topshop, Voldemort killed my parents.  Then, if multiple coaches turn, they have to pitch for that singer and it all descends into showing off.

The following stages don’t make much sense.  There are Battles, where two singers must duet, but then only one can actually go through.  This often becomes competitive caterwauling, adding a great dimension to love songs as the two singers give each other snake eye over romantic lyrics.  After that, the producers try and think up other ways to cull the field.  Sure enough, as a last resort, we resort to a public vote.  As we know, the British don’t have a great track record with democracy: Leon Jackson winning X Factor 2007, Tory governments, Brexit.  Therefore, The Voice UK has yet to produce a household name.  Stevie McCrorie, anyone?  What about Andrea Begley?  Thought not.

So why on earth am I watching?  Occasionally, just occasionally (and particularly in the 2013 series) there’ll be a performance that transforms a well-known song into something completely different and amazing.  Get your ears round this number here or indulge in the brilliance one of the Battles can produce here and here.  It’s even more reassuring when some old lounge singer limps through a boring old standard and all the judges fail to turn.

What of the judges?  Well, you’ve got Tom Jones looking confused.  So confused he missed a whole series while Boy George sobbed in his chair.  Otherwise, it’s been a home of the over-exposed: Jessie J, Rita Ora.  But the only interesting one is will.i.am – you just know he is looking for something bonkers.  I went to see the second series recorded with a good friend who worked on the casting and Will spent every gap in filming glued to his smartphone.  But then, there was also a lady in the front row waving her crutch about in time to the music, so there was a lot to take in.

The good news is that I was born tone deaf, so I’ll never be among the 310 (so far) winners of different versions of The Voice around the world.  But I can just imagine my VT playing out as I approach the blind audition from backstage: “I watch a lot of bad TV and then write about it in a blog.  But I want more from life!”

Celebrity Big Brother

I don’t know if you’ve ever been to Borehamwood, but it’s not worth it.  I’m from a crap town myself so I can say these things.  I have, however, found myself there before, and both times it was due to Big Brother.  Can you believe that the largest commercial operation (probably) in this part of North London is the Big Brother studio?  And every January and summer it is descended upon by a raft of household names (I didn’t say ALL households), each desperately hoping to get a bit of work in showbiz by taking part in Celebrity Big Brother.

Given the show’s home has been Channel 5 since 2011, contestants’ chances of getting back on the telly after a series ends are actually higher than ever.  Hold tight for the inevitable: a heavily promoted four-episode run of Posh Former Politician And Working Class Hero Go Dog Grooming or a three-part special of Disgraced Ex-Popstar And Washed-Up Child Actor Test Lilos.

But if we go right back to 2001, we’ll find a much more tasteful approach to Celebrity Big Brother, designed to be more palatable to the broader tastes and narrower minds of middle England.  There were only six celebrities (and you had heard of them all).  It was for charity.  It was co-broadcast on Channel 4 and the BBC.  The BBC!  And it only lasted ten days.  Today’s celebrity housemates have to stick things out for up to 30 days, though lest we forget that beloved Vanessa Feltz did manage to have a breakdown in series one after only a handful of days.

Sixteen years later, it must be fair to say that it’s really only a hard core of lifelong fans still tuning in, as series 21 hits our screens on a nightly basis.  You won’t be surprised, given my love of trash TV like Bromans and Geordie Shore, that I count myself firmly among this number.  Celebrity or normal, I will take Big Brother in any guise.  With the normos, their desperation for attention drives them to be locked into the house for days on end.  But for the celebrities, it is often their desperation for attention they have had and then lost that drives them, which leads to even more compelling viewing.  It’s not even important if you’ve ever heard of them.  Whether they’re a runner up from some awful US dating show, or they were in that sitcom from the seventies that your parents remember watching, they all end up completely sucked into the highly pressured communities of tension that take shape in the house with each series.

There’s always excitement as they go in.  Who will it be?  What will they say?  Will they get booed?  Will they fall over in the rain?  Why does everyone in the crowd look a bit overweight?  I’ve taken to watching the insertion broadcast on fast forward, as it’s often incredibly awkward.  It’s the first real episode that gives you the insights on the entrances, as the overnight editing that takes place allows the important snippets to be properly sound-mixed and thus begins our journey.  Before long, you’ve forgotten all you knew and assumed about these people and it’s all about what they say and do in the house.  For me, this is perfect entertainment.  While the environment and circumstance are utterly utterly fake, the relationships and interactions become real.  It’s not a soap opera whose script has been generated by cliché bingo, it’s real people struggling to articulate themselves and control their emotions.  Drink it in!

Earlier series were won by whoever was the biggest name going in, such as Julian Clary or Ulrika Jonsson.  2014 was a particularly tough year when the two series were won by the most awful individuals: Jim Davidson and Gary Busey.  But now, with just the biggest fans still watching, it’s whoever has the most harrowing journey in the house that is rightfully rewarded.

So, let’s take a look at my favourite moments from these 21 glorious series.

Series 7 Alex Reid kick-boxes a snowman

It snowed heavily and the housemates made a snowman (see, the famous are just like us, aren’t they?).  Then Alex Reid went out and kick-boxed it into a pile of nothing, all while make weird breathing noises that proved he really knew what he was doing about martial arts.  The editing drew this out into a long segment and it took on a strangely poetic quality.  Fantastic.

Series 18 James Whale pours coffee on Stephen Bear

Bear was an absolute nightmare to live with, antagonising everyone for his own amusement.  Yet it was very gratifying to see how riled up he got right-wing slop-jock Whale.  Sinking to Bear’s level, he slowly emptied a bag of ground coffee over the lad’s head.  It escalated quickly and you could just feel the violence in the air, but Bear was somehow savvy enough to know that underreacting was his best strategy.

Series 3 Jackie Stallone enters the house

She waltzes in and is first spotted by her ex-daughter in lax, Brigitte Nielsen.  Understandably, Brigitte screams Jackie’s name in surprise, to which Jackie replies, in a broad New York accent: “Yeah, Jackie.”  Try shouting it when you next enter a room full of people and you’ll be amazed at the respect you gain.

Series 3 Kenzie is dressed as an egg

Kenzie used to be Blazin Squad, but he isn’t Marcel.  I forget the task, but Kenzie had to spend a considerable amount of time in a giant, encumbering egg costume.  He wouldn’t fit in something like that these days now he lives in a gym, but he was still a wee thing in 2005.  Lisa I’Anson was complaining about her Bo Peep costume.  Deadpan, Kenzie was heard comparing his fate, muttering under his breath about having the raw end of the deal.

Series 4 George Galloway pretends to be a cat for Rula Lenska

I don’t want to be predictable, but this cannot be beaten.  My skin still crawls at these two adults role-playing like children.  Just think about George mewing and licking himself for a moment.  Go on.  The standout moment was how he suggested it to her: “Do you want me to be… the cat?”  That pause, bookended by his Scottish brogue and the subdued volume, gave the whole scenario an air of specialist porn (that I have never seen).

Series 3 Lisa I’Anson calls John McCririck a fox

McCririck is a vile bigot, with high expectations of how women should look.  However, these expectations didn’t extend to his own body.  Undergoing a quick change in the Celebrity Big Brother bedroom, shuffling around to get some trousers on in his saggy, baggy whities, he showed the effects of his lifestyle choices.  Lisa I’Anson (who I can’t believe has come up twice in my best moments) ironically catcalled him, and, of all the words, picked “fox” in order to respond to the sight confronting her.  Cruel, but hilarious.  Sometimes, when I need cheering up, I think of this moment, and it always works.

There are many more, including Jedward, the Austin Armacost and James Hill bromance, Speidi and Kim “I wouldn't shit on you if you were on fire” Woodburn.

The current series has taken a worthier approach.  This isn’t going to be a laugh-and-point exercise at the expense of fame’s failures.  We are celebrating the year of the woman.  Such endeavours have attracted the likes of Ann Widdecombe (who refuses to have any fun) and Rachel Johnson (who I once had tea and cucumber sandwiches with at the offices of The Lady).  At first, the girls were alone, but they have since popped some men in.  So now, I am watching Ginuwine (whose song, Pony, my sister and I innocently sang along to as children) sitting on the same sofa as Ann Widdecombe.

This is the beauty of the show.  But so much for the year of the woman, this has become the year of gender: the casting has thrown together a male-identifying drag queen and a fully transitioned woman who was born a man.  Cue fascinating discourse as to whether their individual gender expressions are at odds with each other.  Hopefully nobody is surprised that men have taken over from women the conversation about women.  What is surprising however, is that this really all does happen in Borehamwood.

Black Mirror

Times are bleak.  It’s wet.  It’s cold.  There’s nothing to look forward to.  We have to go back to work.  We have to leave Europe.  Trump.  Why, then, would Netflix choose this time of year to unleash a fourth season of Black Mirror on us?  I, for one, am feeling particularly vulnerable, following a family Christmas where my thirty-two-year-old self reverted to a moody teenager under my retired parents’ roof.  Have I gained no maturity in the fourteen years since I left home?!  No.  No, I haven’t.  But maybe rock bottom is a great place from which to stare into bleak oblivion.  And that is precisely what Charlie Brooker’s suite of near-future dystopias offers us: a reason to be hopeless.

Brooker himself is a terrifying character.  His rants on the wonderful Screenwipe and Newswipe carefully detail each side of various political and social arguments before proving that both sides are stupid (a bit like a South Park episode).  His Guardian features make sparkling reading.  I rode out a notice period at my first (awful) job simply reading through the entire back catalogue of his Screen Burn column, cleverly minimised to a tiny square on my screen so the fusty old partners had no idea what I was only pretending to work.  As a child that was probably too young, I even cherished his TVGoHome book (based on the popular website from before I had internet) which was a parody of a TV guide – the comedy literally wrote itself.  Then he did Dead Set, bringing together two of my favourite things: reality TV and zombies.  Before I descend into sycophancy, let’s just say I subscribe to Brookerology.

But it is indeed a dark, dark mind that brings us Black Mirror.  The first point to commend is that each episode stands alone.  It’s that uncomfortable experience that comes with starting a new boxset: who on earth is that?  What the fudge is going on?  Am I going to enjoy it?  Well, get used to it, because that is every episode of Black Mirror.  And while your brain is working this all out, there’s also a new interpretation of our soon-to-be future to get to grips with.  To generalise brutally, most episodes take a small life-changing technological invention and show how it revolutionises our behaviour.  This could be an implant that records all your memories for future reference, such as in The Entire History Of You, or the robot guard dogs of Metalhead.  A lot of this stuff tends to revolve around applying some sort of device to your temple.  So far, so sci-fi (but not geeky, everybody).  But yes, we were commending each episode standing alone, weren’t we?  Whereas your average boxset just needs to set everything up just the once, Black Mirror has to reel you in and hold you with something new over and over.  And it manages to do this very skilfully.  You can feel immersed in a brave new society within just a couple of minutes.

The downside is that this, combined with the stark imaginings of our future, makes for relentless viewing.  Therefore, this is not a series you can binge on like so many Quality Streets.  Try and ration them out, maybe one a week.  Don’t do it on Sunday nights, though, or you won’t want to return to your mind-numbing job on Monday.  Pick a time when you feel quite resilient.

This is because things go wrong.  Whatever the episode’s premise, whatever the technological tweak to reality, things will go wrong.  And then they will go wronger and wronger and you will wonder what possessed you to subject yourself to such entertainment.  You could have been watching old Friends, but no, you wanted to chime in with the office Netflix discussion.

If there were a gun to my head making me criticise the show, then it would be that this awry-going has become slightly formulaic.  You could almost break an instalment down into 10% set up new world, 20% things go a bit wrong, 60% things go very wrong and then 10% bloody hell.  But it’s a formula that works.  As with every advancement in our standard of living, there are always consequences we never dreamed of.  I swear my thumb bone is now as brittle as chalk due to iPhone overuse.  I don’t want to use an Alexa as I can’t imagine sitting there in front of housemates and asking it how to cure a runny tummy.

Finally, the show’s progression is curiously from a British thing, into an American thing.  From a Channel 4 property in series one and two, Netflix swiped the rights for what has become the third and fourth series.  As with our beloved The Office, we feel this is a marker of something being good: “Oooh they’ve made an American version; this must be quality.”  This isn’t always accurate, but it works here.  In addition, times may be bleak here, but they’re also bleak in America, so it makes perfect sense.

Mad Men

So, advertising, then.  It’s a pretty big part of modern life.  It’s the industry I pretend to work in (I really do have a job in it, but my contribution mostly boils down to titting about).  Outside of the BBC, it has historically been the necessary evil that has funded content.  Without content, there are no boxsets, and without boxsets, this whole blog would just be me revealing inappropriate and banal childhood memories.  But I also hate it.  I don’t read freesheets or listen to commercial radio, but I do watch TV.  My version of watching TV, however, is setting the Sky Plus so I can fast forward all the ads.  Or I pick shows from Netflix and Amazon in order to keep up with office conversation (though this also includes half an hour or more of agonising over what to begin watching, checking the various trailers over and over until I’ve totally run out of time and have to go to bed).  This Christmas, however, when summoned to spend the enforced festivities at my parents’, I realised some people still watch linear TV, checking in the Radio Times for when things are on, debating scheduling clashes until they compromise on watching bits of most things but never all of one (unless it’s Call The Midwife – not a moment was missed of that horrendous tat), rushing meals to catch the start of a show and then sitting through all the advert breaks in full.  On average, there are three minutes of ads ever quarter of an hour.  In short, Christmas, for me, was watching the same DFS ad over and over.

“Right, let’s make a show about advertising,” said someone at AMC apparently.  But this wasn’t going to be a show that went behind the scenes on the ScS double discount savings shoot (sale starts 9am Boxing Day).  It was to be about the early days of advertising.  In fact, relatively speaking, these were still the early days of consumerism.  Because mass production and consumption were new, they were also sexy.  If you follow, all new things are sexy, then they just become things, and then they are things that we are tired with and want to move on from, and then, when they have been out of our lives long enough for us to miss them, they are nostalgic, and we want them back and want them to forgive us for ever growing tired of them (see my post on Friends).

Thus, we are onto Mad Men.  It might, technically, be a show about working in an office, but it’s one of the sexiest boxsets you can get your teeth into.  But the sexiness doesn’t come from the usual sources: hot cast, wearing not much, engaged in storylines that involve them getting off with each other (though there is plenty of all of that too).  Instead, the show perfectly captures the sexiness of the times, when so much was new.  1960s New York was the throbbing heart of a brave new world.  The show is at its best when pitching the values of past times against a revolutionary regime.  But this is not our modern outlook being catered to.  Mad Men does not meekly give us what we want as a twenty-first century audience, it wrong-foots us repeatedly with its characters’ 1960s mind-sets.  We cannot understand their behaviour because we are of a different time.  This asks so much more of the viewer than something like Downton Abbey that gives us only what we find easy to accept.

This is Mad Men’s appeal.  It is for the discerning.  It makes no concessions.  Remember that old man character from two seasons ago?  Neither do I, but he’s back, and what he did last time is important.  Keep up, stupid!  If you like finishing one episode and going on to the next to see how a situation was cleared up, Mad Men will only disappoint.  It simply moves on to what it finds interesting.  Fill the gaps in yourself, you idiot!  Finally, if you need clear cut directions on which characters to root for, then turn away now.  From Don Draper himself, to Peggy Olson and the rest, each cast member does terrible things for terrible reasons (and they all never stop smoking or drinking).  You’ll be so conflicted you won’t be able to resist the next episode.  Guess what, people are complex!

Importantly though, the viewer goes on a journey with these characters across the show’s seven series.  You’ll also be willing their actual fictional advertising firm to do well.  There is a massive distance between where they and it start, and where things end up.  Along the way, you’ll only get glimpses, but that will be enough.  The perfect stylisation helps you to forgive the show its challenges.

Selling a product is selling a dream.  Buy this thing and your life will be better.  Your dreams will come true.  Seeing the characters launch into these sorts of pitches in the many fantastic boardroom scenes throughout the episodes is the only time you will hear script clichés.  Otherwise there is not one lazy exchange in the dialogue.  It all fizzes in just the right way.  And if they’re not talking, they’re giving knowing looks (which nobody does better than Christina Hendricks’ Joan).

No other industry tries to make the humdrum of everyday life into an aspiration.  I have no point of reference, but I’m sure no other show makes working in a 1960s office so glamorous.  Even with their sharply tailored suits and outfits, the coiffured hair, the (sometimes) impeccable manners and social graces and their (initially) idyllic marriages, however, we are left in no doubt that these people will never be happy.  And in that way, their 1960s fantasy seems entirely relatable.

Chewing Gum

Ever heard of Michaela-Moses Ewuraba O Boakye-Collinson?  It’s an outrage that she’s not a national treasure.  It’s also an outrage that I didn’t even type the whole name out – I copied and pasted it from Wikipedia.  Known professionally as Michaela Coel (as well as Michaela The Poet), Coel’s graduation project from the Guildhall School of Music and Drama was the play Chewing Gum Dreams.  That was in 2012 (I was dancing in the Olympics Closing Ceremony but I don’t like to go on about it) and by 2015, the material had been developed onto e4 as series one of Chewing Gum.  Cue a BAFTA nomination then.

Coel wrote it and played the lead role of Tracey Gordon, all in the same 2015 that I spent playing email bingo in my office job.  Maybe it was that distraction that prevented me from watching that series or indeed the second, which hit our screens in January this year (when I was still ping-ponging the same emails in the same office in the same job).  But, and this is a big but, it went on a list of things I ought to watch.  And yeah, I’ve only gone and watched it now, so let’s pull it to pieces.

Tracey is 24 but her hymen is super duper intact.  This is thanks to many things, including her mother’s religious fundamentalism, her sister’s prudism, her friends’ terrible (and terribly misinterpreted) advice and her own over-enthusiasm for having all the wrong ideas about sex.  Her life goal is getting that hymen smashed through.  Imagine, then, how hilarious it is to watch that journey unfold.

There are elements of Miranda in Tracey’s pieces to camera.  She even plays on this when her cousin, Boy Tracy, visits and starts talking to her camera.  How meta.  Her wiggling about in underwear takes me back to Nighty Night’s Jill Tyrell, as does her obsession with sex at its most gruesome.  It’s graphic stuff, and it’s become a regular occurrence for my housemate to find me watching some eyebrow-raising scenes.  Oh well.  The supporting caricatures come and go with mixed results, but her sister Cynthia is consistently among the funniest.  Who knew how many jokes could be had about Ludo?

The constant e4 trails always made me laugh, and I chuckled often at the early episodes.  But once acclimatised to Chewing Gum’s sunny London estate universe, it was more mildly amusing than hilarious.  Some episodes bumble around a bit, but it’s all the more charming for not having a team of writers tightening every script into mechanical slickness.  It’s cute and it’s relatable (in that these are characters in central London, rather than LA or Westeros – I must stress that I’ve never had a hymen).

Tracey, as a character, eludes me.  Despite the window into her soul that her pieces to camera should offer, her behaviour is unpredictable.  It often seems at odds with itself, veering from confidence to shyness with maniacal intensity.  And where does she get them awful shirts?  Either way, the disparate elements to her complex personality are hard to reconcile, but surely this only makes her more realistic as an extreme representation of our own childish tittering about sex and relationships.  And now I am lolling to myself about the word titter.

I should point out that I am in no way ridiculing Coel’s amazing full name above – let’s not forget I’ve carried the surname Honeywood around with me these last thirty-two years.  It was just a hook to start this post.  As were the comments about her being a national treasure.  In fact, recent events should see her become an international treasure, as she appears in the latest Star Wars (the one that descends happily into Minions through the addition of cute furry birds – what the franchise has been missing all along) as a Resistance Monitor for the baddies.  She’s onscreen only fleetingly, but my heart leapt at the prospect of her talent being recognised and finding the largest global audience possible.  I can’t wait for her next project.

Stranger Things

I don’t think I ever want to go to Hawkins.  Luckily I won’t have to, as it’s fictional, and it’s in 1983 (at the start of series one).  But the odds of having a good time there, especially for the residents, seem low.  This is because the town’s main employer, Hawkins National Laboratory, appears to be a force for evil as well as one of its biggest employers.  In Stranger Things, this kind of gets skirted around.  Its exact purpose is nebulous, but I’ve seen the mighty big car park from aerial shots and that place has room for a lot of workers.  Interior scenes always seem fully staffed.  The turnover of personnel from on-site fatalities must be costing them a fortune in death-in-service insurances payouts.

But this is part of the fun: it doesn’t matter.  Stranger Things is all about the adventure.  Surely, the less able we are to explain things, the stranger those things are.  Therefore, the show has freed itself from having to follow any well-known mythology, building from scratch a belief system that feels perfectly at home in its 80s setting.  I can’t explain more without giving away the mysteries of the first series, but we can go into detail on what makes the show so appealing where other supernaturally themed programmes have failed to capture such a dedicated audience, treating each strange thing in turn:

The perfectly observed period setting.

Millennials can’t get enough of the 80s, and nothing is more 80s that Stranger Things.  Even the 80s themselves.  The music, the outfits, the smoking, the hair, the references: it’s a joke that we’re all in on.  Of particular importance is the 80s technology.  This was a time of walkie-talkies and landlines, enormous video cameras and huge arcade games.  Whenever a TV appears in an episode, we are aghast at how poor the picture quality is.  I’m right back to sickdays as a child, when my parents allowed the spare black and white telly into my bedroom, complete with channel change by turny knob and more snow in the picture than in a Raymond Briggs animation (about a snowy character – not one of the normal ones).  Every classic film of the period has been mined for inspiration and the result is a winning formula on screen.

The opening credits.

I’ve talked before about the importance of opening credits to establishing a show, massaging viewers’ minds into the optimal state for embracing every item of storyline that is about to be thrown at them.  From the first mmmmmmmmmmmmvvvvvvvvmm of Stranger Things’ opening credits, you’re right back at primary school buzzing your socks off at getting to watch a video in class.  You can almost hear the chunky cassette noisily shunting itself into position inside the VCR.  Netflix offers you the chance to skip the credits, sparing binge watchers a chilling reminder of how many episodes they are consuming, but I have always opted to indulge in the full sequence with Stranger Things.  It’s at once wonderfully tacky and completely beautiful.  It’s about as sophisticated in execution as a PowerPoint, but everything has been planned with meticulous cunning to get the tone right.  There are even tiny white flecks that appear, blending our HD viewing experience in 2017 with the limitations of the 80s tech we remember.  And then, the chapter heading floats into view before fading off with glorious tackiness, and I swear to myself that my year six teacher has let us watch Badger Girl.

Winona Ryder.

This is spot-on casting.  As a hysterical mother, Winones is in her element.  She is welcome to chew the scenery as much as she wants, as the chipboard walls are some of the chewiest scenery I have ever seen.  I can’t get enough of her and the show’s creators can’t seem to get enough of torturing her character.

Friendship.

If you can’t identify with the 80s because you’re too young (well done) or have never seen the films Stranger Things so closely references (booo!) then at least the relationships between the characters should warm your heart.  Even when being cold to each other (for example, Nancy ditches Barb to join the cool kids) there’s a lot to identify with.  At the heart of the show and governed by the very just motto “Friends don’t lie” is the Party.  Here they are in order of how much I like each character:

Lucas

He is just a lot of fun on the screen.  He just gets on with things, pedalling about on his BMX, looking shocked when shocking things happen and furrowing his brow when mysteries need solving.  Holding a walkie-talkie like a boss, I really enjoy his little face.  In series two, he steals more and more scenes, so we just need more of Lucas please.

Dustin

You can tell that the show’s creators love having Dustin swear.  Nothing is funnier than him shouting “Son of a bitch” at his friends’ parents.

Will

Perhaps the tiniest boy ever seen, with his bowl haircut being at least 60% of his total volume.  He spends most of the first series absent (and I do wonder what the toilet situation was during that time as I don’t imagine the facilities are great in that dimension) and most of the second series probably wishing he was still absent.  Anyone with Winona as their mother is, let’s be honest, not going to have a great time.

Mike

The whiniest member of the Party, his negativity has got him fourth place on the list.  His hair is also not as good as Will’s.  It’s like when best friends copy each other’s appearances and one ends up being the better version of the other.  I might as well mention Eleven here as well, as she is, at times, party to the Party, at the insistence of Mike.  She and Mike deserve each other really.

I only really struggle with two elements in Stranger Things.  One is that so many scenes are set up with an all-American period car pulling up in front of a house.  Given that I own neither a house nor a car, both are items that lack significance for me and so tend to look the same.  Ultimately, it never matters about not knowing who is in the house or the car, as the characters’ eventual emergence always reveals this to my limited brain.  But, I reckon, on average, ten minutes of each episode is lost to this tool, and it’s ten minutes I could spend watching something slash getting through the full set of episodes more quickly.

Secondly, it’s that tissue paper that floats about in the air.  I won’t say when and why it appears, as that’s technically a spoiler, but it gets quite distracting.  I keep wondering if it’s real or CGI.  What does it taste like?  Does it hurt if it gets in your eye?  I think it probably stings a bit.  At least it’s a special effect you can create at home with matches and loo roll, should you want to, bringing to life a 4D viewing experience, like when a plant fell on my friend when we first watched Avatar on DVD and she thought Pandora was bursting into the living room.

In conclusion, don’t go to Hawkins in real life.  But do go there via the medium of watching both series of Stranger Things.  Then your life will have meaning, as you can weigh in on office discussions about which was better out of series one and two (series two has a better overall structure but of course lacks the surprise and delight of the first as you already know what’s going on).  Enjoy the mysteries and the magic, safe in the knowledge that I am doing enough worrying about the practicalities of Hawkins Laboratories’ finances for all of us.

The Handmaid’s Tale

One of the best dramas of 2017 slipped onto our screens almost unnoticed.  The internet was abuzz with teasers and trailers and stills of this long-awaited adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel.  The author herself could barely contain her excitement in her social media feeds, and rightly so.  But, I asked myself, what on earth is this Hulu thing it was going to be appearing on?  Did I need another subscription alongside Amazon Prime, Netflix and Sky?  But we don’t have it here, so what about people in the UK?  How were we going to watch it?  This, in itself, was a reminder of how long we used to have to wait for entertainment to reach our shores from North America until the internet made most things immediate.  At the last minute, Channel 4 acquired the rights and with little ado, the show made its Sunday evening debut.

I’ve talked before of that final hour of Sunday being a key slot for comfort programming: nostalgic period pieces or luscious footage of natural history.  Snuggled on sofas, we’re at our most vulnerable and will do anything to soften the blow of Monday morning.  The Handmaid’s Tale was having none of it.  Every harrowing moment brought the crushing reality of how awful life can be straight to every Sunday evening viewer.  Suddenly, the TV boxset was a terrifying place.

Atwood has pointed out that there is nothing in The Handmaid’s Tale that isn’t already happening somewhere in the world.  When I first read the novel, it was the very feasibility of Gilead, a religious-fundamentalist state where parts of the USA used to be, that chilled me the most.  I couldn’t shake the concept.  In it, women are objects to be possessed in service to men.  The entire system is based on faith.  It’s over thirty-two years since publication (and twenty-seven years since a 1990 feature film adaptation where everyone’s hair was too big) and faith still abounds in the modern world as a tool to excuse all sorts of reprehensible behaviour.  If enough people believe something, then it must be right, right?

I’ve managed to get to the fourth paragraph without saying dystopian, but it’s the essential descriptor here: in this dystopian vision of the future, (wo)mankind’s fertility is running out.  Handmaids, as the last remaining group that can bear children, are envied by barren women and punished for their fecundity by both genders.  Love doesn’t come into it, as they are assigned to wealthy and powerful childless couples, solely for the purpose of conceiving, birthing and giving away their progeny in a series of ceremonies that display inconceivable brutality.  Yet, in real life, inconceivable acts are justified by faith every day.  So far, so hauntingly realistic.

Our focus is Offred/June, a Handmaid who cannot reconcile her role in Gilead’s society with the life she had before.  The drama is deftly woven with flashbacks to the breakdown of America, the somehow plausible emergence of Gilead through a gradual erosion of women’s rights.  Nothing is ever explained properly.  Instead, we are granted the credit to piece together this society and culture from the evidence presented.  As such, we share June’s horror as she peels back layer after layer of cruelty.  It is Elisabeth Moss’s outstanding performance that heightens not just the credibility of each scene, but the acute suffering June must go through as she becomes Offred.  Yet, she never lets us in that far.  We must guess her next move as much as any other character must, which prevents The Handmaid’s Tale, thankfully, from ever descending into mundane predictability.

The supporting cast is studded with further quality.  Yvonne Strahovski plays the wife to whose family Offred is assigned and bristles with the internal conflict her Handmaid’s role causes her.  The other Handmaids each invite untold curiosity: cruelty begets cruelty.  In addition, Amanda Brugel as the household’s Martha (multipurpose maid, also barren) positively seethes with quiet dignity.  So, not only is the concept utterly gripping, its execution is almost faultless.  My only niggle is that a lot of bumping into each other takes place in Gilead, as if there is only one shop or something, but I will honestly forgive this programme anything.

The medium of a ten-part series has allowed the show’s makers to mine the book’s material in order to expand and enrich the universe Atwood first created.  Carefully teased into tense drama that hooks a viewer within minutes only never to let them go (a housemate got totally sucked into the sixth episode after walking into the room ten minutes in), Channel 4 had an absolute touch sneaking this into their schedule.  And it turned out to be one of their highest rating shows of the year.  The teasing out has paid off as a second season is in the works, so I can only beg as many people as possible to make sure they have seen the first ten episodes before more are unleashed on us.  This show and what it has to tell us cannot go unnoticed.