Dark (Dunkel)

Yes, everybody, here we are: the hundredth post of Just One More Episode.  When I started this blogging business about two years ago, I had high hopes for the unprecedented and life-changing success it would bring me.  My content would be syndicated on national news sites, I’d be an in-demand podcast guest, maybe even a talking head on some sort of Channel 5 schedule-filling tat about the top 50 moments on TV when someone fell over.  Needless to say, none of that has happened.  I’m still a professional email-typer and open-plan office-dweller.  People do shout at me now across the vestibule occasionally though, proclaiming to like my blog while walking off in the other direction.  More often than not, they talk of having seen my promotion of the blog and take pains to tell me they haven’t read it.  So that’s good.  At least the half-hearted Instagram account has eight followers.  And there was the lady in New Zealand who really like my tweets about Bromans.  Even my life hasn’t changed that much – still an eternal renter while I await a completion date on my (a lot of) Help To Buy newbuild flat.  My solicitors are busy being ineffective.  But this isn’t about the banal details of my actual life (it mostly is), but about good telly.  So, what show merits the accolade of taking this blog into triple digits?  Dark.

Dark has probably haunted your Netflix menu persistently over the years.  Its lead image, a yellow-cagouled figure disappearing into a verdant cave, promises mystery and intrigue, but its position among so much else competing for your attention makes it a hard choice to pursue.  I chose to watch it because it’s in German and, I don’t know if I’ve mentioned, but my education culminated in me achieving near-native fluency in that language (as well as a passable ability to understand the odd word in French rap songs).  That reason is also significant enough in my life that I’ve picked this programme to occupy the position of blogpost number 100.  I don’t suppose this has been an appealing factor for a lot of you, especially as Dark seems, at first glance, to be a synthesis of many other shows.  The motif of a brightly coloured item of clothing brings to mind Jean’s anorak in fellow European fare, The Rain.  Making a wet and rainy climate look cinematic places it broadly in a league with The End Of The F***ing World.  The setting of a single town gripped by strangeness reminded me of The Returned (Les Revenants).  And finally, that strangeness of course draws comparison with Stranger Things.

Question: is Dark just a German Stranger Things?  Answer: a little bit, but it’s more than that.  I’ve recently been taking pains to point out to my intermittent readers that Just One More Episode doesn’t reveal any spoilers.  I’m careful not to let slip anything more than can be seen in a show’s trailer or basic synopsis in a TV guide.  There’s always enough inanity that you can share in the pure joy of my self-indulgent prose, even if you’ve had better things to do with your time than watch, for example, Riverdale or Jack Whitehall: Travels With My Father.  What becomes clear very early on is that Winden has a problem with missing children (a bit like Hawkins in Stranger Things). Episode one is a triumph in weaving together a cast of characters big enough to populate a whole town (because it’s basically the whole town), giving you enough about their past and present relationships to hook you in, and then setting up the jeopardy that starts us off from one riddle to the next.

Accompanying the furrowed brows of all these actors is a soundtrack that chimes in specifically to heighten the tension.  It has the rhythm of stomach rumbles, reminding you to concentrate on what’s unfolding before you: something important is about to be unearthed.  You can tell what type of thriller this is by whether people say thanks and goodbye at the end of phone calls.  They don’t.  A real-life chat typically concludes with a series of byes and see yous but, in Dark, the receiver simply drops from the actor’s face, while their expression conveys contemplation and mystery as they stare into the middle distance.  You might find yourself looking similarly vacant when a whole new cast appears in episode three.  A crucial element of Dark’s ambition (without giving away anything about its story) is that the action unfolds on three temporal planes, with the third instalment taking us to 1986 for the first time (cue nostalgia satisfaction for Stranger Things fans then…)

But let’s move on from that, before I inadvertently reveal more than I ought.  Each time the world of Winden expands, the quality of the drama prevents any dilution of your commitment.  Any ultimate resolution to Dark’s mysteries only ever seems further away, with each step towards it unlocking further nuggets to solve, yet there is no frustration, just intrigue.  You might, however, wonder why it rains so often and so heavily.  The cast are almost always soaked.  Maybe it’s to do with the imposing presence of the town’s nuclear power plant.  For fans of GCSE German among you, enjoy yourselves listening out for mentions of the Atomkraftwerk, essential vocabulary from the environment chapter of any language textbook memorised by people in their early thirties now, as part of a curriculum-bending effort to stop pollution by knowing how to talk about it in a foreign language.  Not sure that’s worked then, as the sea is full of your crisp packets (Blue Planet II) and the climate crisis rages (Our Planet).  Either way, pray the planet lasts until June 21^st when series two of Dark is promised to us by our Netflix overlords.  Don’t worry about the rising oceans giving you damp socks though; catch up on series one now and the whole thing will feel like an interactive experience as you view each rain-drenched scene with your own wet ankles.

Years And Years

Sometimes watching TV can be torture.  Granted, it often comes with the accompanying sentiment that you could be doing something better with your time: connecting with family members, perhaps, or making a difference in your community by volunteering to help those in need.  Once you’ve quashed those feelings by persuading yourself that you’ve worked hard enough all week and you’re perfectly entitled to exist inertly on the sofa while images are beamed into your head for the purpose of entertainment though, it’s the content on that hypnotising and paralysing screen that can cause untold pain.  Whether it’s the bodies on Love Island that you will never have, or the bright young things who are already better than you on University Challenge, the sought-after escapism can sometimes give way to unavoidable introspection, leading to an analysis of your reality that makes you feel worse than you did when you popped the telly on.  Enter, then, Years And Years.

An evening peak drama of course has the artistic license to fabricate a world where things happen that are more interesting than daily life.  Downton Abbey mixed ye olde moral compass with the foibles of servant management.  Line Of Duty poses the question: what if all those coppers are bent?  Either way, they offer distance from our humdrum existences, making the characters’ often terrible experience seem exciting and diverting.  Conversely, Years And Years can only fill its audience with dread.  Its narrative device?  It’s set a little bit in the future.  Not quite the virtual reality-dominated future of Black Mirror where attaching little metallic discs to your temple is all you need to enter wholly into an alternative reality.  No, we’re talking a few months’ away.  Things that might happen next year, and the year after, and then, as a result, a few years after that as well.

Why would this be so terrifying?  Two things: not actually knowing what will happen and fearing that the worst-case scenario will win out over the best.  And it’s so near that it’s not a single future that’s been imagined and will affect subsequent generations.  It’s what we ourselves might have to go through as our lives progress.  2019 headlines veer from climate crisis to Brexit farce via alt-right resurgence, neoliberal inequality and the rejection of truth in favour of malleable feeling.  Our future is not looking bright, it’s looking orange (if there’s more Trump and that).  Weathering this onslaught of one thing after the other, our everyman Lyons family boldly goes where a pessimistic media has long predicted we will all end up.

But the Lyons aren’t like most families.  This is because they talk on the phone in group chats all the time.  My own family mostly communicates by a Whatsapp group I set up a few years back.  In it, my sister and parents coordinate my niece’s schedule of educational and extra-curricular activities, my niece herself hijacks the group to use all the emojis at once or to leave voicenotes of her wailing comically, and my mum plumbs new depths of autocorrect mayhem that I am now expert at deciphering.  Conversely, the Lyons, who are split into the five constituent units of four adult siblings and their grandmother, chat through their latest news, pass comment on the world around them and pursue passive-aggressive banter.  In the first example of future technological advancement, they do all this through the voice-activated Signor service, a kind of Alexa-type gadget that actually seems to serve a purpose.

Now, if you thought I was going to make a comment on the family’s diversity, you can get off now.  The Lyons’ ticking of every box in this area might be a socially conscious casting director’s wet dream, but each Lyon is so much more than an exercise in representation, even though their very visibility on screen is significant to communities that don’t always see themselves reflected in their own entertainment.  If, along the way, even some viewers move beyond seeing people as categories and instead view them as individuals, then it can’t hurt for Years And Years to avail itself of the full spectrum of human potential.  So, who are these Lyons onto whom the near future is projected?

Our grand-matriarch comes in the form of Anne Reid (a favourite from dinnerladies), providing a lens on the encroaching of the future into family life that has both the confusion and the liberal attitude of old age.  Rory Kinnear is Stephen Lyons, the settled wealthier son, husband and dad of two, contrasting with his sister, Edith, who has been off around the world on moral missions (played by Jessica Hynes, whose amazing performance as Cheryl in The Royle Family I am currently reliving to great joy).  Feisty younger sister Rosie, meanwhile, succumbs to a more reflexive response to the events that engulf the family, while Danny Lyons, played by Russell Tovey (who should be in more, if not all, things) has a more idealistic approach to the ensuing calamity.

And calamity is what does ensue.  Each episode is interspersed with a number of montages that take us through the course of time, showcasing the family birthdays that mark each passing year as we journey into 2020 and the decade beyond.  Sound-tracked by a choir singing, this change of pace propels us into disaster each time – so much so, in fact, that you begin to dread its every appearance.  I now have a phobia of choirs singing, as they herald bad things.  Inhumane legislation creeps in, international tensions escalate, environments are plundered and, throughout, the British media and public make multiple catastrophic decisions.  Punctuating each of these current affairs round-ups is Emma Thompson (as if the cast weren’t already strong enough), having the time of her life as Vivienne Rook, some sort of Lady Farage (yet, here’s a lie) whose emergent and morally ambiguous political party gradually grows from a fringe movement to a mainstream force for wrong (ring any bells?).

Not only is there the human drama of the Lyons, then, with arguments, infidelity and deep-rooted resentment, but this is compounded by the consequences of the future’s news.  And the nature of compounding, is that it happens over and over (like in The Mandibles by Lionel Shriver).  Each montage screws them more than the one before, and in every area of their lives: employment, freedom, healthcare, housing, human rights etc.  Very occasionally, the relation of this back to the storyline is a touch wedged: some clunking lines swing in overhead to set out the wider political context.  Parts of the technological advancement also tip things unnecessarily from thought-provoking drama to science fiction fantasy, but there’s no reason a TV show can’t be both.  Whatever this is, it’s wildly entertaining, if you can stand the torture.  We’re not yet through all six episodes, but you always know something bad is going to happen, just like with the future in real life.  I’m pinned into my sofa at each viewing on BBC iPlayer and almost crumble under the tension of every time-accelerating montage – here we go again… to oblivion.  It really is potluck who will make it through each episode.  Just like it’s potluck who’ll make it through our real future.

The Royle Family

After so many posts harping on about national treasures in the world of telly (Fleabag, Nighty Night, Chewing Gum), I’m prompted this week to consider the national treasures we have lost.  British summer seems at last to have remembered that it’s June and, judging by my back sweat as I sit on this Sunday morning train home to London from an idyllic seaside wedding in Kent, this better weather may indeed seem at odds with the somewhat hibernal nature of the show in the title of this week’s offering.  But indulge me the lack of seasonality; we’ve covered nearly a hundred shows here so perfect alignment to the cultural calendar isn’t always possible or interesting (to me).  In fact, continuing with the theme of writing more about myself than the shows in question, it’s the loss of a personal treasure that has influenced me here.  But don’t worry: it would be fairly uncharacteristic of me to display genuine emotion, so you’ll just need to bear with me as I segue clunkily from a death in the family to irreverent commentary on a sitcom from a few years back.  I mean, yes, even that sentence was clunky, wasn’t it?

We’ll start with the theme tune.  For us in our late twenties and early thirties, Oasis sound-tracked our coming of age.  In fact, last night’s wedding culminated in the bride and groom held aloft on the shoulders of pals, Don’t Look Back In Anger blaring out from the booth of a DJ only slightly disgruntled that a drunken pal had spilled drinks on one of his lights (which he then mopped up with a cushion) and with raucously caterwauled backing vocals provided by a choir of prosecco-fuelled Millennials playing at being adults, a moment as aspirationally instagrammable as it was beautiful in real life.  But beyond this band’s best-known hits, Half The World Away sticks out, not for being any less anthemic, but for its subtle pain teamed with muted comfort.  And thus, Noel Gallagher’s voice brings us each episode into the world of the Royles of Manchester.

I am bound to confess that my household missed out on The Royle Family during its initial broadcasts on BBC2 in 1998.  As northern as gravy on everything, the show failed to appeal to my southern clan’s Surrey ways.  These people were unemployed, so what interest could we have in their lives?  While their working classness was there to be celebrated, my parents had striven all their lives to project middle class temperaments at every encounter: for example, I wasn’t supposed to watch Grange Hill in case I picked up on their examples of poor speech.  It was only during my year abroad that a dear friend sourced and shared the DVDs.  I’ve previously talked of how, at the time, daily viewings of dinnerladies provided an essential link back to Blighty (before it was an embarrassing place to be from when in Europe), but once we had completed both series, it was The Royle Family that stepped up to offer us respite from all the Vollkornbrot posturing and Umsteigemöglichkeiten announcements.

Our premise is a family sitting on their sofas watching TV.  In many ways, then, an accurate reflection of my own family’s time spent together.  But while we literally ate crumpets for Sunday tea while watching (and bloody loving) Just William, the Royles seem to sit around watching any old thing.  But unlike the showing off of Gogglebox, these viewers’ charm came from their subtlety.  Instead of sweeping statements for shock value, or trying to look good with a pre-practised opinion, the Royles gave us a rawer realism, a more honest reflection of life on the British settee: flatulence, bickering about who makes the tea, gossiping about neighbours and selfish channel-hopping.  Yet, through that, the affection was irresistible, and its identifiability therefore transcended all factors of class and region.

The highs and lows, and the overall below averageness of the Royles made us fall in love with them, accepting them and all their unwashed clothing, nose-picking and toilet talk.  Patriarch Jim of course had the best seat in the house, selected for its unbeatable view of the small screen: a policy repeated in lounges the country over.  Meanwhile, at his side, Sue Johnston’s scrunchy-wearing Barbara perfectly captured that classic mum behaviour of getting very tired after doing what always seemed like not very much (at least to us as kids – I now know that all adult life is peerlessly exhausting), reclining deep in the sofa’s cushioning, her neck barely supporting the weight of her own head, while making sure every visitor had had their tea.  Coming and going was awkward teen our Antony, sent unfairly to the shop for any errand, before growing into a driven young man, much to the surprise of his own parents.

Propelling gentle plots forwards was eldest daughter Denise, played by the show’s creator and writer, national treasure Caroline Aherne.  Her relationship with, then engagement to long-term collaborator Craig Cash as Dave, who goes on to become her husband and the father of her children, generated the drama, if any.  From their spats to the eventual wedding, and in particular, the birth of their first child, crescendoing in a post-broken waters bathroom scene between father and daughter that I esteem to be one of the most accurate portrayals of British parental love ever committed to TV (much like Tim and Dawn’s romance in The Office is the most accurate portrayal of romantic love).  Fair enough, Denise does go on to display a lean-back approach to parenting and later claims that Christmas isn’t really for kids, but you wouldn’t expect much else from someone whose idea of dinner is Dairylea on toast.  And, more importantly, Baby David (or, rather, Dabry Babid) joins a family that love him no matter what.

Sadly, we lost Aherne in 2016.  From her first appearances in The Fast Show, declaring the weather to be scorchio or commenting on customers’ shopping as a garrulous checkout girl, her contribution to national comedy celebrated with laser-sharp observation the silliest things about us.  In addition, The Royle Family featured another lost national treasure.  Liz Smith inhabited the role of Nana Royle as comfortably as she sank into the cushions of her family’s well-used and well-worn sofa, a crafty foil to son-in-law Jim, but a source of grandmaternal comfort to all who sat beside her in that front room.  I could bawl now just thinking of the episode where Nana Royle passes away.  The loss was so touching in its normality that it felt all the more painful.  Understandably, the nation mourned again when Smith retired from the comedy of life at the age of 95, also in 2016.

And so, back to me, everybody.  A matter of days short of ninety, my mum’s last, yet much older, sister died peacefully in hospital.  She hadn’t been out of her nursing home bed in six years and never had any teeth in the whole 34 years during which I had the pleasure of knowing her, yet she was always cheerful and would never say no to a Jelly Baby (in fact, she would actively request them).  Steering clear of an excessive bout of sentiment, I won’t dwell on the grief of losing a personal treasure.  For the first time, I no longer have an elderly relative who needs visiting in an old people’s home, which means my sister and I will have to give up one of our favourite hobbies: speculating on the origins of brown stains on the ceilings (my sister: “that’s not coffee”).  This blog isn’t going to make a huge contribution to how we process grief, but whether it’s your Auntie Yvonne or Nana Royle, cherishing happy memories will always bring more than lamenting loss.  I don’t have a sitcom I can re-watch to reconnect with my aunt as I can with Aherne and Smith, but I can replay recollections of her telling me I had grown bigger, despite me being over 30.  And the smile that brings will have to be enough.

Killing Eve

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tidying Up With Marie Kondo

When this show first appeared on Netflix, I was drawn to its trailer, teasing emotional reveals, personality transformations and an all-round better approach to living life.  However, I held off diving straight in, as it was all about tidying your own home, and I still didn’t have one.  The room I rent is large enough that I can leave socks on the floor and not come across them again for another week, allowing me to pursue the feast and famine approach to tidiness I cultivated during my year abroad in Germany, when renting an even larger room meant that possessions would go unnoticed for months at a time, as long as I could walk around them.  But the days of renting are soon to be behind me, with the purchase of my first flat progressing as fast as the dusty legal staff of a conveyancer up north can process my contracts (ie not very).  Next month, then, I will be a homeowner.  The socks I leave on the floor will be on my own actual floor.  My binary approach to tidying might in fact give way to fastidious house-pride.  With the torture of waiting to move almost over, I decided it was time for a tiny little Japanese lady to tell me how to put my socks away.

So, in Tidying Up With Marie Kondo, Netflix have taken on a best-selling author (our Marie) and given her a show (building on last week’s point about people who make telly probably making their next bit of telly on Netflix (Lunatics) – now people who do other things will be doing their next thing on… you guessed it, Netflix).  TV has a long heritage in telling us what to do.  BBC News coverage has focused in recent times on giving platforms to right-wing politicians.  We had the Supernanny, telling various spoiled brats that their behaviour was “not ’cceptable” when it was their weak parents she should have been punishing.  There was How Clean Is Your House?, hosted by Kim and Aggie as they sniffed people’s grease traps and got elbow deep in their u-bends (leading on to the seminal moment where Kim told someone on Celebrity Big Brother that she “wouldn’t sh*t on [them] if [they] were on fire.”)  And who can forget You Are What You Eat, where “Dr” Gillian McKeith had the audacity to tell people (in a Scottish accent) that they had produced “a poor excuse for a poo” while holding Tupperware filled with their crap.  But once we’ve cleaned our house, made the dinner and raised the bastard kids, who’s going to help us tidy up?  Enter Kondo.

The premise of the show is that Marie goes around a diverse array of American households (mostly within driving distance of LA) to help families whose possessions have begun to posses them.  From empty nesters to expectant parents, new couples transitioning to adulthood or a widow faced daily with her dead husband’s shirts, Marie shows them how to let go of the past and take with them into their future only what they need.  If you’re thinking this sounds like a trashy piece of daytime TV you might find on a channel aimed at women down the bottom of the EPG, then you’d be right.  It is.  But, somehow, with the Netflix name attached, it’s become essential viewing for conversation as an office drone.  Fair play to Kondo, though: without even bothering to learn English, she’s getting herself wheeled out to show us how to organise, fold and store the things we need to live life.

Each of the eight episodes (of surprisingly inconsistent length) unfolds along a certain formula.  Marie Kondo is depositing by a black people-mover in a neighbourhood, gasping whimsically as if she’s never seen a bloody house or pavement before, before trotting up to ring the bell.  Scurrying after her is her translator, Marie Iida.  Each time the door is opened to them, the Maries erupt into high-pitched exclaiming, that I assume is some sort of greeting, which the nervous families then mirror, resulting in the bulk of each show being made of grown adults squealing in doorways and hugging or shaking hands awkwardly.  But that bit somehow never gets tiring, and it’s always edited so you can’t really tell if Marie Iida has been completely ignored again, or if people have bothered to acknowledge the poor dear as an actual human being (with sick language skills).

Desperate for her help, everyone shows Marie Kondo round each nook and cranny of every closet and cupboard so she can judge their mess.  The worse it is, the more she squeaks.  She quite likes to climb in things too, and it’s at these moments you wonder if she isn’t really just taking the piss.  Things then get serious again as she goes through her house-greeting ceremony.  For someone quite jittery and polite, this attention-seeking rigmarole of kneeling on the floor with her eyes closed while everyone wonders how much stranger things will get seems oddly grand.  It’s most powerful when the families join in and realise that the homes whose mess is making their lives a misery are also abodes of fond memories, where they have raised kids and lived through happiness.  You may be touched.

And then off we go, getting out all the clothes (all of them!) to make a mountain of crap tops on a bed.  Marie tells her students to go through them one by one, thanking the ones they are letting go of, and keeping only those that spark joy.  Hopefully they don’t find themselves throwing out all their underpants, but we don’t see this bit as Marie skips off and leaves us all wondering if the family will ever be able to sleep now that their beds are covered in everything they’ve ever (or never) worn.  But I do like this bit – there is something to be said for purging clothes.  Not much is made of where everything ends up – are we talking a landfill, a public burning, or, as some episodes indicate, goodwill?  I’ve been known to go through all my clothes and get rid of anything I’ve not worn between moves, as this means I’m simply packing and unpacking something that serves no purpose.  I do feel guilty for the people in Age UK on Clapham High Street taking my poor style choices, but they have since sent handy emails telling me my unflattering chunky knits have netted £8.33 to stop an old lady from freezing to a switched-off radiator this winter.  Talk about sparking joy!

Over a few weeks, the families tackle everything in their homes, taken through each grouped stage by Marie’s regular visits.  They sort books, categorise papers and toss out toys.  One of the best lessons is number 4: Kimono.  I’m not sure why Japanese dressing gowns get their own category, but that doesn’t stop Marie.  In various interstitials, she talks us through her logic, and we read the subtitles while she whips out the Japanese, but I end up getting distracted when I consider how many syllables it takes to utter the ground-breaking tidying up tip: put things in boxes.  Just when you think a sentence is finished, about ten to twelve more spare vowel sounds tumble out from beneath her rigid fringe.

We crescendo into the reveal scenes at the end.  It’s not always easy to make a tidy wardrobe look like a massive transformation, but the show does its absolute best, all while Marie’s apprentices wax lyrical about their new approach to life.  The slip into hoarderhood is slow and gradual, and everyone seems grateful to have tidied their way out of it, with renewed focus on keeping things spic and span.  If I’m honest, I’ve always enjoyed folding clothes.  An old housemate once accused me of working in a shop while watching me fold my t-shirts, and I have in fact looked on enviously during ill-advised trips to Primark where various assistants wheel round mobile folding platforms to return civilisation to stacks of sweatshop-sewn sweaters that have been disordered by low-income rummaging and perhaps ravaging.  I don’t know; I don’t go in Primark anymore because I’m not a tourist visiting London.  But I do have a recurring dream that involves me putting my folded clothes back in drawers and hanging up shirts.  To dream is to be freed from every restriction that reality imposes, yet I can imagine that it’s only Marie and I whose brains take this liberty and use it to act out banal chores.

I’ll conclude by heroing the real star of the show: Marie Iida.  I’ve already touched on how awkwardly she is edited out, but when it comes to voicing over Marie’s recommendations, Iida’s disembodied vocals are what communicate the KonMari method to us.  Her robotic tone gives everything a stilted and tentative approach to the instructions, but, luckily, these are Americans, and their enthusiasm for not drowning in old crap (as well as their impeccable manners) means there is little forceful resistance to either of the Maries and their lessons.  It remains only for me to say that, yes, if this is how Netflix wants me to tidy my home, then, once I own my home, I will be obeying.  With every penny tied up in fees and the deposit, there won’t be many possessions to tidy, but I’m fairly sure I’ll be sparking joy all over the place.

Lunatics

If you’re a person who makes telly, and you’re going to make some more telly, the chances are that the new bit of telly you make will be on Netflix.  Everyone’s heading over there it seems.  Even Sir David Attenborough (and the tumbling walruses) of Our Planet.  What if my new obsession and national treasure, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, gets on the Flix with a follow-up to Fleabag?  Well, that would be fine, actually, as I have acceptable access to Netflix so consuming anything she ever does again won’t be a problem.  Though I have no idea what’s she doing next, but fingers crossed it involves being my best friend.  Anyway, this week, we are talking about Chris Lilley.  You’ll remember a popular blogpost of mine about Summer Heights High.  A lot of you read that one.  Sometimes barely anyone cares to hear my witterings (Disenchantment, 90210), sometimes everyone piles in (Shipwrecked, Love Island) and sometimes it’s somewhere in between, but then suddenly there are weird bursts of reading months or years later which I cannot account for (Bo’ Selecta!, F Is For Family).  What I’m getting around to saying is that my post about him seemed to gratify my constant need for attention, so let’s look at his new Netflix Original series as well (maybe it will get lots of life-affirming reads).

Weak as we know I am, the minute I spotted Lunatics I abandoned all prior commitments and dived into a world I hoped would be built from sick humour and spot-on human observations.  Let’s meet each lunatic in turn, noting that there is almost nothing linking them together (whereas the characters of Summer Heights High all attended or worked at the same hilarious school).  We are going in ascending order, from my least favourite to my most chucklesome.

Gavin McGregor

This lad is a monstrosity at the age of 12, but it’s clear his awful personality and paunch are both the results of spoiling by his parents.  Raised by YouTube and Instagram, he can speak only in social media phraseology, with most things being dope as f*ck.  Gavin has delusions of his current and future grandeur, trying to initiate sexual conquests with most females as a result of behaviour he is aping.  As a creation, he’s a damning indictment, and therefore unpleasant to watch.  His story arc is even less appealing, transported to England from Australia, where he is groomed by relatives to become the next Earl of Gayford (not a real place, not even a funny place) while corrupting his cousins.  I was distracted by trying to work out whether this was filmed on location in actual England, or just a wet, green bit of Australia.  I began to suspect accent inconsistency whilst working out if the grass looked Antipodean or not.

Keith Dick

Donning a goatee and horrible old-man pony, Lilley becomes Keith, a long-serving department store worker who opens his own fashion emporium.  While the business initially falters, Keith’s self-obsession prevents reality from dawning, as does his sexual preclusion for objects.  A vacuum cleaner and a cash register both come in for his unique love making, but you’ve got to admire his openness about his preferences.

Quentin Cook

I’m sensing a theme where each character is based on two jokes.  The first about Quentin is that he, and all the men in his family, have massive arses.  This is puerile, but that’s fine by me, especially when his bottom knocks things over.  He is a tacky real estate agent who, like Keith and Dick, is deluded about his talents in other areas, and I mean any other areas: art, music, DJing.  His parents’ blind support and favouritism add a subtler dimension, while you can enjoy the two actors playing his brothers adlibbing.  His rivalry with Harrison, an employee who is better than Quentin at everything, also sizzles well.

Jana Melhoopen-Jonks

Cue the jokes: she is Zimbabwean, she is a lesbian whose love for her assistant is unrequited, she is a pet psychic.  Only one of these, though, is a ridiculous thing to be.  Potentially the most fun to play, she lets Lilley laugh at the pretentions of those who provide pointless services to the stupidly wealthy, becoming stupidly wealthy in the process.  She also harbours all the character traits of humans who are obsessed with dogs, something I’ll never understand (note to other Tube users: get your hound’s wet nose off my fresh trainers).

Joyce Jeffries

The mock-ups of Chris Lilley as an adult film actress on the covers of Joyce’s VHSs are almost funny enough in their own right.  Joyce, in later life, has become a hoarder.  Her anguish at the loss of her father (and potentially at the hands of the porn industry) causes her struggle to deal with reality, using a whiteboard to illustrate other friends in her home that only she can see.  She is overall the most richly imagined, and we seem only to scratch the surface, but, deeper down, she is Chris Lilley rolling around and showing off in women’s clothes while we watch.  We can all enjoy that.

Becky Douglas

There are two things that made me love this character.  She becomes a YouTuber, specialising in craft: pointless, ghastly craftwork voiced over with excessive enthusiasm.  Having watched hours of CookieSwirlC unboxing LOL Dolls with my niece, I believe there is a special place in aural hell for these people, and Lilley captures their inanity perfectly.  Secondly, she pursues boys with clearly no interest in her.  Lilley plays the fawning, hair-twirling, hint-ignoring determination with full dexterity.  And this is no mean feat when Becky’s biggest quirk is her big legs, causing her to be seven foot three and get her hair stuck in ceiling fans.

It’s a motley crew, then.  Do we root for them, or are we laughing at their misfortune?  It’s called Lunatics, though: a pejorative term of the past denoting those with mental health issues.  For some of the episodes, the humour veers dangerously close to mocking others’ emotional and physical differences.  As Joyce’s eviction looms, her panic’s urgency piques and elicits genuine sympathy, yet each moment is still played for laughs.

Criticism of Lunatics has compared it to a cheap freakshow that redeems itself only inasmuch as a token effort requires, with a final episode of relatively happy endings.  I, for one, am torn.  An awakening is occurring in how we treat those whose brains work differently to ours.  While my department is predominantly jazz-handsing attention seekers, we are actively recruiting for brain diversity.  In wider society, we are welcoming open conversations about mental health, rather than pointing, laughing and locking away.  In this context, then, these character creations feel at times insensitive.  I’m all for bad taste and believe humour can genuinely be found in anything, but my view would be that Lilley is capable of more than simple cruelty.  We just shouldn’t have to look so hard for it.

Make your own mind up.  I’m taking it in the vein of what he is known for: dressing up in silly costumes, letting the cameras roll and showing off.  To borrow the improper term, each lunatic is simply looking to be accepted for who they are.  And this makes us all lunatics.

Disenchantment

It’s happened again: I’ve succumbed to a cartoon on Netflix.  Though this wasn’t that recent.  A few months back, I found myself clicking play on episode after episode of Disenchantment.  But I can hear my dear reader(s) asking: why am I talking about it now?  Well, it’s vaguely linked to fantasy-based medieval kingdoms with dragons and that.  For a blog about TV shows, the fact that I’ve not really mentioned the highlight of our televisual lives so far can’t have gone unnoticed (unless you’re just dipping in for the shows you actually watch and not indulging my ramblings about things you haven’t seen – the requirement is that you read everything).  I had mighty plans for Game Of Thrones, let me tell you.  Breaking with precedent (93 posts and counting) I was going to cover each series individually, giving me the perfect excuse to re-watch all seven existing seasons (which would be my third time doing this – cool).  Alas, I am no longer in a Sky household however, so each Monday while series eight premiers is characterised by me rushing around London trying to get invited round to friends’ houses to avail myself of their Now TV or (ideally HD) Sky packages.  Today I took four different buses to Fulham and back.

I was supposed to be in my own flat by this point.  I had dreams of returning to Westeros on a massive sofa in front of a 55” telly, but I’ve not moved into My First Newbuild yet, as lawyers are not only doing nothing, they are doing it at their contractually glacial pace.  So, while I’m still in my final rental, with nothing but somebody else’s Netflix account for company while I save my final pennies for furniture, cutlery and a washing machine, I might as well cash in on Thrones fever by talking this week about something that is a bit to do with it.

Disenchantment is to fantasy what The Simpsons were to real life and what Futurama was to science fiction: animated irreverence.  Uniting all three is my hero and the owner of a surname I’m still not really sure how to pronounce: Matt Groening.  Whether he’d have wanted to or not, this man had a hand in my upbringing, such was the influence of his humour on me at an impressionable age (0 to 34).  Luckily, he didn’t have an effect on my appearance, as so many of his characters have horrendous overbites.  That said, I did require orthodontics to fix my own overbite, but this was never horrendous.  It was initially grotesque and now it is nearly moderate.

Instead of Westeros, then, we have Dreamland, a ye olde fantastical kingdom, ruled by a king in a castle.  Through the eyes of our heroine, we join a complex network of political structures.  But while treaties with neighbouring kingdoms or giants might be inconsistent and rocky at best, Princess Bean’s sure-fire ability to make a hash of most things is a very reliable way to create the perfect plot device, ensuring hilarity ensues in each episode.  Voiced by my beloved Abbi Jacobson of Broad City, Bean prefers drinking to all other princess-ly duties.  Goading her in this misdemeanour is a black cat-like demon whose possession of her spirit signifies a sort of adolescent willingness to do the wrong thing.  Funnier than him, though, is Elfo, a little green elf who is picked up into the trinity of pals along the way, and voiced by Nat Faxon of Friends From College.  As the elfin punching bag for all punchlines and physical comedy alike, Elfo’s interminable cheeriness proves a worthy foil to the constant fantasy peril in which our three leads find themselves.

Each instalment is a standalone adventure, though there does seem to be progression towards various landmarks in Bean’s life and Dreamland’s existence.  The realisation of a fantasy world varies, seeming at points incredibly rich such as when they voyage to the damp realms of Dankmire, and at other junctures shallow and only serving a purpose of pay-off for some joke or other.  Similarly, there are moments of animation touched by true artfulness, such as every establishing shot of King Zøg’s castle, and others which look like the creative direction was running out of time.

The misadventure, however, plods along from mildly amusing to oh-so-clever.  Untapped reserves for future mining spring up everywhere, from the various elves of Elfo’s home village, such as Kissy (who kisses), and the fact that Bonnie Prince Derek, Bean’s half-brother, is completely emo.  This is because the territory is fecund and therefore ripe for parody, mostly through shooting fish in a barrel rather than needing to do anything truly original.  Either way, it adds up to a pretty smart watch, leading me to the conclusion that you probably can’t go wrong with a cartoon on Netflix.  There are so many more stages in animation when compared to filming live action; I imagine that this means there are more opportunities for someone to decide the whole thing is bollocks and stop or improve the production.  A second, longer series is greenlit and the security of that acceptance should provoke bolder humour and bring the seminal achievements of Groening’s other canon within closer grasp.  It won’t fill any Game Of Thrones holes in your life, but you may well enjoy a couple of funnies while your beloved characters are brutally killed off.