Keeping Up With The Kardashians

After last week, we’re continuing the theme of keeping up with various things.  Whereas my last post was about the very British pastime of projecting the behaviour of a superior class on one’s friends and neighbours, revealed through sitcom chaos to be as exhausting as it is hilarious (Keeping Up Appearances), this week I’ll be linking that nineties sitcom with the very LA pastime of being a Kardashian, this time projecting the behaviour of a superior class not just on one’s own friends and neighbours, but on the whole world.

Now, you may have asked yourself at various points who or what a Kardashian is.  I have to admit I don’t really recall how and when they came into my consciousness, let alone that of the planet’s.  In isolation, a Kardashian sounds like some sort of medical mishap named after an obscure gynaecologist: “Oh dear, she’s got Kardashians again.”  In fact, for those that don’t know, the Kardashians are a family that is also a series of products.  I’ve paused here to see how I can succinctly explain how they all fit together, but I’m going to have to do it in long form.  We come to know these products, sorry, family members over something like forty-two series of their reality TV show, plus an array of spin-offs.  I’m not actually a willing viewer of any of this.  Sure, it ticks a lot of my boxes.  Trashy?  Yes.  Reality TV?  Most definitely.  The real world filtered to look better than it actually is?  Absolutely.  But there’s a hollow ringing to its message that makes each minute seem like time that could be better spent doing something else: watching You’ve Been Framed, for example, or thinking fondly of childhood memories.  So, let’s meet the Kardashians we are trying to keep up with:

Kris Jenner

Our matriarch styles herself as the momager, a title that’s as apt as it is sinister.  Her shrewd skills at self-promotion have seen her many progeny foisted into the spotlight for their earning potential.  It feels a bit wrong, but she’s very good at it, so we have at least unearthed some semblance of talent behind the worldwide fame.  She’s a loose cannon who thrills at embarrassing her children – you can’t miss her fun-loving attitude, even beneath several strata of expensive make up.

Kourtney Kardashian

The eldest sister, but the second-best wit.  She wins for being first to reproduce, with her most scathing stare reserved for ex-husband Scott Disick, who enjoys himself far too much throughout the whole show.

Kim Kardashian West

The internet requires nothing further to be said about this person.

Khloé Kardashian

The wittiest sister: Khloé has the best personality and is therefore the most attractive within a family that is already inordinately appearance conscious.  Her lines alone almost make the show worth watching, but you can actually scroll through endless gifs of them in various Buzzfeed listicles instead.

Kendall and/or Kylie Jenner

There are some younger half-sisters whose names also begin with K.  I have trouble distinguishing them but it doesn’t matter as both/either are wildly more successful than I will ever be.

Rob Kardashian

Yes, there’s a brother as well, but they couldn’t think of a name beginning with K for him, so this has caused him to spiral into obesity and obscurity.

Caitlyn Jenner

Before transitioning to live as a woman, this was Kris’s husband and the father of the two youngest daughters, with the elder siblings’ father, Robert Kardashian (the lawyer off the OJ trials) having passed away.  Divorcing Kris with mixed results, Caitlyn can now hair-flick with the rest of the Kardashians, though has faced as much criticism as praise since coming out as trans.  I’ve always found this individual wooden and boring, regardless of gender, so if that doesn’t make me a trans ally, I don’t know what does.

Anyway, that’s enough slagging off of real people.  There are also various babies and hangers on.  One pal, Jonathan Cheban, only got his spot on UK Celebrity Big Brother purely through dint of being Kim’s friend.  What an achievement.  Though I suppose Kim only got famous in the first place for being a chum of Paris Hilton.  Allegedly the whole concept of the show was conceived in partnership with Ryan Seacrest, but I can’t hear that name anymore without thinking of the Bojack Horseman character of A Ryan Seacrest Type so we’ll get straight into my other reasons for finding life too short to watch Keeping Up With The Kardashians.

While there is humour and drama, and plenty of escapism in this guilty pleasure, it’s their self-obsession that sees me itching to switch the station.  It’s hard to identify with people so privileged who still find so much to moan about, either in their soft-focus, flatteringly lit pieces to camera, or during the constant staged conversations in various expensive kitchens where everyone stands between the units pretending to eat food while never letting their smartphones out of their clutches, probably because another family member is on speakerphone.  While watching them jetting around the world, enjoying sumptuous meals out, splurging on jewellery, clothes and skin creams, the girls harp on about their anxieties and the resentment they harbour for each other.  They complain about their lack of privacy, which is delicious when you consider the camera crew has been invited into their private life (and I won’t even dignify Kim’s sex tape with a mention.  Oh.  Whoops.)  Rarely does the outside world get a mention, or do they prioritise using their platform for greater social good.

This was perfectly encapsulated by the 2017 fallout of Kendall Jenner’s appearance in a controversial Pepsi ad that indicated a carbonated sugary beverage could solve America’s entrenched racial inequality.  The episode was filled with Kardashians sympathising with their billionaire sibling, lamenting how hard she had worked only for people to be nasty about her on social media.  The real issue of a society that seems culturally prejudiced against people of colour was not mentioned.

So what is this show’s appeal?  An old flatmate used to watch it religiously, and it was only after a few viewings that I realised this wasn’t ironic consumption: she really did love the girls.  They sell, through their show and their social platforms, a lifestyle that is aspirational.  By being voyeurs to their TV-produced storylines, that lifestyle becomes tantalisingly close to reach.  This is what drives the capitalist minion in all of us.  Skipping down the street with a takeaway blended might make you feel like some Hollywood A-lister, but you’re really just a few quid worse off, consuming calories you don’t need and generating plastic waste that will end up in Our Planet.  And you still live in Leatherhead.

As a family, the Kardashians are winning at sweating their assets and their asses to make cash.  They are swept up in their own hype, but we needn’t be.  There’s not much to keep up with besides a lot of spending, some drama and only thinking about yourself.  I don’t know why I feel so aggrieved that they don’t use their fame for more good – they’re not the only celebrities setting questionable examples.  Just look at British right-wing politicians.  I think it’s because I am so aware of their influence on a generation of girls needing more support and sustenance than unrealistic expectations and unfair comparisons.  I have a way to prevent the Kardashians ever getting a hold of me: I just think of the Big Fat Gypsy Kardashians from the Keith Lemon Sketch Show.  They’ve got the biggest caravan on the site, so they do. 

Keeping Up Appearances

This blog was going to be so cool and edgy.  I was going to uncover hidden gems on obscure platforms, curating them for readers’ viewing pleasure like some sort of Walter Presents, only with more hair and no glasses.  Highbrow people would come to me wondering what to watch.  This was clearly never going to happen for two reasons: firstly, I watch too much trash.  I’ve covered all the dross on here, from Geordie Shore to Ex On The Beach (broadly the same show) via Love Island and Bromans (which I still remember fondly yet it curiously doesn’t seem to be appearing for a second series).  Secondly, there aren’t enough hours in the day to get through all the TV.  I’m fairly vocal with anyone who’ll ask (nobody asks) that I have to be in bed by 10pm, which leaves a maximum of two telly-viewing hours of a weekday evening when I’ve dragged my heavily sweating body home from the office via a Tube, a bus and a quick walk.  With so many subsequent series of things like Peaky Blinders and Great British Bake Off taking up my schedule, my chances to uncover and share any gems, trashy or otherwise are limited.

So we’re back raiding the archives this week.  And what an old archive I’ve raided as I’ve gone all the way back to a sitcom that ran from 1990 to 1995.  I think I was searching for Cardinal Burns clips on YouTube for a previous unpopular post when I suddenly started getting served montages of this show, all in aid of promoting BritBox – seems to be some sort of platform for watching exactly the sort of old stuff I’m talking about this week.  Cunningly, though, another motivation to cover this is that aged British comedy that only just predates the internet gets the most reads.  Not straightaway, but I think eventually the searchbots crawl in and I end up being a leading authority on such classics as Bo’ Selecta! – now the most read post out of everything on Just One More Episode despite the clamouring apathy that greeted its initial publication.

And here we are, then, talking about Keeping Up Appearances.  Let’s begin with Patricia Routledge, a national treasure if ever there was one.  She had already proven she could hold her own, fully alone, in the outstanding Kitty monologues that featured in Victoria Wood’s As Seen On TV (something I immediately binged through when I spotted it on Netflix, but given my sycophantic piece on dinnerladies, I’ve saved posting about until another time).  As Hyacinth Bucket, she was given a wider world to expand into with her trademark impeccable character portrayal – not that any single line of Kitty’s lacked a complete visual rendering in the mind’s eye.

Hyacinth likes to keep up her appearances.  This is because her origins are distinctly lower class, so having scraped into the bottom rung of the middle class by acquiring a three-piece suite and (obsessively) cleaning her well-twitched net curtains, she exhibits the excruciatingly British trait of being agonisingly class-conscious.  Throughout the five series, she denies any association with her sisters: slovenly yet lovely Daisy and glorious maneater Rose, not to mention Daisy’s other half, Onslow, king of the slobs, played by the fondly remembered Geoffrey Hughes (also known as Twiggy in The Royle Family).  I’ll be honest though: as a Surrey schoolboy whose own parents’, shall we say, self-improvement naturally led to an element of snobbery, I was as appalled by Hyacinth’s family as she was.

In fact, as a child between the ages of five and ten when the show first broadcast, I couldn’t for a long time see what the joke was with our Hyacinth.  She had high standards, liked nice things and always wanted the best to happen – what wasn’t to like?  Her phone manner was clearly over the top, “The [bouquet] household; the lady of the house speaking,” but her candlelight suppers sounded like a hot invitation and she was always immaculately turned out (unless she had a tipple, in which case she became immediately dishevelled).  I could never understand why her neighbours, Elizabeth and Emmett, got so nervous about seeing her, though their anxiety rubbed off on me as I was always terrified of the impending moment one of them would be left with no choice but to smash their teacup on the floor in response to Hyacinth’s outbursts.  In conclusion, I really just thought this was a show about a nice lady, with lots of unexplained canned laughter.

Granted, despite the academic heights I later reached, some of the cleverer jokes were beyond me.  Whenever she quickly spelled her surname as B-U-C-K-E-T while insisting it be pronounced bouquet, I really had no idea what was going on, unable to match the spoken letters quickly enough to form the joke – all this despite the letters and spellings questions in University Challenge later being my top scorers.  Another regular recurring joke revolved around her phone number resembling that of a Chinese takeaway, which teed up many euphemisms about the availability of crispy prawn balls at the Bucket residence (low) due to misdials.  My own parents firmly believed that takeaways were for emergencies only and a clear sign of idleness on any other occasion.  To this day, I don’t use Deliveroo or Uber Eats, which does save me money and demonstrates a clear benefit to all the emotional scarring we’re unearthing here.  But this meant I had no idea that you used dish numbers when phoning a Chinese takeaway so I simply patiently waited for these scenes to end, safe in the knowledge something silly would happen eventually.  I remember we did once get a Domino’s as a family for some sort of treat, but this was of course served on our own crockery, with folded paper napkins, just in case anyone looked in through the window and thought we had a low household income.

Suffering through all of this we had Hyacinth’s husband Richard (a name she pronounced so wonderfully I can hear it ringing in my ears).  While driving, he would be told to mind the pedestrian, while gardening, he would be told to look like he was enjoying himself, lest people think a gardener beyond their budget, while rushing around at Hyacinth’s beck and call, she would hope he wouldn’t spoil things with lower middle-class humour.  Let’s face it, the man probably had clinical depression, which, added to her neighbours’ crippling anxiety, was just part of the show’s scathing social commentary around British snobbery.

Indeed, in real life, as a Daily Mail reader and probable Brexit voter, Hyacinth would be my natural enemy.  It’s hard to say how well the show has dated, but more valuable are my fond memories of crashing down the stairs to join my family in watching each episode in the early nineties.  This was all thanks to Routledge’s ability to create charm where there should be none.  Every line is a masterclass in delivery.  Every delivery is a masterclass in character.  Hyacinth Bucket remains as relevant as she ever was so we shall give her the last word, and the lifelong snob in me can’t help but agree with her sentiment: “If there's one thing I can't stand, it's snobbery and one-upmanship. People trying to pretend they're superior. Makes it so much harder for those of us who really are.”

Black Summer

I’m not sure why I’m doing this now, as Black Summer dropped on Netflix back in April and, as with all zombie content, I had to watch it there and then.  However, something about the title seems appropriate as we reach the back end of August.  No, it’s not a spin-off of Dear White People, whose third season has just launched, the viewing of which I am saving for when I’ve bought a big telly for my new flat.  My choice is more to do with the tempestuous weather that everyone has been moaning about.  Brits have evolved to be waterproof as it’s almost always raining here, so I’m not sure why one globally warmed day of 38 degrees would lead us to expect constant sunshine until the schools go back.

Summer 2019 is black due to the gathering storm clouds that seem to signal an afternoon shower each day as some part of new European rainy season.  From my office window I can spectate as workers clad optimistically in summer dresses and t-shirts alike sprint across pavements while a good old bucketing-down catches people unawares.  I know I shouldn’t delight in others’ suffering but getting caught in the rain (along with piña coladas) is something that truly affirms your humanity: the planet has literally wetted you.  Plus, I must get it from my father – he used to arrive early to pick me up from my Sixth Form job at Waitrose before I could drive, simply because my shift ended half an hour after closing time and he would derive endless entertainment from watching affluent potential shoppers stride towards the automatic doors, only to respond with outraged incredulity when they were denied entry to their favourite providore and therefore forced to forego a top-up shop consisting mostly of artisan cheese and fine wines.

Let’s make no bones about it: I don’t like summer.  In fact, a zombie apocalypse would probably improve my ability to withstand the aestival months.  I would like to blame London for this.  It’s the worst place in the world when hot, mostly as it was built in Victorian times for the damp climate mentioned above (though, over a hundred years later, they’re still building most of it).  The morning Tube, as unpleasant as it already is, takes on a new level of odorous odiousness: once you’ve spotted one sweat patch, you suddenly realise that everyone’s every crevice is proffering its own wet spot to any casually observing eye.  I may scoff into my novel, but I secretly know that the tickling in the small of my back is from my own sweat beads dashing down my spine to pool and fester in the dark dankness of my crack.  And there it stays for the whole working day and whatever else I am doing with my evening (watching boxsets).

Londoners do two things in the sun.  The first is to find a patch of grass, regardless of its proximity to the heavy traffic of a thoroughfare.  The second is to drink on it.  I don’t enjoy exhaust fumes, nor is it fun to look for somewhere to wee after your third cider, all while wishing you’d put more effort in at the gym as your body stretches before you like some squidgily marshmallow-like dough.  So, once the longest day has gone past, the chill in the air returns and the leaves start to fall, a certain joy fills me as I know we are approaching my favourite time of year.  For some reason, autumn carries with it the most nostalgia.  A breeze can suddenly evoke the exact moment in Year 10 when I realised that other people were stupid.  Factor in the bonus that each autumn brought another year of school: older, wiser, no cooler, but with a new pencil case.  The geek in me loved going back because I enjoyed all the writing and the learning and such.

Which is why some writing is happening now, as a hobby.  I started this blog about TV shows.  I should probably therefore spend a couple of passages actually tackling this week’s programme instead of sharing half-baked yet whimsically charming reflections on the passing of time.  Regular readers will know of my love for the zombie genre.  Fear The Walking Dead remains one of my most-read posts, while The Walking Dead and Korean treasure, Kingdom (킹덤), have of course been covered.  One show I’ve seen some of but not included here is Z Nation, another serial tackling the undead apocalypse.  Its crime?  Too many LOLs  I exist in perpetual fear of a zombie takeover, so I really struggle to see the funny side.  I don’t mind dark humour in the face of annihilation, but the viewer in me wants the genuine threat treated seriously.  The point is, Z Nation misses the mark slightly, but my scant research has revealed the Black Summer is its origin story.  Let’s not hold this against the show though.

Our action opens in an unnamed suburb, some weeks after breakout.  Enough confusion still exists about what is going on, and things are never really explained.  We only glimpse the unfolding of disorientating events through seemingly unrelated characters, all desperately trying to survive (with varying levels of success).  The characterisation has been accused of shallowness, but I’m going to describe it as subtle – you’re deliberately left conflicted about who is good and who is bad, bringing to life the fact that trusting others while the undead chase you can lead either to salvation or betrayal, but you’ll only find out when it’s too late.

The suburban streets in the sunshine take on a claustrophobic air, with peril around every repetitive corner, separated individuals hopelessly searching for loved ones.  Tension builds around rumours of sanctuary, yearning for reunion and the constant risk of zombies and bad people.  The eight episodes stumble forward, arrhythmically switching perspectives and pace, though we culminate in a series of gun battles which are equal parts thrilling climax and video game fodder.

For devotees of the genre, this is a worthwhile watch.  Its fresh-enough approach avoids the pitfalls of what we have seen before, but there’s a sense a bigger vision is lacking behind all the death and destruction.  I’d happily sit through a second series, but the internet is not forthcoming with details of any recommissioning.  I promise you genuine chills from Black Summer’s flesh-eating walkers, especially in the mix of the show’s concerning plausibility.  But I realise the most alarming image you may have from this week’s post is that of my sweaty crack.

Prison Break

Welcome to the blogpost on Prison Break, or Why Some Shows Should Only Have One Series Really.  It’s been a light week from a TV viewing perspective.  New home ownership has seen my evening and weekend hours spent away from my favourite screen (and I haven’t bought a telly yet), whether that be spiralling in Old Kent Road B&Q because I don’t know what drill to buy, or spiralling at home because I’ve drilled fixings into the wrong bit of wall and totally destroyed the home I’ve saved for ten years to buy, or spiralling with happiness now that I’ve finally got a blind up over the bedroom window, sparing my new neighbours (and any innocent passer-by) the daily torment of my genitalia appearing in their line of vision while I’m putting my pyjamas on.  And yes, the whole blog so far has been about me putting a blind up.  Buying a flat has made me the most boring person in the world and I know this because my friends have not been shy in confirming it to me.

But this means we are indeed trawling the archives of old stuff I watched when my life still had hope.  Why prisons?  Well, thanks for that question.  It’s nice when we’re interactive, isn’t it?  I’ve been partly inspired by the return for a seventh and final series of Orange Is The New Black.  One of the good things about my flat (cue more boring chat – let’s call it flat chat) is that I have a bath again, but I get bored in there quickly, as lying inert in scalding water waiting for Epsom salts to assuage the cramps of my Crossfit-overtrained limbs and unravel the angry knots in my back isn’t as entertaining as I would like.  I’ve therefore been taking my laptop into the bathroom with me, positioning it away from the water on an old duvet box and enjoying me a bit of on-demand premium content while my glasses steam up and my fingertips go all pruney.  This is how I got through the mind-boggling second series of Dark (even more wildly ambitious that the first outing – watch it now).  I then thought I could catch up on the latest The Handmaid’s Tale in there (this is over a number of bathing occasions – I haven’t just been in the tub for weeks in one go) but Channel 4 only have the catch-up rights to that for twenty-five minutes or so after broadcast.  So off I went to trusty old Netflix to catch up with the ladies of Litchfield.  I’d forgotten who most of them were, but I soon remembered that I loved them.

Prisons, then…  A friend first showed me Prison Break during my final year of university.  We’re no longer in touch, but that is not a result of his boxset recommendations.  When people ask where I studied, I like to retort with a bit of modesty and say Hogwarts.  I’m not actually a wizard, but people’s viewing experience of the Harry Potter films is the best way to bring to life the realities of my tertiary education.  I loved learning so much that I got myself into ye olde Oxford University, where diversity meant someone didn’t go to Eton (I didn’t) and a Scout was a local woman who smoked in your bedroom whilst wearing a tabard and changing an empty bin.  I’m only naming the place for context: my college days were spent working hard.  Not as hard as I should have, but the workload was inordinate.  The approaching final exams, then, which accounted for 100% of my degree, rendering the whole four-year faff (with year abroad) an excessive preamble, only served to ramp up the fervent book-learning.

But each night we allowed ourselves an hour of leisure before bed, and that’s where the Prison Break DVDs got whipped out.  My friend wanted me to watch the whole of season one to demonstrate its mastery of the art of suspense.  He was righter than ever.  Each instalment ended on such an earth-shattering cliff-hanger, that we were succumbing to the concept of Just One More Episode long before I realised my life would end up with me writing an unpopular blog.  If you haven’t watched it, you’ve probably guessed that the storyline revolves around people breaking out of prison.  Pow, there’s your narrative tension straightaway.  Our hero is Michael Scofield.  He is so determined to break out his unjustly incarcerated brother (though he deserved his sentence for crimes against the male plunging neckline, by having a plunging neckline) that he has elaborate escape plans tattooed over his entire body and then commits a bank robbery to place himself within the prison walls.  Wentworth Miller’s growling, earnest whispers characterise his every line, while Dominic Purcell as the wrongly accused Lincoln Burrows barely grunts in return.  At each stage of progressing their plan some sort of compromise would be contrived that forced them to link in one more escapee.  Some we rooted for, like dear old Sucre, overreacting to everything, while the sinister sexual predation of T-Bag made skin crawl, though it did prompt discussions about who would be whose prison bitch.  Apparently, you just need to turn one of your pockets inside out and whoever held onto the protruding material was yours to do bitch things with.

Their chances of success were stretched out over a phenomenal first series, with twists, turns and panic-inducing disasters.  I’ve got to be careful to give away any spoilers, but if your whole first series is about breaking out of prison, where do you go from there?  Subsequent series, which I won’t dwell on here, became echoes of this first burst in descending order of volume.  Some characters would be on the run, others would be wrongly imprisoned elsewhere, someone else would be trying to break into another prison.  Then the womenfolk were getting imprisoned as well.  And throughout, LJ (Lincoln Burrows’ awful son) was gurning at the camera and chewing the scenery in response to the implausibility of it all.  To expand on some sort of justification for the whole thing, naughty corporation The Company was suddenly invented, along with some very devoted employees (I hated Gretchen), and I began to question my viewing choices.

In conclusion, some series really should only have had one series.  It’s called the Lost effect.  A good idea works really well as a single arc, but then gets stretched out to capitalise on audience demands till it snaps.  It’s like when someone brings salted caramel M&Ms to the office and you really enjoy having just one, but then suddenly everything is a blur and you’ve eaten 75 of them.  Prison Break even came back for a fifth series in 2017, but our only focus must remain the masterpiece that is the premier season.  That is its legacy.  And also, tattooing things on your body in case you’re worried you might forget about them later.

Derry Girls

“Oh, you should watch Derry Girls,” everyone said, “It’s so funny.”  Well, I did.  And it is.  My fame as a TV blogger has been spreading far and wide, resulting in an inundation of recommendations for things I should watch and write about.  A lot of the time I nod and smile, wondering if people realise these posts are more about me than any of the programmes in question, but the input is mostly welcome.  Like any normal person, I don’t always know which boxsets won’t let me down.  Peer-to-peer word of mouth comes in very handy.  I had totally missed the first series of Derry Girls when it premiered back in early 2018, and I still hadn’t sorted myself out in time for the second in March 2019.  If I’m honest, I don’t like watching things on Channel 4 that much.  It’s because I’m exposed to trails for their other shows and want to watch almost everything else, and we can all see that I already spend far too much time with telly.

Nevertheless, the first series is on Netflix, while I was able to catch up on the second with Channel 4 On Demand.  I don’t know if it’s called All4 anymore, or if it went back to 4oD, or maybe it’s Catchy Uppy or something (and I should know really, given my job), but I do know they don’t frequency cap their ads on there.  I’ve seen the same McDonald’s spots upwards of ten times, yet I’m still unswerving from my lifelong vow never to consume food from that hellhole.  Their agency has literally wasted them around 5p on me.  The good news is, after all the award wins, Derry Girls will be back for a third series.  Let’s unpick what has made it so successful.

Silly Accents

For those that don’t know, Derry is in Northern Ireland, so most of the dialogue is in the famous local accent and dialect where “how now brown cow?” becomes “hurr nurr brurn curr?” though I was disappointed that my favourite ever Northern Irish word didn’t make an appearance: a friend from the same town grew up thinking that passing wind was called doing a roodie doodie (say it out loud in your best Northern Irish accent) until he, as an adult, realised it was actually just his family that did that.  Either way, I commented in my post on Nighty Night how the right accent can make everything seem funny.  Add a good old “so it is” on the end of each sentence and this Celtic turn compounds the effect even further.

Nostalgia

We’re not just in Derry, we’re in Derry in the 1990s.  Mobile phones weren’t yet a thing, PJ & Duncan hadn’t become Ant and Dec and double denim was still on its first time around.  Derry Girls plants you unmistakably in the decade, not just through the hair and fashion and (lack of) tech, but through a soundtrack that surprises and delights the viewer at every turn.  That’s if you’re old enough to remember.  If you’re not, then get out.  But who would have thought that Gina G’s Ooh Aah… Just A Little Bit would still sound like such a banger?  I’m sitting here with a Spotify playlist lifted directly from the show, wondering how on earth I bring about some sort of personal Ace of Base reunion tour.

The Hilarity of Sectarian Violence

The Troubles, at least to a Surrey schoolboy, always seemed a bit far off and endless – the kind of thing you tune out as it’s a bit overexposed: a bit like climate change, Brexit or Boris Johnson.  While teenage life is full of frustrations (see the post on The Inbetweeners), I can’t imagine the further paralysing effect of growing up in the midst of a conflict that claimed over 3,000 lives.  Our Derry Girls are of the Catholic persuasion (allowing easier pickings for jokes about priests, nuns and the Pope) but any real antipathy towards protestants is reserved for their parents and grandparents.  A protestant boy is as good a ride as any, at least according to Michelle.  If you’re not familiar with the Troubles, though, you can look forward to the whole thing being reignited for an unnecessary sequel, courtesy of our good pal Brexit.

Outstanding Characters

You’ll come to love the Derry Girls (and boy) but it’s Michelle that has all the best lines: “You can’t ring Childline every time your mother threatens to kill you.”  Her scrunchy perm and hoop earrings are mere accessories to her pursuit of the best craic no matter the consequences.  Cousin Orla, meanwhile, clinches it for the best individual accent, aided by the strangeness of her every utterance.  Our lead, Erin Quinn, has amazing timing, but her mouth never stops moving, while Clare spends most of each episode shrieking.  It’s actually the supporting cast I enjoy the most.  School swot, Jenny Joyce, is an instant favourite, with her delicious unstoppable smugness at every turn wonderfully foiled by Sister Michael’s utter disgust at her sycophancy.  Jenny’s assembly harmonies show a voice as weak as her two shoes are goodie.

But Erin and Orla’s family deliver the most laughs.  We’ve all been cornered by an Uncle Colm – a relation whose unending stories guarantee instant boredom.  We all know someone as self-centred as Aunt Sarah – the kind of person who wears white to a wedding.  And we all love a matriarch as domineering as Mary.  Erin’s mum truly is a domestic force to be reckoned with, often ending up an unwilling accomplice in the girls’ ill-advised misdemeanours.  She captures some major universal mum-isms that can be recognised among the Irish, the British and the world over.  She gets the names of new things wrong, mistakenly thinking that Take That are called This And That.  And she has strong sentiments about laundry, flying off the handle when someone suggests doing just a half load of washing because doing “A half load goes against everything I stand for.”  My own mother once matched this when I asked her innocently why she preferred Sainsbury’s over Tesco, to which she responded instantly, “I just hate everything Tesco stand for as a company.”  Fairly neutral then.

So, well done to Lisa McGee, the show’s writer and creator.  She’s added something to the national canon that’s so nuanced and local that I’m thrilled at the thought of other English-speaking countries struggling to work out what on earth is going in each episode.  Maybe someone’s told them they should watch Derry Girls because it’s so funny.  But they can’t.  It’s ours.

Skins

With Love Island until recently taking up an hour of viewing time each night (apart from Saturdays when there’s no new episode worth watching), I’m struggling to complete any new boxsets.  Luckily that show is over (as I’ve just turned down my invitation to the final waaaah), but I’m raiding the archives again this week.  Let’s talk about Skins.  It’s often there in the Trending Now part of your Netflix.  Nostalgia sees me hover over it every time, curious to see if it’s as I remember.  But then, I remember not liking it all that much, so it can’t be nostalgia for the show that’s driving this.  I still watched nearly the whole bloody thing, desperate that at some point I would love it like I was supposed to.  Therefore, my urge to sit through it all again must come from nostalgia for my life at the time when it first aired, back in January 2007.  I was finishing my final year at university.  Before long I would be renting the first in a long line of dodgy flats in London while pretending to play careers with other real adults.  I had a lot more energy.  I was a bright young thing.  Now, I’ve recently fulfilled my lifelong ambition of owning my own home (and not having to share it with people who can’t shower without creating a body hair-strewn tsunami).  Instead of being young and fun I’ve spent the weekend cleaning the bathrooms, on the phone to John Lewis about ordering the wrong ironing board and feeling guilty about not buying any more furniture for my flat.  No wonder I’m tempted to relive a part of my long-lost youth.

Busting out on its spiritual home of e4, Skins promised to expose the real truth about being a teen in a way that no other drama had dared to do.  Its first two series followed an initial generation of friends, each beset by their own psychological traumas, external pressures, hormonal urges and web of relationships across the group.  A key premise was that all adults (played by a variety of household names having inordinate fun with their cameos) would be flawed so obviously that we were naturally to conclude that it was no wonder these children were struggling with modern life.  The results of all this bad parenting were lots of sex, drugs, partying, inadvisable behaviour and, to my academic geek sensibilities, not a lot of schoolwork going on!  But whereas this should have provided ample drama and entertainment to the viewer, each episode drew itself out so painfully that I would tut in frustration at its luxuriation over every hard-laboured point (a bit like my prose here…).

The pace was glacial.  It was as if every actor had been told that long pauses between lines equal dramatic scenes.  They didn’t – it just made everything take ages.  Sure, I talk fast in real life, but I don’t expect this of all TV characters.  I just like them to get a wriggle on occasionally so some momentum can develop in order to charge us through to the climax.  Each instalment focused on a different character which also irritated me.  Rather than progressing the group narrative, we would dwell on introducing all these incidental people in that person’s life, delaying things further.  Nevertheless, its attempts at honesty were original, but it tripped into cliché on its way there, developing its own classic trope of each character crying on the floor, swigging from a bottle of neat spirits while claiming “Everything is so f***ed up” as if nobody’s ever had a bad day before.  Having done teenage life myself, I can attest that it’s not actually that bad (especially from the perspective of my mid-thirties).

Despite all this, I persisted, as I wanted it to give me what it had promised.  Besides, we all wanted to see what puberty had done to the About A Boy boy’s eyebrows.  Nowadays, Nicholas Hoult is one of our smashingest actors and, indeed, the class of 2007 have enacted their contractual clause of no future quality entertainment being made without them.  Whether it’s Joe Dempsie and Hannah Murray in Game Of Thrones (which I promise I will eventually cover here), Dev Patel in Slumdog Millionaire and beyond or Daniel Kaluuya in Get Out and Black Panther (no longer pigeonholed as Posh Kenneth), the talent was clearly there.  Maybe it was just practising.

All this said, though, the second series finishes superbly, and the way is paved for the next generation.  Tony Stonem’s younger sister, Effy, played by Kaya Scodelario fulfils that classic British destiny of following in sibling footsteps at school and becomes the alpha of the new crop.  Her love interest, Cook, steals the attention from her though, thanks to Jack O’Connell’s red-raw performance, something he has taken through to everything he has done since (seriously, watch everything he has done right now).  There’s also Luke Pasqualino who’s in lots of things these days, but I only remember him from an obscure scene in Miranda.  Either way, the themes of relationships, sexuality, excess, trust and good old fashioned growing up are investigated further.  By this point, I was more acclimatised to Skins’ sluggish rhythm and more susceptible to its melodrama.  So much so, in fact, that by the time the third generation arrived, I just couldn’t be arsed getting into it all over again.  They just didn’t interest me and I bailed out, cherishing what I had witnessed so far, despite all my frustrations.

Certain scenes still occur to me now and then, whether it’s Cassie’s distressing demonstration of how someone with an eating disorder convinces others she’s eating by rearranging food on her plate, or the moment she whispers “Wow, f*** you, Sid” at a lad who always wore glasses and a beanie.  I still call a wild night a Skins party, after the Gossip-soundtracked promo trail.  For every Jal’s clarinet, there was Cook bouncing off brick walls with the intensity of it all.  For every overuse of effing and jeffing until it lost all its impact, there was heart and truth struggling to get through.  Skins was a step in an evolution of British confidence in its own youth drama, only coming to fruition in more recent times with the likes of Fleabag and The End Of The F***ing World.  So yeah, when I’m wondering what’s going to tempt me from the Netflix algorithm, Skins will always tempt me.  But I’m going to eschew the repeat view in favour of the memory.  You can’t turn back time, but you can do better things with your adult life than watching old things (and cleaning the bathroom).

Cardinal Burns

After going for broad appeal with last week’s homage to Made In Chelsea, I’ll be taking things in a much more niche direction this week.  Cardinal Burns was a sketch show that ran on e4 in 2012 and then Channel 4 for its second series in 2014.  Why on earth would I be talking about it now?  Well, it too had a sublime parody of scripted reality, which I almost included last week, but instead decided to branch out into its own post this week (see, I do plan).  Secondly, and this takes us back to the niche point around the show, the only other person who loved this show as much as I did is a dear former work colleague whose response to a number of years in the same office as me was to move as far away as possible to Australia.  I’ve got a guilty conscience as he messaged me this week just as I was running out the door to a wedding, so hopefully he reads this and forgives me.

I’ve talked about my love of the sketch show before when covering Little Britain and Come Fly With Me.  Even Bo’ Selecta! has been fondly remembered in this blog (and, after little to no interest from readers at the time, that post has been gathering clicks like nobody’s business and is now my second most popular piece of content – no idea why, or why now).  Every two minutes, you’ve got something new to look at.  It’s either a new set up where you’re wondering what humour will strike next, or we’re given returning characters that are nice and familiar.  If a scene doesn’t work, it’s over before you know it, and if it does, you can chuckle into your microwave meal or Ottolenghi sides, making a mental note to remember the best lines for work tomorrow, safe in the knowledge you’ll have forgotten everything by the time you reach your desk.

Below I’ll run through some of Cardinal Burns’ top characters, but the selection is merely incidental.  Seb Cardinal and Dustin Demri-Burns, the namesakes of the show in question (though it’s not actually called Cardinal Demri-Burns) have acute skills of observation which they couple with an ability to enact incredibly accurate mimicry.  Each character has a root in the banal and everyday, but the lads’ amplification of behaviours we might otherwise miss, exposing them with comedic acid for the silliness that they are, elevates their scenes and characters to the exact level of wit you need when you only know one other person who watches a show.  My highlights are as follows:

Camp Ghost Hunters

Phil and Jase channel their inner Yvette Fielding from Most Haunted and dive into dark spooky houses in search of the paranormal, accompanied by a film crew.  Their passive-aggressive bickering, “Someone’s a bit tetchy,” soon escalates until they fully miss each and every ghoulie they would otherwise come across among the shadows, which is bound to happen if you’re worried about texts from Steve asking to borrow your juicer, or if you fancy the priest at an exorcism.

Banksy

In real life, it’s universally agreed that Banksy is cool.  But in Cardinal Burns, he is a big old saddo.  He’s agreed to be filmed, but only if he can wear a really naff disguise.  We see him interviewed by local radio or struggling with his satnav, all with underlying currents of casual racism and a deep underestimation of the meaning of his own work.  Things ramp up as he tries to get his stepson on side, but nothing comes close to his announcement that he has taken the last nana from the fruit bowl.

The Office Flirts

Flirting is a huge part in the world of doing business.  People do deals with people they fancy.  I wear skin-tight shirts so nobody realises I have no idea what I’m doing.  In this series of sketches, the culture of flirting is given a Microsoft Outlook approach, with a dreary office temp scheduling quick flirts with various office females, telling them they look nice, which shows his distinct lack of game in this area.  Suddenly, the New Guy enters.  Seb Cardinal with bouffant hair and a leather jacket projects a give-a-shit attitude that has all the girls losing control and giggling coquettishly.  At one point, he parades about on a motorbike.  The original office flirt is impressed and signs up for a masterclass in this artform, but nothing beats New Guy’s departure from each scene, which typically involves punching a random square-on in the face.

Young Dreams

And so to the Made In Chelsea link, but this also has an air of The Hills about it.  Young Dreams is a spoof scripted reality vehicle following three girls, introduced with some saccharine pop music while we get the roll call of the girls.  Cardinal is Rachel, the alpha queen with immaculate hair and pronunciation so affected that you won’t recognise a single vowel.  There’s Olivia, a dogsbody for Rachel who mostly just hides her giant mole, and, lastly, we have Yumi, a Japanese transfer played by Demri-Burns.  All are convincing.  Each segment plays out around some scheme of Rachel’s to do whatever she pleases, typically prefaced with her declaring that “this little fishy is about to” before announcing her self-serving intentions.  Inadvertently, Yumi always manages to ruin everything with some sort of faux pas.  At this point, the emotional music scores in, Rachel storms off, and Yumi is left shouting out in a racially insensitive Japanese accent: “Raaaachel, pleeeeasse.”  I don’t know why this line has stuck with me, but I’m unable to address any Rachel I work with without replicating her emotional whine.

I won’t go on anymore – there’s no time for Vomit Cops and I daren’t describe the Fiery Hawk sketch (where an enthusiastic young actor obediently follows a casting director’s ever more sinister directions) – oh, I just did.  Either way, if you’ve not heard of Cardinal Burns, get to watching it.  It even comes with the epithet of award-winning.  I don’t what awards these are, and I can’t be bothered looking it up, but I can give it my own award: the award for the show that my friend and I really liked.  I hope the chaps turn up working together somewhere else soon (though I did spot Demri-Burns in an episode of Peaky Blinders), but until then, this little fishy is going to have to think of shows that more people have watched (help).