The Fast Show

As we reach the end of Just One More Episode (and, in fact, there are just four more episodes to go of this nonsense) I wanted to dedicate some time to rambling about a very influential show that people don’t seem to talk about anymore.  I’ve mentioned before my passion for sketch shows, both the terrifying highs of jokes that come off well and the dizzying lows set ups that never really pay off (see post on Little Britain), so it’s only right that I touch on The Fast Show before bowing out.  I was recently assailed by an irresistible urge to revisit some of my beloved sketches and managed to track down a handful of episodes downloadable from Sky Comedy.  Sadly, given that series one appeared in 1994, some of the footage looks like it was filmed on Vaseline (but don’t worry, guys, as the adverts that are inserted everywhere are crystal clear HD) but the humour still shines through and I found myself laughing my head off all over again, despite having seen all of it many times before.

These days, my attention span is so much shorter than it used to be, ruined by years of little whatsapps and incoming office work on multiple fronts (emails, calls, instant messages, someone standing next to your desk coughing lightly back in the days of actually working from anywhere but home), so it stands to reason that The Fast Show’s delivery of its very name’s promise (it’s quite fast) has helped to ensure that I’ve only grown fonder of it with age.  Most sketches are fairly rapid, some are even a few seconds and a single sentence.  Perfect if you’re itching to get the next one without delay.  This results in a vast population of characters and scenarios that I could never do justice to here, but my recent viewing has yielded two conclusions.  Firstly, the writers and actors love silliness as much as I do, as each sketch plays out in a parallel universe of messing about.  Secondly, their target is always anything that takes itself too seriously.  Sign me up.

Let’s take, for example, Jazz Club.  I remember only ever waiting patiently for this one to end when I was a child.  The punchlines were buried and subtle and, probably, it was too similar to real programmes at the time.  But it’s proven a revelation this time around.  John Thomson’s compere is unflinchingly earnest in his curation of various jazz musicians’ backstories, delighting in their hilarious-yet-subtle made-up names (hello, Toast Of London), before throwing with real enthusiasm to the stage where something terrible always unfolds, yet with every artist believing they are a heaven-sent gift to the music scene and the world in general, all conveyed through the medium of the rest of the cast messing about.  There’s an interpretative dance where you can just see Caroline Aherne (princess of The Royle Family) having the time of her life, channelling every pretentious performer she’s probably had the displeasure of coming across.  It’s at this point there’s a great moment of self-reference when the amazing Tom Bola and Jack Pot waddle into shot with their creepy dance.  I think about them all the time and have recently taken to whatsapping friends a video of me laughing along to this without any preceding explanation.

The two first appear in a sketch from Chanel 9, the brightly coloured pastiche of foreign telly, set in the scorching hot Republicca Democratia Militaria.  While it feels a bit Brexit-y and jingoistic these days, the sleaze of the presenters, the chaotic unfathomable action of the shows and the superbly coined and indecipherable language are all so well observed that you really do have the impression of having switched on the TV in a Spanish hotel room.  The linguist in me immediately starts decoding to find units of meaning, relishing in each Chris Waddle as much as every sminky pinky.  The awards show must have busted the budget, but it’s the lottery numbers that take me to my favourite farcical territory, with the multisyllabic word for five pushing the very boundaries of credibility, yet still erring on the side of plausibility.

Call me simple, but sometimes the repeatability is exactly what the fragile mind needs in comedy.  I’m going to channel my inner Simon Day with a “someone’s sitting there, mate” at the next opportunity.  I still maintain that every one of Jessie’s Diets and Fashion Tips is superbly written, and brought to life as an individual and unique performance by Mark Williams.  I didn’t even realise my habit of saying “no offence” in a South African accent after something offensive is generated by an Arabella Weir character.  Inevitably, I do need to question how well everything has aged, as it mostly, and shoot me if I am wrong, seems ok.  Upper class superciliousness and affectation seem to be The Fast Show’s target for its most extensive ruthlessness.  A few other lines have become a bit dud as our attitudes have improved, but I think the things we now deem sexist were in fact highlighting our imbalanced expectations from women, from “does my bum look big in this?” to the competent female employees who turn into simpering idiots at the first sight of a man.

I have to mention Paul Whitehouse, even if just to make it clear that my sister and I still whisper to each other “you ain’t seen me, right?” and Charlie Higson as Johnny Nice Painter, because we two siblings still re-enact the moments he finally utters the word black and asks mother why we must stick pins in our eyes.  Even all those years ago, some of the humour is eerily prescient, with Sir Geoffrey Norman MP a spot-on rendering of today’s chinless Tory, refusing to accept any assessment of reality by simply shouting nooooo.  I’d like to end outrageously by claiming The Fast Show invented humour as I now know and love it.  From the crude, such as the couple who have to pause briefly to explain that they’ve “just come” in inopportune circumstances, to the uncanny depiction of my childhood, as shown in the sketch which I now know is called The Hurried Poor, where a family constantly run about with too much luggage while the dad shouts “come on!”, the breadth of The Fast Show is as much a part of its charm as each sketch’s brevity.  I laughed then, and I laugh now.  Which was nice.

Call My Agent! (Dix Pour Cent)

There’s nothing smugger than asking friends what foreign language programme they’re enjoying currently, only for them to stare back blankly, forced to reveal they don’t like things with subtitles.  I’ve been banging on about Call My Agent! to anyone who’ll listen for the last few weeks, acting like some sort of unappointed Walter Presents in my attempts to make everyone watch it.  Sure, the smugness has been advantageous bycatch (a phrase borrowed from the harrowing Netflix documentary Seaspiracy), but I’ve genuinely enjoyed my hour an evening with Paris’s craziest talent agency, so there’s been a touch of altruism in my evangelising.  I’ve already bored everyone here with my inconsistent keepings-up with the French language, covered in my post on Lupin, but Call My Agent! actually came into my life following a flurry of articles on the Guardian extolling the show’s virtues.  Suddenly, I was the recipient of smugness, unable to nod knowingly as I read the journalists’ words celebrating a secret club of enlightened British folk who enjoyed comedy dramas that were almost too French to function.  I didn’t want the Guardian thinking I can’t keep up, so off I went.

Let’s start with the premise: bienvenue chez ASK.  Agence Samuel Kerr is a top-flight acting agency in Paris, representing all the biggest names in the French film industry.  I’ll stop you there if you can’t actually name any French actors or if you didn’t know there was a French film industry.  There are a lot of the former and plenty of the latter – don’t give me an excuse to be even smugger!  Our pilot episode introduces us to the four key agents that run the show, cruelling letting their boss and the agency’s namesake expire during a rare stretch of annual leave, meaning that four egotistical workaholics are about to find out it’s not so easy keeping France’s flightiest thespians on their books when to do so involves sacrificing their own happiness to see to their every whim.  Enabling and hindering them in equal measure is a team of assistants, papering over cracks, often of their own making, in order to solve that episode’s désastre.

You’ll come to adore the characters pretty quickly.  From Andréa’s extreme sarcasm to Arlette’s extreme honesty, via the relief that Gabriel does sometimes get a haircut and Mathias nearly always, eventually, somehow, sort of does the right thing.  Agents aside, though, I’m here for the assistants.  We’ve given all the best lines to Hervé, our sympathies lie with Camille as Mathias’s illegitimate daughter, Sofia injects a sense of fun and Noémie steals every scene with her madcap and manic antics.  All of them, in true French style, fly off the handle and deliver expletive-laden abuse at the slightest inconvenience.  This doesn’t seem to be a sackable offence in the workplace.  Rampant door-slamming is also positively encouraged, so sign me up.

With such a rich cast, you almost don’t need the show’s other main feature: A-list guest stars.  Just as Extras built each instalment around sending up the public persona of a household name, Call My Agent! does exactly the same thing.  I’ll admit to not recognising every big name to cross the threshold of ASK with unreasonable demands, but you can tell they’re really enjoying entering into the sense of fun, and who am I to deny them a nice day out?  But, dare I say it, I almost don’t need them…  It must be the uncultured Brit in me, so if you’ve recognised each one of them, caught all the references to classic French films (Amélie doesn’t count) then feel free to smug it all over muggins here.  My other slight adjustment at first was the episode length – clocking in nearer an hour, I always felt I was done ten minutes prior.  But by the time I was fully invested in seasons two, three and four, I ended up feeling wishes that it would never end.

Fans of silliness will fare well here, but given our Gallic cultural influence, it’s more of a sexy silliness.  There’s surprise nudity, as our neighbours across the Channel take a far less prudish approach to the female nipple, but snogging seems to be banned.  Any kissing is reduced to lengthy pecking which rings ever so slightly false when there’s so much passion elsewhere.  This is the joy of watching something from another culture: it’s not for you.  Much discussion takes place about fathers officially recognising their progeny, not just Camille, but also Andréa and Colette’s new-born.  I assume this is a piece of very efficient legislation we don’t have here, no different to having to cope with people paying for medical treatment in US dramas when we’ve got the trusty old NHS here funded by weekly clapping.

On that note, as we slide out of lockdown, you could do worse for escapism with Call My Agent!  Paris looks its best, but even in the drizzle, you’ll be itching to catch the train there, just so a waiter can be rude at your attempts to speak the language or you can be run down by Gabriel on his moped.  Most enduring of all, though, is the signature theme tune, oscillating through storylines with all the power of the music in Succession, elevating our sexy silliness to something a bit more artistic.

So, read along with Paris’s best agents, or, find your GCSE, A-Level and actual degree in French returning episode by episode so that, by the end, you’re suddenly able to meet a friend and spend the whole afternoon talking French after a gap of a decade.  Educational, and fun!  On that note, do be warned of the classic gopping translation of tu and vous.  English doesn’t distinguish by politeness between forms of the pronoun, you (and we only have one if you discount the archaic thou).  But in every French adult relationship, parties must elect to switch from the formal vous to the more LOL tu.  This is artfully done by using the verbs tutoyer and vouvoyer, but in the subtitles you simply have cast members saying “Hey, shall we be familiar with each other now?”  Call My Agent!, with a fifth series now promised after claiming the fourth would be the last, you can be familiar with me all you want.

The Simpsons (Seasons Six To Ten)

Since my last post on The Simpsons, in which I covered my stupid opinions on the first five series, as well as how the show came into my life in the first place, my loyal readers have been crying out for me to continue my ramblings and share opinions on subsequent instalments of the yellow family’s adventures.  So here we are, doing The Simpsons again, but make it seasons six to ten.  You might be asking yourself how I got through five sequences of around 25 episodes in under four weeks, but that’s one of the good things about lockdown.  There’s nothing else to do.  I let an episode roll while I lounge on the sofa with a morning coffee before I log on to the laptop for a bit of working from home.  A couple more play over lunchtime when I briefly step away from the laptop to eat some food that I have to make at home in my own kitchen, and then tidy up afterwards as well.  And finally, once I am finished with the laptop for the day, I step away to eat dinner, in the same room I have been in the whole time, only this time I play some more Simpsons episodes, eyes on the animation while I shovel in another home-prepped meal.  Don’t worry, my actual evenings, spent watching more telly (in the same room, guys), are filled with more adult and aspirational boxsets, like Fargo or Lupin.  I’m not a savage that simply canes hundreds of instalments of the same thing.

Airing between 1994 and 1999, this is what I shall deem The Simpsons’ sophomore years.  Let’s be honest, I only watched these many years later, although I do recall we did actually as a family finally get Sky at one point and for a few expensive years we did watch premier episodes in real time.  I remember the Mayored To The Mob episode being trailed so endlessly that watching it live became an involuntary inevitability.  Worldwide, The Simpsons’ incomparable cultural influence was well established and undeniable.  They had the near perfect storytelling of the vintage seasons to build upon, heritage with the perfect balance of humour and heart and, goodwill surrounding their beloved characters.  Everyone wanted to know what was happening in Springfield.  Indeed, these are some of the absolute classic episodes, but their density among lesser instalments decreases with each progression from one series to the next.  From Lemon Of Troy and Homer The Great’s terrific heights, we slide down a slippery slope of relying on tropes that extinguish the original charm with repetition and unsatisfactory plotting.

Let’s just remind ourselves that I have no legitimate position from which to criticise any of this.  These series are still some of the best TV committed to my eyeballs.  Some sequences I have seen countless times yet they still bring irresistible amusement (such as all of Das Bus).  It’s only as a fan and through this slightly academic process of re-watching that I have been able to pinpoint where things began to lose their shine for me.  We shall go through each one in turn, exceeding only Comic Book Guy for geeky irrelevance.

Firstly, Homer has now become nothing but stupid.  Not just a bit silly, but utterly and unforgivably reckless.  When he is slightly childlike, yet ultimately sacrifices to put his family first, as in You Only Move Twice, he is at his best.  Or in The Joy Of Sect, where his impenetrability offsets cultish earnestness, playing him for laughs is an utter joy.  But when he’s repeatedly ruining Bart and Lisa’s lives, it starts to grate.  Often, he’s a foil to both sides of an argument, as in The Cartridge Family, but his actions veer into unpardonable territory.  He was always preferable as an everyman family man that at least had some, if only modest, aspirations.  This is why he’s always my least favourite character.

Compounding this is an increase in far-fetchedness.  The Simpsons are at their best dealing with the banal – literally managing the household budget or coping with the education system.  But to eke out plot, they have to go to new places or become new things.  Marge and Homer embark on CV-busting dalliances with any and every career:  Homer becomes a carny, Marge becomes a policewoman, Homer becomes a bodyguard, Marge becomes an estate agent, repeat to fade.  Even Bart and Lisa dabble in broadcasting, military academies and ice hockey.  As a cartoon, we have to return everything to how it was at the start, but, as we move on from season six, our routes to getting there become increasingly extreme.  By series seven, we’re having to take an epic approach, and this just isn’t the Evergreen Terrace I want to hang out on.

What makes this more curious is that The Simpsons have always had an outlet to exercise and exorcise nonsense: the Treehouse Of Horrors specials.  In fact, my favourite ever Simpsons story is The Genesis Tub, found in series eight’s anthology (actually instalment number VII), where Lisa accidentally creates life for a science fair.  The very meaning of our existence is lampooned, all while taking aim at Lutherans and teacher assessment.  With the rules out the window for these seasonal specials, couldn’t the standard episodes have retained more realism?  My preference for nuclear family humdrum is probably just a personal matter, but the more celeb cameos (playing themselves), the more destination episodes (New York, Australia, Japan) and the more Homer embraces and then abandons a different lifestyle, the less original charm remains, even though each episode still offers many moments of brilliance.

I don’t think I’m even whingeing about inconsistency.  I’m just a viewer, setting up a mythology in my mind about what rules a show should play by, applying those rules to the world without telling anyone, and then expecting something else to what I’m being offered.  Let’s end on a moment I had clean forgotten but which surprised me with its poignancy and hope to such an extent that my spine tingled.  In ’Round Springfield, Lisa says goodbye to Bleeding Gums Murphy.  He was never a popular character, but he represents to her a certain metropolitan quality that’s lacking in Springfield.  The show deals with loneliness, being remembered, and family.  Lisa only comes across her hero because of her brother absorbing her parents’ attention.  Appearing to her after his death, Bleeding Gums reprises the song Jazzman with Lisa, and I’ll have to admit here that it brought a tear to my eye.  I don’t even know why.  So, despite some imperfections, The Simpsons can still touch me all these years later.

 

Fargo

“Whatcha got there, Margie?” seems like a strange choice for the most memorable line from the 1996 film, Fargo.  A lot of crime goes on in that story, all against the backdrop of the snowy Minnesota landscape, but it’s the charming local accents and the banal interest in what people are having for their meals that has stayed with me to this day.  That said, I only saw the film during my university years in the early 2000s, during a period in which I felt the best way to round out my terrible personality was to make sure I had seen all those classic films people talk about.  Back in the days of DVDs, Fargo was easily procured from a now-defunct online rental company, viewed on a laptop intended for academic support, and sat through with an attention span that now seems alien as these were also the days that predated smartphones and their irresistible whispers of distraction when you are trying to concentrate on absolutely anything at all.

Fast forward to 2014 and, a mere 18 years after the film’s release, a TV spin off emerges.  I’ve chosen the word spin off, as it really cheapens the programme, making it clear where the quality lies in this originator-progeny relationship.  Pah, I thought to myself, I shan’t ever be watching that.  But join me, if you will, in 2021.  More advanced in age, with greater maturity and self-assurance than my student self from decades before, I was no longer pursuing self-betterment through lists of must-see movies.  Oh no, I was looking at the IMDb list of top-rated television programmes.  And this is called growth.  There, at 38 (rankings may change over time) and with a score of 8.9/10, was the previously ignored Fargo TV series.  Well, this omission needed rectifying.  What kind of wildly successful TV blog would this be if, while having sat through the vast majority of top scorers (don’t worry, they’re all covered here, guys, from Rick & Morty to Our Planet) I allowed this oversight to continue?  And lo, thanks to Netflix, three quarters of my neglect has been rectified.

From my vantage point of having seen three of Fargo’s four seasons, I shall now offload all my thoughts and opinions for you to read.  Unfortunately the fourth series emerged while I was otherwise preoccupied and I haven’t been able to track it down on a platform, so we’ll just pretend we don’t care (though I truly do as it looks like a ripping period production with casting that finally offsets Fargo’s overwhelming whiteness).  But what I can say is that those first three outings of this boxset are cracking viewing to put in front of your face – how wrong I was about not expecting much from the TV version of a film.  What’s more, the stellar cast just goes to show how far TV has come in taking on cinema as the home of the big acting name or indeed of the quality production.

Each episode of Fargo is exquisitely crafted.  From the first frame, care and attention has been taken over every detail, as if all of it is a pilot that wants you to like it.  It’s how telly should be.  This is made all the more impressive by the fact that so much of it is shot in temperatures below freezing, as I can only imagine cameramen wanting to get out of the cold and therefore not really caring a toss.  I also like to think of everyone slipping over in the ice during the outtakes.  Not because I wish them ill, but because I am the sort of person that slips in ice, so I might as well assume it’s a universal quality.  One curious feature of our storytelling is that every instalment is preceded by a statement that the events are based on a true story, but that names have been changed to protect identities.  There’s no way of checking this as I simply cannot be bothered to type it into the internet, so again, we can just sit with it, wondering if we believe it, wondering if it matters, before moving on.

It’s pertinent, though, as the plots in Fargo are delightfully far-fetched.  To me, this is proof of veracity.  Honestly, you couldn’t make this stuff up.  Right?  Each series tracks over its ten episodes a wholly different storyline.  This means you’ll need to jettison an old cast and get to know a new one.  Gradually, hints of how these worlds and timelines connect are revealed, with series two’s seventies setting engendering an aftermath that plays back into the first series, which in turn has repercussions on the third.  May I one day know how this comes to bear on the fourth.

Playing out over the real towns of Minnesota and the Dakotas, our cast is often split into three camps.  We have heroes, often nice folk with above-average yet underappreciated ability in their jobs, normally law enforcement, who have to put up with the nonsense that swirls around them.  These are our Margies, carrying a torch of affection over from our original film.  Then we have our malcontents.  Their morals are often dubious, yet we can’t resist rooting for them.  They’ve faced hardship and come out stronger, but their drive and effort often lead to their own downfalls.  And then we have some great straight-up baddies, doling out evil willy nilly, creating the murderous rampages and bloodstains in the snow that are required to propel much of the plot forward.

I’d venture to describe Fargo as gently soothing, even though it’s awash in ultraviolence.  Somehow, the gruesome gore is easy to forgive, maybe because it’s framed in a higher art form.  We have a top-notch ratio of intrigue resolution to new curiosity establishment in each episode, as well as exemplary season finale crescendoing that resulted in my own patented viewing strategy: episodes nine and ten of each series had to be back-to-backed simply because I would get so excited (what a sad little life, Jane).  I typically only ever watch one instalment of a drama at a time so it doesn’t become wallpaper, but don’t worry if you have an alternative approach – it just means I am better than you.

So come all and feast upon this ensemble masterpiece.  You’ll revel at whatshisface off that film once and whoshername that used to be in thingy.  Not everyone masters the accent as successfully as others, and all the “oh yah”s and “ok then”s are a crucial part of our charm requirements, but each player has a great time with their character.  There’s bold storytelling as far as the eye can see, and dusting everything else in snow covers a variety of other flaws that I simply didn’t notice.  So take a trip via your screen of choice to this slice of the USA and treat yourself to some of the nicest murder stories ever known.

Last Chance U: Basketball

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

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

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

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

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

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

Top Of The Lake

 

There I was, the other day, struck by the thought that I hadn’t had Elisabeth Moss’s face in front of me on a big screen in a long time.  Mad Men was ages ago, and we are a while off another season of Handmaid’s Tale, though the memory of the excellence of series three is still a tingling sensation.  With recent government curbs on demonstration and their response to violence against women, we are another step closer to Gilead anyway, so we’ll all be blessing the fruit in no time.  Under his eye, indeed.  This brought me to click on Top Of The Lake on Netflix, a Moss-fronted drama that aired on the BBC back in 2013.  It looked rainy and gritty, promising some crimes perpetrated against a backdrop of luscious scenery and I felt safe in the knowledge I would have a strong performance from such a gifted actor in the lead role.

The first series is set in New Zealand, which is something I had somehow missed.  This isn’t Yorkshire (I was imagining Happy Valley vibes) but Lake Wakatipu at the bottom of South Island.  You can imagine my surprise, then, when Moss whips out a Kiwi accent.  It sounds decent to me, but from my perspective on the other side of the world, I realise I have no credibility to judge.  Moss plays Robin Griffin, returning to her home community from Sydney (which nicely covers an irregular vowel sounds anyway).  She’s in the police, sort of coming and going in a role to do with sexual assaults.  It’s hard to be sure if she’s on a working trip or not.  Her mum is unwell, but she almost ignores her to re-tread the paths of her own traumatic youth there, making it clear that she left for a very firm reason.  In a bit of a busman’s holiday, a local girl goes missing, and there are many suspicions of foul play, so Moss is in her element as the strong female and only capable police officer, dealing with an avalanche of male incompetence and insouciance as she tries to right the wrongs in her own community.

Before long, every character is a suspect, and this is because everyone is awful.  Unlikeable characters loom as large throughout as the spectacular scenery, but we are drawn in as Moss dashes in the drizzle from riddle to riddle.  There’s even a strange women’s commune set up beside the lake in shipping containers, riling some of the local populace but mostly sitting about drinking tea.  The climax gripped me with not only its gruesomeness, but its plausibility among a group of lakeside settlements who treat the most vulnerable in their society as expendable commodities.

Come 2017, the standalone conclusion is overturned as a second season appears.  The action has moved to Sydney, so our only point of continuity is Robin Griffin herself.  Still carrying the (additional) trauma of her previous lake-based experience, she now has new vulnerable girls to protect.  There are the South East Asian young women working in the licensed sex industry, branching out into further ways of selling their bodies.  There’s also the now-teenage daughter that Robin had given up for adoption.  She’s mixed up in these brothels, it turns out, rebelling against her adoptive parents (including a Nicole Kidman with little to do but have distracting hair) by pursuing a relationship with a vile German man who specialises in looking after stray cats better than he treats his sex workers.

Being strange throughout, Game Of Thrones’ Gwendoline Christie is our cop partner, clashing with Robin in various ways, while we sort of wobble through a sequence of events to our climax.  The unlikability of everyone far exceeds series one’s motley crew of characters, and this made it a bit of a slog to get through.  Everything was gross, but not quite grotesque enough to be a reason to be compelled.  I stuck with it for the sake of dear Elisabeth, covering for patchier performances.  On many an evening, clicking next episode felt like more of a duty than a treat, especially in a world of so much else to watch (bonjour, Lupin).

While this might not sound like the strongest recommendation, Top Of The Lake is still important viewing.  As a slagger-off of TV despite never having produced any, I should confess I am deep in the Introduction To Screenwriting term of a part-time Creative Writing MA I am doing.  I think we can all agree the quality of my prose needs professional help.  I also have a new-found respect for anyone who writes anything on telly.  A fellow course-member (on Teams of course – I have never met these people) pointed out to us that Top Of The Lake is a great example of a female story structure.  I think this is part of feminist literary theory, but our hero’s treatment within the show follows a different arc to what we see in the hegemonic male stories of our culture.  This is all a bit academic so let’s focus on the easy bits.  This is a strong female character, leading storylines that make us question how women are viewed and treated by our societies.  It’s not pretty, but it’s more relevant than ever.

Lupin (Lupin, Dans L’Ombre D’Arsène)

Due to a dreadful administrative error, it’s taken me until this 190^th post to include any boxsets in the French language within my ramblings here.  Désolé, everybody.  This has not been intentional.  Rest assured we’ve had plenty of Spanish (Money Heist and Elite), some German (Dark) and even some Korean (Kingdom) but I’ve been very remiss by omitting la Francophonie.  Most particularly, my guilt comes from my own possession of a French degree (or half of one, really).  There was a time I could pursue conversation with almost any citoyen, wielding the imperfect subjunctive and having at my disposal vast reams of memorised vocabulary in obscure areas (for some reason, I once knew all the garden birds).  I vowed I would never become one of those adults who lost the language skills of their degree, but here I am.  The truth is, I spent nine months in Germany for my university-mandated year abroad, but only nine days in France.  I haemorrhaged money in Paris during a summer heatwave trying to find a job/set up a whole life before I called it quits and brexited myself.  The oral part of my final French exam was abominable, so let’s acknowledge my trauma with the language before we go any further.

This did not stop me jumping on board the Lupin train in recent weeks.  Yeah it’s got subtitles, and yeah, even after twenty grand of student debt got paid off for that French degree, I still needed them to stand a chance of understanding a word of what was going on.  I’m of the ability where I can read the onscreen transcription really quickly and then compare it to the words the cast utter, using the text as a clue, and then making pointless comments to myself such as: hmm, that was an interesting approach to rendering that expression idiomatically in English.  Worse still, given the UK’s international pointlessness, we’re rendering things into American English.  But this is boring for everyone and doesn’t matter; Lupin is a great watch.  Just don’t destroy it by plumping for the dreadful dubbed versions that Netflix offers.

Our hero is actually Assane Diop, the son of a Senegalese man who came to France with big dreams.  Our star, therefore, is Omar Sy.  Not a household name in the UK, and I had only ever seen him in Jurassic World doing not much besides caressing a velociraptor while Chris Pratt pulled all the expressions.  I have a problem with watching that film over and over and Sy is consistently one of the most compelling parts, alongside my obsession with any storyline that involves things going wrong at a theme park.  Nevertheless, Lupin is the Omar Sy show and people of all linguistic bents should gather around and be drawn in.  You might be wondering where the Lupin bit comes in then.  Well, Arsène Lupin is actually the 1900s literary creation of Maurice Leblanc.  A bit like our Sherlock Holmes only with a different signature hat and a career on the other side of the law, Arsène Lupin’s gentlemanly thefts still inspire imaginations to this day, none more so than Diop’s.

In present-day Paris, Sy’s character enacts a thrilling series of heists under the noses of many a member of the snooty elite.  As a black man, he’s often able to exploit racial prejudice to his advantage, dressing as a cleaner in the opening episode and therefore becoming invisible to anyone with money.  At first, you might just think he’s a bit of a Jacques the lad with sticky fingers.  But no, this all ladders up to a life’s mission to avenge the death of his father.  Cue flashbacks to Diop’s youth.  His pa works for the high-net-worth Pellegrini family but they’re clearly bad news because the patriarch shouts a lot (proving money doesn’t buy happiness).  Finding himself in the care system, Diop’s only comfort becomes the gentleman thief and his stories, and thus a modern-day Lupin is born.

You’ve got Paris at its best and worst, some mixed-ability policemen on his trail (I believe these are what the French call “les incompétents”), the rich being dreadful towards the poor, racial injustice, family scenes where a super cool thief has to work hard to impress his teenage son, and enough French in which to bathe your ears that it’s like a GCSE listening exercise only you don’t have to write down any answers for the teacher to mark.  Sy immediately charms you into rooting for our hero, and the plot in both its episodic and series-long arcs picks up the pace and the jeopardy until you’re keen to race through with considerable vitesse.  Shame, then, that we only get five bits to kick us off with, but Netflix is following up with the next part soon and I, pour un, will be locked down in my flat ready to watch it and be inspired for my own ambitions to become a gentleman thief.  Ok then, maybe just a thief.