McMinn and Cheese

Lightning strikes twice

June 5th, 2022

And fuck your blue passport

As always, I struggled to sleep on our last night in France, knowing we would be travelling the following day — but not for the usual reason. Somewhere after 2 a.m., everyone in the village was woken by a colossal crash. To me, it sounded like it was right outside my bedroom window, as if someone had slammed the metal door to the old chicken shed with the force of a thousand angry teenagers.

In the split second between hearing the crash — an earthquake? an intruder? the roof coming off? — and the resulting roll of thunder, I had time to hope that it was only lightning. So strange, the working of the human brain. For example, I distinctly remember being awake to hear the bolt of lightning, and yet I was also clearly woken by the bolt of lightning. And the time between lightning and thunder can only have been a second or so, and yet I had time to imagine all the less welcome things it might have been.

It was lightning, and the house circuit breaker tripped out, not just for us but for the whole village. We were all up in the middle of the night, using phones as torches (I actually have a bluetooth speaker that is also a lamp) to switch the electricity back on.

In the morning we discovered that, far from being right outside the house, the lightning had struck a few hundred metres away, “on the Haute Saone side” of the mountain (we live in Territoire de Belfort, which is celebrating its hundredth anniversary, according to a roundabout on the way into the city).

So it was just lightning, but if I’d been wearing my Apple watch in bed, I would most certainly have had one of those concerned messages about my elevated heartrate when I was just lying down.

Couldn’t sleep after that, which meant business as usual as we started the long drive home. A friend texted to ask if the thunderstorm had cleared the air, and the answer to that was, not really. It was hotter and more humid the following day. Two hours in, we stopped at the fortified town of Langres for (expensive) diesel, and the temperature outside the car was over 28°C. It was as hot as July, and you got that same feeling: the one you get when you’re on your way in the summer and get out of the car at a service station and hit the solid wall of heat. Yes: we’re on holiday. Except, cruelly, we were on our way home.

I was nervously counting the UK numberplates on the Autoroute des Anglais, but when we reached the terminal at Calais, it wasn’t too bad really. But Sod’s Law applied throughout. The queue for check-in was short, but when we stopped at the machine, it immediately developed a fault and wouldn’t print our hanger. We paid £30 for an earlier crossing, but by the time we got the hanger printed and went around to join the queue for passport control, it was already touch and go.

The French passport guy did a swift check and waved us through with a “Bon courage!”, as if he knew what was about to happen. We approached British passport control. There was a line of eight (ish) lanes, all with a similar length queue, and all showing a green arrow meaning open. We were in the second lane along — the one on the left being for the fast-track “Flexi-plus” passengers.

Now, I don’t mind if people want to pay through the nose in order to board the next available train when they arrive. In normal times, fair enough. But times have not been normal since 2016, and — frankly — they’re wasting their money because the trains are not the hold up. Getting your passport checked is vexatious and stressful, and nobody gets through the process quickly.

Here’s what happened.

First of all, the green arrow in the first lane turned to a red cross. This meant that the traffic in that lane was now being filtered across into the next (and others, I think). Then, 10 minutes later, the green arrow in our lane turned to a red cross. And now we were being filtered across to join the next lane over. So that’s now three into one. And then the next lane turned red, and the next. Apparently, British passport control were closing lanes without warning the Eurotunnel staff who were directing traffic. Staff were told “fifteen minutes” but an hour later all the closed lanes were still closed.

By the time we inched our way to almost the front, we’d been sitting there well over an hour and had missed the train we paid £30 for. And then some joker suggested I give up trying to filter in and instead turn around and join the back of another queue. LOL. I refused.

Seconds later, one of the red crosses turned to a green arrow again and I managed to be third in line.

It still took an age to get to the booth, at which point the passport officer decided to make a fuss — for the first time in 20 years — because my OH and daughter were travelling on their French passports. “The rules are different, you see,” she said. Now, both OH and daughter have two passports, but while one was in the boot of the car, the other is at the US Embassy (we hope) waiting for a student visa. So we were stuck there, arguing with the passport officer for another 10 minutes. I’m sure the people behind us were delighted.

In short (and I’m sure anyone who travelled anywhere this half term will join me in this): fuck this country, fuck its government, fuck the flag wavers, fuck the jubilee, and fuck anybody who voted for this fucking shitshow.
A Carnival of Snackery by David Sedaris

June 1st, 2022

This second volume of diaries has a different tone than the first, Theft by Finding. That earlier (2017) volume covered years (1977–2002) during which Sedaris wasn’t yet a successful essayist and public speaker. In that first volume, the younger Sedaris spent indigent years as an addict and odd-job person before finding his voice in Santaland. This second volume covers the years in which the hugely successful Sedaris flew around the world signing books, giving public readings, and shopping.

And everywhere he goes, he collects outrageous stories. Whether they come from his people, or are simply his observations of the terrible things human beings do, they are all grist to his mill. At one point, he ruefully mentions one of his pieces being “fact checked” by The New Yorker. He writes non-fiction, but not really. His main subject has always been himself, and these diaries give you access to the base material before it is honed.

His people are the ones who stop him on the street to share an anecdote or off-colour joke, or attend one of his readings, or line up in a book store to ask for an outrageous dedication in the front of his latest publication. Be careful what you wish for, by the way: one man asks for such a dedication in a book he planned to give to his mother. Sedaris wrote, Your son left teeth marks on my dick. Don’t come here if you’re the type to take offence.

A Carnival of Snackery takes us from 2003 to the end of 2020; it’s not so much a day-by-day account of that time as a quick-fire tour, edited highlights, not even week-to-week as it is month-to-month. It’s still a hefty read: 562 print pages, giving each year (on average) just over 30 pages. Sedaris writes in the foreword that he has missed out the multiple entries about mice infesting their house in France, for example.

It comes across as a restless, magpie existence. The flat in Paris, the house in Normandy, the London pad, the apartment in New York, the beach house in North Carolina, the house in West Sussex. And this doesn’t include the hotels, the airports, the bookshops, the cars and coffee shops in which Sedaris encounters his people. He enjoys the fruits of his success: the first class seats, the five star hotels, the VIP treatment. At the same time, he’s not remotely squeamish or standoffish, and has made a career out of his willingness to “go there”, whether “there” is a swimming pool someone just took a shit in, or a slightly dodgy neighbourhood in Bucharest, or the roadside verges of West Sussex, where he famously picks litter.

Sedaris’ lack of squeam is his brand, which means that some parts of this are a bit gross for someone like myself. You might also end up horrified at Americans in general, as almost everyone he meets seems to hold views that are beyond the pale. And Sedaris collects all these stories because he is able to withhold judgement — or at least appear to at the time.

Reading these diaries might mean that you decide never to swim in a public pool again, and you will certainly wonder about every surface that you touch in a public building from now on. It’s ironic for such a globetrotter to have ended up locked down in New York City in 2020. Of all the places he could have landed, this surely must have felt the most claustrophobic.
Will the French ever forgive us?

May 29th, 2022
Pre-pandemic, I would drive to and from my OH’s house in France six times a year. In recent times, we’ve been using late night crossings and driving through the night. This has generally been a little less stressful than crossing during the day— or delay, as it might as well be called.

I’m a little out of practice making this journey, although I’ve been keeping up with my insomnia, so being awake in the middle of the night is no real challenge. This time, in a bold experiment, we decided to cross in my new car-shaped car. This is not something we’ll do often, as my OH prefers her brick-shaped car. But I was looking forward to the journey because I nerdishly wanted to see if we could make it on one tank of fuel: the car-shaped car being more economical than the brick-shaped one, even though they both have (more or less) the same engine.

But the problem these days, even crossing in the middle of the night, is that the French are punishing us for Brexit. As anyone who has made this crossing regularly knows, passing through French passport control used to be a non-event. Often, there was nobody in the booths; even when there was, they would wave you straight through. Since Brexit, though, they’ve taken to checking every passport. Add this to the thorough checking the British have been doing since 2005 (no Schengen Zone for us), and we’ve got ourselves a capacity problem.

Hence the overnight crossing habit. Peak times have become unbearable. Big holidays, like this Whitsun half-term, can still be a bit slammed, but it’s usually a bit quieter in the night.

Little did I know that there was a football match on. I have no understanding of what would drive someone to want to put themselves through this experience in order to watch tiny people kick a tiny ball around a distant pitch rather than just watch it on TV, but fanatics gonna fanatic, I suppose.

I was pre-warned in the sense that I saw the headlines about the Port of Dover being gridlocked, and I read about the 21 planes that left Liverpool airport, but how many more might there be at midnight in Folkstone? This of course, is on top of the closure of motorway lanes necessitated by so-called Operation Brock (Operation Brexit, as it should be properly called).

So the queuing began just off the M20, as we sat waiting to move forward to check-in. We were surrounded by the usual massive SUVs, but also a high number of Transit vans and mini-buses, one of which disgorged a dozen or so speci-men (of bullet-headed, over muscled or beer gutted British manhood) to piss at the side of the road. It’s a rookie mistake to drink anything when you’re likely to be sitting in a queue of cars for any length of time, let alone huge quantities of lager. One particular chap emerged three times from the same van in the space of 40 minutes. Cystitis?

Needless to say, forty minutes was barely scratching the surface of this Hell in the South. The authorities were allowing a few vehicles at a time through check-in, in order to manage traffic flow on the other side. So it took us a couple of hours to get through. One of the pains of check-in is that – first of all – two lanes of traffic turn into 8 or 10 check-in lanes; and then these 8-10 check-in lanes turn into one lane of traffic to get to the car park.

So it took another 40 minutes or so to reach the terminal car park. Nobody was really parking, however. They were just driving round the car park in order to join the queue for passport and customs control. We did have to park, however, because we had the cat with us, bless him. So, we got to pee in a toilet like civilised people, drink a swift coffee, and then join the queue again.

This took a while. We were up to four hours in total when we eventually reached the queue for boarding. I was taking everything in what stride I have left. Sure, the French are now checking passports as thoroughly as the British, and are even trolling us by building additional border control lanes – another five or six, over the six they already had. But not opening them, of course. But then we get to the part that, no matter how much of a talking to I get or give myself, always stresses me to the max.

All we are doing is sitting in a lane, in a car, waiting for the barrier to lift at the end, so we can go round and board a train. We have been here (literally) a hundred times. And a hundred times, people wind me up.

Having done this a hundred times, I know that the time between turning off the engine in the boarding line and the lifting of the barrier can vary between 60 seconds to 60 minutes plus. So you just don’t know. You just don’t know whether you’ll be waiting a minute or over an hour. So here’s what you shouldn’t do:
1. Leave your car
2. Fall asleep
3. Leave your car then fall asleep
4. Fall asleep then leave your car
Listen: we’re all tired, we’ve all driven a long way. We’ve all, at various points, had children (or cats) in the car with us. We all want to shut our eyes and sleep. BUT: if we needed to pee, you know what we did. We PARKED at the TERMINAL and used the TOILET in the TERMINAL. And then we got back in our car and joined the queue.

So I sat there for an hour. And I watched them, doing all of the above, and more. The performative male stretching and walking about. (If you were really the old hand you’re pretending to be, you would know that the barrier could literally lift at any moment*.) The kids running around even while cars were driving into lanes at inappropriate speeds around them. (Imagine the paperwork if one of them got killed.) The trips to the toilet. (There were toilets in the terminal, you cunt.) The rummaging in the boot. (If you thought you might need it on the journey, don’t put it in the fucking boot.)

The deadbeat French dad in front of me had three small children with him. He came out to rummage in his chaotically packed boot three times, clearly looking for something. Took his children for an endless toilet visit. Came back, rummaged in his boot three more times, each time closing it as if it were the last time. Then he opened it again, retrieved a plastic can of oil, and opened his bonnet to perform an oil change service while his children played musical seats in the car. And then?

Then he got into the car and fell asleep.

So that when the distant barrier lifted and I could see all the cars in front of him go through it, he didn’t move.

I drove around him, but not before a cheeky Skoda driver in the next lane along took the opportunity to sneak across and ahead. (This is unnecessary, by the way — the trains are long and there is plenty of room.)

Having got all that off my chest, I’m pleased to report that I made it to Auxelles with over 200km of range after an 800+km drive. As it turned out, because FIVE HOURS of the night was wasted at the terminal, I didn’t get to drive much in full darkness, but I did enjoy the clever headlights and the pretty interior lighting. And for the first time, I got my dream, which has always been to be able to push a button or throw a switch to adjust the headlights for driving on the wrong side of the road. Sure, it was in a menu within the infotainment system, but still. Right hand driving? Check the box, et voila. I appreciate this more than I can say, so I now forgive all stupidly bright adaptive LED headlights for being stupidly bright.

As for every other human being on the planet: you are not forgiven. Stay in your vehicle.

*Yes, the matrix sign might say something about when boarding will commence. But sometimes, they discover a bit of room on a train that’s about to leave, and they’ll count 5, 10 cars through the barrier to fill it to capacity. I’ve shared a spare spot in a carriage with a coach before now.
Slow Burn Sci-Fi (Night Sky)

May 25th, 2022
I think it’s telling that Night Sky (Amazon) was originally known as Lightyears. You can almost hear the sharp intake of breath in the meeting room when some wag suggested that – for a show that takes so long to get going – the title Lightyears is apposite. But I concur with many reviewers that it is a watchable show because of its two leads, Sissy Spacek (b. 1949) and J K Simmons (b. 1955), who play a married couple dealing with grief and a secret in their back garden.

The fact is, both Lightyears and Night Sky are meaningless titles for a show that could be called any number of other things more appropriate to its subject and themes. The Shed; or Neighbours; or If We Make it Nonlinear People Will Think It’s Clever.

It’s a show that fits in with several other “slow science fiction” dramas that have been on the “quality” streamers in recent years, from the exceptional (Station Eleven) to the meh-ceptional (Invasion, The Open Range). In fact, there is a growing list of these kind of genre shows, which try to put human relationships in the middle of all the sci-fi ideas, with varying degrees of success. This list might include:
- Raised by Wolves
- The Terror (and its sequel The Terror: Infamy)
- Foundation
- Invasion
- The Open Range
- Homecoming
- The Man in the High Castle
- Mr Robot
- Counterpart
- Station Eleven
- Devs
- Travelers
Now, this is very much a mixed bag. One person’s “slow burn” is another person’s “watching someone scrape the fiddly bits of wallpaper off a wall”. I tried an episode of The Open Range, for example, and couldn’t be arsed with it. And why I forced myself to watch all of Invasion, I will never know. I thought The Man in the High Castle was great, but I wouldn’t watch it a second time (ditto Mr Robot); whereas I watched Station Eleven, Travelers and Counterpart twice each. I really rated Raised by Wolves but on its own it wouldn’t be enough to get me to renew a lapsed subscription.

I’ll admit to having impeccable taste.

The problem with all these “genre shows that put the human drama at the centre” is that, well, all the other dramas do that. Science fiction is the genre of ideas. Big ideas, bewildering ideas, new ways of seeing the world, thinking about the past the present and the future, Big Dumb Objects, mystery objects, strange new worlds. It’s about squaring the circle in a time travel plot, or exploring an abandoned alien ship, or encountering The Other at the far reaches of the universe.

That Spacek and Simmons have some kind of a portal under their garden shed is so incidental to this show that it might as well be a Mysterious Door That Never Opens. They go visit this viewing room, look out at the amazing alien vista, and then go back across the garden to their house. When a stranger appears in their viewing room they take him in and the show is concerned only with him and his story for most of its run. Portal schmortal.

Fine, whatever. Take out the science fiction window dressing and you’ve got a story about a grieving old couple who take in a stranger and get involved in some conflict/shenanigans. And there’s my problem, as a lover of genre shows and science fiction in general. If the sci-fi tropes are incidental to the point of the show, then it’s just a show.

As to the non-linearity of the narrative, we’ve been here before. Does it add anything that we flash back occasionally to when this couple were a younger couple? Or when they were apparently exactly the same age as they are now but it’s supposed to be TWENTY YEARS EARLIER, or whatever? I’m a poor attention-payer, I know, but while I could work out what had happened to the granddaughter’s father, I’ve no idea what became of her mother. Then there’s the side-plot that starts – for no particular reason – in Argentina and doesn’t really add up to much, except… well, there’s this bad guy.

Stop thinking about Spacek and Simmons and you start thinking this show isn’t very good at all. Which is a shame, because they could have done so much more with it. You get a hint of the kind of thing they might have done in the final episode, but by then it’s too late. The litmus test is whether I would seek out a second season, and I’m not sure I would.
Times arrow

May 22nd, 2022

Make your mind up, Guardian

For a while, I was paying for a subscription to the Guardian app, which gives you a marginally less annoying experience for £10 a month (although I think I got 50% off that for a while).

But over time, these various subscription leeches are sucking you dry, so it’s sensible to go in and cancel things and start from scratch occasionally. (Kids? Can I cancel Disney+ yet? Please?)

So I cut my running costs by cancelling the Guardian for a bit, which makes it slightly more annoying to use. In the meantime, The Times (always paywalled) was offering three months for £1.29 a month (even cheaper if you do it on the web rather than through the app). This is only ever going to be a short-lived flirtation, because they want TWENTY SIX QUID a month after the trial period.

Haha! Keeps the riffraff out, I suppose.

I don’t need to detail here why the Guardian is annoying. There is no such thing as a left-leaning quality newspaper, so it’s all we have. You just have to put up with its centrist ways and the tappety-tap-tap of hot takes appearing all day long. On the other hand, there are some great writers (Marina Hyde, Zoe Williams, Rafael Behr) in amongst the annoying dross and Monbiot’s counterproductive catastrophising. The recipes are often great; but there are vast swathes of wasteland, pointless live blogs and frankly perverse TV recaps. The grown-ass adults who comment in vast numbers on the Doctor Who recaps are a particular low point.

One particular bugbear I have is the way that the Books page will frequently offer two reviews by different writers of the same book. Sure, I know the Observer is the fictive sister newspaper, but c’mon. Let’s see some joined up thinking, and throw out some review crumbs for a wider pool of writers. The other thing that makes me laugh is when you come across two comment pieces that are more or less at odds. I know this is the Guardian being a broad church and an open platform, but what I really want is for them to pick a fucking side and stop wringing their hands and plumping for the Liberal Democrats. Every. Single. Fucking. Time.

There aren’t enough eyeroll emojis in the world.

Here’s how I find The Times to be a bit of a breath of fresh air, in comparison. Mostly, it’s because it feels more like a newspaper, with a fresh edition each day. This does get updated a few times, but mostly there’s a sense – especially on the News pages – of starting fresh. This is also true of the Comment section. The tone here is very much about keeping the riffraff out of our society. So although Times Comment is predictably full of all of the worst possible takes you can imagine (example: it’s really unfair that parents who pay expensive school fees are seeing their horrible offspring overlooked in favour of bright state school kids when it comes to places at Oxford), these stupid takes don’t stick around like a bad smell for days on end, like they do at the Guardian.

The Times has some good puzzles, too.

I’m not going to make too much of the fact that I fundamentally disagree with The Times’ columnists on most things, but I think it is kind of useful to see how the opposition think, to know exactly what you’re up against. This is not because I think I need to look outside my bubble or some such self flagellating thing. It’s because, as the man said, it’s the hope that kills you. It’s when you read the Clarksons and the Corens and the India Knights and the Rob Liddles (or, if I’m honest, just the headlines) that you realise the size of the problem. It’s all very well the Guardian crew telling us what the government absolutely must do to address poverty/climate etc.; but when the ruling classes are talking about getting cashback by recommending investment firms to your rich friends, there is no hope. Gotta pay those school fees somehow, even if the playing field is STACKED against them.
Dumb action movies

May 21st, 2022

Along with the rest of the world, I shrugged my shoulders recently at the new trailer for the forthcoming Avatar sequel. I always thought this was the dumbest of all the dumb action movies, a film that seemed to exist only so that people could talk about how much it all cost.

It being mid-week, and because I’m paying for Disney+ (still! Can I cancel it yet, kids?), I thought I’d rewatch the original last week. I did so over two nights, partly to see if it was as stupid as I remembered it being. I’m sure I’m not alone in feeling a kind of fascinated horror at what has become of popular film. Can it really be this bad?

Yes, it can. I don’t have much to say about Avatar, and I’m sure none of my thoughts are original, but it really is truly, shockingly, stupid and bad—to the point where my mind boggles that there was any momentum for a sequel.

Item: hanging in the sky over the planet of Pandora, is (among other orbiting bodies) a gas giant. Now, I’m no scientist, but I imagine that an orbiting gas giant would generate massive tidal forces (think daily earthquakes and volcanic eruptions) as well as massive amounts of radiation. Basically, everybody would be living underground, if at all.

Sure. I know “Pandora” is a metaphor or something and the whole film is a metaphor and it’s the plot of Pocahontas etc., but still: dumb. Looks cool, but still dumb.

Item: unobtanium. Yeah, yeah, metaphorical maguffin, but fucksake: dumb.

Item: it’s a cartoon. There’s a line you cross when there’s more CGI than live action, and this film crossed it a million miles back. And like all CGI, no matter how “great” it is at the time of release, it looks shite after a few years. Avatar is a very expensive and very very stupid Saturday morning cartoon for a generation raised on such rubbish.

One of the reasons the idea of an Avatar sequel gives me the heebs is the memory of those 3D glasses. I think it was the first and last film I tried to see wearing glasses-over-my-glasses, and I swore never again. What a horrible, isolating experience. We already know I’m turned off by IMAX, and I’m doubly turned off by 3D.

I sometimes think about those people who bought a 3D television set. Do they still have them? Do they ever use the glasses that came with it? How many of them ended up in landfill? That kind of thing.

I think of Avatar as a landfill movie. So chock-full of really stupid ideas, cartoon violence, destruction, and howlingly bad dialogue that it needs to be buried in a really deep hole. In the end, although the blue people “win”, the amount of destruction visited upon their planet was so great that you can’t imagine they’d have much of a life. (Still, they would have been used to destruction from all the earthquakes and volcanic eruptions caused by the gas giant in the sky.) Avatar leaves us with the uncomfortable message that perhaps there would have been less damage, less suffering, fewer deaths, more to live for, if the blue people had just surrendered everything the humans wanted. You win, you lose.

All of which makes it seem like a foreshadowing of what is happening to the “yellow and blue” people as they fight off the invasion force from the Country to the East. You might fight them to a standstill, but you’re left with wrecked cities, a ruined economy, a traumatised population, and food shortages. Like Britain in 1945, and look where we ended up: with a government of cartoon villains.
The Terror: Infamy

May 15th, 2022

“Infamy, infamy, they’ve all got it in for me!”
Dennis Norden / Frank Muir

And so to The Terror: Infamy, a confusingly named follow-up to the 2018 TV series based on the ill-fated Franklin expedition to seek the Northwest Passage. Only this is about a different group of people being beset by terrors both material and supernatural. In this case it was their own government, ably assisted by the usual pitchfork-wielding suspects and people who ought to have known better who had it in for them.

Yes, that Dr Seuss

I reviewed the AMC TV series The Terror a while ago, and had a little moan about the lack of parts for women in the show. And now, belatedly, here comes this second series (which has appeared on the BBC iPlayer over here), and what do we have? Why, not only are there plenty of women in it (see? it can be done!), but there are women behind the camera, directing, writing episodes, and producing.

Infamy first appeared on AMC in 2019, a year after the original series. I said that it’s confusingly named because it has nothing to do with the original Dan Simmons novel, nor the series based on it. Instead, this sequel (?) is based on one of the most shameful events in the history of the United States. Which is saying something, because there are so many to choose from.

Following the Japanese attack of Pearl Harbor, American citizens of Japanese heritage were rounded up and sent to prison camps. Their fellow Americans mostly stood by and let this happen. Beloved children’s author Dr Seuss draw a cartoon for a New York newspaper depicting all Japanese Americans as potential saboteurs.

So on one level, this show is about that horrorshow. People being rounded up and sent to camps. In America. Denied their civil rights, their livelihoods, due process, dignity, fairness, recognition. One member of the cast, George Takei, was there in one of the camps. Other members of the cast and crew had family members, grandparents, and so on, who were there. Many Japanese-Americans joined (still! joined!) the 442nd Infantry Regiment and were involved in fierce fighting in the Vosges mountains in 1944. All of this we learn in a touching post-script to the final episode.

On another level, because this is The Terror, we have a story of a Yōkai – or perhaps a bakemono –, a mysterious spirit, which is variously haunting, possessing, and shapeshifting as it seeks something lost, and which will destroy anybody who gets in the way. In summary: scary Japanese ghosts, in America. Soldiers throw themselves from watchtowers, babies are still-born, people behave – and move – in disturbing ways.

So if you enjoyed being creeped out by the weirdly-moving ghosts in Ringu, you will probably enjoy this too. It probably lasts a couple of episodes too long, but that’s a fault with all kinds of shows. There are quite a few subtitles too. Still, this is a step up from the original, and it’s good to see that so much of the story (at least half!) centres around women.
Let’s talk about Ten Percent

May 10th, 2022

When Amazon dropped Ten Percent, the English language version of Dix Pour Cent, which was the original French title of Call My Agent (keep up at the back), the tenor of the reviews was that the adaptation was fairly pointless, largely because the producers chose not to depart from the original storyline very much.

A straight remake, then, almost a shot-for-shot duplication. The action is transplanted from Paris to London, and the cameo appearances are well-known British actors rather than well-known (?) French actors, other than that, same show, complete with all the flaws of the original.

Why was Call My Agent so popular on Netflix in the first place? My theory is that it was because of lockdown. People generally don’t really like watching subtitled shows, but because of the lockdown(s), everybody got desperate.

For myself, I did “watch” Call My Agent, or I should say I was in the room while it was on, but as I treat television as radio with pictures, I didn’t really read the subtitles. My understanding of the show, therefore, was based on my shaky schoolboy French and my high level of media literacy. Anyway, my opinion is and was that it was fairly harmless, lightweight, but that it wouldn’t have been so popular if not for lockdown. It was two kinds of escapism: light entertainment, and dreaming about Paris when we couldn’t go there.

So the English version is almost exactly the same, as I said, except we’re no longer in lockdown and only wankers think London is cool. The show does have several flaws that make it a bit irritating. Here goes.

First of all, the theme music. JESUS CHRIST. If you’ve never heard it, count your blessings; if you have, then rest assured that the deafness is only temporary, unless you deliberately stuck knitting needles in your ears so you wouldn’t have to hear it again. The screeching singing is like two forks tangled together in a drawer, and it’s possibly the worst thing I’ve ever heard.

The irritant music, sans vocals, continues throughout every episode, with the jaunty piano bar interludes padding each one for length. It’s the kind of music used to make unfunny comedy shows seem more, you know, funny. It’s the Comic Sans of music, and like Comic Sans, it’s terrible.

Moving on from the music to the premise of the show, are we supposed to believe that this talent agency in London, which seems to have so many prominent and successful actors on its books, is also in deep financial trouble? Clearly, the joke of the programme is that nobody knows what they’re doing, but still. I’ll redact the names, in case you are the one person who enjoys cameo appearances, but these people are all working and presumably paying the commissions. Shaky premise aside, the show really rests on the one joke (nobody knows what they’re doing) and repeats it over and over again.

The script that accompanies this one joke is dreadful, and it’s one we’ve seen before in a slightly different (but not different enough) context. While there is a team of writers, and they were clearly adapting the original French thing, the principal brain behind this is John Morton, who was also responsible for the BBC-satirising W1A, and the Olympic Games-satirising Twenty Twelve. If you know those scripts, then you know Ten Percent. It’s a lot of people sitting in meetings looking bewildered and or bored and saying, “Yes…” and “Of course…” over and over again.

It’s tired and it is tiresome. Haven’t we been here before, with a show about the meaninglessness of work, the pointlessness of meetings, and the vacuousness of corporate communication? We have. And we have the “Great!” “Super!” guys from The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin to thank for it. Jack Davenport has almost nothing to do except look puzzled and say, “Yes…” at intervals. Meanwhile, Maggie Steed says, “Of course they do,” at similar intervals. Another actor (actually several of them) get to make the same face across the office over and over again. And then there’s the perky American who is “Really excited!” but secretly sad. It’s all very lazy writing. Why give anybody anything to say when you can just have them hem and ha and apologise all the time?

It’s all a bit unforgivable. As to the actors who were clearly queueing to gently send themselves up as the variously stitched up, long-suffering, disenchanted, tolerant, slightly insecure clients of this agency? Shame on them.
Grace (ITV/BritBox)

May 9th, 2022

I’ve got very mixed feelings about Grace, which has been running on ITV on Sunday nights, and is available on BritBox without adverts if you’re a subscriber.

On the one hand, it stars John Simm, who is always a very watchable actor. It’s set in Brighton, which makes a change. The series is based on the novels by Peter James, which I’ve never knowingly read but which seem to be very popular. There have been 18 of them!

On the other hand, the show is a very by-the-numbers procedural, apart from the one thing that might set it apart, which the producers seem to have downplayed to make the show more standard. More on this below. Then there’s the unforgivable use of the hoary old trope of the dead/missing wife. Roy Grace’s wife is 10 years gone, and of course he’s obsessed/haunted etc., and apparently unable to move on with his life. *thunk*

ITV seem lukewarm on the show. Sure, it has a prime Sunday night slot, but at this time of year; and Season 2, so-called, comes a year after Season 1, which in the UK at least consisted of just the one episode. Wikipedia has it as two (ooh), but the second was shown on the 24 April this year, not last year, which was when the first episode appeared. Call episode 1 a pilot, and what we’re watching is Season 1 proper, which is still only going to be 4 episodes, making 5 in total.

All of the novels have the word dead in the title, and the TV show follows the same styling. But this conceit is fairly pointless, and the titles don’t seem to bear much relation to the episode contents.

The one wrinkle this show has is that Roy Grace sometimes takes items belonging to murder victims and consults a psychic. This is a background rumble to a lack of respect for him from his superiors, and sometimes shouted questions from fictional journalists, but it doesn’t seem to lift the show enough out of the ordinary. The producers have definitely shied away from making this a show about a detective who solves crimes by consulting a psychic.

John Simm remains watchable, but while the show is competent, it doesn’t zing. Also, if there were that many murders in Brighton, I think we’d know about it.
Bosch: Legacy (Amazon tried to hide it, but I found it)

May 8th, 2022

I’ve pointed out before that Amazon are terrible at curating their own premium television service. There is actually quite a lot of decent stuff on Amazon, but you would never know it from looking at the interface for Amazon Prime, which mixes so-called “originals” with back catalogue, mixes stuff you have to rent or buy with the stuff included in your subscription, and – now – mixes Amazon Prime stuff with Freevee stuff as well as stuff – like Station Eleven – that you have to get a subscription-within-your-subscription to see.

It’s way too complicated in a universe of premium TV services, and if you’re looking for something to watch, your heart might sink at the prospect of negotiating that interface. And on top of all this, Amazon are simply terrible at telling people when new stuff is going to be available. To the point, I think, that TV critics can’t even be arsed with it. I listen every week to the Radio Times podcast, and it seems they’re much more likely to talk about something on BritBox than something on Amazon.

In the middle of all this nonsense, and for reasons best known to themselves, Amazon have decided to take what is probably their best show (and the main reason to get a Prime subscription) and put its sequel series on Freevee, a television service so pointless that it’s already on its third name — and still nobody cares about it.

Laving aside the terrible (and non-compliant) Prime TV apps, the problems begin on the Amazon landing page, where you’d barely know that there is a whole premium television service with expensively made shows somewhere behind it.

When you do get to the Prime page, what do you see?

Two (2) prominent promotions for an undoubtedly shit film; something that might be a comedy aimed at teenagers, some kind of undoubtedly shit true crime documentary, and some kind of undoubtedly shit live comedy thing. None of which, you’ll notice, is Bosch: Legacy, the sequel series to the five (excellent) series of Bosch. Bosch: Legacy dropped its first four episodes on Friday 6th May – two days ago.

Scrolling down, and we get two almost identical tiles for something called The Escape Artist. Ooh, is this new? No: 2013. Then a bunch of films which were made in years ranging from 1962 to 2019. These are categorised, variously, as Movies We Think You’ll Like (or How Algorithms Get Things Wrong), Popular Movies. Then we get TV Shows We Think You’ll Like and then New Movies Every Day, Science Fiction Movies; suggestions based on the fact that I watched an episode of The Wilds before deciding I couldn’t stand it; then Documentary Movies, Top Rated TV Series, Noughties Movies, Popular TV Shows, Documentary TV Shows, Emotional TV and Movies, Action and Adventure TV Shows, Tense TV and Movies, Because You Watched William and Kate (I didn’t), Comedy TV Shows, Top 10 in the UK, Comedy Movies, Feel Good TV and Movies…

And so it goes. None of the above included Bosch: Legacy. It took till I scrolled down to Top 10 in the UK to even see the latest episode of Star Trek: Picard, a show I have actually been watching. You’ll also note a huge number of movies, comedies, and documentaries, which I almost never watch. I skipped over mention of the sport that I never watch. You’ll also note there’s not a single opportunity to Continue Watching things I’m in the middle of, no Wish List (even though Amazon does let you add things to a personal list). Even the My Stuff tab at the top takes me not to my current list or shows I’m currently watching but to things I have already watched.

Amazon spent $11 billion on TV production in 2020, and $13 billion in 2021. But their trash interface makes their TV service look trashy, and completely hides the good stuff. Stuff like Reacher, Wheel of Time, Patriot, The Man in the High Castle, The Marvellous Mrs Maisel, Homecoming.

And so to Bosch: Legacy, which has been made with the same great production values, same lead actor, same high-quality scripts, some familiar faces and some new ones… and yet where is it?

It’s on FreeVee, which used to be called IMDb TV, and before that IMDb Freedive. Amazon own it. It has stuff on it. You can watch it for free (with ads). And I must say that the phrase “free with ads” did make me hesitate. But it turns out I needn’t have worried. Here in the UK at least there are hardly any ads. You barely even notice them. It seems that its only purpose is to allow Amazon to offer a free, ad-supported tier, although it doesn’t have the same stuff on it as the paid-for Prime service. And all it seems to do, for me, is cheapen the offering, make it harder to find Bosch: Legacy, and make it less likely that people will watch it.

It’s all absolute insanity. Still, as long as Bezos gets to play astronaut, I suppose. Do you think Amazon know how close “Freevee” is to the UK’s “FreeView”?

As to the actual show: in spite of Amazon’s efforts to prevent me from ever watching it or knowing it existed, I enjoyed it. Didn’t like the theme tune much. Bosch has left the LAPD and is working as a private detective. He’s hired by a rich old man in a wheelchair (in a scene reminiscent of The Big Sleep) and is also working with his former nemesis Honey Chandler (Mimi Rogers), who is pursuing to corrupt billionaire who tried to have her killed. And Bosch’s daughter Maddie (Madison Lintz) is a rookie cop. The story picks up exactly where Season 5 of Bosch left off, so that you’d barely know the difference. So a great big shrug emoji, but catch it if you can.