An early reality TV series in which neighbours are challenged to redecorate each other’s homes in a limited time period and with a limited budget. They can call on the resources of carpenter ‘Handy’ Andy Kane and presenter Carol ‘nominative determinism’ Smillie. They also have the help [citation needed] of one of a suite of interior designers: jumpy cool mum Linda Barker, hip head girl Anna Ryder Richardson, or foppish spaniel-man Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen. The remodelling is done in secret, with each episode ending with the grand reveal to the other team, who are now going to have to eat dinner under a chandelier made out of a colander.

Rooms

In the late ‘90s some friends needed furniture for their new offices and that, inevitably, meant a trip to the fabled two towers of Croydon IKEA. Equally inevitably, that meant getting lost in Thornton Heath. Eventually, like Sam and Frodo trying to reach Minas Morgul, they had to ask a passer-by for directions. This South London Faramir was holding two differently flavoured Bacardi Breezers, with which he gestured as he said: ‘Keep going till you get to a little fuck-off. Then go left. Then there’ll be another little fuck-off, where you go right.’

Once they had discovered that a ‘little fuck-off’ was a mini-roundabout, the directions from the Bacardi Geezer — like a friendly ranger of Gondor — came good. Instead of killing a giant spider, on reaching IKEA they bought (also inevitably) a blue sofa.

The blue IKEA sofa was everywhere at the time; it’s even in the Museum of the Home’s exemplary ‘90s living room. There was an awful lot of IKEA in Changing Rooms: cheap furniture that could be easily acquired and easily — if not competently — customised. IKEA was the furniture retail equivalent of MDF, a cheap and adaptable wood substitute without which Changing Rooms could not have existed.

Both these things were relatively new: IKEA first came to Britain in the late ‘80s, around the same time that MDF started in mass production. The potential audience for Changing Rooms was also pretty new. By the late ‘90s almost half of under-35 year olds in the UK owned their own home, and were looking for cheap furniture to put in it. This was pretty much the peak of home ownership in the UK. (Within a decade, we would discover that the cheap mortgages that had enabled this boom had been a very, very bad idea indeed.)

Even those of us who were still renting tiny flats (and the tiny TVs on which we were watching Changing Rooms) were sitting on our own IKEA chairs and eating our supper off IKEA crockery with IKEA cutlery. This was not just because IKEA was cheap and practical, but also because it was stylish: all Scandinavian simplicity and understated design. Wildly affordable stylish homeware had not previously been available to the British. You could have cheap and nasty things, or florid and expensive things. The only way you could get nice furniture cheaply was to buy it second hand, with free clothes moths thrown in. Or you could ‘salvage’ old furniture other people had thrown away, which is why our sofa smelt funny in damp weather. Cheap and modish was new, and undeniably exciting. Not to mention very handy for Changing Rooms.

Watching Changing Rooms was like wandering through the exploded house of an IKEA ‘Showroom’, with all its mocked up sitting rooms and bedrooms and kitchen/living spaces. Like a funhouse mirror version of the Museum of the Home, it offered a glimpse of all those other possible lives. It was a series of domestic dioramas, like looking out of the window of a suburban train: lives suddenly opened up before you and then carried away.

We were also watching Changing Rooms, to be frank, because it was on. With a choice of four TV channels and no internet to speak of, you watched what you were given. BBC2 went on at 6pm (the moment I got in from work) for Star Trek: The Next Generation, and then stayed on until I went to bed. I couldn’t think of anything else to do, and wouldn’t have been able to afford it if I could.

But the show also held a specific appeal for me, because I was working in design. My friends who got lost in the fuck-offs were buying furniture for their web design agency (another New Thing), and I ended up working there with them. Web design has a lot in common with interior design: people think it’s all about the visuals, but really it’s all about the usability, and if that’s done well you won’t notice it at all. There’s even language in common: screen furniture, wallpaper and, in those days, an awful lot of tables.1

I felt an intense empathy with the Changing Room designers in their battles with vague and incomprehensible briefs, small budgets and over-involved clients. (Design clients always think designing is easy, and they always refuse to believe that the professionals know what they’re doing.) The fevered invention, and the desperate search for anything that could be easily reused and repurposed, was all too familiar. Frankly, I admired their professionalism. They designed, as all practical designers must, for the audience: not the battling DIYers who were going to have to pay to have that room re-redecorated afterwards, but the audience at home. Their unhinged creations were not supposed to be good interior design; they were supposed to be backdrops for dramatic reveals. They were supposed to be good TV.

Changing

In 1962, the BBC bought a derelict semi-detached house in Ealing and filmed DIY guru Barry Bucknell as he spent a full year renovating it. In the Reithian frame of the BBC’s purpose this was more information and education than it was entertainment; Barry Bucknell was there to teach the nation how to Do It Themselves. Before the Second World War most Britons had lived in rented property, but after the war an increasing number owned their own homes (by the ‘70s this was the majority). They needed to know how to lay a path, plaster a wall and put up a shelf, and the BBC was going to make sure they did it properly, while wearing a tie.

The closest television got to Changing Rooms in the ‘60s was a show called, deliciously, In Your Place (1967), in which two interior designers pitched different ideas for remodelling a room. There were two amazing things about In Your Place: firstly, it was presented by voice-of-Dougal-and-father-of-Emma Eric Thompson; and, secondly, there was no competitive element. The two designers presented their designs, everyone said how interesting they both were, and then the show ended. The point was for the viewer to be introduced to new concepts in interior design, not for them to experience any dangerous excitement.

BBC2 was still proudly ploughing the gentle education furrow in the late ‘90s. (In fact there was probably a programme about gentle ploughing somewhere in the schedule.) On the day Changing Rooms first aired, the channel also broadcast an appreciation of the apple orchards at Wisley, a display by young sheepdog handlers, and a look at the pickles of Italy and Scandinavia called A Perfect Pickle Programme. Even the less rural programmes were still relentlessly responsible. In the same week, instead of engaging in heavy-handed banter and male status anxiety, Top Gear worried about the EU mechanism for setting car part prices.

The only other show on BBC2 that was remotely as fluffy as Changing Rooms was Ready, Steady, Cook, a show in which cooks were given random ingredients and a time limit and told to conjure a meal. There are no coincidences here: they were produced by the same man, a man who was about to launch the UK’s version of the Dutch reality show Big Brother. That man was Peter Bazalgette, the great-great-grandson of Joseph Bazalgette, a Victorian engineer best known for his totemic improvements to London’s sewerage system. In other words, both Bazalgettes have been instrumental in massive changes to British cultural and domestic life. Joseph helped take effluent away from people’s homes, while Peter… well, like an episode of Changing Rooms you know how this is going to end.

If we’re trying to be fair about it, there’s an argument that Bazalgette was attempting to redress an imbalance in the way Reith’s principles had been applied. For a long time, ‘entertainment’ had been deprioritised in lifestyle programming in favour of a whole lot of education and information. Shows like Changing Rooms and Ready, Steady, Cook, which introduced competition and ‘stakes’ into lifestyle programming, were intended to right that bias. And Changing Rooms did sometimes contain trace amounts of information. Instead of magically revealing a set of MDF bookshelves, ‘Handy’ Andy would occasionally stop and explain how he had done something. But the information was a bit like the oats in Honey Nut Cheerios: it wasn’t the point. It was just there to assuage any residual guilt we might have about consuming so much rubbish.

Here’s a proper documentary about ‘Handy’ Andy himself from Adam & Joe:

From one angle Changing Rooms looks very innocent these days: a spoonful of sugar in the high-roughage BBC2 diet. But it was actually the first tremor of the approaching cultural earthquake of Big Brother, the beginning of the end of Reithian broadcasting. Thirty years later, all lifestyle programming is some form of game show; the news is dramatic wallpaper; and every documentary features a replaceable celebrity going ‘on a journey’ to discover something you already know. Broadcast television thinks it can compete with internet video by deprioritising information and education. Meanwhile, what are we doing with this glut of streaming video? Watching reviews of power tools and DIY how-to videos on YouTube.

For a (slightly) more sober form of ‘90s lifestyle programming, there’s always people and their cars, instead of houses, and From A to B:

Edmund Blackadder (Rowan Atkinson) is a suave, cunning and much put-upon member of the court of the capricious and all-powerful Elizabeth I (Miranda Richardson). With the hindrance of his idiot hanger-on Lord Percy Percy (Tim McInnerny) and his innocently dumb servant Baldrick (Tony Robinson) he is constantly devising schemes to get ahead, all of which fail, leaving him constantly just a few steps ahead of the executioner.

Blackadder

If you’ve ever noticed that older adults tend to have a peculiarly clear and immediate recall of events from their childhood and adolescence, you might be interested to know there’s a term for this phenomenon: ‘the reminiscence bump’. This refers to a fertile period, memory-formation-wise, that kicks off around the age of 10 and peaks somewhere between 15 and 25. This explains why cinemas are full of billion-dollar remakes of ‘80s comic books, why Facebook groups are full of crumblies posting about Spangles, and the existence of this newsletter.

It also explains why these memories are so beguiling and cosy: we were young when we formed them, and did not yet have the understanding or context to properly comprehend the world. The recollections might be clear, but they also tend to be narrow in focus and misleading in apprehension.

The reminiscence bump appears to happen because this is a period in our lives during which everything is new, including us; and new information is important information. So in it goes: into our memories, our world views, ourselves. All of which is a long-winded explanation of why, while watching Blackadder II recently, I raised a little cheer at random phrases. ‘A nugget of purest green.’ ‘You have a woman’s hand, my lord!’ ‘You’re so clever today, you better be careful your foot doesn’t fall off.’ The lines that provoke this response aren’t usually ‘jokes’ in the sense of punch lines; they’re set-ups, or bits of business. But they are nevertheless hard-coded somewhere at the root of my personality, impressed upon my brain at its most malleable and hungry moment.

It should be noted, however, that Blackadder II is also full of incredible jokes. One of the reasons it went in so hard and deep is that it is very, very good. It is significant that I don’t remember whether I even saw the previous series of the show, The Black Adder (1983).

The Black Adder was written by Richard Curtis and Rowan Atkinson as a vehicle for Atkinson. It is set in the late Middle Ages, opens with the Battle of Bosworth, and features Atkinson as an idiot prince ineptly scheming to get ahead at court. It is not very, very funny. It is full of funny ideas, but the execution is off. It smacks of an idea that has been both over-thought and under-thought. The opening episode, for example, starts with a voiceover (never a good sign) explaining how Henry VII rewrote history, wiping a fictional Richard IV from the record. If this isn’t complex enough, a lot of the subsequent jokes rely on the audience having an intimate knowledge of Shakespeare’s Richard III.

Blackadder II, on the other hand, begins with a knob joke. We are introduced to Blackadder as he and Percy are practising archery indoors, and Baldrick is holding the target. Blackadder distracts Percy, who consequently hits Baldrick in the genitals with an arrow.

Of course, this is not just any knob joke; it’s a good knob joke that escalates in all kinds of unexpected ways. But it is a knob joke nonetheless; a mangled knob, rather than a mangled quotation from Shakespeare.

Blackadder II was written by Richard Curtis again, but this time alongside Ben Elton, who had made his name with the anarchic student sitcom The Young Ones (1982). It is often claimed that it was Elton who brought the knob gags to Blackadder II, but this flies in the face of the evidence: there are plenty of rude jokes in The Black Adder. They’re just not very good. One thing that Elton clearly did do was persuade everyone that Rowan Atkinson — who later found international fame as Mr Bean, and whose true comic love is clowning — could get big laughs as a witty and intelligent authority figure.

In other words, Elton brought a different comic sensibility, which went along with his different background. Curtis and Atkinson had both been to Oxford, and Atkinson was already a TV star after appearing in the sketch show Not The Nine O’Clock News (1979—82). Elton, meanwhile, had studied drama at Manchester (alongside Rik Mayall and Adrian Edmondson), and was strongly associated with what was then called the Alternative Comedy scene. And while he was in the process of becoming a TV star himself with Saturday Live (1985—88), his preferred mode of performance was stand-up.

Elton has spoken about how torturous he found working on Blackadder with all those Oxbridge graduates: Curtis, Atkinson, McInnerny, producer John Lloyd, Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie. The ‘Oxbridge’ of it was relevant, and not for inverse snobbery reasons. It was Elton’s belief that the tutorial system at Oxbridge had encouraged in these men a strong preference for disputation. Script-reading sessions, he says, were like agonising quasi-tutorials in which the comedic potential of individual words was discussed at such length that everything stopped being funny. Eventually, unable to bear it any longer, Elton stopped attending them.

The combined backgrounds and talents of Curtis and Elton made the resulting partnership extraordinarily fecund. Indeed, I think there’s an argument that the three seasons of Blackadder they wrote together is the best work either of them has done. The historical satire is leavened with slapstick, the in-jokes with knobs. Just like The Black Adder, Blackadder II has plenty of Shakespeare jokes in it; indeed, there’s one early on in that first episode, shortly before Baldrick’s lucky willy. But it’s a joke about a woman disguising herself as a boy, instead of a ‘humorous’ misquote from a history play. At a more fundamental level, the show’s setting is not the incomprehensible Wars of the Roses, but a period every British child knows all too well; a period that is instantly recognisable from ruffs and codpieces; a period that needs no explanatory voiceover.

Baldrick’s lucky willy joke is a good example of how the rebooted Blackadder approached history. Elizabethans did indeed sometimes practise archery indoors (albeit in the long galleries of grand houses, rather than tiny sets in television studios), but it absolutely doesn’t matter if you don’t know that. If anything, the scene is somewhat funnier if you don’t, the idea of indoor archery being somewhat preposterous.

Then, there is the depiction of Elizabeth I. Miranda Richardson plays her as a psychopathic pony girl, a Tudor St Trinian with access to an executioner. This means there is somewhere around three different levels of comedy in this character. One comedic level springs from portraying Elizabeth I in this way at all. There is a view of the Elizabethan era that is foundational to British sensibility, and it runs as follows (please imagine it heavily italicised): it represented the end of the damp, incestuous, confusing quagmire of medieval Britain, and the glorious beginnings of Empire. Given this, it is comically impudent and slightly rebellious to present Gloriana as a petulantly insane schoolgirl.

Then there is a deeper historical joke, one that is more nuanced and a bit sad: Renaissance princes were, essentially, coddled posh kids who existed in luridly weird circumstances. Their childhoods frequently combined imminent violence with extreme luxury. They believed themselves to be anointed by God, and yet were repeatedly presented with evidence that they were human. They were often, as a consequence, driven more than a little mad.

But the primary-level joke is the obvious one: Miranda Richardson is hilarious. Elton has said that Richardson’s performance was the one that always surprised and delighted him and Curtis; they literally did not know what she was going to do next. It’s a wonderfully unhinged bit of business, totally mad and utterly committed.

But then, all the core cast are brilliant, including Tim McInnerny in his television debut as the spectacularly dim Percy and, particularly, Patsy Byrne as Queen Elizabeth’s childhood nurse, a deliriously lurid performance. And we haven’t even got to the cameos from legends, including Miriam Margolyes and Tom ‘The Doctor’ Baker.

This was the genius of Blackadder II: the marriage of deep wit, punchy jokes, and superlative performances.

II

These days, Blackadder II is a historical comedy in another sense. It is a testament to the BBC of the period.

When it was made in the mid-’80s, the BBC had all the infrastructure of a state broadcaster. Indeed, it was practically a little state itself. It had the studios at Television Centre, where most of Blackadder was filmed. It had a costume department that could handmake Elizabethan costumes for a six-episode sitcom. And, as one of only four television stations in the UK at the time, it had the clout to pull together an amazing crew to make it.

As well as not being hugely popular, The Black Adder was also hugely expensive; as John Lloyd said, it looked a million dollars, but unfortunately cost two. But it was nevertheless recommissioned, because this was a time when the BBC was willing to give shows a chance. Curtis cannily recruited Elton, who insisted that rather than being an expensive, location-shot parody, Blackadder had to become a much cheaper (and more familiar) studio-set sitcom. Then, with perfect comedy timing, the show was cancelled. But after reading the scripts, the incoming Director of Programmes, Michael Grade, reversed his own decision and gave it another go. This brave behaviour by a senior manager says something about the internal culture of the BBC at the time.

Now, that internal culture is as lost to history as Merrie Old England. Admittedly, it was a culture of state control, limited opportunity and suffocating bureaucracy; but it was also a culture that allowed for innovation, principles and taste. It was a culture in which an unsuccessful, niche period comedy was given the room to become a national institution, instead of being quietly cancelled halfway through by a streaming platform that cares only about quarterly results.

But that’s probably just my reminiscence bump talking.

Speaking of the hysterical terrors of the Tudor court: here’s Wolf Hall

TV and radio are are little boxes full of many kinds of friends: informative friends, entertaining friends, distracting friends, friends who just won’t shut up and go away. In our semi-regular TV re-watch feature, we take this metaphor and chases it into the ground with deadly intent.

Sir Stephen Fry (Uppingham, HMP Pucklechurch) was introduced to Hugh Laurie (Eton) by Dame Emma Thompson (Camden School for Girls) when they were all in Cambridge Footlights. A BBC2 sketch show was inevitable. Also inevitable, given the late-‘80s timing, was the meta nature of the show, with Fry and Laurie acting as TV hosts introducing sketches that frequently satirised the forms and cliches of television. It also featured running characters – including the naive spies Control and Tony, and the self-important businessmen John and Peter – and non-sequitor vox pop catchphrases such as ‘Well, I wouldn’t suck it.’

M’colleague Stephen

The first thing you notice about A Bit of Fry & Laurie is how visually horrible it is. Everyone celebrates the day-glo early ‘80s, all st-st-studio line graphics and primary colours and Memphis design abstraction; we forget the late-’80s slide into greige. The sets for A Bit Of Fry & Laurie are beige, ecru, taupe and ivory, peach and mauve and powder blue. The sitting rooms are full of Laura Ashley slip covers and bamboo effect coffee tables; the offices sport black ash desks with chrome effect desk tidies. The whole thing appears to have been filmed inside one of Frank Bough’s cardigans.

It’s a portrait of insipidly stifling monotony, enforced by public opinion-driven marketing, the right wing press and an increasingly authoritarian government. And within these bland sets, Fry and Laurie perform sketches that make it clear they are absolutely furious about all of it. They imagine a privatised police force run by witless marketeers that provides tiers of service named ‘Super’, ‘Lovely’ and ‘Gorgeous’. The greed-is-good businessmen Peter and John are over-inflated morons, screaming about their Uttoxeter leisure centre as though it were a matter of life and death, DAMMIT! They puncture the banalities of advertising, the mediocrity of mainstream media and the venality of Fleet Street.

The fact that this hectoring is being delivered by a pair of champagne socialist Cambridge graduates with their own TV series on a state sponsored broadcasting channel is, of course, a bit thick. There’s plenty of snobbery here: intellectual snobbery, cultural snobbery and plain old-fashioned class snobbery too. Stephen Fry had a habit of peppering sketches with the unlikely names of English towns and villages: Uttoxeter, Garboldisham, Swindon. These were chosen, one suspects, as much for the snort-worthy nature of such places as for the ludicrousness of their names. Most of those places voted Leave in the Brexit referendum, no doubt fed up with exactly this kind of thing.

But for all that, Fry and Laurie were not entirely wrong in their political diagnosis. You can see both the snottiness and the prescience in a sketch called ‘The Cause’, actually three separate sketches set in the same restaurant. At one table Hugh Laurie plays the hapless Neddy, a well-meaning idiot who has been tricked into planting a bomb by the sinister, possibly far-right conspirator Jack.

WAITER
Good evening, sir.

JACK
Good evening. A table for bomb please.

WAITER
Excuse me?

JACK
(LAUGHING HYSTERICALLY)
A table for one. Sorry ... bit nervous. I've never actually eaten a meal before.

At another table, Hugh’s opinionated executive Stuart is having a post-theatre dinner with his friend Gordon and their wives after seeing a play written by Jeffrey Archer, then at the peak of his popularity.

STUART
I'm going to come right out and say it. To me, Jeffrey Archer is the finest playwright this country's turned out since William Shakespeare.

GORDON
That's a hell of a statement, Stu.

STUART
Well let me go one further, Gordon. To me, Jeffrey Archer delivers.

It gradually becomes apparent that Stuart has completely failed to follow the plot of the play. In other words, anyone who enjoys anything so popular must be an idiot.

Meanwhile, Stephen Fry is a waiter who discovers to his delight that he is serving a Tory MP who backs deregulation in the name of sweeping away ‘elites’ and offering ‘choice’. Snatching away the silver cutlery, the waiter dumps a massive hessian sack in the politician’s lap.

POLITICIAN
But these are plastic coffee stirrers.

STEPHEN
(shouting)
Yes I know, but at least you've got the choice now. I mean they may be complete crap but you've got the choice ... that's what's important, the choice …

Elitist? Certainly. Sneery? Quite a lot. Metropolitan? Mais bein sur. But scrolling listlessly through the Netflix interface, through endless thumbnails of plastic coffee stirrers, searching for something that’s not ‘complete crap’, one begins to suspect it was also alarmingly prescient.

Watched now, especially in the contemporary binge style, the series is a little too full of the self-indulgent echt sesquipedalian ramblings of Stephen Fry: ‘If two broad-shouldered, long-fingered men such as ourselves can come independently to the conclusion that the morning they are currently experiencing is one of a goodness, then one of a goodness it must assuredly be.’ Lots of the sketches purport to be making fun of pretentious, pseudo-intellectual TV shows, but Fry and Laurie are just as fond of their own intelligence and knowledge as the people they’re satirising.

But then, in 1989 there weren’t very many Stephen Frys on television. Indeed, there’s still only one now. To an 18 year old who desperately wanted to be clever, knowledgeable and witty himself, Fry’s enjoyment of his own intelligence, knowledge and wit was intoxicating. I felt like I had found my people; I absolutely doted on A Bit Of Fry & Laurie, and followed their lead to the extent that I came to regard advertising, marketing and mainstream entertainment as despicable. Which is a shame, because – as Rowan often points out – most of my talents would be extremely well-suited to these fields, and some of these jobs pay quite well. Some people blame their lack of success on their parents, or their education, or their class; but when it comes to finding people to blame for the fact that I’ve never had a proper career, Fry and Laurie are squarely in the frame.

M’colleague Hugh

Let us not forget that Fry & Laurie could be very funny indeed. When executed well the wordplay could be delightful, as in the absolutely perfect ‘Flushed Grollings’ sketch. Fry plays a customer in a hardware store ordering plumbing materials that have increasingly and believably disgusting names. Even if you don’t understand the more outré terms, the sounds of the words are glorious.

Because of that Cambridge/Edinburgh/BBC pipeline Fry & Laurie tend to be a little forgotten when we talk about ‘80s alternative comedy. They certainly coincided with the beginning of the end of one tradition, beginning with Peter Cook and Jonathan Miller, down through Cleese and Chapman and Idle. A tradition that was waning as a new, less Oxbridge one waxed, the BBC lost its broadcasting hegemony, culture broadened, and styles of comedy changed. Inveterate radical Alexei Sayle refused to appear on screen with them on The Young Ones, despite the fact that they were there to satirize themselves as the University Challenge team from ‘Footlights College, Oxbridge’.

I was, of course, being disingenuous earlier when I wrote about my career. I too have performed, ineptly, on the Edinburgh Fringe. I have made a programme in BBC Television Centre, albeit an inept one. And have written sketches for BBC Radio 4 that were also, you know, inept. The BBC, bless them, even sent me on a course to try and make me better at it, but it didn’t take. I could have been a comedy great, if only I’d had the talent. Writing sketch comedy is really hard, which makes it worth noting that Fry and Laurie wrote all of their show themselves. This is not common; it wasn’t true of the contemporaneous sketch show Harry Enfield and Chums (1990), or of Fry and Laurie’s Cambridge/BBC successors Armstrong/Miller and Mitchell/Webb.

And they performed it all too. Which, again, is a lot harder than it looks. Stephen Fry is, of course, excellent at playing Stephen Fry-ish characters; but there’s a reason why Hugh Laurie was, for a time, the highest paid actor on US television. He’s capable of moving seamlessly between upper class twits, hard bitten action heroes and self-important middle management twerps. My favourite performances of his, though, are the weird little monologues he delivers while sitting in the front seat of a car parked in the rain at a service station, sucking on a milkshake and reminiscing about his past. They’re strange little things, full of non sequiturs and wordplay and very few punchlines, but elevated by Laurie’s perfect, off-hand conversational playing.

This was precisely the sort of whimsical, ludicrous thing that delighted me, and that I wasn’t going to get anywhere else. In that late ‘80s world of four TV channels and barely an internet, there weren’t many places to go for entertainment if you didn’t enjoy the beige mainstream. A Bit of Fry and Laurie was an oasis in a sand-coloured wasteland of chat shows, game shows and Railwatch (in which ex-Radio 1 DJ Mike Smith took at look at the changes facing British railways).

And it turned out I was not alone. Over the years, brief references and dropped phrases have activated fellow sleeper agents like codewords whispered on a St James’ Park bench: ‘I have never had an Opal Fruit on me’, ‘Oh Christ, I left the iron on’, ‘Ticket pocket, ticket pocket, ticket pocket’. There are contributors to this newsletter with whom I made friends simply because they knew just what a challenge it was to cut all the hairs on a man’s head.

And that’s got to be better than having a career. Isn’t it?

A Bit Of

When I rewatched them all, the sketch that stood out to me as somehow quintessentially Fry and Laurie was the very last of season one. It begins with Stephen Fry as a slick-haired politician who is reeling off some almost-believable economic measures when he is interrupted by a voice from the audience:

TONY
Aye, but what of the people?

Hugh Laurie, hidden under a ‘lightweight travelling hat’, berates the politician in cod swashbuckling dialogue, accusing him of raising taxes ‘so that your own bathroom may be lined with venison and fine delicacies’. Finally he reveals himself to be Tony ‘of Plymouth’, and swings down to the stage to start a swordfight that spills out into the sets of previous sketches. Finally Tony dives through a window before turning to the camera and delivering the punchline:

‘Or, you could write to your MP.’

It’s not a great punchline, because sketch punchlines rarely are; but the rest of the sketch is a delight. It’s a satire of pointless political debate shows such as the BBC’s Question Time, but it’s also making fun of Errol Flynn movies, the nature of sketch comedy, and the practical details of television making. It plays with the form even as it delights in it and reinvents it: ‘Ah, so the worm has claws!’

You didn’t get that from The Good Life over on BBC1.

Speaking of the Oxbridge / BBC pipeline, there’s some very obvious examples, without whom Fry & Laurie almost certainly wouldn’t have happened.

TV and radio are are little boxes full of many kinds of friends: informative friends, entertaining friends, distracting friends, friends who just won’t shut up and go away. In our semi-regular TV re-watch feature, we take this metaphor and chases it into the ground with deadly intent.

Trevor Chaplin (James Bolam) and Jill Swinburne (Barbara Flynn) are, respectively, a woodwork teacher and an English teacher at a Leeds comprehensive. They are also friends with benefits: Trevor gives Jill lifts to school in his van, and she ‘slakes her lust on his loins’. Things get more complicated when Trevor tries to buy some Bix Beiderbecke records from a platinum blonde with a mail order catalogue, leading to shenanigans with Big Al’s secret emporium, the punctilious and censorious Sergeant Hobson B.A., and the corrupt councillor McAllister. In the end everything is more or less sorted out and Jill and Trevor escape to the Dales, where they run down the hillsides in slow motion.

‘Singin’ The Blues’

The Beiderbecke Affair is a cosy ‘sort of’ show: sort of a detective show, sort of a sitcom, sort of a comedy drama. During the six episodes the lead characters wander around the fringes of a mystery while getting on with their own idiosyncratic projects: Jill runs for the town council on a green agenda, Trevor tries to track down jazz records. It is gentle, funny and distinctly Northern in its humour and peculiarity.

It is based around a single, simple joke: what if you set a ‘40s film noir in ‘80s Yorkshire? You could call it a Film Nowt, perhaps. Instead of the stark neon night streets of LA, you have the back-to-backs of Leeds; instead of monstrous gangsters, you have the genially idiosyncratic Big Al and Little Al; instead of hard bitten shamuses, you have a pair of medium-sized teachers.

The show announces its intentions right from the start. Trevor’s very first line — ‘What I don’t understand is this…’ — is the kind of line that is supposed to come right at the end of a mystery story; after the detective has done their summing up, and their side-kick is still confused about one little detail. By starting with it, The Beiderbecke Affair turns the detective story inside out. And then has the temerity to never tell us what it is that Trevor doesn’t understand. Its daft, meandering plot is worthy of Raymond Chandler, who similarly never seemed to have a full grip on what was happening, and whose detectives frequently solved their mysteries more by luck than judgement.

The Leeds streets are certainly mean, full of demolished factories and crumbling infrastructure. This is Yorkshire in the mid-‘80s, a victim of Thatcherism, with all the old jobs gone and the old certainties repudiated. As Big Al puts it: ‘Monetarism; it may be great for the pound sterling but it's deadly for the building trade.’ For all its cosy affect and gentle antics, The Beiderbecke Affair is very angry about these things. The villains of the piece are trying to stop Big Al’s underground co-op not just because they dislike his socialist-tinged approach, but because it’s weird. ‘They like normal things, like proper shops. Uniforms. Trains that run on time.’ The Beiderbecke Affair stands against this priggish, po-faced, petit bourgeois morality, mostly by being funny. ‘80s Conservatives were deeply unamusing; getting rich and bullying the poor is a serious business.

This also explains the jazz. Trevor’s obsessive search for his Beiderbecke records not only gives the plot its inciting incident, but also stands for his oddness, his stand outside the mainstream. It also stands for the show’s own quirkiness.

The concept of ‘fake books’ is a key element in the jazz tradition. Fake books are collections of jazz standard tunes; they contain just the bare melodies and the key elements a player might need to grasp the basics of the tune. They give the players, in other words, the skeleton around which to improvise. This is The Beiderbecke Affair’s model of human relationships: a set of fundamental understandings around which we all improvise. Careful arrangements are for dictatorial conductors; this is just everyday, joyful mucking about. Like the polyphonic playing of ‘20s jazz, everyone plays their part in their own way but to the same end, pulling together to make something wonderful.

“Because my baby don’t mean maybe now”

Fellow Jazz musician Eddie Condon said that Bix Beiderbecke’s cornet playing sounded ‘like a girl saying yes’. Jazz also means sex. Literally. Well, possibly. The etymology is obscure, as all the best etymologies are. The origins of the word ‘jazz’ are much debated, but it appears to have been applied to music to mean to go at it with brio. Pep. Spunk. And it got that meaning from, well, the other kind of spunk. Jazz and jism don’t seem to be all that etymologically distinct.

As well as film noir, the other key cinematic reference throughout The Beiderbecke Affair is romance. Jill references Casablanca (1942) constantly, almost as much as she references Some Like It Hot (1959) (a film that features a pair of jazz musicians). But Jill and Trevor aren’t Rick and Ilsa, the doomed lovers of Casablanca; they’re the wise-cracking, sex-crackling, martini-necking married detectives of The Thin Man (1934), Nick and Nora Charles.

Both The Thin Man and The Beiderbecke Affair have a similar ‘sophisticated’ relationship with sex. They both acknowledge their lead characters are sexually involved (although the ‘80s couple, Jill and Trevor, don’t have to be married and can actually talk about it), but neither couple is prurient or smutty about it. By finding a pre-Code model for Jill and Trevor’s situationship, writer Alan Plater was able to find a different way of portraying and talking about sex and, perhaps more importantly, love. He manages to create a classic romantic tension in a modern story. It’s the same trick that Nora Ephron pulls off in When Harry Met Sally (1989), complete with the same Casablanca references. The question is no longer will they, won’t they kiss? Because they already are indulging in a little Bix n’ chill, on the regular. The question is when will they, won’t they finally admit that they’re in love?

This aspect of the show made a distinct impression on me as a sixteen year old. I was already very interested in sex, like most sixteen year olds, but I was also very interested in classic Hollywood movies of the ‘30s and ‘40s, like no other sixteen year olds. It gave me an image of how that romanticism of Rick and Ilsa, or Nick and Nora, might fit with the reality of relationships, even modern ones.

“Clarinet Marmalade”

The other thing it gave me was Leon Bismark Beiderbecke. The nineteenth century essayist Sydney Smith said that his idea of heaven was ‘eating pâté de foie gras to the sound of trumpets.’ Now, foie gras undoubtedly has its charms, but surely its means of production is unsupportable in the 21st century. So let us substitute some Comté cheese. But trumpets we can surely agree on. As long as we admit cornets too.

Smith was probably thinking of Handel, but I think heaven sounds like Bix. If ever anything sounded like ‘making a joyful noise unto the Lord’, as Psalm 100 puts it, it is surely ‘Clarinet Marmalade’.

In those days you recorded as a band, crowded around a microphone, a needle carving your performance straight onto the shellac; you can hear them all on recordings, all pressed into the room, the piano fainter at the back, the horns blaring away at the front. The lumping gallop of the banjo and the plashing high hat, the great wailing wall, the warp and weft of the interweaving brass, putting some jazz into it, all dancing around the melody like Bacchantes leaping and jiving in the train of the great god. It’s quite the party.

Jazz, particularly the early New Orleans Jazz that Bix Beiderbecke played, was not mainstream in the mid ‘80s. Madonna, Queen, maybe Vivaldi; you might hear any of these if you were on hold to a call centre, but not ‘Clarinet Marmalade’. Its use in the show is emblematic of the intention to do something a little different; of the defiant quirkiness of its main characters, of its own construction, of Northern England in opposition to the slick and suburban South.

It stands for something the show is anxious should not be lost. After all, it is the main characters’ persistent peculiarity that leads to them uncovering the town hall corruption that has been lurking in the background of the plot the whole time. It is a high stakes twist, this corporation and corporate greed, for a programme so thoroughly devoted to low stakes larks, but that is part of the message.

It’s hard to explain now just how rebellious it felt in the late ‘80s: to be a little weirdo in the face of the homogenising, implacable Thatcherite mainstream, but The Beiderbecke Affair was there to tell us that it mattered; that by being a little childish we might manage to stay adult, by being a little difficult we might keep things working, by being a little strange we might continue to be human.

There was more jazz on ‘80s TV than you’d expect, The Singing Detective being a case in point:

TV and radio are are little boxes full of many kinds of friends: informative friends, entertaining friends, distracting friends, friends who just won’t shut up and go away. In our semi-regular TV re-watch feature, we take this metaphor and chases it into the ground with deadly intent.

Sapphire (Joanna Lumley) and Steel (David McCallum) are trans-dimensional agents who appear when fractures in reality produce ghosts, monsters and unexplained happenings. It is up to Sapphire and Steel to fix things, often to the detriment of the humans caught up in their investigations.

All irregularities will be handled by the forces controlling each dimension

Well, here’s a tricky assignment: how to explain why Sapphire and Steel is still talked about.

To begin with, we should say what it is. It's a paranormal investigation show, a cross between The X Files (on which it was an undoubted influence) and Doctor Who. Doctor Who because the villain of the series is Time; or, possibly, monsters from outside Time; or is it forces from the beginning of Time? Or maybe the end?

Let me start again.

Every story starts with Sapphire and Steel arriving somewhere in mundane early-‘80s Britain — say a crumbling townhouse down the end of an alley — and encountering some very weird events. Sapphire is attacked by a flock of umbrellas that all squawk like crows. There is a man with no face halfway up the stairs. There is a sex-worker in an upstairs flat whose best friend has been trapped in a picture of a Victorian street market.

Finally, a few half-hour episodes later, they will appear to solve the problem by doing something weird themselves, like trapping in a kaleidoscope the shape that’s haunting all the photographs in the world. A kaleidoscope that they hide in a shipwreck. Under the ice pack.

Wait. That’s no clearer.

Oh, I haven’t explained who Sapphire and Steel are. For a start, they aren’t human. Indeed, they’re frequently extremely harsh with the human characters they encounter, especially Steel, who is often an utter shit. Anyway, it’s not clear what exactly they are. The introduction to each episode says they’re elements, which they’re patently not. Steel is an alloy and Sapphire is a gemstone.

This isn’t helping, is it?

The show, as you may be beginning to suspect, is delightfully, ludicrously weird.

The secret — the reason why Sapphire and Steel is exemplary TV of its kind, and why it still works and is still remembered decades later — is its budget. Or, rather, its lack of it.

David Reid, Head of Drama at ATV, loved creator P. J. Hammond’s pilot script so much he gave the show’s producer Shaun O'Riordan £5,000 on top of the usual budget. But then they got David McCallum, who was a big TV star after Man from U.N.C.L.E., and his fee took care of that five grand. So Reid moved them to an adult drama slot of 7pm, which gave them enough money to get Joanna Lumley too.

This, however, left very little to make the actual series. It’s largely shot like a stage production, almost all on studio sets, with only the simplest special effects. In ‘Assignment Two’ (probably the best of the stories), which is set in an abandoned railway station, the effect of bright light at the end of a railway tunnel was achieved by McCallum himself pinning up an arch of white card against a black curtain.

The thing is: it works. As series producer Sean O’Riordan said, having access to better effects would have been detrimental; the cheapness is its superpower. Contemporary British sci-fi shows like Doctor Who now look deeply silly in comparison, trying to do the Star Wars Cantina scene on a BBC budget with nothing but some bubble wrap and radiophonic voices. Sapphire and Steel had to rely on other aspects of the production to achieve its effects: trivial things like acting and writing.

Most of the Assignments were written by the show’s creator, P. J. Hammond, who was in the practice of starting stories without knowing how they would end. He would throw Sapphire and Steel into situations that he himself didn’t yet understand, and would then discover what was going on as his characters did. Such were the pressures of making the show that he was often still writing the end of a story as they were shooting its beginning. It has a sense of breathless invention and the crazed, dream-like logic of a child’s make-believe.

Although this approach led to Lumley storming off set in exasperation at the nonsense she was having to spout, it also led to delirious, inspired, terrifying images: the mother with the wrong eyes in Assignment One; Sapphire’s face melting in Assignment Two; the abattoir sequence in Assignment Three. All of this made Sapphire and Steel the holotype for the kinds of ‘70s TV shows that seemed designed to give children nightmares and therapists a career.

And whatever its frustrations, the production is extremely effective. The atmosphere is achieved by thoughtful direction, theatrical but inspired lighting effects and inventive sound design. The performances are terrific; McCallum and Lumley persistently playing it straight, selling the nonsense admirably. It's not just the leads, either. Part of the success of Assignment Two is the brilliant job Gerald James makes of the parapsychologist Tully: credulous, frightened, kind and brave. He roots all the strange things happening around him in a true and believable character, and so makes the horrors more horrific and the tragedies more tragic.

This is part of what made Sapphire and Steel so good and what has helped it last. It turns its improvisational, studio bound, ‘70s cheapness to its advantage, so that it lodged itself into the memories of a generation and remains eminently watchable, decades later.

Transuranic heavy elements may not be used where there is life.

And then there’s the truly brilliant decision about the setting to the series. Or lack of one.

Every episode starts with a voiceover.

This sort of thing is usually used to explain the premise, as it does in The A-Team and Knight Rider. But instead, this voiceover just muddies things even more:

All irregularities will be handled by the forces controlling each dimension. Transuranic heavy elements may not be used where there is life. Medium atomic weights are available: Gold, Lead, Copper, Jet, Diamond, Radium, Sapphire, Silver and Steel. Sapphire and Steel have been assigned.

Each sentence makes successively less sense. The whole thing tells us nothing, but promises everything. It suggests a complex cosmology and then purposefully obscures it.

At first glance Sapphire and Steel, like its successor The X Files, appears to be a ‘Mystery Box’ show in which an underlying lore will be discovered that will eventually explain everything.

This quasi-genre is named after a TED talk given by the writer and director J. J. Abrams, whose show Lost might be considered the prime example of the genre. He talks about how, as child, he bought a ‘Mystery Box’ from a magic shop: a box that apparently contained lots of bargains but which you had to buy sealed, so you couldn’t know what you had bought till you opened it. He talks about how he has never opened this box, as the mystery is more enchanting than any revelation could be.

The Mystery Box show traditionally drops characters into the middle of a mystery. It provokes curiosity in two directions: the solution to the immediate story, and also the solution to the puzzle of how the characters came to be there in the first place.

The possible weaknesses with this approach are evident. If your primary means of holding the audience is continued mystery, then things have to get ever twistier and can never be resolved; and any resolution is only going to be disappointing. Lost, for example, became famously convoluted and was notoriously unsatisfying in its conclusion.

Sapphire and Steel manages to escape both problems. It resolves immediate mysteries in ways that are emotionally satisfying but otherwise just as mysterious as the mysteries themselves; and it determinedly explains absolutely nothing about its fictional universe. We understand nothing about what has been going on, who Sapphire and Steel might be, or what the series is actually about.

In many ways this is a Mystery Box series as it should be, rather than it has been in practice: constantly posing and solving puzzles without ever opening the box and revealing its secrets. In doing so it avoids the fundamental flaw of the genre: lore. Fictional lore -- the backstory to narrative settings -- can lend an epic, mythical weight, as it does in Lord of the Rings. It can also generate new stories, as it did for Ursula K LeGuin in her Earthsea series. But it has become the great weakness of contemporary serialised fiction, reducing shows and movies to a series of characters and tropes, trivia answers instead of stories.

The best example of this kind of failure is probably one of J. J. Abrams’ own films, the final movie of the most recent Star Wars trilogy: The Rise of Skywalker (2019). The film answers questions posed in earlier episodes using answers cribbed from previous films, and in doing so becomes nothing but a series of references, call-backs and cameos. It is a two-hour curtain call of nothing but lore, not so much a film as a chore, a movie not to enjoy but to have been seen.

The closest Sapphire and Steel gets to lore is the final episode of the last series, in which our heroes are trapped in an extra-dimensional travel cafe by ‘transient beings’, enemies who are hinted to be agents of a power rival to whatever it is that assigns Sapphire and Steel to their missions. But that merely poses a fresh mystery, leaving the protagonists lost, gazing out from between gingham curtains at a spinning star field forever. Unrescued, unresolved. Unspoiled.

No wonder we’ve been unable to forget it.

For a slightly more successful Star Wars sequel, try our piece on fictional fascists and Andor:

TV and radio are are little boxes full of many kinds of friends: informative friends, entertaining friends, distracting friends, friends who just won’t shut up and go away. In our semi-regular TV re-watch feature, we take this metaphor and chases it into the ground with deadly intent.

Mystery writer Philip Marlow (Michael Gambon) is hospitalised with severe psoriasis. As he suffers on the ward he hallucinates about his ex-wife, his wartime childhood, and the plot of one of his own books: The Singing Detective.

Who's your friend?

What is The Singing Detective? It's not an ongoing series; there’s just one season of six episodes. It’s not a ‘classic serial’; those are usually adaptations of books. Perhaps you could argue it’s a mini-series. But what it is, really, is a very long TV play.

TV plays have almost entirely disappeared now. The closest analogues are the self-contained episodes within anthology series such as Inside No. 9 and Black Mirror. This is a shame, because it is a unique form capable of unique things. As with stage plays, a TV play tells a single and complete story with no cliff-hangers or sequels; but the medium means a TV play is very different from a stage play, especially in the hands of a master like Dennis Potter, who wrote The Singing Detective. TV plays do not need to have the classical unities of person or place, but they do have the fundamental unity of purpose.

Each episode of The Singing Detective briefly stands alone, but really each is an act within a play that had five, week-long intervals. It is not a constantly developing story; there are no surprising twists or effortful developments. And it's complicated; it demands your attention, because Marlow’s perception of time and reality become fluid, and his memories becomes muddled with his fiction and with his past, as actors and plotlines and music drift and intertwine between all three. The whole is an individual, crafted thing, the product of thought and skill and work. It is an object to hold, observe and consider. It is a solitary, self-contained work of art.

Potter wanted the three main strands to be filmed in different ways: the detective story shot on film to look like a noir movie, the past shot in black and white, and the hospital shot on TV video to look like a sitcom.1 Fortunately, he did not get his way. The director, Jon Amiel, does vary the visual language, using noir-ish angles for the detective story and period choreography for the music; but while Potter’s idea might have been more formally interesting, having everything shot on film makes the experience more complete. It makes it harder for us to disentangle the relationship between past and present, and between fiction and fantasy, contributing to our sense of Marlow’s fevered state.

This entanglement is particularly striking when it comes to the music. Ah, the music: the most notable and renowned of Potter’s formal inventions. Throughout The Singing Detective, characters break into song. They do not sing, though: they mime to recordings of pop songs from the ‘30s and ‘40s, the music of Marlow’s (and Potter’s) childhood. Potter had used this trick before (in Pennies From Heaven (1978), for example) but it works absolutely perfectly here. It enables Potter to conjure a distant place and experience with extraordinary immediacy, using that emotional valence of music to summon someone else’s memories. The music was as strange in 1986 as it is 2024; an alien pop music long since derided and discarded, surprising and unsettling. The first moment it irrupts into the drama, as Marlow’s doctors all join in a chorus of ‘Dem Bones’, is a startling coup, still as extraordinary as it was forty years ago.

What kind of friend was it?

As well as being extraordinary in lots of other ways, The Singing Detective is an extraordinary piece of work at the base level of sheer craft. Let take just one example: exposition, one of the most difficult problems in script-writing.

Due to his terrible skin condition, Marlow has to be regularly rubbed down with emollients. In one early, memorable scene, young Nurse Mills (Joanne Whalley) has to come and ‘grease’ him. Desperate to not get an erection as she works away at his privates with a handful of creamy gunk, Marlow tries to think about boring things:

A Welsh male voice choir. Everything in Punch. Wage rates in Peru. James Burke. Finnegan’s Wake. The dog in Blue Peter. Brian Clough and especially James, Henry AND Clive. Australian barmen. Ecologists. Semiologists. The Guardian’s women’s page.

The list is hilarious, and the scene is excruciating with pain and embarrassment. What you don’t notice is that during it Potter is cramming in exposition, telling us what we need to know about Marlow, his condition and how it causes him to hallucinate. The painful hilarity of Marlow’s predicament distracts us from Potter’s fancy footwork.

We also barely notice the further, more subtle piece of exposition Potter is giving us when he has Marlow list ‘The Guardian’s women’s page’. Marlow is precisely the sort of man who prides himself on being ‘subversively’ snide about feminism; he uses that cynicism to cover his deeper misogyny. (He’s certainly more regretful about his instinctive racism than he is about his horrendous tirades at his ex-wife.) His hallucinations frequently drift into misogynist fantasies; he has a fraught relationship with relationships, and sex. When his list of boring things does not work and he ejaculates in front of the nurse, he is immediately humiliated by it; he finds sex shameful, further degrading his relationships with women.

These themes become the core of the latter half of the series, as the hospital psychiatrist starts to unravel his childhood and his mother’s suicide. The psychiatrist is played by Bill Patterson, who is as superb as you would expect Bill Patterson to be; but then, everyone’s superb in The Singing Detective, several of them in multiple parts. Michael Gambon plays both Marlow and Marlow’s fictional creation, the detective; Patrick Malahide plays multiple versions of the same paranoid fantasy; Alison Steadman plays Marlow’s mother and different roles within his hallucinations. Even the bit parts are great: including Imelda Staunton as the Staff Nurse and David Ryall as a patient on the ward (making this something of a Harry Potter preview, what with a scrofulous and sweary Dumbledore in the lead role).

Everything is superb in The Singing Detective: not only the writing and performances, but the direction, the production design, the choreography. It is an extraordinarily compelling piece of work; you want to keep watching not because of cliff-hangers or story arcs but because of the sheer artistry. But you also want to find out, in the words of the young Philip, whodunnit. Dennis Potter knows what the writer Mike Royce pointed out about Twin Peaks:

‘the essential secret of storytelling: you can do whatever the fuck you want as long as you’re also trying to solve a murder’

Potter runs several detective stories at the same time. There is the plot of Marlow’s own novel; there is a paranoid mystery in Marlow’s hallucinations, which concerns what has happened to his screenplay of The Singing Detective; and there is the fundamental question that all these other puzzles are really about. What has happened to Marlow, to bring him to this point?

Whodunnit?

The fact that Potter drops a reference to Agatha Christie’s Who Killed Roger Ackroyd (1926) points to one possible solution. In Roger Ackroyd the narrator is the murderer: the writer dunnit. This is certainly the opinion of the Singing Detective himself, the fictional Philip Marlow, who shoots his author dead in the latter’s climactic fantasy. But Marlow’s own name is the real clue, a near-twin of Raymond Chandler’s iconic flatfoot Philip Marlowe. Marlow’s book The Singing Detective is a Chandler parody, full of self-consciously world-weary hard-boiled talk and over-extended metaphors.

But the show itself has most Chandleresque form of all. Chandler’s stories are famously more interested in setting and character than they are in plot. During the making of the film adaptation of Chandler’s The Big Sleep (1946) the screenwriters asked Chandler who had killed the chauffeur, to which Chandler replied ‘damned if I know’. Life is a mystery with no answer; as Potter’s Marlow says, ‘All clues and no solutions, that’s how things really are.’

Are you still friends?

Mike Royce’s observation about the flexibility of detective formats isn’t the only way in which Twin Peaks and The Singing Detective seem to me to be similar artefacts. When I re-watched The Singing Detective I felt the same thing I felt when revisiting Twin Peaks: a sense of relief. Not that something I had loved as a young adult still stood up; relief because I was watching something genuinely good, a piece of television that stretched and developed the medium and did something extraordinary with it.

Pulp fiction relies on pre-existing forms and tropes to entertain us. We have a sense of the shapes of stories we expect, they satisfy our pattern-matching brains; moreover, those shapes make the stories easy to follow and easy to enjoy. (This is not a bad thing, by the way. You are actually supposed to enjoy culture, not just suffer through it.) Both Singing Detective and Twin Peaks use these genre forms to cover unexpected themes; they bend and repurpose them to reveal the unspoken psychologies that underlie them. While watching pulp TV we can second-screen, cook, chat, sit back, and relax. But Singing Detective and Twin Peaks demand we sit forward. They catch and require our attention; they necessitate and reward our engagement. They are art, or something very like it.

That aside, though, I was very much invested in it still being good because so much of my cultural life depended on it. It’s thanks to The Singing Detective that I became interested in pre-war pop music, and British pre-war pop music in particular: the clipped, unnerving RP enunciation of Henry Hall, the aching, unlikely English blues of Anne Shelton, the cosy colonial croon of Al Bowlly, and the avuncular tones of Flanagan and Allen, as warm as a valve in a radiogram. These are the sound of my grandparents’ youth, of an atlas stained pink, steam trains and aeronauts and the Light Programme. When I first saw Singing Detective I immediately went out and bought the soundtrack cassette and slotted it into rotation between Tom Waits and Japan, playing it until I could mime along to ‘Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate the Positive’ as well as any actor in the show.

The songs were terrific but what The Singing Detective had done was freight them with their context. Like all pop music they had been the background to other people’s lives and loves. It produced a sense of anemoia, the nostalgia for a past one has never known oneself. Of course, they’re now also full of my own nostalgia too, the music of the ‘30s now tied to the ‘80s through Dennis Potter’s magic.

Still know all the words to ‘Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate the Positive’, too.

We’ve written before about Twin Peaks and how it reinvented TV:

TV and radio are are little boxes full of many kinds of friends: informative friends, entertaining friends, distracting friends, friends who just won’t shut up and go away. In our semi-regular TV re-watch feature, we take this metaphor and chases it into the ground with deadly intent.

One-off seasonal episodes of one of the most popular TV variety shows in ‘70s Britain. Hosted by the comic double act of Eric Morecambe and Ernie Wise, the shows featured sketches, guest appearances by stars of stage and screen, pop music performances, and little plays what Ernie Wise wrote.

How did you meet your friend?

The same way as everyone else: by being alive in the 1970s in a British house with a television.

Morecambe and Wise started performing together as a double act in the 1940s, working their way round the country and up the billing. They eventually made their way onto radio and, finally, television, where they were a complete and utter flop. As a review of their first TV show put it, ‘Definition of the week: TV set: the box in which they buried Morecambe and Wise.”

Ernie Wise apparently carried a clipping of that review in his wallet for the rest of his life.

It took almost ten years for them to get a new series, Two of a Kind. This went well enough for them to be poached by the BBC. Then, in 1969, they were put together with the writer Eddie Braben and the ‘Golden Triangle’ was complete; the gods of Saturday night television had assembled.

For the next decade, until they went back to commercial television in 1978, the BBC would broadcast a special episode of their show each Christmas Day. It became an institution. In 1977, somewhere between 21 and 28 million people watched it. This was the transmission audience, remember; before streaming, before asynchronous viewing, before videotaping.

At five to nine on Christmas evening in 1977, tripped out on turkey and Quality Street and Bristol Cream, getting on for half the population of the entire country watched the Morecambe and Wise Christmas Special: all watching the same show, all laughing at the same jokes, all swaddled in the same cosy, Christmassy cultural wrapping.

This, of course, is something that today’s atomised and multi-channel media doesn’t deliver. We don’t have national television any more; we don’t have shows almost everyone is watching. It can feel like we do, when everyone is discussing some new, self-serious, stylised detective show in your corner of social media; but then you find out that billions of other people are watching a dead-eyed YouTuber reacting to videos by other rictus-grin YouTubers, and you have heard of none of them, despite the fact that they are the most famous people in the world.

In many households in the ‘70s and ‘80s there was a ritual in which you would go through the double-length Christmas edition of the Radio Times (the BBC’s TV listing magazine) with a biro, marking what you wanted to watch. You had to do this because there was only one television in the house. It was a massive box of a cathode ray tube that had its own supporting furniture, a cod regency cabinet or a wheeled stand; it took up a whole corner of the room, and everyone had to share it.

On Christmas Day in 1977, ITV was showing Young Winston (1972), a biopic of Winston Churchill starring Simon Ward; BBC 2 was, inexplicably, showing a compilation of home movies of other people’s Christmases. And so, instead, we and half the rest of the country watched The Morecambe and Wise Christmas Special, because what on earth else were we going to do? Talk to each other?

What kind of friend are they?

When they were small, side by side in their double Maclaren buggy, my father taught my twin sisters (they’re twins of each other, not of me; that would make us triplets, much to the disgust of everyone involved) to answer the question ‘What do you think of it so far?’ with a squeaked, unison ‘Rubbish!’. This was one of Eric Morecambe’s catchphrases — he would usually (badly) ventriloquise the ‘Rubbish!’ as coming from a prop — and it proved a hit, not just because children that age doing any kind of performance is funny but also because everyone knew the catchphrase.

Everyone knew all the catchphrases. You can’t see the join! Look at me when I’m talking to you. Boy’s a fool. Arsenal! Eric Morecambe was a kind of national uncle, supplying the whole country with little bits of schtick with which to fill a lull in conversation or a lack of personal wit.

But this kind of monoculture can also be stifling and oppressive, enforcing unpleasant norms. For several years in the early ’70s The Morecambe and Wise Christmas Special was preceded on BBC 1 by The Black and White Minstrel Show, a long-running variety show in which male singers often appeared in, yes, you guessed it, blackface. Degrading racial stereotypes on the publicly-funded national broadcaster as a background to Christmas lunch.

To be fair to Morecambe and Wise, they rarely descended to that level. Their material tended to avoid easy racist caricatures and, indeed, sexist ones, which was quite remarkable for British TV in the ‘70s. There is a certain level of period smut, particularly in the specials written with Barry Cryer; but Eddie Braben’s material tends to play that stuff as guileless and playful rather than seedy and predatory. Kenneth Tynan accurately described their characters on screen as ‘fixed at a mental and emotional age of approximately 15’, who are thus unable to deal with adult sex. This was necessary because this was mainstream entertainment. You wouldn’t want to frighten Grandma or have to explain anything to confused children who’d been allowed to stay up late at Christmas.

At its worst, then, The Morecambe and Wise Christmas Special is mild stuff. Banal sketches that go on a little too long; bits of business that rely a little too much on knowing the members of Ted Heath’s cabinet; dull musical turns by undistinguished Radio 2 acts.

But at its best, on the other hand…

Are you still friends?

You said that without moving your lips.

The thing about writing for a general audience is that when you do it well… well, then you have written material that absolutely everyone will get. Free of references and in-jokes, free of stereotypes and bullying; beautiful, essential jokes, uniting, uplifting and uproarious.

There’s a reason why Braben, Morecambe and Wise are so revered. They were exactly the right people at the right moment. They became national institutions not just because they were broadcast to a nation who didn’t have anything else to watch, but also because they were very, very good. One upside of a monopolised culture is that it gets to monopolise talent, titrating out genius and broadcasting it to the nation.

There is a moment in a 1973 BBC Omnibus documentary in which Morecambe says that Braben had the hardest job in the world, sitting in a room on his own with a blank piece of paper, trying to be funny. But the documentary shows Eric and Ernie rehearsing just one sketch from one show over weeks and weeks. Table reads and off-book blocking, technical and camera rehearsals and dress; running through their business relentlessly and thoroughly. You can see, right from the beginning, how their intonation and interplay lift a joke to another level, or uncover two more jokes underneath in performance and interpretation.

They cut and improvise, of course. The script starts with Big Ben striking four times, and they decide that no one wants to sit through that; two’s enough. But they know not to change the first line: ‘Nine o’clock!’ When you’re repeating the same, apparently mundane line over and over again through rehearsal after rehearsal, the temptation can be to fiddle with it for one’s own amusement, but they know better. Sure enough, in front of a live audience and a sonorous Big Ben sound effect, the disconnect between the chimes and Ernie’s earnest ‘Nine o’clock!’ gets a big laugh.

If you want an example of this golden conjunction between writer and performers, you could do worse than watch the Christmas special from 1973, the year of that Omnibus documentary. It features one of the most perfect sketches of their career. The two of them sit side by side in bed — Eric with his pipe and Ernie with his Financial Times — discussing the Christmas presents they had as children: ‘I had a little Dinky’ says Ernie, to which Eric inevitably replies ‘You still do’. Then Eric gets up to close the curtains, an ambulance goes by with its siren on, and Braben gives him one of the great comic lines: ‘He’s not going to sell much ice cream going at that speed, is he?’, giving every Dad in Britain something to repeat all year.

The sketch’s actual punchline isn’t very good, but that’s not the point. The point is all the bits of business: the to and fro, their relationship, the whole rambling, joyous nonsense of it. Eric Morecambe was a stupendously, joyously funny man. In a conversation Tynan relates in his book The Sound of Two Hands Clapping, Morecambe worries about contemporary American comedy: ‘There are funny lines, but no funny men’. He was, first of all a funny man with funny bones, who could make every tiny movement funny, any line; a man whose mere presence delighted. But his performance of that comedy relied on Ernie, whose timing, understanding and interplay were just as skilled.

Eric and Ernie were, by this point, seasoned performers, with a comic rhythm and stock of business that could cover all manner of poor material. When Braben gave them gold to work with, they really wrought jewels. Key to this was Braben’s understanding of their partnership. Tynan described Braben’s version of their double act: ‘Ernie… is the comic who is not funny. And Eric… is the straight man who is funny.”

Far be it for me to disagree with one of his generation’s finest critics and the first man to say ‘fuck’ on British television, but I don’t think this is quite right. Braben described Eric and Ernie as ‘closer than brothers’; the overwhelming sense of their double act in the ‘70s is of Ernie as an over-enthusiastic and under-talented theatre kid, forcing his sardonically amused older brother to take part in his lunatic performances.

It worked beautifully as an amplification of their real life characters. Ernie had been a child star, billed as ‘Britain’s Mickey Rooney’. It was deep in him, that song-and-dance, eyes-and-teeth, light-ent razzle dazzle; the dream of being Gene Kelly or Fred Astaire. Braben’s genius was to convert this theatrical enthusiasm into parody, giving Eric a way to muck about without looking like a spoilsport. Indeed, Eric almost always takes part enthusiastically. Wise is still his Little Ern, after all; they are still brothers. Eric can make fun of Ernie, and his wig, and his short, fat, hairy legs; but if anyone else tries, they get grabbed by the lapels and slapped on the cheek.

What could be more Christmassy than this? Two brothers putting on a show for the rest of the family, hilariously amateur and ramshackle, calling in theatrical aunts like Glenda Jackson, Penelope Keith and Angela Rippon to play embarrassing cameos, constantly peppering us with asides and familial in-jokes. No wonder we all wanted to join in.

Would you introduce us?

Don’t watch the 1977 one. It was getting a bit tired by then. If you were to watch one, I’d recommend, for the full effect, 1971. As part of the research for this piece I watched that episode with Ro’s dad. It starts slow and somewhat mediocre, with a couple of weak sketches and very odd little musical interlude, and I was starting to regret suggesting it. But once Glenda Jackson arrives for a ludicrous dance number, things start to look up.

And then the next guest is introduced: the Principal Conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra, Mr Andre Previn, and everything becomes perfectly delirious. ‘Andrew Preview’, ‘Grieg with him and him’, ‘All the right notes, not necessarily in the right order’. If you’re a British person of a certain age, you’ve seen it a thousand times on clip shows and nostalgia compilations. It's practically a catechism now, a national ritual; but, and this is the crucial note, it's still funny. A thousand watches and fifty years later and it's still an hysterical masterpiece.

So, by the time we got to Shirley Bassey singing ‘Smoke Gets In Your Eyes’ with a perfectly straight face as Eric and Ernie accidentally destroyed the set around her (another joke that never gets old), we were all quite weak with laughter.

And I can’t think of a better way to spend Christmas evening than that.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00gw1d0/the-morecambe-and-wise-show-christmas-show-1971

We’ve covered Morecambe and Wise before, in a piece in which we compared Eric Morecambe to a beetle and Doctor Who:

TV and radio are are little boxes full of many kinds of friends: informative friends, entertaining friends, distracting friends, friends who just won’t shut up and go away. In our semi-regular TV re-watch feature, we take this metaphor and chases it into the ground with deadly intent.

‘80s ‘Alternative Comedy’ sitcom about a group of students: People’s Poet Rik, depressed hippie Neil, homicidal medical student Vyvyan, and Mike Thecoolperson. They share a house in which they variously host parties, bands, terrorists and demons. They also flood it, strike oil in it, burn it down and blow it up. They are mostly, however, bored. To quote the programme write-up in the Radio Times: ‘a video head helically scans the high coercivity medium, taking full advantage of the inherent wide hysteresic characteristics and fully saturating the magnetic structure of the oxide emulsion with predictably hilarious results.’

Who’s Your Friend?

The Good Life (1975—78) was the model of the classic BBC sitcom on which Generation X was reared. Tom Good (Richard Briers) quits his job designing plastic toys for breakfast cereal and with his wife Barbara (Felicity Kendall) sets about converting their suburban house in Surbiton into a commune-style self-sufficient farm. And with a goat in the back garden and a cockerel called Lenin, you can just imagine the hilarious scrapes they get into with their uptight petit bourgeois neighbours, Jerry and Margot Leadbetter. And…

Vyvyan’s sentiments are encapsulated in the Series 2 episode ‘Sick’, in which the opening titles of The Good Life start playing only for Vyvyan to rip right through the screen, screaming with rage.

It sums up The Young Ones perfectly. There’s the ‘80s media-savvy culture-jamming of including another show’s credit sequence in yours. There’s the unconventional visuals of Vyvyan ripping through the screen, and the comic-book extremity of his violence. ‘Right on’ politics are juxtaposed with playground language. And above all there’s a very clear and unambiguous message that The Young Ones is not The Good Life.

Like Vyvyan, The Young Ones tore the conventional sitcom apart. To begin with, it eschewed conventional farce plotlines. In ‘Flood’ (Series One), the house is cut off by a flood, forcing the house mates to resort to cannibalism. Then their landlord accidentally drinks the ‘homicidal axe-wielding maniac’ potion Vyvyan has made and the only way they can dispose of him is to lure him into Mike’s bedroom, which has a lion tamer and all his lions in it.

But even within that loopy and unpredictable plot, the show continues to fracture and distort: there’s a mediaeval witch trial in the garden, puppet vegetables dancing in the sink, and Vyvyan discovering Narnia inside the wardrobe in the hallway. The Young Ones didn’t only subvert the safe and dependable sitcom format with strange language and violent action. It also fundamentally atomised its structure.

Written by Rik Mayall, Ben Elton and Lise Mayer, The Young Ones came out of the early ‘80s Alternative Comedy scene, and featured many of the stars of the new stand-up clubs. Mayall, Ade Edmonson, Nigel Planer and Alexei Sayle played starring roles, but there were also bit parts for Dawn French, Jennifer Saunders, Robbie Coltrane, Lenny Henry and countless others. Watching it now prompts a lot of rewinding to see if that really was Paul Merton as a mediaeval peasant (yes it was).

Alternative Comedy was a radical departure from cosy and conventional mainstream sitcoms; but, more importantly, it was also a radical departure from the lazy, habitually bigoted and bullying tropes of the traditional stand up-circuit, a boozy round of creaking old racial stereotypes and ‘take my wife’ cliches. It was comedy’s punk moment: instinctively young and left wing, but even more instinctively rebellious and anti-authoritarian.

This is frequently played for laughs. Rik Mayall’s Rick is a self-appointed rebel who writes terrible performance poetry, uses the insult ‘fascist’ with all the fervour and meaninglessness of a Twitter poster, and reverts to petit-bourgeois prissiness in the face of any actual threat. But the anti-authoritarian stance also meant something. It was all very adolescent; but that made it immensely appealing to actual adolescents, assuming they were allowed to stay up and watch it.

How did you meet?

This is where I confess that I didn’t actually see the first series of The Young Ones at the time. I was at boarding school, and even if we had been allowed to watch television on week nights, the chances of me persuading the assembled Meatheads and Fauntleroys to watch punk comedy on BBC Two were not high. Instead, my parents watched it and, every week, my mother sent me a hand-written recap in a letter. They did not do this on sufferance; as far as I can tell, they thought it was brilliant and that I needed to know about it. So much for rebellious and anti-authoritarian.

Because, of course, while The Young Ones might have been an alternative to mainstream sitcoms and bargain basement entertainers, it was firmly within other comedy traditions. It owed more than a little to the Oxbridge alumni of The Goodies and Monty Python’s Flying Circus and Beyond The Fringe; indeed, Terry Jones made an appearance in the Series Two episode ‘Nasty’. It feels significant, though, that Alexei Sayle refused to be on set with Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie and Emma Thompson in the Series Two episode ‘Bambi’ because they had been in the Cambridge University Footlights. You didn’t get people making that kind of gesture in Monty Python.

More directly, with its mixture of daft jokes, cartoon slapstick, nonsense non-sequiturs and freeform approach to plotting, it can often feel like an ‘80s updating of The Goon Show or even the Marx Brothers (with Christopher Ryan’s Mike as the Zeppo Marx of the group). 

Indeed, it was even more traditional that might have first appeared; it had to be made as a ‘variety’ programme rather than a conventional comedy in order to get the kind of budget the producers wanted. This has the pleasing side-effect of episodes being interspersed with performances by a sequence of ‘80s acts including Madness, Dexy’s Midnight Runners, Madness, The Damned and Madness.

You could even argue that in Mike, Neil, Rik and Vyv, you have the fundamental family dynamic of laid back Dad, busy Mum, good Daughter and naughty Son that powers sitcoms from The Good Life (Jerry, Margot, Barbara, Tom) to Cheers (Sam, Diane, Coach, Carla) to The Simpsons (you get it).

Are you still friends?

And here is where I confess that when I finally sat down to watch all of the first series for this rewatch, I found it somewhat hard work. It was lovely to see Rik Mayall again with his ridiculous face, obviously, and its somewhat shambolic nature is charming; but the pacing is all off, the scripts are flabby and few of the jokes land. It was noticeable that most of the bits I remember and still quote are from Series 2, in which the scripts are tighter, the performances more confident and the budgets larger.

Parts of it are still funny, but none of it feels revolutionary any more. This is inevitable, and not just because that revolution had a profound effect and changed television comedy forever. Revolution is context-specific: it is defined by that against which it revolts. Alternative comedy was defined by the mainstream that it aimed to disrupt. The Young Ones, in trying to not be The Good Life, is entirely dependent on The Good Life for its definition. 

Out of that context it is not only no-longer-revolutionary; it is incomprehensible. The shock depends on norms that have long gone; the subversion depends on conventions no one observes any more. All you’re left with is some shouting and a bunch of indecipherable cultural references.

But, of course, it did have a profound effect. Most obviously, it launched careers, and not only for its onscreen stars. Writer Ben Elton became the host of Friday Night Live, which in turn provided a platform for a whole new generation of comedians, including many of those in the background of The Young Ones. Many of these people — French and Saunders, Lenny Henry, Ben Elton himself — are now national treasures.

The Young Ones also changed the sitcom fundamentally, and opened up the possibilities of what the form could achieve. Elton’s next project was Blackadder with Richard Curtis, which is brilliant but tends to a more conventional shape; but there were other shows that picked up that idea that a sitcom could be freeform, inventive and weird: the Flann O’Brien loopiness of Father Ted (1995—98); Edgar Wright’s movie pastiches in Spaced (1999—2001); the handmade strangeness of The Mighty Boosh (2004—07); the musical interludes of Flight of the Conchords (2007—09). These were all sitcoms made by people who presumably had not been to boarding school, and who were allowed to stay up and watch The Young Ones.

Who were you in the show?

Most crucially, of course, what The Young Ones gave me was a guidebook on how to be a student. I wasn’t a student in 1982. I was a schoolboy. Scumbag College was still seven years in my future. But when I got there, I knew precisely how to act: messy and obnoxious, self-absorbed and opinionated, drunk and bored, like Neil, Vyvyan, Mike and Rick.

Another wonky sitcom no doubt influenced by The Young Ones was Matthew Holness’s Garth Marenghi’s Rick Dagless’s Darkplace (stay with us, it will all make sense if you read this piece):

TV and radio are are little boxes full of many kinds of friends: informative friends, entertaining friends, distracting friends, friends who just won’t shut up and go away. In our semi-regular TV re-watch feature, we take this metaphor and chases it into the ground with deadly intent

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Who’s your friend?

The Clangers are an extended family of pink woollen moon mice who live inside a tiny, cratered planet. They move by stop-motion and communicate in the hooting glissando of swanee whistles. Sustained by daily deliveries from The Soup Dragon, they go about their projects of making weird contraptions for Major Clanger, all the while assaulted from without by constant interruptions of space debris, most often from that troublesome world, The Earth.

The Clangers was a TV show for kids created by a production company called Smallfilms. And these were small films: not just because they were short films for tiny children, but because the whole business was small. It consisted of two men — designer Peter Firmin and writer and narrator Oliver Postgate — crammed into a repurposed pig-shed in Kent and kitted out with a load of Meccano, some knitted puppets and a Bolex camera.

Smallfilms was already known for producing children’s shows. It had been responsible for Ivor the Engine (1959, remade in colour in the ‘70s; trains, Wales and small dragons), Noggin the Nog (1959—65; cardboard Norse sagas) and Pogle’s Wood (1965—68; stop-motion folk horror). Then, in 1969, the BBC approached Smallfilms to make something in colour, to help promote the new broadcasting technology. Postgate reached back to the ‘Moon Mouse’, a character from an episode of Noggin the Nog, and came up with The Clangers.

The show was deeply influenced by the Space Race of the late ‘60s and the moon landings. The Clangers’ tiny moon is deeply fanciful, riddled with seething soup wells and dotted about with musical trees, but it is constantly bombarded from out of the void by sharp-edged space-age technology, often of human design: satellites, probes, landers, objects of science intruding into the fantastical to probe and understand it. And, usually, to ruin it, until they’re shooed away again and everyday life can be restored.

How did you meet?

I am almost precisely coeval with The Clangers. I was a couple of months old when the first episode was broadcast, and was thus the perfect age for the show. I am one of those Generation Xers for whom Oliver Postgate’s voice — gently serious, simultaneously authoritative and dreamy — is a formative sound: the voice of childhood, the voice of comfort, the voice of story itself. Postgate was our Pied Piper: we would have followed him anywhere and done anything he asked of us, not least because he asked nothing but for us to listen to a story. A story that would be slightly odd, but never frightening; unexpected, but never unnerving.

It’s ironic that the beginnings of The Clangers was so tied up with new technology and science, because the programme is deeply suspicious of all such things. The title Major Clanger — given to their their apparent leader — is surely a joke. (Non-Brits might find it useful to know that in British slang a ‘clanger’ is a mistake, and a ‘major clanger’ is a total balls-up.) The Major is constantly trying to invent space rockets and flying machines, and they are always major clangers. They fall apart; they knock Iron Chickens out of the firmament. These inventions are always bad ideas, and things are always better when they are put away and forgotten about.

At some point in the ‘90s we had an American visitor staying with us and we sat him down to watch a random episode of The Clangers. It was ‘The Intruder’, in which an Earth robot lands on the Clangers’ moon, prompting them to consider returning the favour by visiting Earth. Major Clanger tries to shake hands the robot, but what he thinks is an arm comes off in his grip and turns out to be a telescope. When the Clangers look through it they see New York City, the symbol of ‘60s America’s revolutionary restlessness and fervour:

NARRATOR
No, no. They don’t seem to like the look of that planet after all. Perhaps it would be best to… stay at home.

Having watched this, our visitor announced that he finally understood Britain.

There has been a twenty-first century reboot of The Clangers, narrated in the UK by Michael Palin and in the US by William Shatner. Palin — another voice revered by British Generation X — is the correct choice, but Shatner is surely wrong. The Captain of the USS Enterprise is precisely the sort of person who would land on the Clangers’ moon and start messing about with it, taking cuttings from the Music Trees and analysing the safety of the Soup Wells. 

Despite being set on an alien moon, this is not a show about outer space. It is a show about home. It manages to speak to both the innate imaginative curiosity of children and their instinctive conservatism: the urge to learn and the fear of the unknown, the desire to explore and the equal desire to go home again.

This is, perhaps, a product of Postgate’s own politics. A distant cousin of Angela ‘Murder She Wrote’ Lansbury, he was the grandson of Labour Party leader George Lansbury and grew up surrounded by (champagne) socialists. The suspicion of technology was perhaps the response of the traditional left to the new oppressive tools of global capitalism.

It is also the politics of its time. At the beginning of ‘The Intruder’, the Clangers are building something that the robot smashes into and destroys. The narrator describes it as ‘a sort of house’ but what it looks most like is Stonehenge. Like the strange folk magic of the subsequent Smallfilms series Bagpuss, The Clangers has some of that late ‘60s atavistic mistrust of technology. In that moment of scientific enthusiasm, as mankind was climbing into the heavens to touch the face of God, it was quietly revolutionary. It suggested that God might not want his face poked, and that we might more profitably spend our time and money worrying about the environment, sustainability and society.

There is a sly rebellion in the fabric of the show. Although the Clangers themselves speak entirely through the tootling of swanee whistles, Postgate wrote full scripts for him to base his whistling on. These scripts often included swearing, a matter that alarmed the BBC when they saw them. But the children wouldn’t hear the swearing, protested Postgate. But it would still be there, objected the BBC. Postgate went ahead and recorded it anyway and no one complained. Because no one knew. Not until the scripts were published at any rate.

So when the mechanical door to their underground lair gets stuck and Major Clanger complains: ‘Oh, dammit, the bloody thing’s stuck again’ (Postgate even wrote the ‘bloody’ as ‘B.’ in the script, so shocking was the word in 1968), it’s not just Postgate poking fun at the fallibility of technology; he’s also poking fun at the BBC. This is slightly unfair, of course. He himself said the BBC was a delight to work with, happily taking whatever Smallfilms produced, never asking them to pitch or consider commercial pressures. But then this fits with the conservative socialism of Postgate’s worlds: the patrician state-owned broadcaster doing what it thinks is best for the children of the nation.

What kind of friend is it?

Delightful, obviously. The Clangers is cosy, but in strange and inventive ways. It’s no more strange than a lot of (excellent) children’s shows — Spongebob Squarepants, for instance, or Over The Garden Wall — but there is a particular synaesthetic aptness to all of The Clanger’s apparently whimsical choices. Space boats use not wind power but music power, wafting along on swelling notes; soup is the staff of life, forever bubbling in subterranean wells. These ideas fit, just as Postgate’s sesquipedalian, orotund language fits and Vernon Elliott’s plangent, piping music fits. It’s all very unusual, and possibly incomprehensible to childish ears. It invokes the alien nature of the setting but also highlights the homemade domesticity of the Clangers themselves. Against all the contemporaneous sententious speechifying about the vastness of the infinite, here are a bunch of pink woollen shrews eating string pie.

This home-made quality is its chief joy now. The Clangers had Meccano skeletons and their flesh was knitted by Peter Firmin’s wife. The stars were Christmas baubles; their moon was a football covered in plaster; the doors to their burrows were foil tops from milk bottles. The whole show was made from objects scrounged from the nonsense drawer in the kitchen and the bottom of the toy box. It was not only a world made for children; it could have been made by them.

Every episode starts with an introduction from Postgate. Often these introductions are invocations to imagine another world and what might populate it. At its most fundamental level the show requires the imaginative involvement of the viewer. We can’t understand the Clangers, with their weird whistling language; we, like the narrator, have to imagine what they are talking about.

This is the ultimate cosiness of The Clangers. It doesn’t ‘tell’ stories to children; it requires children’s involvement in the telling. It reassures them that they can imagine their own, that there is no idea too silly or too small. That among the forgotten bits and pieces scattered about the house, there are strange new worlds to discover.

For more of the strange worlds offered to ‘70s children, try Rowan Davies on “Ballet Shoes”

TV and radio are are little boxes full of many kinds of friends: informative friends, entertaining friends, distracting friends, friends who just won’t shut up and go away. In our semi-regular TV re-watch feature, we take this metaphor and chases it into the ground with deadly intent.

A post-Python Michael Palin (with writing help from Terry Jones) sets about parodying Edwardian adventure stories in a series of one-off comedy dramas including horrific boarding schools, daring (almost) prisoner-of-war escapes, spies, football, murder and crossing the Andes by frog.

As Monty Python ran down in the wake of John Cleese’s departure, someone finally twigged that Michael Palin was perfect TV presenter material. He was offered his own light-ent show, but couldn’t quite picture himself coming down a staircase in a spangly jacket to introduce Englebert Humperdinck and the Michael Palin Dancers.

However, he did like the idea of having a programme of his own. After Terry Jones’s brother showed them a big book of early-twentieth-century stories for boys, Jones and Palin set about writing a spoof school story, ‘Tomkinson’s Schooldays’. It was intended as a one-off, but eventually became the first episode of Ripping Yarns.

The stories they parody were the staples of pre-War boy’s entertainment: boarding school japes, intrepid explorers, ghost stories, murder mysteries. The comedy comes in the shape of Jones and Palin’s customary bathos, which forces determinedly ordinary little men into extraordinary circumstances. The terminally boring Eric Olthwaite (whose conversation is so dull that his father pretends to speak only French) becomes a bank robber; ‘Roger of the Raj’ is heartbroken to discover he’s too posh to follow his dream of owning a little chemist’s shop. The inspired casting of guest actors (including Roy Kinnear, Denholm Elliot and, in ‘Roger of the Raj’, the glorious combination of Richard Vernon, Joan Sanderson and John Le Mesurier) means that Palin’s (terrific) comic performances are embedded within something that could almost pass for a genuine historical drama.

Why did you spend time with it?

I was only small when Ripping Yarns was first broadcast. As a prep school boarder myself, a lot of ‘Tomkinson’s Schooldays’ resonated. Especially having to fight the School Bear.

The boarding schools I attended were very Edwardian institutions, and their libraries were full of books about Imperial derring-do; I grew up reading Buchan and Kipling and Conan-Doyle, just as Palin surely did at Shrewsbury. The schools clung onto the ethos as keenly as they did the books, steeping themselves in ‘Muscular Christianity’ and aiming to produce cohorts of young men who would go out into the world and tell it what to do. By the ‘70s and ‘80s this ethos looked increasingly farcical.

It wasn’t just that Palin’s small men shoved into outsized Imperial situations were funny; they were also me, stuck in a silly hat, immured in vast Victorian buildings, being educated to run an Empire when all I wanted to do was build increasingly loopy escape plans, like Major Errol Phipps in ‘Escape from Stalag Luft 112B’. Although I also thought it was funny, of course. And as Joel Morris points out in his book Be Funny or Die, the comedy you take in as a child and young adult has an outsized effect on your taste ever after. I’ve taken in a lot of Edwardian comedy and the form has become instinctive. My Christmas story The Adventure Calendar of Mr Timothy Hope is basically a seasonally-themed Ripping Yarns episode.

What kind of friend is it?

It’s rather a ‘70s sort of friend. It parodies the attitudes and assumptions of imperialism, but it has the attitudes and the assumptions of the 1970s too. There is a lot of public school excitability about the rumoured existence of women’s bodies, and some very ‘70s racism wrapped up in a critique of some very ‘20s racism.

But there’s something else going on with its relation to its source material. The opening to ‘Tomkinson’s Schooldays’ has a joke about celebrity presenters (which relies on knowing that Orson Welles spent a lot of the ‘70s slumming it in low-quality adverts and TV shows). A pompous man in an Edwardian hat and cape stands on a windswept headland mangling a quotation he (probably wrongly) ascribes to G. K. Chesterton: ‘The follies of our youth are in retrospect glorious when compared to the follies of our old age.’

The fondness with which Ripping Yarns parodied the Edwardians suggests that the follies of the 1910s looked glorious indeed to Palin and Jones.It is noticeable that they’re all set in the Edwardian period: no Georgians or Victorians here. These are not stories of the winning of Empire; they are stories of its troublesome maintenance, its apogee, when the schoolroom atlas was stained with pink. And in poking fun at Empire, Palin and Jones begin to excuse it. These weren’t ruthless imperial stormtroopers, they say; they were boring little tits from the Home Counties. They just wanted to build railways and then write all the engine numbers down in a little book.

In ‘Whinfrey’s Last Case’ Palin’s character — an analogue of Buchan’s Richard Hannay — has only to show up on holiday in Cornwall for whole villages of German spies to surrender to him. He doesn’t have to do any spying or thwarting; his superiority is communicated to funny foreigners through the simple medium of his flagrant poshness.

This is the story that Britain likes to tell itself; that it won an Empire by accident. The British weren’t beastly like the Belgians, or profit-driven like the Dutch. Instead they were kind-hearted bumblers stuck in an uncomfortable Imperial position due to the twin ineptitudes of the East India Company and the French navy. Like Roger Bartlesham in ‘Roger of the Raj’, they didn’t want to rule India; they just wanted to be a nation of shopkeepers, like Napoleon promised. These aren’t stories of colonisation, conquest and oppression. They are just Ripping Yarns.

Who were you in the show?

Well, back then, definitely Tomkinson being beaten up by The School Bully. Now, probably Major Errol Phipps in ‘Escape from Stalag Luft 112B’, so distracted by his mad little projects that he completely fails to notice everyone else around him getting on with being successful.

For more Palin and Jones, try our essay on whether ‘Life of Brian’ is Boomer Bullshit or not (spoiler: it’s not).

TV and radio are are little boxes full of many kinds of friends: informative friends, entertaining friends, distracting friends, friends who just won’t shut up and go away. In our semi-regular TV re-watch feature, we take this metaphor and chases it into the ground with deadly intent.

It’s 1965, and Detective Constable Endeavour Morse (Shaun Evans) is seconded to a murder investigation in Oxford, a town he hasn’t been back to since he dropped out of the University. Once there he falls under the grumpy wing of D.I. Fred Thursday (Roger Allam), who is impressed with Morse’s arcane knowledge, analytical intelligence and dogged pursuit of justice. Together they set about investigating a series of swinging mysteries among the screaming spires. 

Endeavour is the prequel to the classic ‘80s/‘90s Oxford-set detective show Inspector Morse (ITV, 1987-2000). The grumpy old loner of the original series was so embarrassed about his first name that he refused to tell anyone what it was, but this prequel sticks it right there in the title. Finally, it promises, we’ll solve the mystery of Morse.

The problem is that there isn’t much of a mystery there. We know exactly where we’re going. We’ve already met the fully-formed character ‘Morse’; he was played to perfection by John Thaw nearly 40 years ago. We know how his career has gone (so-so), where he lives (Oxford!), roughly how many friends he has (none), how he relates to women and colleagues (badly), how often he has sex (reasonably often, with a host of British ‘80s TV stars), and what music he listens to (opera!). We know what the finished apple cart looks like; there can be no events in the young Morse’s life that fundamentally upset it. Morse is not going to suddenly lose a limb or gain a wife; there can be no astonishing developments.

It is also absolutely necessary that we do get the expected developments. We need to know how he got the limp and the Jag, and why there’s no Mrs Morse; we’re interested in the provenance of his co-dependency with nice young Sergeant Lewis. We demand to see Morse becoming increasingly Morseful.

Given these limits, Endeavour contents itself with the mildly unexpected, the generally unimpactful, and - at times - the absolutely deranged. It does most of this using a formula you will be familiar with if you’ve ever watched TV. At the beginning of each episode we are introduced to a group of apparently unconnected characters, one of whom is about to become a corpse. Morse then puts his special skills - in his case, the cruciverbalist and the cryptographic - to work, coming up with ever more abstruse theories as the bodies pile up around him, a tally of his bad guesses in mortuary form.

Then, with about ten minutes to go - and this is where we depart a little from the formula - the script writers of Endeavour throw a final, loopy curveball: the dead man turns out to be his own identical twin, or the serial killer turns out to be an actual tiger.

Some detective series, including the original Morse, try to enlist the viewer in the police force; they challenge us to solve the mystery before the sleuth. Endeavour absolves us of that duty. You will never be able to guess the ending, because the solution is going to be far more unhinged than you could ever have imagined.

With this in mind, you can just sit back and enjoy the scenery. And what scenery it is. These delightful plots rise from an entertaining project: the construction of a fantasy 1960s. As Sellar and Yeatman point out in 1066 And All That (1930), ‘History… is what you can remember. All other history defeats itself’. Endeavour is a kind of ‘1966 And All That’, little repurposed scraps of a collective folk memory of the ‘60s. That tiger, for example, is a repurposing of the extraordinary story of Christian the Lion, who was bought from Harrods in 1969 by John Rendall and ‘Ace’ Bourke and taken for walks in the Moravian graveyard just off the King’s Road. There’s a version of media prude and morality arbiter Mary Whitehouse, called, splendidly, ‘Joy Pettybon’ (Russell Lewis, the writer, has a real gift for Dickensian names). There’s a half-remembered version of the famous Rolling Stones drugs bust of 1967, featuring a fictional band called ‘The Wildwood’ (an appropriately Kenneth Grahame reference to equal Pink Floyd’s Piper at the Gates of Dawn). There’s a whole subplot featuring Joan - the daughter of Roger Allam’s Inspector Thursday - that’s just a dramatisation of The Beatles’ ‘She’s Leaving Home’.

There are ‘race riots’ and the British space programme, nuclear threats and hippy communes. One episode set in a remote village appears to be a restaging of The Wicker Man (1973), while another set in a public swimming baths is a version of Deep End (1970). It is the ‘60s summarised and, largely, expurgated. There are some racists, but they turn out to be actual Nazis (a Unity Mitford avatar called Charity Mudford), not regular series characters. There are some sexists, but they’re bent coppers, not our coppers. No one ‘falls down stairs’ at the nick and the female victims are rarely ‘interfered with’, as Superintendent Bright tends to put it. Everyone is largely decent and if they’re not - well, they’ve probably done some murdering.

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Refer a friend

What kind of friend is it?

It’s more of a relative than a friend. Roger Allam, in his hat and slightly-too-tight single-breasted suit, being genially gruff around the corner of his pipe, insistently and reassuringly reminds me of my maternal grandfather. All he needs is a pair of horn-rimmed glasses and I could be back on the carpet in the sitting room of their house, not that far from Oxford in fact, sitting in front of the TV waiting for The World About Us to begin.

Because this is what Endeavour is: Sunday evening viewing par excellence. It has been a long week and a long day; there has been a big family gathering and a big family meal, with a big row about politics and then a little one about washing up. All anyone wants is something undemanding, something cosy to lull them until bedtime, one final rest before another bloody working week.

In June 1965 - the month in which the pilot of Endeavour was set - Sunday evenings on BBC1 meant Dr Finlay’s Casebook, a drama set around a small GP practice in Scotland. In January 1987 - when Inspector Morse premiered on ITV - Sunday evenings meant the Yorkshire-based sitcom Last of the Summer Wine and, of course, Joan Hickson as Miss Marple. Soapy medical dramas, humorous rural antics and cosy murder. Nothing too demanding, nothing too flashy. This is the sort of thing that gets called a ‘guilty pleasure’, which is as grindingly Protestant a phrase as one could imagine. It is only surprising in that it suggests that there may be pleasures about which we need not feel guilty. Of course, what it means to imply is that we ought to find pleasure in the unpleasant and difficult, in gritty ‘realistic’ portrayals of the everyday misery of malfunctioning men, and crunchy documentaries about challenging moral conundrums. As if we ought to feel guilty about snatching an hour or two of gentle entertainment to distract ourselves from our own everyday miseries and moral challenges.

Endeavour, with its logic-defying plots and its drowsy recollections of the ‘60s like the murmurings of a grandfather about to snooze in an armchair, makes for perfect easy viewing. But it has one other, splendid feature…

Why do you watch it?

In the episode I mentioned earlier about the municipal swimming pool, Morse is questioning the staff about the body found floating in the deep end. But, protests, the receptionist, it's not as if it happens often: ‘In 1964, no one died. In 1965, no one died. In 1966, one person died. I mean, I could go on.’ At which point there was general jubilation in The Metropolitan household, because we recognised the reference immediately: Steve Coogan’s tedious little security guard from the spoof documentary ‘The Pool’ as featured in the spoof news programme The Day Today (1994).

Endeavour is full of this sort of thing. It doesn’t only have references to ‘60s ephemera like Christian the Lion; it also sneaks in very specific winks to weird little pieces of pop culture. Once you start noticing them, they’re everywhere. In the episode with the Nazis and the knock-off Mitford, there is an off-screen character called Roderick Spode, the name of P. G. Wodehouse’s knock-off Moseley in the Wooster stories. Another episode features a stolen case of ‘Killoran’ whiskey, named for the island in Powell and Pressburger’s classic film I Know Where I’m Going! (1945). An artist’s landlady is called Mrs Cravatt, named for Irene Handl’s character in Tony Hancock’s The Rebel (1961). There’s a Soho door marked ‘Raymond Duck, Theatrical Agent’, Uncle Monty’s agent from Withnail & I (1988).

What Endeavour has done is replace the traditional murder mystery game of whodunnit with a far more congenial and Sunday-suitable game: spot the glancing reference. Every episode has a joyful little gem hidden inside it, reassuring you that Russell Lewis - and, indeed, the whole team behind the show - know exactly what they’re up to. You are in safe hands; a whole bunch of skilled TV professionals have invented a lunatic pastime, just for you. 

Put the kettle on, there’s time for another episode before bed. Wait, did that friend of the dead scientist just say that this breakthrough chess computer was coded in a programming language called ‘FORBIN’? That’s a reference to Colossus: The Forbin Project (1970). One point to me, I think.

We’ve discussed Morse’s future in the past, as well as The Day Today and Prime Suspect, when write about the original ‘80s TV series:

TV and radio are are little boxes full of many kinds of friends: informative friends, entertaining friends, distracting friends, friends who just won’t shut up and go away. In our semi-regular TV re-watch feature, we take this metaphor and chases it into the ground with deadly intent.

Berlin, 1929: two new faces join the city police force. One is Köln cop Gereon Rath, who has come to Berlin on the trail of a blackmailer; the other is the resourceful Charlotte Ritter, who is trying to work her way up from the typing pool to the detective squad. Their backdrop is the seedy underbelly of Weimar Berlin, peopled by communists, fascists, spies and gangsters.

Babylon Berlin is a German TV adaptation of a series of popular novels and was a smash hit in its home country. It's not hard to see why. Period detective shows always have the best of both worlds, combining show-off design and style with the plot hooks of a mystery. Babylon Berlin also has excellent performances - not only from the leads Volker Bruch and Liv Lisa Fries, but also from a splendid rogues’ gallery of character actors - and electric direction.

Most of all, though, it has the setting.

Babylon

Berlin during the Weimar period (1918-33) is the perfect setting for a policier. The ‘20s and ‘30s was the golden age of British detective stories, but these were stories set in the cosy heartlands of the largest Empire the world had ever seen. They are stories about railway timetables and disputed wills, polite little poisonings at the tea party and bodies in the billiard room. Babylon Berlin is set in another inter-war European world, featuring monster gangsters, political turmoil, conspiracy, and revolutionary artistic languages: film and jazz, recorded music and mass media.

Its first two seasons cover Trotskyists and White Russians in Red Berlin, a fascist military conspiracy and a shadowy gangster controlling the city’s underworlds. The latter is very clearly modelled on Dr Mabuse, the villain of Fritz Lang’s film Dr. Mabuse the Gambler (1922), who symbolised the psychic turmoil of Weimar Germany. (The Nazis interpreted Mabuse as an emblematic sinister Jew; the left saw him as prefiguring Adolf Hitler in his ability to mesmerise and pervert the popular will.) The show dramatises this maelstrom in the fate of Lotte’s friend Greta, who is pulled to and fro by the competing tensions of class, politics and emotion. Humiliation and tragedy are heaped endlessly upon her as she is betrayed by Nazis, failed by her friends and destroyed by the state. She is the image of a working class Berliner everywoman, scrabbling for survival, running on instinct and susceptible to manipulation.

The first storyline in these opening seasons makes full use of the possibilities of the Weimar setting. Rath arrives in Berlin on the heels of a pornographer called König (‘king’) who specialises in amateur movies starring lookalikes of German statesmen, including President Hindenburg and the Kaiser. Here we have not just the underworld of loose sexual mores and criminal enterprise, but also the political wasteland. The loss of the Great War has diminished authority, and no one takes the state seriously any more. 

And there’s also a streak of satire there, too. Because Berlin isn’t all communists and criminals; there are also nightclubs and dark bier kellers full of hectic jazz, transgressive entertainers and desperate young people trying to find some glint of transient glee. Wilkommen, bienvenue, welcome im Cabaret, the abiding image of ‘20s Berlin: what Peter Cook referred to as ‘those wonderful Berlin cabarets … which did so much to stop the rise of Hitler and prevent the outbreak of the Second World War.’

Period setting (all flapper dresses and sharp suits), political turmoil (the street fighting clash of communists and fascists), seedy underbelly (gangsters, dopefiends and cabaret) and cultural maelstrom (cars! movies! jazz!): the perfect setting for a detective series.

Berlin

But it's a scene in the show’s central nightclub, the Moka Efti, in the second episode of the first season, that really sold me on the show. Here Lotte and her friends watch, and participate in, a performance by the Countess Sorokin. Sorokin, a Russian emigre played by the Lithuanian actress Severija Janušauskaitė, is in her male persona of the mysterious Nikoros as she sings the song ‘Zu Aschen, Zu Staub’.

The song contains the whole setting. It starts in shadows and fog, haunting piano and cymbal, out of which emerges an insistent throb, an urging of desperation. Sorokin’s voice is declamatory and resigned behind a keening woodwind phrase that yearns for joy. It all resolves into a transcendent chorus, a great cry of triumphant survival, of the perseverance of humanity amongst the hectic, inescapable drumming of life.

The staging is perfect. There’s a deliberate tension between jazz individuality - the dancers’ Josephine Baker banana skirts, Nikoros’s distinctive cabaret cross-dressing - and the instinctive group choreography of the crowd, who know all the words and perform a mass dance routine, mimicking the roboticised workers of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. They have a deep need to perform joy together, but there are also hints of how that togetherness might be exploited; Nikoros’s signature gesture, an upraised arm, is almost a Nazi salute.

Also, the song itself is absolutely brilliant: I have been playing it on repeat for months. It was co-written by, among others, Nikko Weidemann (who has worked with Einstürzende Neubauten and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds) and Larry Mullins (who has also played for the Bad Seeds and is in Swans). It’s the sound of underground Berlin alright: underground Berlin in the ‘80s.

And this is, perhaps, the ultimate appeal of the setting. This is Berlin as the outsider’s demi-monde (eine halbe-Welt, perhaps); the anti-Paris, Paris being a city that easily accommodates itself to American musicals and glossy Netflix series. Berlin has always been different, awkward. Post-war West Berlin was eine halbe Stadt, a half city, an outpost of free Europe marooned in the drab communist East. This is the city that gave us the underground pop culture of the ‘80s, formed by Bowie’s ‘Berlin Trilogy’ Low (1977), Heroes (1977) and Lodger (1979), in which you can find all the genres of ‘80s pop in larval form.

Of course, it doesn’t hurt that, for British Generation X, Berlin had a very distinct image. This wasn’t just a city full of spies, the front line of the Cold War; this was the old capital of Germany, the legendary enemy of two world wars (and something called a World Cup, which isn’t really my area). We were brought up in a country where the bad guys were always German; even forty years later, primetime TV was full of sitcoms, dramas and films about THE WAR. In this (at the time) instinctively anti-German country, the appeal of Berlin to even the most timidly rebellious teenager (ie me) was unparalleled. What better way to annoy the Boomers, after all? It helped, of course, that the Berlin of the Cold War ‘80s was just as febrile and creative as the city of the ‘20s. Dancing, once again, on the edge of an abyss; dancing, it has to be said, to brilliant music.

It is impossible for people of my vintage to see Berlin of any period without this foreshadowing. But especially this period, this brief moment in which German democracy and the entire future of Europe (and European Jewry) hung in the balance: possible, promising, doomed.

It is hard not to see the characters as people whistling past the graveyard, trying to eke some life and joy out of the wasteland of economic depression, political turmoil and personal tragedy. We see Berlin as a city under two shadows. The First World War’s shadow falls forward; Gereon Rath is addicted to the morphine he takes for his shellshock, and suffers from survivor’s guilt over the death of his brother. And the shadow of the Second World War falls backwards on a society hungry for order and identity. In this double darkness, the spotlight burns twice as bright and twice as furious.

For more Berlin, there’s always Wim Wenders’ ‘80s indie hit ‘Wings of Desire’:

TV and radio are are little boxes full of many kinds of friends: informative friends, entertaining friends, distracting friends, friends who just won’t shut up and go away. In our semi-regular TV re-watch feature, we take this metaphor and chases it into the ground with deadly intent.

Amuse bouche

Following the suicide of his charismatic older brother Michael, Michelin star winning chef Carmen Berzatto inherits the family sandwich shop and, with the help of star-struck apprentice Sydney Adamu, sets about trying to turn it into a fashionable restaurant, The Bear, much to the frustration of current staff including seething ball of anger Tina, conflict refugee Ebraheim and most of all boorish would-be-alpha-male Cousin Richie.

The Bear is billed as a ‘comedy/drama’ but it’s initially not clear where the laughs are coming from. Grief, anger, interpersonal friction, knives and guns: yes. Jokes? Not so much. Despite sharing a set up with ‘90s Lenny Henry vehicle Chef! (in which Henry’s culinary genius Gareth Blackstock sets about bullying his kitchen staff into saving a failing restaurant), The Bear is very definitely not a sitcom.

The ‘comedy’ label appears to have been adopted as a kind of neoteny, the process by which adult domestic pets retain juvenile features and so end up looking more like puppies and kittens than wolves and tigers. The Bear is a drama, but not a drama. You are not going to be expected to sit through harrowing depictions of sexual violence, agonising descents into addiction or long sequences of gloomy bourgeois parents have quiet breakdowns in unlit kitchens and chunky knitwear. There’s emotional, financial and culinary dysfunction, but you can feel safe knowing that nobody will sexually harass Sydney, and that Marcus is not going to meet a single racist while he’s in Denmark. Like beef sandwiches, it is comforting to consume.

It helps that it is incredibly well made. You most likely haven’t heard of Chef! - I doubt Lenny Henry even remembers it - but it’s a decent sitcom of its period; it even has some actually funny jokes, which is rarer than one would like. But it is of its period. It has a kitchen set with a camera in the fourth wall, a background cast of one note characters, and a lot of broad ‘comic’ performances. 30 years later, even an apparently run-of-the-mill show like The Bear is extraordinarily well written and directed. It also has a brilliant soundtrack, although I bring this up to have an excuse to tell you that every piece of music used was already on my Spotify playlist.

This is modern American TV, where all the performances are like something out of golden age New Hollywood cinema, all effortless naturalism and pin point characterisation. This style is particularly noticeable when Olivia Colman pops up in a cameo in Season Two and doesn’t do it. Which is not to say she can’t do acting - this is Olivia Colman, after all, she’s generally considered quite good at it - both she and Ebon Moss-Bachrach as Richie are extraordinary in the scene, but they’re subtly distinctive in their performances. It’s partly in the characters, of course, her Chef Terry is in a position of power in her own kitchen compared to Richie, but it’s also, one suspects, simply a difference in cultural temperaments, between American self-expression and British emotional repression; a different style, a different taste.

Hors d'oeuvres

The kitchen is a metaphor, of course; a big, hot metaphor full of knives, flames and delicious ironies. Key to that metaphor is the system of the commercial kitchen: the intricate hierarchy of roles, the insistent ticking of the tasks, the shouts of ‘corner!’ and ‘behind!’ as they move around, the uniforms and equipment and ingredients.

This system is the cage in which Carmen keeps ‘the bear’, which is his grief1: his fear and anger and primal hurt. Although it is wild, it is trapped by ritual and purpose. (Everyone calls Carmen ‘Carm’, which to English ears sounds like ‘calm’.) Jeremy Allen White’s face looks like a Renaissance statue, but it's stucco on a rotten wooden frame, the impassive front to a seething maelstrom. The kitchen gives Carmen the space in which to be stressed and stressful, emotional and controlled. Appropriately enough <spoilers> Season 2 ends with him finally cornered in the kitchen, locked in the cold store having a meltdown, caught in a trap that he thought was a defence.

But the bars of the cage are also scaffolding. The system of a commercial kitchen also enables communal work; it is set up to maximise people’s ability to build together productively. It gives people spaces and roles in which to grow and develop. It provides the constraints that allow creativity. 

Main Course

Early on in Chef!, Lenny Henry’s Gareth Blackstock overhears a diner in his restaurant asking for salt. He launches into a scathing and impassioned diatribe, browbeating the customer with his knowledge, skill and derision. When he has finally stormed off the maitre d’ tries to placate the customer: ‘You must try and look at him as an artist, rather than a rude and overbearing megalomaniac.’

The Bear is a riposte: not just to this bullying, arrogant, snobbish idea of cooking, but also the Romantic idea of the lone, bohemian genius whose art doesn’t so much outweigh his failings as necessitate them. It suggests the restaurant kitchen as a place of communal creation, as all art is, or should be. It places the auteur back within the team, acknowledging the system that supports the creation. 

In the Lenny Henry series the cry of ‘Chef!’ is a terrifying, magical invocation to placate the monster; in The Bear it becomes a mark of mutual respect. Everyone is referred to as ‘Chef’, because they are all integral to the process. In Chef! Blackstock is relentlessly disparaging to the wait staff, but when The Bear’s Cousin Richie is sent for some training at a high-end restaurant, he learns that running a dining room is an art in itself. He had thought of himself as a man without purpose, someone who was merely ‘good with people’, but discovers that this overlooked skill is a crucial component in the restaurant’s production of happiness.

The kitchen in The Bear has no time for the snobbishness of ‘90s-style fine dining; its job is to produce sensory and emotional experiences for joyful consumption, and it takes customer service as seriously as it takes the food. (It’s just a shame that the artful food produced by the revamped restaurant in Season 2 looks so much less appetising than the beef sandwiches they were making before.) While both The Bear and Chef! see high-end cooking as a form of art, The Bear sees this art as an ephemeral and, more importantly, commercial art, driven by the customer’s enjoyment. At Cousin Richie’s fancy training berth we see how determined the staff are to spoil their customers, in one case surprising a pizza-mad diner with an off-menu Chicago deep-dish pizza. This is a deeply American conception of luxury, available to anyone who can pay for it.

Just desserts

The whole of Season 2 of The Bear is a kind of mise en place for the opening night of the eponymous restaurant. The ingredients/characters are being prepared, and one by one we see them grow and discover new purpose. Here The Bear chimes with other recent shows such as Ted Lasso and Stranger Things, carefully making space for individual redemption through a communal endeavour: getting promoted to the Premier League, fighting extra-dimensional demons, making pastry. Cousin Richie’s dysfunction is revealed to be the result of his toxically masculine response to his divorce and his perceived lack of identity. The system and the communal support of the kitchen give him the space to learn and to grow, to redeem himself, to feel purposeful and become a broader person.

At Ever, the high-end restaurant where Richie does his training, there’s a motto on the wall of the kitchen: ‘Every Second Counts’. At first we assume that this is the implacable exhortation of a Gareth Blackstock, and that it refers to the frenetic, barely controlled panic of the restaurant service: the relentless ticking of clocks, pan lids, orders, the high-pitched seething of ‘New Noise’ by Refused on the soundtrack. But then we meet Olivia Colman’s Chef Terry, and through a personal story that she shares with Richie we realise it is not a command to hurry up; it is a reminder to slow down, to savour every moment.

In the town museum in Ilfracombe, Devon - which is the best museum in the world - there is a cabinet full of slices of Victorian wedding cake. The weddings for which they were baked are long gone, as are the marriages and the couples. Only the food remains, the crumbling evidence of love and connection. It has to be said that most food is more ephemeral than Victorian wedding cake (God knows what they put in it). Most food goes cold, goes off, goes into the stomach of the eaters; goes, eventually, into the sewers, revolting and poisonous.

The Bear holds two ideas in balance. Even in the midst of life we are in death; change and entropy are inevitable. But within that entropy, humans make communal experiences and memories that nourish the individual and the group. In the end, this is the only magnificent stand we can make.

Every Second Counts

For more discomfort food:

TV and radio are are little boxes full of many kinds of friends: informative friends, entertaining friends, distracting friends, friends who just won’t shut up and go away. In our semi-regular TV re-watch feature, we take this metaphor and chases it into the ground with deadly intent.

Decade-long (1982-93) US sitcom set in the Boston bar ‘Cheers’, owned by ex-baseball star Sam Malone and staffed by nerd Diane, spitfire Carla and profound dimwit Coach (and then later Woody and Rebecca). The bar is home-away-from-home for a cast of regulars, including Norm (Norm!), Cliff, Frasier and an audience of millions.

The very first episode of Cheers, ‘Give me a ring sometime’, tells the story of how Diane - a serial academic and intellectual snob - ends up working as a waitress in a cocktail bar. Right at the end, just before the credits, there’s a little throwaway scene in which Diane serves her first customers.

And in that one little epilogue we get a perfect encapsulation of the whole series: how it worked, why it worked and what it was like to watch it working.

1. Character

‘Parenthetically’. In one word, Diane’s precise character is confirmed. She is not only the sort of person to whom the word ‘parenthetically’ is casually available; she is the sort of person whose utterances - whose thought processes - require brackets. The word itself packs a comic punch in its nerdily correct usage, and in the context of a waitress doing her job. (Anyone who’s lived in a large city or university town is used to being served burgers by people with PhDs, but it's still a silly situation.) And Shelley Long kills it. She just throws the word away, showing us that for Diane, delighted by her own cleverness, this is just normal speech. 

‘Parenthetically’ gave parched British viewers in 1982 a glimpse of the American network precision machine. You can almost hear the writers debating which word would be the funniest and the most fitting, and then having stand-up arguments with the producers about keeping it in the script despite its difficulty. ‘Parenthetically’ refuses to underestimate the audience, a tendency that was carried over (and much further) into the spin-off series Frasier.

The whole of the first episode is like this. It’s a whirlwind of zingers, but each of them is employed in the service of character. Everyone is introduced, and all of them are funny in their own peculiar ways. Not every joke is an absolute killer, but each one earns the right to be there by telling you something about somebody.

The interplay between joke and character is what powers a good mainstream sitcom; the job of the cast is to smooth over the joins. When Shelley Long sits down next to the bemused customers (having delivered her parenthetical musings) she doesn’t do it with overt physical comedy, but with the unconscious movement of someone so wrapped up in her own thoughts that she has lost all apprehension of the external world.

2. Theme

They make a joke of it, of course, putting it in the verbose mouth of pretentious Diane and then undercutting it (‘their kind’), but they’re saying the theme out loud.

It is noticeable that very few people get drunk in ‘Cheers’. Even Norm, who sits at that bar for hours every single day, never falls off his stool or is sick in his glass. This is a bar - run by a recovering alcoholic - where drunkenness is barely mentioned. It is a fantasy ‘local’, a warm and happy place where you can leave the day behind, be funny and amused, enlivened and revelatory; where having a cheering beer or two is entirely by-the-by.

They chose a bar for the setting not because it’s a place where you can buy alcohol, but because a bar is inherently democratic. Anyone can walk in, be welcomed and share in the common life. It’s right there in the lyrics of the theme tune:

3. Exotica

This commonality is precisely the appeal of a British pub. In the UK at the time, the local was the communal front room (and now it’s the communal dining table). But Cheers isn’t a British pub. It's an American bar, a basement, all ‘70s Tiffany-style lampshades and mid-century brass and wood. For Brits, the layout and design was as foreign and opaque as the American class system on which the comedy rests; everything was strange and slightly off-kilter. Speaking of which…

If this was a British sitcom, Diane would hate working at Cheers, just like Basil Fawlty hates running Fawlty Towers and Tim hates working at Wernham Hogg. She would want to escape, in the way the younger Steptoe wants to escape his father, the scrapyard and his class, and Father Ted wants to get off Craggy Island. But this is America; they do things differently here.

Cheers illuminated another trans-Atlantic divide. A British show might have six or eight episodes in a series; US seasons are often three times as long. The explanation for this lies in the old structural differences between the TV networks in the UK and the US. Before streaming, commercial success in the States lay in ‘going into syndication’, being shown and repeated on multiple state and local channels across a giant nation. You needed enough episodes in a season to signal that you were a long-term good bet. There are more than 200 episodes of Cheers; you could put it on every Friday at ten o’clock and not repeat a show for five years. And in the UK, Channel 4 did. 

Cheers on Channel 4 was a pleasing example of a premise coinciding neatly with the audience’s state of mind. This wasn’t ‘appointment TV’ - or, at least, it wasn’t initially intended to be appointment TV; it was intended to be the sort of show you watched after a few pints in your own local, perhaps with your own crew of mismatched colleagues. It assumed that you needed something undemanding and graspable by the beerfuddled as you spilt most of a kebab into your lap and then fell asleep, drooling onto the remote. This is precisely what Channel 4’s post-pub sitcom slot was for: easily understood, immediately recognisable, a respite, a consolation, a launch pad for the weekend.

4. Situation

And there it is. Having spent the first episode setting up the bar and the characters, the episode ends by teeing up the situation bit of this situation comedy: Diane, an outsider, is now inside. And everyone is going to have to spend at least five years figuring out how that works. 

This narrative drive is heightened by a feature that most sitcoms share: the reset button. Once the set-up has been delivered, the end of each episode must see the characters remaining largely where they were 30 minutes earlier. There are two main reasons why sitcoms do this. One is that much of the comic premise rests on the situation, so it must be preserved at nearly any cost. Another is that for a sitcom to be seriously successful in the long term, casual viewers stumbling over random re-runs on those near-infinite US networks - this was pre-binge and boxset, remember - must know what is going on. 

5. Comedy

Diane might tell us out loud what the show is about, but this joke tells us what kind of show it is going to be. Other sitcoms might have taken the opportunity to humiliate Diane explicitly, mocking or embarrassing her, but this line goes in a very deliberate direction. It pokes fun, but not at her cleverness or her job or her ineptitude; it gently takes the piss out of her self-absorption. The customers haven’t understood a word she was saying, and Diane has completely failed to notice. The joke comes entirely out of her character, and is not at all unkind. 

The tourist is asking for help; he has come to Cheers looking for aid and succour. We are pretty sure, by this point, that he is going to get it. And we are pretty sure the show is going to be funny, but not challenging; friendly, with a slight edge, but only a slight one. We are pretty sure that we are welcome along with all the other regulars. As the screen fades to black for the commercial break there we are, reflected in the TV, on our sofa against the background of the bar, at once in Cheers and in our own living rooms, where everybody knows our name and we’re always glad we came.

For more ‘90s comfort viewing:

TV and radio are are little boxes full of many kinds of friends: informative friends, entertaining friends, distracting friends, friends who just won’t shut up and go away. In our semi-regular TV re-watch feature, we take this metaphor and chases it into the ground with deadly intent.

A BBC2 documentary series in which people sit in their cars and talk about their relationships with vehicles and with driving. There is no narration, and very sparse, exquisitely timed editing. Everything is concentrated on the drivers and their cars.

There’s fly-on-the-wall and then there’s fly-hovering-persistently-in-your-eyeline. The camera in From A to B barely moves: it sits in the passenger seat or on the bonnet, staring unflinchingly at the driver as they idle in traffic, monologuing. Every shot is meticulously composed, and the careful editing allows still moments to bloom into revelation. Photographed by Martin Parr, it’s full of his remorseless concentration and knack for timing. 

Reality TV didn’t quite exist in 1994: there were fly-on-the-wall documentaries, and there were interview shows. From A to B hovers somewhere between the two, the larval stage of British reality TV. Changing Rooms, the first great breakthrough in makeover TV, was still two years away. A year after that, in 1997, we arrived at Ground Force, Driving School and the inescapable, foundational Big Brother.

But although From A to B can be placed within the taxonomy of reality TV, it was a distinct thing: a strange evolutionary off-shoot, like the Tasmanian tiger or the Morris Traveller. While much reality TV is rushed, cash-strapped schedule filler, From A to B is relentlessly crafted and produced. It disdains gossip-fuelling, soap-adjacent emotional churn. It is not interested in what people say and do so much as what they think about what they say and do; it is not interested in cars, but in what interests its subjects about their cars. Its preoccupation is the semiotics of cars, and what people think about the semiotics of cars. Appropriately for the 1990s iteration of BBC2 - a channel with a postgraduate degree from UEA - this is sociology on wheels.

Where did you watch it?

Not in my car. Partly because that wasn’t a thing you could do in those days (unless you had one of those tiny portable TVs that security guards watch sport on) but also because I didn’t own a car. I was living in London, which meant that I both did not need one and could not afford one. I’m not very interested in cars anyway.

What kind of friend was it?

A sneery, metropolitan one. 

Like Martin Parr’s pictures, that still, unblinking film camera is just waiting for people to damn themselves out of their own mouths, patiently paying out the rope. Inviting people to talk about how they present themselves to the world through their cars also invites other people to judge them for it. As Henry Higgins observes in Pygmalion, ‘​​It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman hate or despise him.’

A middle-class family asserts that owning a Land Rover distinguishes them from other middle-class families, all of whom look identically smug  and suburban to the viewer. Monomaniacal identikit salesmen obsess over microscopic status games in gradations of car marques. A young woman calls her Capri ‘Leroy’, ‘not really because it's a black car’. The merciless camera framings spread the subjects out like pinned butterflies, calmly placing their opinion of themselves against the observable facts.

But it is not only the drivers who are being judged. Who are we, after all, sitting in front of the windscreens of our TV watching the road unfurl before us? Who are we, kidding ourselves that we are taking a dispassionate, educated look at the complex social signals and interplay of modern Britain, when all we’re doing is sating our basic ape curiosity?

Why did you watch it?

Basic ape curiosity. Moreover, I was a sneery metropolitan type myself (I still am), and wanted my curiosity cloaked in a veneer of intellectual detachment. And I was a child of the ‘80s, the decade of branding and advertising; I understood cars as signals of identity and status.

I also recognised - and welcomed - the style. The static, carefully framed shot was everywhere: it featured in my other favourite sneery metropolitan TV show, Further Abroad with Jonathan Meades (1994), in which the black-suited embodiment of ironic enquiry stumped in and out of artfully arranged tableaux.

It’s also the whole premise of Patrick Keiller’s London (1994), a series of still shots accompanied by Paul Schofield’s lugubrious voiceover.

This is the ironised superciliousness of the quotation generation made visible, Generation X as a camera set-up. The resistance to involvement, the determination to detachment, the whole world-weary, implacable independence of it all. The camera as the eye of the flaneur, taking in the Bishopsgate bombing and the gates of Vauxhall Park with equal amounts of curiosity and application.

But this is the whole point. Everything is interesting, everything is capable of being read, being scrutinised and understood. Those camera shots are so still because we must see the whole scene, take it all in. The wanderer is relentlessly moving but also relentlessly motivated, interested and curious.

Ultimately what From A to B reveals is that we are surrounded by millions of tiny universes, all inching past in traffic, whirling past down the motorway, stacked up in the multistorey. Whole lives, with all their sorrows and joys, dreams and disappointments, packaged up in aluminium and set spinning out into the world on four white-walled radials.

That staring eye is not just full of judgement and mockery; it is also full of wonder at the endless strangeness of the ordinary, the indefatigable inventiveness of culture, the extraordinariness of people. And their cars.

For more ‘90s hipster posturing:

The Metropolitan

Uneasy listening

At one point in the early ‘90s a friend and I were turned away from a Soho pub for wearing suits. Suits were for management stiffs or trouble-making wideboys, coked up ad execs in Armani or drunk-fighting estate agents in unfortunate shoes and something shiny off a peg at Next. P…

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3 years ago · 8 likes · 3 comments · Tobias Sturt

TV and radio are are little boxes full of many kinds of friends: informative friends, entertaining friends, distracting friends, friends who just won’t shut up and go away. In our semi-regular TV re-watch feature, we take this metaphor and chases it into the ground with deadly intent.

Straight-arrow medically qualified FBI agent Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) is assigned to partner up with (and spy on) wildcard agent Fox ‘Spooky’ Mulder (David Duchovny). Mulder, who studied psychology at Oxford and was once a star serial killer hunter, has gone rogue within the FBI, opening up the ‘X-files’: cold cases shelved for being too weird or esoteric. Initially sceptical of Mulder’s paranoid investigations, Scully begins to suspect that ‘the truth is out there’.

I can distinctly remember watching The X-Files on TV at some point in the mid-’90s and thinking that the clothing was classically stylish. However else we might view the series in the future, at least the characters’ outfits - dark business suits, with ties for the men - were anonymous enough that they wouldn’t date.

They have, of course, dated. Noticeably. There were still shoulder pads in the early ‘90s - in fact they were so ubiquitous as to be functionally invisible to me at the time - and everything is about two sizes too big, including Gillian Anderson’s hair. And I don’t think I’ve been in a meeting with someone wearing a tie for at least a decade.

The X-Files is just very ‘90s all round. It is primarily concerned with conspiracy theories around UFOs and alien abductions, conspiracies that have their roots in the Cold War: in weather balloons and spy planes, NORAD and Area 51. This was a culture that had spent 50 years being habitually paranoid; governments did not trust the people, people did not trust each other. The main plot engine of the series has one arm of the government (the FBI) investigating another ( intelligence organisations that guard the secrets of contact with aliens). This has echoes of the intra-agency wars of the ‘60s and ‘70s: Nixon’s use of the CIA to distract the FBI, MI5 hunting Russian moles in MI6. Even the one-off stories that aren’t part of this wider UFO narrative often have stories that originate in Cold War conspiracy and cover up.

And there were more immediate cultural influences too. 1991 saw the release of both The Silence of the Lambs, in which a female FBI agent had to seek the help of a weirdo in the basement for help profiling serial killers, and JFK, in which a government agent unravels a high-level conspiracy perpetrated on the American public.

It’s also evident now that The X Files could only have been made before the Millennium. If Mulder and Scully had had an internet connection a lot of those X-files would have been cleared up with a couple of seconds of Googling.

Where did you watch it?

In the living rooms of various shared houses through the ‘90s. It landed on BBC2 on September 19th, 1994, smack in the middle of that channel’s Imperial phase; it came after Lucinda Lambton looking at vernacular architecture, a rerun of The World At War, and Rab C. Nesbitt, and was followed by Harry Hill’s Fruit Fancies (his first TV show!). I don’t think I lived in a house in that period where BBC2 wasn’t the default channel.

What kind of friend was it?

A slightly unreliable one, much like the quixotic Fox Mulder himself.

The show itself has the weekly format that is required for all comfort watching. The agents get drawn into an odd case, usually somewhere out the pine forests of north western North America. Mulder spouts a bunch of theories about cattle mutilation/trickster gods/archaeoacoustics from back issues of the Fortean Times. Scully scoffs scientifically. Weird stuff proceeds to happen, proving both of them wrong in different ways. Eventually the case comes to a close while remaining unsolved, and then a final twist before the end credits shows the audience more than the FBI ever imagined.

Rewatching the first season for this piece I was startled by how terrible the performances and script-writing were in parts. But as the series became a cult hit, it grew in confidence. The budgets visibly expand, the lead actors find their feet, and you start to get standout episodes, including Darin Morgan’s ‘Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose’ and ‘Jose Chung's From Outer Space’.

The X-Files had more than a tinge of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks; both featured deadpan FBI agents, occult underpinnings, northwestern US settings and odd locals. (Duchovny appeared in Twin Peaks as Dale Cooper’s fellow FBI agent.) And, like Twin Peaks, The X-files presaged the changes that were about to happen in narrative TV, as weekly networked shows gave way to bingeable content. Along with other ‘90s sci-fi shows like Babylon 5, it had an overarching storyline (in this case, alien visitation) that spanned multiple seasons. Vince Gilligan (the producer of Breaking Bad) and Frank Spotnitz (Man in the High Castle) are both X-Files alumni.

This proved to be a mixed blessing, introducing a narrative puzzle that becomes more pronounced as time goes on. The more Mulder finds out, the more he has to discover things he doesn’t know. Conspiracies for him to unravel are desperately improvised, as are ever-more preposterous reasons why he is allowed to continue. The show began with the admirable habit of keeping everything as obscure and mysterious as possible, but the continued run made that mystery harder to maintain. The overarching narrative grew increasingly convoluted and confusing, over-complicated and under-developed. In the end, these attempts to keep the show interesting gradually exhausted the audience’s ability to be interested.

Why did you watch it?

In ‘Jose Chung's From Outer Space’, Jose Chung, a science fiction writer, is interviewing Scully about an X-file. Under his curious, intelligent enquiry the story becomes a hall of mirrors. Apparent alien abductions are revealed as staged distractions from other abductions, which are then revealed as government experiments. An Air Force pilot is shown as doubting his own existence, and is then removed from the story entirely. The episode ends with Mulder pleading with Chung not to write his book, saying ‘When presented in the wrong way in the wrong context, the incidents and the people involved with them can appear foolish, if not down right psychotic.’ Well, yes. Quite. 

We’re supposed to take all the alien stuff seriously, but it's far too foolish for that. (There was a lot of snickering from the cheap seats while I was rewatching it.) The show is strongest when it leans into the pleasurable weirdness and uncanny silliness of cryptozoology and parapsychology. It is in the monster-of-the-week stories that The X-Files still stands up, where the foolishness and the mystery can exist side by side. The bizarre horror of Eugene Tooms squeezing through air ducts to extract people’s livers, the icky creepiness of the killer clone children of Eve, the sad weariness of Peter Boyle’s sublime performance as the doomed insurance salesman and clairvoyant Clyde Bruckman.

You could probably trace Mulder and Scully’s roots all the way back to Holmes and Watson, but there were even closer antecedents in the investigation of the weird and abnormal: Steed and Mrs Peel in The Avengers, Lumley and McCallum in Sapphire and Steel. There were also space-alien shows like Gerry Anderson’s UFO and the ‘60s conspiracy series The Invaders (which BBC2 had recently rerun). This kind of thing - and sci-fi in general - had become increasingly rare on mainstream TV in the late ‘80s; it was all gritty ‘realism’ and luxury soaps. 

As a nerd I felt underserved, especially after a golden era of weirdness in the ‘70s and early ‘80s. On my bookshelf I had The Folklore, Myths and Legends of Great Britain, Colin Wilson’s The Occult and Swiss extra-terrestrial obsessive Erich Von Däniken. I had heard of Kenneth Arnold and listened to Tim Dinsdale speaking about the Loch Ness Monster. Arthur C Clarke had invited us into his Mysterious World, and Steven Spielberg had visited E.T. upon us. The X-Files was a welcome return for the haunted generation, and we didn’t realise how much we had wanted it until we got it.

The X-Files made its subject matter mainstream. Just as you might be able to draw a line backwards from The X-Files to Cold War paranoia and hippy esoterica, you can probably draw one forwards to Q-Anon and conspiracies about the Deep State. We live now in a thoroughly post-Cold War, post-9/11 and post-Edward Snowden world, where many people distrust authority and prefer to construct their own ersatz realities online.

Behind Mulder’s desk is a poster of a flying saucer with the legend ‘I WANT TO BELIEVE’. Belief implies the irrelevance of proof, but the ‘want’ suggests a lack of faith and a need for evidence. The evidence can never be enough to disprove the belief, but the belief can never find enough evidence. This all prefigures the liar’s dividend of internet falsehoods. If it becomes impossible to distinguish lies from facts, why bother with the truth at all? It’s much easier to believe what you wanted to believe all along.

For more on the weird world in which Gen X grew up:

The Metropolitan

Folklore, Myths and Legends of Britain

We were raised by Puffins. With three TV channels and no internet, for long stretches of our lives reading was the best (and sometimes, the only) way to pass the time. In X Libris we return to the books that made us. Folklore, Myths and Legends of Britain (Reader’s Digest, 1973…

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4 years ago · 8 likes · 2 comments · Tobias Sturt

TV and radio are are little boxes full of many kinds of friends: informative friends, entertaining friends, distracting friends, friends who just won’t shut up and go away. In our semi-regular TV re-watch feature, we take this metaphor and chases it into the ground with deadly intent.

Adapted from Colin Dexter’s novels, Inspector Morse was first shown in 1987 on ITV and ran, off and on, until 2000. National treasure John Thaw plays Chief Inspector Morse, a dyspeptic high-functioning alcoholic bachelor whose grumpiness disguises a passionate bromance with his junior, Sergeant Lewis, played by Kevin Whately. Together they stomp around Oxford trying to work out how it can be possible that the Classics Fellow from Madeup College has been stabbed with a ceremonial dagger stolen from the Ashmolean, again.

The Oxford setting of Inspector Morse - and this is university Oxford, not the Cowley Road Mini plant Oxford - is important: this is a show that places great weight on academic cleverness, tradition and privilege. You know that Morse is an intellectual because he likes classical music, poetry and paintings. (Lewis is Northern, and has no truck with such things.) Morse’s social life consists of opera and public lectures and Old Boys’ cricket matches, and yes he did go to Oxford, actually. Truly, this is the sophisticated high life. 

Inspector Morse was never a great detective show, if we’re honest. Its real genius was its pitch-perfect depiction of late-’80s aspirational middle-class aesthetics. It’s basically Merchant Ivory with stereo speakers, a collection of period-specific bourgeois signifiers suspended in amber: linen suits, Laura Ashley curtains, Welsh dressers; tasteful landscapes and ebony-effect furniture stretching off into the distance. 

It brilliantly cossetted the viewer’s ego, serving up an entirely predictable and frequently hokey detective format with a top-dressing of Wagner and crossword puzzles (and a surprisingly artful, spaced-out title sequence). Morse, helpfully and despite his plainly enormous brain, is not one of those savant detectives who knows the solution before the viewer; in fact he is usually several steps behind us. Sitting at home with M&S hummus and crudites and a Brentford Arts Centre membership card, murmuring ‘oh that’s Keats isn’t it?’, the viewer could feel pretty good about themselves.

Where did you watch it? In the television room (as it was always called) of my childhood home. Around the time that Morse first became appointment telly, my parents’ financial situation suddenly improved and our house in London, which had been furnished from local skips and charity shops, began to fill up with the accoutrements of tasteful boho affluence: a Saab (second hand, but glorious), an antique oak farmhouse table, a dinner service from Heals. I remember sitting at the fancy table eating a Hobnob (another new feature) off a fancy Heals side plate and thinking: well, this is different. That feeling - which was spreading across a booming south-east England at the time - is very strongly connected to my memories of watching Morse.

What sort of friend was it? Morse (the show, definitely not the character) is the friend you’d give your spare house keys to; the one you’d ring at 3am asking for a lift to A&E; the kind of person who knows where to find the little water jug that came with the iron. Dependable, predictable and very comforting.

Why did you watch it?

While writing this piece I watched the first few seasons of Prime Suspect, thinking it might make an interesting comparator as another high-profile TV detective show from the same period. And let me tell you, ladies and gentlemen: Prime Suspect is utter bobbins. Despite Helen Mirren, Lynda La Plante, directors including Tom Hooper and John Madden, and appearances from everyone from Peter Capaldi to Ralph Fiennes, it is a pompous, stupid, badly-written mess from start to finish. Most of my viewing time was spent shouting ‘HOW DID YOU GET TOM WILKINSON TO ACT THAT BADLY’. So when I say Morse is dependable, I mean that while it hasn’t held up brilliantly, it’s nowhere near as bad as Prime Suspect.

It’s interesting to think about why this is, and I think the answer lies in the respective series’ attitudes towards contemporary issues (or ‘ishoos’, as we used to say in the ‘80s). Morse’s commitment to late-’80s aesthetics might have been second to none, but the series was markedly uninterested in real-world politics, or indeed in the real world. There are no sideswipes at Thatcher or raging polemics about Hillsborough (as in Cracker, another totemic ‘80s detective show; but Cracker is a more complex beast and we will save it for another day). 

Prime Suspect - which could have been just another mostly brainless but passable police-procedural-with-a-twist - is driven mad by the writers’ determination to be contemporary. The entire show is built around the struggle of being a woman in the workplace, and within that framework each series has a second newsy theme that is pursued to the point of lunacy. In the first series the theme is sex work, and every single copper is either involved in sex trade or is covering for the people who are. In the second series, our theme is racism and every single character is either spouting or enduring racist abuse. In the third series, which is centred around gay men (no lesbians, obviously), the entire in-house police squad has suddenly stopped being explicitly racist and become explicitly homophobic instead. Switchover day in the staff canteen must have been hell. 

Not a single scene in Prime Suspect passes without a random character morphing into the walking, talking personification of something or other. One copper is given an ‘Actually, I AM gay, Dave’ speech that recalls nothing so much as the episode of ‘The Bureau’ in which Patrick Marber’s co-workers walk out in solidarity when he’s sacked for being gay (“I’m going. And I don’t even work here!”). Actually, that’s not fair. ‘The Bureau’ is much more acute than Prime Suspect and the acting is in a different league.

Morse, in contrast, remains just about watchable because of its total dislocation from anything that has ever actually happened, and its setting in a dreamy never-never land of cheerily submissive college porters, High Table dinners and art exhibitions. Lady-women professionals pop up being distracting and unnatural, but Morse takes them in his stride, other than occasionally trying to shag them much as a dog tries to shag a chair leg: good-naturedly and without any expectation of fulfilment. Thaw and Whately are given the space to actually act, and to develop their characters, without constantly being interrupted by the opinion pages of The Guardian. 

Morse has nothing whatsoever to say about the tempora or the mores, thank god. It just pats you warmly on the back for knowing what the words mean. The only thing that is remotely realistic about Inspector Morse is the main character’s bad-tempered commitment to real ale, which will feel almost traumatically authentic to anyone who has ordered a white wine in a CAMRA pub.

Who were you in the show? Probably Barbara Flynn, who pops up as one of Morse’s romantic targets. I’m usually Barbara Flynn. (Although not Barbara Flynn in Cracker, confusingly; she’s far too much of a minx.)

For period policing with a gun instead of a pint, check out our piece on the Frank Sinatra movie The Detective and its sequel, Die Hard:

The Metropolitan

He didn't do it his way

This article is mostly about films Frank Sinatra wasn’t in. Obviously, this is most of the films in the history of cinema. He wasn’t in The Battleship Potemkin, for instance, or Avengers: Endgame. (Unless he was in that bit at the end, standing at the back among the Guardians of the Galaxy. Could have been. Everyone else was.) No, I mean the films that …

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4 years ago · 4 likes · 3 comments · Tobias Sturt

TV and radio are are little boxes full of many kinds of friends: informative friends, entertaining friends, distracting friends, friends who just won’t shut up and go away. In our semi-regular TV re-watch feature, we take this metaphor and chases it into the ground with deadly intent.

Matthew Holness & Richard Ayoade’s woefully short-lived comedy series about an appallingly bad horror novelist and the terrible TV show he supposedly made in the ‘80s, a show “so outré (out there), that the top brass pulled the axe on the entire project”.

Each show within a show in Darkplace starts with an introductory narration:

“I'm Garth Marenghi: author, dreamweaver, visionary… plus actor. You are about to enter the world of my imagination; you are entering my… darkplace!”

The list of roles at the start is a clue to what we’re getting into, because Darkplace is a complicated confection, a multi-layered matryoshka of the macabre (as Marenghi himself would probably put it).

The premise is this: in the 1980s, schlock horror writer Garth Marenghi (Matthew Holness) and his publisher Dean Learner (Richard Ayoade) pooled their resources to make a TV show set in the cursed hospital Darkplace, in which Marenghi plays Vietnam vet/warlock/doctor Rick Dagless M.D. and Learner plays (and loses to) hospital administrator Thornton Reed. These episodes have now been dug out of the vault and are bookended with interviews with Marenghi, Learner and actor Todd Rivers (Matt Berry), who plays Dr Lucien Sanchez. It also features Alice Lowe as Madeleine Wool as Dr Liz Asher.

Stupid horror stories, written by a fictional writer, in a failed TV show within a parody of a making-of documentary.

Multi-layered. Like a frightening lasagne; a Victoria sponge of terror.

And also splendidly silly. From Matt Berry delivering precisely the wrong emphasis in the best baritone to Noel Fielding in an ape suit having a bike chase through the woods on a Raleigh Chopper, and from the eyeball kid to a karate fight with a steam iron, it is full of joyfully bizarre moments.

Where did you watch it? In an attic bedsit in Tufnell Park.

What TV were you watching? A bulgy old CRT wedged into IKEA bookcases already overflowing with questionable pulp horror.

Who was in the room when you watched it? No one. Even if I could have persuaded anyone to watch it with me, the bedsit was far too small for more than one human.

Why did you watch it?

Well, mainly because it’s funny; each of its ridiculous layers is jam-packed with jokes.

“I know writers who use subtext, and they're all cowards.”

The interviews with the fictional actors/writers/visionaries Marenghi, Learner and Rivers are gloriously Pooterish, self-important as only creatives interviewed about their own work can be. They are splendid additions to the long line of pompous little twerps whose misguided amour propre drives sitcoms.

From Hancock to Mainwaring, from Rigsby to Fawlty, from David Brent to Boris Johnson, British comedy is full of small men who wrongly believe themselves to be big; petty, bourgeois men who remain confidently ignorant of how their deluded opinion of their own importance and ability is relentlessly repudiated by reality, whose dreams of ludicrous success are ever thwarted by the meanness of their ambition.

“I’m one of the few people who's written more books than they’ve read.”

The show they are being interviewed about, the actual Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace, is a canny bit of period recreation, from the ‘80s Channel Four ident to the smeary video and model railway level special effects.

There is a running joke with dubbing - the adding in of dialogue in the editing process. All of Alice Lowe’s dialogue is redubbed, while Matt Berry’s voice constantly loses sync with his mouth and then starts to intrude on other bits of action, exclaiming in the background. Throughout the show is playing with form, recasting and upending the tropes and conventions so recognisable from ‘classic’ TV.

"All I do is sit down at the typewriter and start hitting the keys - getting them in the right order, that's the trick, that's the trick."

The joke about Marenghi himself, as a writer, is a joke about form too. He understands what it is to be a writer, and what the shape of a horror story is supposed to be. But he is entirely incapable of telling a good story or writing it well.

He is a parody of a certain kind of author, the kind that is more interested in the idea of being a writer, of ‘weaving stories’, than he is in the actual business of writing. He is a kind of carnival mirror image of a Neil Gaiman or a Stephen King, full of warped aphorisms, pontificating about the process of his malformed art.

“Mike stared in disbelief as his hands fell off. From them rose millions of tiny maggots. Maggots? Maggots. Maggots, maggots, maggots. Maggots. All over the floor of the post office in Leytonstone.”

And what art it is. The stories that make up the actual episodes are beautiful little distortions of horror stories. Stories where the idea of Lovecraftian cosmic horror is a woman turning into broccoli; where the image of a realm of absolute terror is Glasgow. 

Marenghi’s stories are relentlessly bathetic, grasping at overwhelming fear only to be undercut by his own paucity of imagination and expression. But this, again, is merely a comic exaggeration of the form. The best horror stories rely entirely on this trick, the eruption of the uncanny into the real, the revelation of the unsuspected beneath the mundane.

Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace works precisely because it is true to the form. It understands each of those levels: acting and TV making, writing and horror.

And it contains one of the greatest comedy songs ever.

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For more classic TV and multi-layered silliness, check out our piece on Doctor Who & Monty Python:

The Metropolitan

The Genesis of the Dads

An occasional series looking at popular stories of Doctor Who, a peculiarly British kind of TV hero, and the cultural contexts that influenced the ever changing character and his stories. On second thoughts, let’s not go to Camelot. ‘Tis a silly place…

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4 years ago · 4 likes · 3 comments · Tobias Sturt

TV and radio are are little boxes full of many kinds of friends: informative friends, entertaining friends, distracting friends, friends who just won’t shut up and go away. In our semi-regular TV re-watch feature, we take this metaphor and chases it into the ground with deadly intent.

Created by ‘Jurassic Park’ guy Michael Crichton, ER explored the work, life and loves of the staff of the Emergency Room in Cook County General Hospital, Chicago. Its first season, which aired in 1994 (1995 in the UK), supercharged the careers of George Clooney, Julianna Margulies and Anthony Edwards. It ended in 2009 after 15 seasons.

From Cagney and Lacey to The Good Wife, American TV networks excel at character-led workplace dramas. When I was little my parents watched Hill Street Blues as a grown-up treat in the evenings, and when I was a teenager I watched thirtysomething alongside them, but ER was the first US drama series I watched independently; the first one that really belonged to me. It was a smash in the US and the build-up to its transmission in the UK was breathless. But when the first episode finally aired I was still surprised by how slick and laconic it was, how much better it was than equivalent British offerings: The Bill (urgh), Casualty (eheu). 

As well as being well-written, beautifully performed and absolutely rolling in budget, ER was a window into the daily life of my cultural overlords. Like Roseanne (an earlier sighting of George Clooney, whose face seemed to belong to a different, better universe), ER painted a granular, workaday picture of modern America that was oddly revelatory: pine furniture, wipe-clean surfaces and supermarket clothes, fat people and unisex scrubs and snow shoes. It felt very different from indie movies and Donna Tartt novels, let alone Hollywood flicks, and somehow - because of its verisimilitude - more glamorous and exciting.

Where did you watch it? In the living-room-cum-kitchen of a rented flat in Brixton, South London.

What TV were you watching? A squat 24-inch box with a massive back end, on loan from Radio Rentals. 

Who was in the room when you watched it? Just me. My (male) flatmates weren’t interested.

Why did you watch it?

ER is, at heart, a show about relatively young people making their way at work, which made it instantly relatable for a 23-year-old in her first job. In the pilot episode, third year medical student John Carter is the viewer’s avatar. As he is pitched into the maw and people shout strings of code over his head (‘CBC, lytes, Chem7, cardiac enzyme, dig level, 3mg morphine IV push!’) we are reassured by his bewilderment.

Along with squelchy viscera noises (‘Jimmy, get your hand in here and push aside the small intestine’), impenetrable medico-speak was an ER staple, and the refusal to explain it added to the appeal. As with any show that takes you from the outside to the inside - of a police station, of a hospital, of the White House - the thrill for the viewer comes from being treated as an initiate. Watching it, I just felt immensely grown up.

Carter, who admits to having experience only of dermatology and psychiatry - ‘the well dressed specialisms’ - is immediately required to perform tasks at which he is fundamentally incompetent. Like any new recruit in the workplace, his function is to bounce around being well intentioned but wrong. Unlike most new recruits in the workplace, his errors could have terrible consequences. We find out later that he comes from an uber-rich family, and it’s this fundamental patrician confidence that enables him to acknowledge his own inadequacy while continuing to function confidently as a doctor. (Confidence and decisiveness - their presence or absence - are running themes in the first season.) This subtlety made ER a cut above the average; a lesser show would just have portrayed Carter as a brash snob.

ER was a soap, which we’re going to define here as ‘a collection of open-ended dramatic narratives focusing on relationships between recurring characters in a bounded setting’. (When soaps appear in limited seasons, rather than spinning off into narrative infinity, we call them ‘drama series’; but the soapiness - the focus on contextually-related human dramas, rather than on a single overarching storyline - remains the same.) Just as there’s nothing inherently trashy about detective novels or sci-fi or disco, there’s nothing wrong with soaps in and of themselves. What distinguishes a good soap from a bad one is that the plots serve the characters, rather than the characters serving the plot.

The ‘80s had been a soapy decade in the UK. Channel controllers, noting the enthusiasm for Dynasty and Dallas, commissioned EastEnders and Brookside and The Bill and later (God help us) Eldorado, making it possible to surf from teatime to bedtime on nothing but soap. This provoked considerable huffing in stuffier quarters about the cheapening of television drama and the moral decline associated with mindless goggling at the tellybox. But the more important point was that most British soaps, most of the time, are just absolutely bloody dreadful; delirious nightmare carousels of bad writing and reaction-gif acting.

To be satisfying, soap characters have to have fixed points. In a crappy soap, characters are gaping flesh-suits animated by whichever traits the current storyline demands. (Just look at the Wikipedia entry for Ian Beale.) Soap characters can be complex - people are complex - but if they are to give a damn about what happens to them, the audience has to believe that these people have fundamental attributes; that they are bounded in some way; that there are some things they tend to do, and some things they would never do.

As a normal member of the human race Carter is capable of arrogance and fear, vulnerability and braggadocio, open-mindedness and prejudice, naivete and world-weariness. But he has a well thought-out backstory and an integrated, consistent set of characteristics from which his actions arise. Throughout the first few seasons at least, he remains recognisable as a person.

What sort of friend was it?

ER was the cool older hand in your workplace; the funny, popular head of team who invites you to after-work drinks and doesn’t try to put their hand up your skirt. The sort of friend, in fact, that Sherry Stringfield’s Dr Lewis is to Carter.

Stringfield (who left ER because she found fame to be an unpleasant side-effect of acting) was an oddly uneven actor given to emphasising the wrong words in sentences, but about halfway through the first episode she talks to a patient about his probable diagnosis of terminal lung cancer, and Dr Lewis suddenly shows up: a low, beautiful voice, a face you could look at forever, a strong and honest presence. (Later, a man with a duodenal ulcer is convinced he has cancer and the scene is played for laughs. ‘Every person who comes into this hospital is worried they have cancer! YOU DO NOT HAVE CANCER!’)

Who were you in the show? Back then I thought I was Carol Hathaway - beautiful, tragic, universally beloved and desired - but in fact I was probably more like Nurse Lydia, who clocks off on the dot and laughs through her nose. These days Carol strikes me as a sanctimonious pain in the arse anyway.

Are you still friends? I’m still in a relationship with the first few seasons. When Stringfield, Clooney and Margulies moved on, the heart went out of the show and we were left with increasingly bizarre helicopter accidents, endless intra-staff shagging and a slowly deflating Dr Green suffering the trials of Job. In other words, it stopped being a good soap and became an increasingly bad one. But those first couple of seasons still resonate, from the unvarnished portrayal of the cruelties of the US healthcare system to the thoughtful treatments of status, power and ethnicity.

One of the slightly insidious functions of this kind of telly is to show you your own life, but better: smoother, wittier, more noble. ER was my young professional life, but with higher stakes and better one-liners. I’ve had some great colleagues in my time, but I still miss these guys.

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4 years ago · 5 likes · 3 comments · The Editors