Metropolitan Mixtape: 2024 November

Brace for tinsel

In

Say Nothing (Disney+)

We’ve been moaning recently about half-arsed soi-disant entertainment, but this series – about the ‘disappearing’ of mother-of-ten Jean McConville, and the activities of sisters/soldiers/IRA terrorists Dolours and Marian Price – is nothing less than fully arsed. Multiple arses have been given, in fact. The Editors have become somewhat Ancient Mariner about it all, grabbing friends and family and fixing them with a fervid eye as we urge them to watch it. We have Said Something. Slightly too often.

The writing, performances, direction and set design are all excellent. And if you’ve read the book (by Patrick Radden Keefe) on which it is based, you’ll also know that the structure and approach of the TV series are markedly, thoughtfully different from it. Unlike, say, the BBC’s ponderous, twittering adaptation of The Mirror and the Light – which treats Mantel’s work as some sort of holy revelation and in consequence barely resembles it at all, because creative timidity is as far away from Mantel as you can get – the team behind Say Nothing has had the courage to leave large parts of the book behind and do the thing that works for the screen. For example: in the book, the spine-chilling moment when Radden Keefe reveals the name of Jean McConville’s murderer comes like a gut-punch after pages and pages of sober, detailed research in dusty archives. On the screen… well, you’ll see. If you watch it. WHICH YOU SHOULD <grips arm>

Most of all it’s a compulsively clear-eyed depiction of what we in this country call ‘The Troubles’, like someone was acting up at the back of the school bus for thirty years. (One of the immensely cathartic things about it is that it has unilaterally decided it’s time for us all to stop pretending that Gerry Adams didn’t run the IRA.) Some people have complained because they think it’s too sympathetic to the IRA; others have complained because it’s not sympathetic enough, or because it doesn’t mention Unionist terrorism. Both complaints seem to us to be missing the point. God knows there was enough pain and terror and fury to go around, and there are plenty of stories to be told. This story is the one this series is telling.

For most Gen Xers in Great Britain, The Troubles were a distant, booming backdrop to the first 30-or-so years of our lives. It was sometimes horrifying, but mostly arcane and mundane, full of wicked people repeatedly doing wicked things for incomprehensible reasons and – as an admittedly trivial result – making it really difficult to travel around London. Now, a person born when the Good Friday Agreement was signed will be closing in on their 30th birthday. Finally, we’re getting enough distance to have some creative perspective on this astonishing tragedy. Which leads us to…

Derry Girls (Channel 4, 2018)

After wondering why there weren’t any good sitcoms any more, we realised we hadn’t actually watched any sitcoms made in the last ten years, and shamefacedly decided we ought to actually check some out. It turned out that our uninformed opinions were entirely wrong, because Derry Girls is terrific.

This is a very different Northern Ireland to Say Nothing. We are in the ‘90s; British troops are still on the streets and bomb scares abound, but mostly we are just watching teenage girls trying to live ordinary lives. With predictably hilarious results! But Derry Girls frequently is hilarious, which makes it a rare occurrence not only recently, but in the entire history of sitcoms. It has an admirable willingness to commit fully to a ridiculous premise, and to really go for silly jokes in a way that defies the weak smile of the all-pervasive streaming dramedy. Nicola Coughlan was the breakout star, but we’d like to declare our undying admiration for Saoirse-Monica Jackson, who can make you laugh just by having that face and moving it around.

The Post (2017) / All The President’s Men (1976) / The Final Days (1989) / Watergate (1994)

The Editorial Board’s self-soothing after the US Presidential election consisted of watching a series of fictional representations of Tricky Dicky getting his arse handed to him by a bevy of unbowed journalists, lawyers and honourable citizens. It's good to have goals.

The Post is Steven Spielberg’s dramatisation of the Ellsberg leak of the Pentagon Papers. Spielberg takes it as seriously as you would like, as the casting of Tom Hanks as Ben Bradlee and Meryl Streep as Kay Graham suggests; but it’s not entirely stolid, especially not with both Bob Odenkirk and David Cross lurking in the background wearing ‘70s wigs. It goes big on the diligent heroism of journalists and the freedom of the press, partly because it is very conscious that it is essentially a prequel to All The President’s Men. It even ends with the Watergate break-in, shot in such a way that it marries perfectly with the opening sequence of the earlier film.

The Post is shot with Spielberg’s customary sure hand, but by god All The President’s Men is a beautiful piece of work. Pakula (the director) is constantly isolating characters in emptiness or fragmenting space with split diopter shots that simultaneously bring the background and foreground into focus and juxtaposition. It’s simultaneously thematically coherent and very, very stylish; ever so slightly more stylish than Redford’s outfits, although it's a close-run thing. That boy sure could wear a suit.

The Final Days, on the other hand – an adaptation of Woodward and Bernstein’s book about the end of the Nixon Presidency – is not stylish at all. Nor is it very good, and we can’t really recommend it.

What we can recommend, however, is Norma Percy’s 1994 Watergate documentary, which includes interviews with a lot of the people involved, including: a charmingly befuddled FBI agent; a Nixon stooge who spouts B-movie dialogue (‘a million dollars, that’s a lot of lettuce!’); and the unnervingly unhinged ramblings of G. Gordon Liddy. It’s on BBC iPlayer right now: https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episodes/m000v94s/watergate

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Cornwall’s Forgotten Corner

As intimated, the Editors took their regular holiday down the secret end of Cornwall at the end of October. We stayed in the splendid Mordros House in the bifurcated village of Kingsand Cawsand (two for the price of one!) and spent a lovely couple of weeks stumping about tors and coastal paths and Daphne Du Maurier’s old haunts fuelled by the exquisite sausage sandwiches from the Old Bakery in Cawsand and as a prelude to splendid lunches at the Canteen on Maker Heights. An excellent holiday. The journey home, however…

Out

Car crashes

Pace J. G. Ballard fans, but crashing in your car is not fun. Obviously you weren’t expecting us to say that car crashes are a good thing; there’s a reason why they’re a clichéd metaphor for sudden and unexpected disaster. But holy moly: WOULD NOT RECOMMEND. Having someone drive head-on into you at 80mph combined velocity on the A303 is not a good way to end a holiday. We didn’t even get to drive past Stonehenge, dammit.

Fortunately the Editors’ middle-class predilection for Volvos paid off – for us, if not for our lovely V60 (RIP) – and we were largely unscathed, as was the – ahem – elderly lady who couldn’t quite work out which side of the road was relevant to her purpose. If we were properly mercenary we’d insert a plea for subscriptions to help us buy a new Volvo; but really we just want to tell everyone: DRIVE SAFELY. TWENTY’S PLENTY. THAT WHITE LINE IN THE MIDDLE OF THE ROAD IS THERE FOR A REASON.

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Shake the jingle bells about

If you’re a regular reader of The Metropolitan, you’ll already be braced for the December content, because you’ll know just how daffy about Christmas we are. Well, it starts here, with this month’s tracks being just ten songs from our monster seasonal playlist:

‘Christmas Wrapping’ by The Waitresses. Whamageddon is for amateurs. The real test is how soon you can hear the best Christmas single ever being played somewhere. The answer is now. You just won! Congratulations!

‘Hospital Tree’ by Jamie Lenman. But surely the best Christmas single is one being sung by your actual friend. Especially with the video featuring Jamie singing to a Christmas tree like Elvis with the basset hound on the Ed Sullivan Show

‘Just Like Christmas’ by Low. The unofficial Metropolitan Christmas anthem. The lyrics claim not to be ‘like Christmas at all’, but it has snow and bells and a hopeful seasonal melancholy, so there we are.

‘Christmas Card From A Hooker In Minneapolis’ by Neko Case. A beautiful cover of the Tom Waits classic.

‘Winter Wonderland’ by Goldfrapp. It was this or The Cocteau Twins cover, but I didn’t feel I could do both.

‘Linus and Lucy’ by Bela Fleck and the Flecktones. Obviously Vince Guaraldi’s music to A Charlie Brown Christmas (1965) is peerless, but this is a nicely jaunty cover. One might even say: ‘jolly’.

‘The Five Jingle Bells’ by Kait Dunton. I was trying to find a good version of Jingle Bells as theme music for this year’s Christmas story but it seems to be such a simple song that it defies interesting arrangement. And then I discovered that Kait Dunton had done a version and it is, predictably, brilliant.

‘Sleigh Ride’ by the Ramsey Lewis Trio. Lovely piece of mid-century Christmas jazz. Makes you feel like going skating at Rockefeller Plaza.

‘Siberian Sleigh Ride’ by Raymond Scott. I thought it was only recently that I wrote about Raymond Scott but it was this time last year. How time flies, like a sleigh over the Siberian wastelands.

‘Twelve Days of Christmas’ by John Denver and The Muppets. Before you listen to this, I want you to guess which Muppet they chose to sing the ‘Fiiiive Goooooold Riiiiings’ bit. Go on, who do you think would hog that part? Exactly, of course they did. Perfect, as ever.

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We warned you we were daffy about Christmas, so daffy in fact that this month’s podcast is an exclusive preview of Chapter One of this year’s Christmas Story, written by Metropolitan editor

Tobias Sturt

and read by Metroppolitan contributor

Jon Millington

: Last Christmas in Hexwood