A Cock and Bull Story (2005)

 "Poke your little pecker out the window..."

I've actually read (and indeed blogged) The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, which on balance added to my enjoyment of this very funny film. And yet one might just as well see this as a precursor to The Trip, and the partnership of Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon.

Of course, the whole thing is quite postmodern, alternating scenres of Tristram Shandy, that famiusly unfilmable novel, with a behind the scenes narrative where Brydon and, especially, Coogan, play versions of themselves, rather effectively.

The joke throughout, of course, is that Coogan himself hasn't read the novel, and everyone else has. Through all the buddy buddy stuff with Coogan, the jokes about his sexual difficulties following the birth of the baby and his habits of infidelity nonetheless, it's really all about the fourth wall.

Stephen Fry's academic cameo puts it best: the novel probably shouldn't be seen as postmodern, an anachronistic term. There's nothing modern about textual self-referentialism- see Rabelais and Cervantes- but it becomes rather less fasionable after Lawrence Sterne. By 2005, it's back, and can be commingled with actual postmodernism. Hence this film, and its almost obvious playfulness with the fourth wall, where Coogan's sexual wakwardness echoes Walter Shandy's. Yet Coogan's life is like the Shany of the novel; too complex, real and nuanced to accurately be summed up by any narrative or work of art.

This film isn't as deep as I've made it sound. But it's funny.

It's a Sin: Part 5

 "I haven't handled this well. I realise this now."

RTD, you magnificent bastard. You have this grown man still teary an hour after seeing the episode, damn you. You get us to like these very human characters, and then you do horrible things to them.

This is an incredible conclusion to a sublime television drama that will be remembered through the ages. Keeley Hawes shows us exactly why she's there in what had previously seemed like a suspiciously small role as Valerie realises what's happening with her dying son ("I've got AIDS. I'm gay" all at once) and reacts with a heartbreakingly realistic sense of denial and a very specific type of bigotry, the bigotry of Middle England and the Daily Mail: the bigotry that sees itself as "common sense". RTD absolutely nails this attitude as Richie's parents whisk him off to the Isle of Wight and keep him away from the people he loves- and Ash, his boyfrend, is stuck in London.

It's not all about Richie's death: Roscoe starts to reconcile with his contrite father, shocked at the treatment of AIDS patients in Nigeria. Valerie says some interesting things about Jil having no life of her own, and we see at the end how Jill, a familiar face to the hospital staff, holds the hands of men dying from AIDS, whether she knows them or not. She's lovely.

The dialogue, the characterisation, the structure, all of them are perfect. The fact that we end not with Richie's death but, like a wake, a flashback to a moment that makes us smile. The lttle things about Valerie's reaction- and how Richie's dad, previously so firm abot Richie's career choices, just collapses emotionally. The skeweing of a sort of stiff-upper-lip English type of family emotion. And, of course, the cruel revelation of Richie having dies alone, kept away from his real family. Jill's parting words to Valerie are powerful and, I think, authorial voice: the real tragedy of AIDS is that so many men died in shame, shame of what they were, shame that is drip, drip, dripped on them by a culture that erases and centures any thing that does not conform to traditional family values. The curse of Middle England, that evil place.

It's a Sin: Part 4

 "Something's wrong with your skin..."

Four episodes in it's quite clear that this series is an extraordinary masterpiece; following Colin's death last episode we have nothing comparable here, but we have somebloody good drama where, yet again, each character gets developed and every character is three dimensional and real. RTD has had a long and distinguised career, but this is his magnum opus.

It's 1988. We get THAT advert. We get a superb bit on Section 28 where Ash also gets to point out how history and culture has erased LGBT+ people for centuries. Well, except for Mary Renault. But this is also a time where the Pink Palace gang are attending funeral after funeral in what looks like a punishing schedule. There's a powerful moment at a funeral where it's pointed out that the vicar hasn't mentioned the dead man's boyfriend, and indeed he has no rights at all.

But greed is good. Richie and Jill have got a mortgage on the Pink Palace- even if Richie has to lie about his sexual orientation; it seems, incredibly, you could be denied a mortgage for being gay. But the fact that Richie and Jill have joined the Thatcherite revolution (Richie even voted Tory!) is soundtracked, inevitably, by Yazz' "The Only Way Is Up". The soundtrack of this entire series is really rather glorious, and often clever in how it uses those well-known '80s hits that have almost become divorced from their original context.

There's a fascinating sub-plot with Roscoe, and his dalliance with a Tory MP, portrayed to perfection by Stephen Fry, who doesn't see himself as gay because he's a top. There's a perfect punchline to this whole sub-plot, and Roscoe himself is a wonderfully nuanced chaacter. I love his outburst about how he loved Colin, but Colin behaved himself, and died- so why behave?

But Richie. Oh Richie. It's implicit, after last episode and given his cautious behaviour throughout, that he is HIV positive, and it's while acting with some Daleks (ah, RTD!) that it becomes clear something is wrong and he has full- lown AIDs. He fails to tell his blood family, who seem to live in a different world, and ends up telling all his friends in the back of a police van after a defiantly awesome demonstration. And the last line is perfect. 

I'll save the real superlatives for the finale; I have high hopes.

It's a Sin: Part 3

 "Don't lose your head..."

Dammit. All these bloody feelings. RTD, you are one magnificent bastard.

Right. Obviously, Colin, but let's touch on the other stuff. AIDS has already touched the Pink Palace and taken Gloria, but at this point evryone is under siege. Lovely Jill is volunteering on the phones to help. Richie has a new boyfriend, a fellow thespian with similarly big dreams- there's an interesting cht about how being "out" means career death ("I Clavdiv's gay!")- but we get the horribly realistic scene of struggling with a condom and then deciding to go without- only for Richie to see the tell-tale carcinomas on his lover's back the following morning. We have a hint that, while Ash and Roscoe are both negative (a miracle for Roscoe), Richie may not be so lucky.

Plus, there's other stuff, like Roscoe making the acquantance of a Tory MP who will presumably be important later as he's played by Stephen Fry. But Colin...

It's clever how it's eventually revealed how Colin got infected- at least he had a few good shags after all. But to die like that, at twenty-four, going senile, is just horrible. Equally vile is the prejudice- from the local copper who locks him in a hospital ward by court order (until a kick-ass solicitor busts his balls in a highly enjoyable scene) to the local firm refusing to do a funeral. But Colin's mum is a truly lovely person, and the bond she builds with the whole gang is a wonderful thing. I'm glad we got a character like that.

But oooh, Colin. This is brilliant telly. But ouch.

It's a Sin: Part 1

 "You haven't got a parrot, have you?"

Russell T. Davies, after a few quiet years since leaving Doctor Who (alas, said quietness for tragic personal reasons) has not only been very much back over the last few years but is arguable at the very peak of his career right now. Cucumber was perhaps underappreciated, as was Years and Years, but few deny that A Very English Scandal was sublime. If this first episode is any guide (and I'm told reviews are raving from those who've binged the whole thing on All4; I'm soing it week by week), this could be the best thing he's ever done.

RTD has always said he wanted to return to gay themes in recent years, and this series confronts the elephant in the room: AIDS, which destroyed and traumatised a generation of gay men through the cruel double whammy of a horrifying disease and the added cruelty of society. I'm sure we will see much overt homophobia in later episodes (RTD has already shown with truthfully subtle dialogue the casual racism), but just as cruel is the fact that same sex relationships must be covert, informal, unrecognised, existing only at the margins of society. 

We see this, horrifyingly, in the person of Henry, played superbly by Neil Patrick Harris. He's lived with his partner (that unsatisfactory word) Juan Pablo for thirty years, a blissfully married couple in all but name. And yet, when they both become sick with this mysterious new gay plague (and yes, this all has resonance in early 2021, with our plague being less easy to ignore for most than the plague of forty years earlier), Juan Pablo's mother takes him "home" to Portugal and they must both die without seeing each other again. Equally horrifying is the sight of Henry, alone in a ward to himself, food left at the door, with no one approaching unless wearing what we have over the past year come to refer to as full PPE.

This episode is about introducing the characters, however, although not without a little foreboding. RTD is making us like these very human, flawed, likeable individuals before putting them through the wringer. We focus on three young gay men- Richie, student turned actor; Roscoe, who has fled the worst kind of religious fundamenalism with his Nigerian family set on "curing" him; and Colin, a shy young tailor from RTD's part of the world. There's also the very lovely Jill, the heart of the Pink Palace, but this episode shos lots of joyous, hedonistic sex, silliness and young people behaving as young people should, ignorant (and in denial) of what's coming.

Worryingly, we end with our three principals expanding on their dreams for the future. Let's hope at least some of them have one.

This is utterly sublime television. RTD makes it look effortless. I already feel I know and care about these people, and am worried.

Richard III (Dominic Cooke, 2016)

"So wise so young, they say, do never live long..."

And so the BBC's Hollow Crown series comes to an end with Benedict Cumberbatch excelling as our antihero in Richard III. Much emphasis is placed on the direct continuation of the Henry VI plays; we begin with a "Previously" montage and the cast is the same, adding a certain richness; Sophie Okonedo in particular has been magnificent as Margaret from Henry VI's young bride to the embittered young woman we see here. But the stand-out performance is obviously Cumberbatch, from the very beginning.

This, unlike the previous two instalments, is based on a play I know well, so I will not be treading over the same ground here as I did in uni essays many years ago. Suffice to say that this play, though still an early one, is deliciously addictive tale of the pursuit of power, and its central billion is one of the greatest in all drama. But it feels very different seen in sequence, with Richard and many other characters familiar from earlier plays.

Visually, this is a claustrophobic production of the play, with Richard often seen in a dark room with a chessboard (symbolism much?), and even the climactic battle scenes shot closely and claustrophobically, giving us a vivid impression of the fear, violence and chaos. There's a lot of visual storytelling here, helping with the abridging of the play.

This, and the whole second series of The Hollow Crown, has been a triumph. Now, if only they'd filmed Cumberbatch's Hamlet...

 

Henry VI, Part 2 (Dominic Cooke, 2016)

"O tiget's heart wrapped in a woman's hide!"

The cast also includes Stanley Townsend, Sam Troughton and Jason Watkins and is a superb assemblage of actors not all of whom, alas, can be tagged. This is a superb array of performances.

Anyway, the BBC continue their Season of Shakespeare's Henry VI plays plus Richard III under the Hollow Crown imprimatur, and it's awesome. Here, despite the title, we have the very end of Part 2 and all of Part 3, much abridged. I've seen and read a lot of Shakespeare but these television plays are my first experience of the Henry VI plays.

These plays are early; Shakespeare was much younger when writing them than he was for his more acclaimed plays, so the theme of kingship is not dealt with in the subtlety of the plays he would later write for the decades prior to Henry VI's accession. The dialogue and characterisation are sublime, though; Queen Margaret is delicious, and it's so fascinating to see the young Richard of Gloucester, slowly forming into the Machiavel he will eventually become. Benedict Cumberbatch stands out, obviously, but Sophie Okonedo gives the most memorable performance as z superb Margaret, and Stankey Townsend's Warwick deserves mention too, as does Adrian Dunbar's Richard of York.

It's a gloriously bloody play, with Richard of York's sadistic dispatching at Margaret's hands as its centrepiece. Henry, again, is shown to be a peaceful, harmless wet blanket- something which, for a King, paradoxically engenders civil war, death and untold misery, as Henry sees at his defeat by Edward IV, with father killing son and vice versa. No wonder he goes mad. And in allowing his armies to be commanded by a woman ("The Queen has more success when you are absent"), he fails at what a King was expected to do.

It's a superb production of a gripping play, one I'm glad I've seen. And the end- with Richard plotting his own way to the throne- makes me excited for the next instalment, one much more familiar...

Doctor Who: Time Heist

"Still don't understand why you're in charge...?"

"Basically, it's the eyebrows."

My heart sank when I discovered this was to be written by the less-than-impressive Steve Thompson, and even more by the "and Steven Moffat"; is this a script so bad it's had to be largely rewritten by the showrunner? Still, perhaps I wasn't to worry; after all, Into the Dalek was by "Phil Ford and Steven Moffat" and that was ok. Still, what's with all these co-credits? RTD rewrote scripts all the time and never claimed a co-credit. Moffat had a reputation for not re-writing as much, but surely he must have done so a little, and if not then why so often this series? It's a mystery.

Still... this is actually quite good, and certainly the best from Thompson. I suspect it's not really down to the script, though; the pre-credits sequence is superb (is it just me who was reminded of Saw by the concept of four strangers waking up and being made to perform a task by a mysterious figure with a voice like Tobin Bell's?), but the rest of the episode, while exciting, doesn't really fulfil it's promise and the ending, while logical, feels a little abrupt, although I like the twist of the Architect being the Doctor, predictable though it may be. I'm afraid that this story, while good, is only my second favourite Doctor Who take on the Minotaur legend after The Horns of Nimon.

Still, there's much to like here. I like the tragic cyberpunk figure of Psi, who can delete his memory banks without the aid of those worms from The Snowmen. Its a heartbreaking tragedy to have to delete your loved ones to avoid harming them and... the character is essentially a walking metaphor for the Doctor. So is Saibra, forever apart from others and yearning to be free of her baggage. And Keeley Hawes makes a superb guest baddie as both Kabraxos and her clone. But are we to infer, from the Doctor's observation that she must be full of self loathing if she "fires" her own clones and that he "hates" the Architect, that he is full of self-loathing too? Is every major guest character here a metaphor for the Doctor?

So much for the good-but-not-great script. What really elevates this is the direction of Douglas Mackintosh, whose use of colour and camera angles is at once modern, brilliant and heavily suggestive of the visual grammar of the heist movie. I'm struck by the scene in which he shoots our four bank robbers, in a little room, from above. In fact, the general standard of direction so far this season has been universally superb. 

Oh, and Abslom Daak is now officially canon!

There's not been much in terms of the season arc this week, aside from Clara's upcoming date and another mention of that mysterious woman in the shop. But it all seems to be coming to a head this week.