Like most people I know, I don’t watch a lot of ‘live’ T.V. Instead, I clog my recorder up with hours of television that I rarely get around to watching, watch a few things on ‘catch-up’ or whatever my package provider calls it, a few shows on Netflix, Amazon Prime and Now T.V. So, it is slightly inaccurate to call this post ‘a week in T.V’, it would be more apt to term it; ‘My week of viewing’.
First up, a thing that was actually on live T.V last week:
Upstart Crow
Written by Ben Elton, starring David Mitchell. A comedy about Shakespeare trying to break through in his early career.
So far, quite likeable and funny. I saw David Mitchell being interviewed by Richard Herring last year, for one of Herring’s Leicester Square podcasts:
Mitchell was talking about this upcoming project and, when he found out that it was penned by Ben Elton, Richard Herring asked;
“Is it shit?”
Mitchell handled the question with good grace, I thought, and said that he hoped not. He also said that Ben Elton was very aware that that was what people were saying about his recent output.
My first impressions, of the program, are that the cast are very good: particularly David Mitchell, and (rather surprisingly) Liza Tarbuck. It is very similar to Blackadder (which to my mind is no bad thing) - the character that Mark Heap plays could almost be brother to Stephen Fry’s Melchett in Blackadder II. I'm not really sure what they’re trying to do with the ‘Ricky Gervais’ character; the actor who has made it big in Italy. That particular joke could wear very thin but overall the program isn't bad. There are clever jokes about Shakespeare letting Christopher Marlowe pass off Shakespeare's plays as his own but I'm not sure whether that would alienate the audience or draw them in. There are also plenty of what Elton calls his 'knob gags', or in this case, gags about men playing women and shoving coconuts down their dresses.
I also tried to watch Love, Nina
But I'm afraid I fell asleep, not because it was boring but because I was exhausted. I read the book this was based on and really loved it; (Love, Nina by Nina Stibbe) about a nanny in the 1980s who works for Mary Kay Wilmers - editor of the London Review of Books. In the book, Alan Bennett comes round regularly for dinner and helps to fix a broken washing machine. The family borrow drills from Jonathan Miller and various other ‘famous’ literary neighbours make appearances. The ‘Nina’ of the letters is unimpressed and tells her sister that she thinks Alan Bennett ‘used to be in Coronation Street’! There is no ‘Alan Bennett’ character in the T.V adaptation, instead there is a dour, humourless Scottish writer. I can’t really write a review of how that works as I only saw about ten minutes of the program but one of the joyful things about the book was that, whenever one of the characters tried to be nasty about someone or pass on some scandalous gossip about one of their neighbours, Alan Bennett would interject, like a character from one of his own works, with something dampeningly mundane! I can’t help but think that the exclusion of the Alan Bennett 'character' would be to the detriment of the program.
Now, to move on to something not on general T.V, I'm going to talk about Girls
Created and written by Lena Dunham, this program follows a group of twenty-somethings and their travails through life in New York. This program could, potentially, be intensely annoying; the characters are narcissistic, relatively affluent and, often, not very nice, but I found it totally addictive. I've just watched it up to the end of season 5 and they haven’t released season 6 yet.
There we have one of the double-edged joys about modern T.V viewing - binge watching! All well and good when you are so captivated by a program that you just have to download one last episode before you go to bed but then you find you have vacuumed it all up and you have nothing left to watch. You are left feeling bereft (well, you are if you are me, anyway). And just why is Girls so addictive? I think, for me, it is the pull of the central character, Hannah Horvath, played by Dunham herself. Hannah is a writer, sometimes successful, often hapless and usually, despite her narcissism, self-aware. And, in almost every episode, Hannah is partially or completely naked and this is brilliant and this is brilliant because Hannah/Lena doesn't look like a Hollywood star. Hannah looks like a regular human woman; she is slightly chubby, her breasts are smaller than her hips and she is covered in tattoos.
It is so refreshing to see a ‘normal’ looking woman having sex on T.V. I read an article once where it said that we are so used to seeing ‘beautiful’ people shagging on film that it made the rest of us mere mortals feel that we didn't have the right to a sex life. Compare this to the recent T.V adaptation of John Le Carre’s The Night Manager (which I loved, BTW) where the two leads looked like Greek gods and displayed some pretty impressive thigh muscle control in their sexual shenanigans.
I guess that was in context, the characters were supposed to be beautiful; they are described so in the book (also brilliant) but it is kind of cool to see someone who doesn't look like a mythical being getting their kit off. So, thanks for that, Lena Dunham! And thank you, Nancy, for recommending Girls to me - you are right, I loved it!
One thing that I’ve been watching in an ‘old school’ way; as each episode is released and as soon as it’s been released, to avoid spoilers, is Game of Thrones. Obviously I can’t say too much about this, to avoid spoiling it for my *cough* multitude of readers...but I, too, have been affected by the...er, revival of a certain character and the reunion of certain family members and the magically uplifting and anti-ageing properties of a certain necklace….
Anyway, Game of Thrones has often been criticised for its gratuitous sex scenes and, (mainly female) nudity and it led me to think - why is the nudity acceptable (to me) in Girls but rather tiresome in GOT? It’s not just because Lena Dunham looks normal and the women in GOT look like Marvel comic women. Is it about plot? Girls is about relationships and sex, whereas Thrones is about….war, intrigue, other stuff...so the sex often seems tacked on and unnecessary.
I think that my objection to the amount of female nudity in GOT is that, to my mind, it makes the women seem exposed and vulnerable. After all, it is even used as a punishment, in one of the episodes for one of the characters, to walk through the streets, naked, and get pelted with rotten vegetables! (I know that this scene comes from the actual books so don’t take me to task on that). There is definitely something to be said about power play, in an environment where the men remain clothed and the women are naked. GOT often looks like a mediaeval lap-dancing club!
The notable exception to this, *spoiler!* I'm sure the program makers and the actor, Emilia Clarke, would argue, would be the character Daenerys Targaryen’s recent triumph, where she burns down the place of her captors and stands, magnificent, before its people, naked, with a striking backdrop of flames. In this context, Daenerys' nudity makes her look powerful and is symbolic of (another) rebirth.
I feel that there is something political about Lena Dunham’s nudity in Girls: look at me, she seems to be saying, I don’t fit in with Western society’s supposed ideal of beauty but I still have a right to display my body. There is definitely something empowering about that.
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