Jamie on the Box – Game of Thrones

Posted on April 29, 2019 by Jamie Andrew

My pictorial review of Game of Thrones, Season 8 Episode 3

‘The Battle of Winterfell’

Jamie on the Box – Barry, Game of Thrones

Posted on April 25, 2019 by Jamie Andrew

TV Review: Game of Thrones, Barry

Westeros gears up for death, while Barry tries to stall it

HBO used to dominate the prestige TV market, and it very much knew it, even going so far as to rub the networks faces in it with their slogan, ‘It’s not TV: it’s HBO’.

HBO was entitled to crow. After all, it gave the world Oz, The Sopranos, The Wire, The Larry Sanders Show, and many more ground-breaking smash hits besides.

Unhampered by network focus groups or the vested interests of advertisers, HBO could afford to take greater risks with its output. Once show-runners, writers and producers had been freed from the burden of having to please most of the people most of the time, or of having to play to the lowest (or most conservative) common denominator, creativity became king.

The televisual landscape is different since HBO’s heyday, seismically so. Network television has upped its game, and streaming services like Netflix, Amazon and Hulu are taking the sorts of bold risks that used to be HBO’s exclusive calling card. It’s a testament to HBO’s enduring creative clout that even among this dizzying proliferation of content two of the best shows currently on TV – Game of Thrones and Barry – come from the HBO stable.

As Game of Thrones enters its endgame, it’s gifted us the most hotly anticipated team-up this side of Infinity War. Every hero, villain, vagabond, brother, bastard, king, queen, drinker, thinker, miscreant, meanderer and murderer that ever lifted a banner or a broadsword is assembled in Winterfell for A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, which basically serves as an hour-long breather (and an opportunity for us to hold our breaths) before a wave of wights and walkers descends from the north to reduce all of Westeros’s problems to one: survival.

An episode of Game of Thrones never feels as long as its run-time. Whether it lasts 48, 58 or 90 minutes, the narrative always twists and clicks around as fast as a man having his neck broken by the Mountain. In the beginning I attributed the greater share of that feat of time-dilation to the show’s vast and sprawling geography – the action flitting from desert to forest to castle to cave over distances of thousands of miles, essentially telling six or more loosely interlocking or wholly separate stories within each episode; keeping the pace brisk to distract us from any mounting sense of boredom – but it quickly became clear that the thing keeping us hooked was purely and simply the sheer, breath-taking quality of every element of the production.

There’s no flitting between locations in A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms. The whole hour (an hour for us, a day for the characters) unfolds in and around Winterfell, where the characters meet, talk, drink, lament, commiserate, drink, and drink some more. There are no battles or blood-shed, but the episode holds us utterly spellbound as it weaves together and pays off dozens of plot-lines, reunions and partnerships, sometimes calling back to feuds and fuck-ups way back in the first season.

There’s not a word or gesture out of place. Everything counts, everything builds, everything works. As always with the show, the rich dialogue springs from character, not circumstance. Some characters are clipped, some garrulous, some truthful, some false, some terse, but every word that comes out of a character’s mouth sounds and feels like it belongs there.

Emotional responses from the audience – whether they be joy, panic, relief, fear, tears or sadness – are worked for and earned. Shows like Star Trek Discovery and The Walking Dead might roll out some emotionally manipulative montage over-played by some puffed up, expository, wholly contrived speech in a bid to stir our souls, but Game of Thrones can provoke the same response with a word, a grunt, or even just a look.

If we became misty-eyed when Brienne of Tarth earned the respect and recognition of her friends and peers, felt touched yet again by Arya and the Hound’s rather gruff and grudging father-daughter act, laughed when Tormund told tales of suckling milk at a giant’s breast, and shouted ‘no’ at the screen as Arya’s final layer of innocence was stripped away, think how we’re going to feel next week when everyone starts dying. I trust you, Game of Thrones, but I’m not ready. Can’t it be summer again?

When you start to describe Barry to someone who’s never seen it, you become conscious of the molten gimmickery at the show’s core. Isn’t this just a Saturday Night Live sketch with too thin a premise to sustain a whole series? (apposite, as the show’s star and co-creator, Bill Hader, is a SNL alumnus). Barry seems like the kind of crazy idea two friends would cook up one night between bongs and back-to-back episodes of Rick and Morty.

‘So there’s this guy, right, and he’s called Barry, and he’s a cold-blooded killer, right? I mean he does it for a living. And this one time he wanders into an acting class when he’s stalking a target, and he decides he wants to become an actor, give up the killing business. But he has to kill someone in the class, that’s his target, right, but he falls in love with this acting chick who’s friends with the guy he has to kill, and he ends up betraying the Ukrainian mob, and his handler won’t let him quit, and the police are hunting him and every time he tries to walk away from killing and murder he gets pulled in ever harder and… em… [scratches head] are there any more Cheetos?’

Barry, though, is much more than just a quirky premise. It’s a smart, wicked, wickedly funny show that’s got just as much room for fatal and farcical shoot-outs and misunderstandings as it does meditations on mortality, culpability, life, love, death and fate. Grim reality goes toe to toe with macabre fantasy in a heightened world populated by characters both urgently real and grotesquely cartoonish. Instead of conflicting with each other, all of these elements coalesce into something beautiful and funny and horrifying and black. It’s a show that makes you feel. Really feel.

Season two is all about redemption, betrayal and root causes. Can Barry be redeemed after his multitude of murderous sins, the first of which – his first government-sanctioned kill – is coaxed out of him at acting class by his mentor, Gene Cousineau (Henry Winkler). Gene uses Barry’s pain as a way to explore and over-come his own; the grief he feels at the disappearance of his girlfriend who, unbeknownst to him, was dispatched by Barry at the close of the first season. Gene, too, is trying to redeem himself. He’s reaching out to his estranged son, who Gene abandoned long ago in pursuit of his own selfish wants, needs and aspirations. Meanwhile, Barry and Gene continue to develop a deep bond, more father-and-son in nature than mentor-and-student. Given that Barry is the root cause of Gene’s pain, he may be looking for love and absolution in a particularly ill-advised place.

Barry (the show) is good at making you feel complicit in the crimes of its eponymous lead. A few episodes ago, Barry decided against carrying out a hit, and we applauded his personal growth. Then, he declined to pull the trigger on Hank (the hilarious Anthony Harrigan), even after the metro-sexual mafioso had just tried and failed to assassinate him. Again, we admired his restraint. Good for you, Barry, we said. But, in episode four, What?!, when Sally’s abusive ex shows up, we found ourselves cheering ‘KILL HIM! KILL HIM! KILL HIM!’

It’s a delicious irony that Barry – an angry, empty, clinically-depressed man with PTSD who’s probably murdered far in excess of 100 people – has more scope for redemption and capacity for empathy than the wannabe actors with whom he shares a class, especially his girlfriend, Sally, who is so self-absorbed that she can walk into a room that’s been riddled with bullet-holes and not even notice.

The whole show is a joy to watch, and Henry Winkler and Bill Hader continue to turn in exceptional performances. Westeros may be preparing to draw the final curtain, but I hope there’s plenty of life – and death – in Barry’s future. If the rug-pulling ending of What?! is anything to go by, I’d say the answer is a resounding ‘yes’.

Roy, Boy of Earth

Posted on April 20, 2019 by Jamie Andrew

A free, funny story for you and your kids to enjoy together at bed-time.

An alien boy had grown sick of the sight,

Of the food he was served every day, every night.

His tummy would rumble and grumble and churn.

Couldn’t they give a new chef a wee turn?

The things that he ate on his planet of Munch,

For breakfast, and dinner, and supper and lunch,

Were mushy black nuggets that tasted like sand.

All crunchy and gooey and horribly bland.

“I won’t eat these nuggets,” he shouted one day.

Then jumped in a spaceship and went on his way,

Heading to Earth, where the eating was good

And he’d heard boys in jammies made wonderful food.

He zoomed into orbit, then dived to the planet,

Not even stopping to survey and scan it.

Crashed down on a roof like a hungry green Santa,

Dreaming of human washed down with cold Fanta.

He leapt in a window, he followed the snore,

(Which meant there was one boy, he’d hoped there’d be four).

The room smelled like sneezes, old socks and a fart,

Delicious, in other words: food for the heart.

In his hurry he tripped over toys on the ground,

Which hurled him, and bumped him, oh boy, what a sound!

The little boy woke, and rubbed hard at his eyes,

Which grew wide and excited and full of surprise.

“Hello there, strange creature, well, my name is Roy.”

The alien scowled, “You’re my food, stupid boy.

I don’t need to know what your name is, you see,

You’re nothing to me but a new recipe.”

“Are you from space?!” the young chappy exclaimed,

“From which planet? And won’t you please tell me your name?”

“There’s no point in that, boy, because humans can’t say it,

But if you really must know it’s Frass-Jassa-Mump-Frayvit.”

“I’ll just call you, Frass, then, it’s so nice to meet you.”

The alien laughed, “Boy, I’m going to eat you.

I’ll chop you all up like a tasty risotto!

Don’t greet ’em, just eat ’em: that’s my planet’s motto.”

Roy let out a laugh, it soon filled up the room,

And hit Frass’s ears like a big sonic boom.

“You’re laughing,” growled Frass, “I don’t think that you get it,

When I make you a sandwich you’re going to regret it.”

“You’ll make me a sandwich?” said Roy, “Thank you, please,

My favourite is tuna, or pickle with cheese.”

“No, no,” said the alien, ready to crack.

“YOU’LL be my sandwich, my tummy’s next snack!”

Roy smiled a big smile, asked: “Why can’t we be friends?”

The alien prayed for this moment to end.

“I feel like my words are all stuck in a loop,

But perhaps that will end when I make you some soup.”

“You’ll make me some soup? Oh Frass that would be great.

Can you butter some bread up; I often have eight?”

“No, no,” said the alien, “My soup will be YOU,

“And I’ll mop you all up, with a slurp, bite and chew!”

Roy reached out behind him, and scooped up a bear,

And handed it over, while saying “There, there”,

Which made Frass so angry he wanted to squawk.

He’d never expected his supper to talk.

“Now look, boy,” said Frass, “Let’s just make something clear,

I need you to listen, I need you to hear.

I’m not your best pal, not your mucker or mate.

I’m going to cook you; you’ll be on my plate.”

“I’ll start with your cheek, oh my, c’est magnifique!

I’ll heat it up nice, with a fat plate of rice.

I’ll use a big wok… no a pan, no a skillet.

I’m drooling already… I want my cheek fillet!

I look at your nose, and my appetite grows!

I’ll make a big pie with your fingers and toes,

Then garnish it all with a sprinkling of lips,

Maybe throw in some ankles, some thigh-bones and hips!

One leg or two? Well, I’m going to have both.

I’ll carve them like turkeys, I give you my oath.

Your eyes can be sprouts, then you won’t see you’re thinner,

Once I’ve gobbled you up like a hot Christmas dinner.

What to do with your teeth? Why, I’ll stuff them with cheese,

Then I’ll grill them with mushrooms and one of your knees.

I’ll fry you like bacon, I’ll braise you like steak,

And your eyebrows and eyelids I’ll bake in a cake.

I’ve said all I can, I can’t say any more,

All of this talking’s an arduous chore.

I hope that my meaning is clear on this day,

I say what I mean: and I mean fricassee!

Prepare to be eaten…

…Roy, boy of Earth!”

Roy started laughing, he just couldn’t stop,

He thought that his tummy was going to pop.

And Frass stamped his feet, like a paw-thumping bunny,

And jumped up and down, shouting, “Why is that funny?”

Frass tried his best to stay fierce and defiant,

Even when Roy scooped him up like a giant,

And held him right up to the ball of an eye,

Saying: “How will you eat me, you’re two inches high?”

“Oh… Erm…”, said Frass-Jassa-Mump-Frayvit of Munch,

Suddenly losing his hunger for lunch.

He wondered, with fear, what his wee life was worth.

And he said, “…please don’t eat me, kind Roy… boy of Earth.”

Roy didn’t eat him, he fed him instead,

Fetched him some honey and small bits of bread.

Which Frass gobbled up with the greatest of ease,

Before reaching his main course, some hot mushy peas.

Those peas were the best food that Frass ever tasted,

And finding them meant that his trip wasn’t wasted.

“These things are sand nuggets, but tasty and green,

I’ll take a load home in my flying machine.”

So Frass said goodbye, and then loaded his ship,

Thanking his friend for a wonderful trip,

Roy said, “You’re welcome, and hurry back soon,

I’ll find you more peas than can fit on the moon.”

Frass was delighted, he’d found a new food,

On a lovely new planet where people were good.

He smiled to himself, feeling happy and fine,

“I’ve done it,” he shouted. “It’s peas in our time.”

Thank you for reading ‘Roy, Boy of Earth’. Hard to believe the pictures were drawn by me and not a professional artist, right? RIGHT?? If you and your kids enjoyed reading my story, all I ask is that you donate a minimum of £2-4 to CHAS (Children’s Hospices Across Scotland). You can do this by calling 0141 779 6180 or visiting www.chas.org.uk/donate.

This isn’t an official CHAS campaign. CHAS isn’t affiliated with me or this website in any way. I just wanted to help the best way I knew how: by writing something silly. CHAS does such important, admirable work for people and children in heart-breaking situations that I’m sure none of you will grudge digging deep for donations – even a shallow dig for £2-4 is a tremendous help. Every penny counts.

Jamie on the Box – Santa Clarita Diet

Posted on April 18, 2019 by Jamie Andrew

TV Review: Santa Clarita Diet

Netflix’s popular zomcom is back for its third season, and it’s bloody good

Years ago I worked with a lady in her early sixties, who told me that the secret to her long, stable and happy marriage had been variety, pacing and always having something to look forward to. She and her husband courted, they married, they got a house, they had kids, they moved, they grew, they became grandparents – the beats of their lives perfectly timed and arranged to minimise monotony and banish boredom whenever it threatened to rear its head.

Variety, pacing, something to look forward to. See? The secret to a successful marriage.

It’s also the secret to a successful TV show. The best ones keep moving – quickly, powerfully and with purpose – forking off at just the right times and in just the right directions to keep the journey rolling forwards and the scenery fresh. In gourmet terms: giving you just enough to fill your belly, but never enough to make you sick.

Two recent shows that have been exemplars of this pattern are the super-slick, high-concept comedies The Good Place, and Santa Clarita Diet. The former is due a welcome return later this year, while the latter dropped its third season on Netflix at the end of March: even zanier, funnier, and gorier than ever before. This time around there’s also a surprising amount of heart to proceedings, and I don’t just mean the kind that’s ripped from a victim’s chest and snacked upon by the ravenous undead.

The aftermath of Officer Anne’s desert-based pledge to serve as Sheila’s disciple (season two’s cliff-hanger) is dealt with in typical fast and funny fashion, paving the way for this season’s trio of real and credible dangers: the FBI, sniffing around Eric and Abby’s explosive political statement; the Knights of Serbia, an ancient order dedicated to the eradication of the undead, in town to ply their post-fatal trade; and Dobrivoje Poplovic, the Serbian colonel who wants to capture Santa Clarita’s ‘zombies’ and subject them to a fate worse than… well, undeath.

As always, Santa Clarita Diet deals zippily with its many perils and conundrums, putting them front-and-centre just long enough to wring the maximum amount of interesting and hilarious moments from them, but always wrapping them up and burning them off before they threaten to become humdrum.

This season’s enduring philosophical and ethical question centres on the morality of immortality, specifically if it’s ever right to pass zombiehood on to another person, even with their consent. As the season unfolds it’s clearer than ever before that the power of life over – and life after – death is a heavy burden to bear, for biter, bitten and bystanders all.

Good old Gary

Jonathan Slavin is brilliant as former mental-patient Ron – a maniacal, bug-eyed cross between Peter Capaldi and the Dean from Community – who dupes literal talking-head Gary into biting him, before going out proselytising in the name of zombiehood. Despite Joel and Sheila’s very active opposition to Ron’s reckless behaviour, Sheila has a crisis of conscience when she meets Jean, a prickly old lady with a terminal illness. Jean’s prickly because she won’t live long enough to see her first grandchild born. To bite or not to bite. That is the question… the question that Joel and Sheila have very different answers to.

And Joel finds himself under increasing pressure to join the ranks of the undead, so he and Sheila won’t find themselves separated by his inevitable natural death. Will they or won’t they renew their wedding vows to read ‘Til undeath do us part’?

Incidentally, having loved and admired Timothy Oliphant as seasoned tough guys in both Deadwood and Justified, it’s a joy to see how good he is at comedy. He’s pretty much done a reverse Brian Cranston.

One of the many brilliant things about Santa Clarita Diet is how the big questions about and dangers to Joel and Sheila’s marriage are dealt with as if they were the sort of minor irritations more typically encountered on tea-time soap operas. In Santa Clarita, as in real life, we absorb the horrors of our lives and shrink and tame them until they seem as ordinary to us as Uncle Frank farting at the Christmas dinner table. The very funny juxtaposition between the absolute, blood-splattering insanity of the undead life-style and Joel and Sheila’s sanitised, almost cliched existence in middle-class suburbia is made funnier still by the couple’s tendency to react to the misfortunes and people around them with the forced jollility and fixed smiles of a cutesy couple in a 1950s sitcom.

Laughs, gore, fun, shocks, head, heart, soul: Santa Clarita Diet’s third season has got the lot. Not to mention a healthy, hefty dollop of empowerment.

While representation in media is important, the recent glut of male-to-female character transformations on the big and little screens has felt less like a cultural revolution and more like an effort on the part of media financiers to adjust to the shifting demographics of cinema attendance and merchandise spending. In short, they’re going where the money is. And all the while radical feminists, right-on lefties, chauvinist assholes and slobbering incels battle each other beneath market capitalism’s steely glare…

Santa Clarita Diet proves that you can approach the whole subject of gender and representation without being gimmicky; without even making it obvious that’s what you’re doing. It’s quietly subversive; a highly polished, very funny, wildly entertaining show that just happens to have strong female characters at its helm. And not strong in a ‘look, I can bench-press a body-builder, and I know 6 kinds of karate’ sort of a way, but strong in a ‘we’re regular women surviving and keeping our family afloat in these unique and highly dangerous circumstances, and sometimes we fuck it up’ sort of a way.

Sheila and her daughter are the lynch-pins of the show: strong, flawed, fierce, funny, likeable women who drive the action forwards through a combination of their tenaciousness, kindness, curiosity, compassion, intelligence, impulsivity and thirst for activism. In contrast the men – while also very likeable, and occasionally heroic in their own bumbling way – are neurotic, over-cautious, angst-filled, and frantic. Joel and Eric evoke the Jay Pritchett and Phil Dunphy dynamic, except both of them are Phil Dunphy.

Toxic masculinity – whether it’s located in lecherous lotharios, serial abusers or actual Nazis – is always punished, and always fatally. It doesn’t get much more right-on than a recently empowered woman literally devouring the very worst the patriarchy has to offer. I look forward with great relish to see how the squeamish and squirrelly Joel reacts to joining the ranks of the post-living.

Here’s to the variety and exquisite pacing of season four. To Joel becoming Sheila’s newest pupil, to Abby embarking upon a fledgling romance with Eric whilst rising through the ranks of an ancient order of zombie-killers, to Sheila’s new ass-kicking team of an old lady, a camp coward and a reformed zombie killer.

Definitely something to look forward to.

It’s awful when your kids fight; it’s worse when they don’t

Posted on April 13, 2019 by Jamie Andrew

When Christopher, our second child, was still wibbling about in his mother’s yolk, a fish-faced lump of stubby proto-limbs, our first-born, Jack, was already manifesting signs of fraternal protectiveness. He’d rub his mummy’s tummy and tell us how much he was looking forward to his baby brother joining the family. This reassured us, even though he was clearly just parroting back at us the many words of enthusiasm and encouragement we’d chirped into his ears.

In the beginning, things were great. Jack doted on his baby brother, and seemed to harbour zero resentment towards the little guy for jumping on his being-born bandwagon. I know ill feelings and jealous reactions don’t always manifest themselves straight away, but I know they can because of my sister. When I was born, my then eight-year-old sister didn’t shit for a month. The child psychologist said her wildly conflicting feelings of love, anger and jealousy were playing havoc with her insides. She was bottling things up, physically as well as mentally. In a weird sort of a way, the shit she stubbornly refused to release represented her love for me. Love won, in the end. As it always does. I guess you could say I literally loved the shit out of her.

My partner and I realised, as Christopher developed more and more autonomy, that it had probably been easy for Jack to love his brother when he was nothing more than a tiny creature who spent his days either asleep or variously shitting and screaming, because there was no competition between them. Sure, there was competition for time and attention at a basic level, but we always strived to mitigate Jack’s ill-feelings as best we could by giving him plenty of one-on-one time with each of us, not to mention oodles of cuddles with his brother. We wanted Jack to see his brother as a part of him, and a part of the family. An addition, an enhancement, not a replacement.

And it was a success. Maybe Jack wasn’t considered the cutest kid on the block any more, and maybe the greatest share of the ooos, aaaaaaaas and cooooooos now went to Christopher, but Jack was still king. A ruler of absolute power, at least as far as the Kingdom of Little People was concerned. And if the going got rough? If Jack grew tired of this wide-eyed, swaddled little jester? He could simply walk away, go someplace else, be by himself… with brother, no brother, with brother, no brother, as quick and easy as an optician replacing lenses in those weird Meccano glasses they put on your face at the eye test… better with, better without, with brother, no brother. The best of both worlds.

Unfortunately for Jack, Christopher became mobile, and discovered that he didn’t have to live life passively like a leaf on a river. He could be the river. At least until he learned how to be a boat… I’ve really lost the thread of this multi-part metaphor, haven’t I? And why didn’t I say ‘flow’ instead of ‘thread’? This is what happens to your mind when you spend the better part of a year shouting endless variations of ‘LEAVE HIM ALONE!’, ‘LEAVE EACH OTHER ALONE’ and ‘STOP FIGHTING’ at the future WWE stars your children have become.

Christopher, although absolutely bloody adorable, is fearless for his size. He’s always ready and able with a hoarse rebuke or a swinging slap. Thanks to Jack’s campaign of brutal dominance, Christopher learned to fight back at an incredibly early age. He’s a honed, toned battle-machine in a way that Jack never was, or needed to be. If Christopher is occasionally a little monster, then he’s a monster of Jack’s creation [nothing to do with us, you understand, we’re just the parents].

That’s not to make the mistake of assuming that Jack is now the helpless victim in the face of his brother’s revenge-based brutality. Just the other month we heard Christopher screaming, and ran upstairs to find a chunk of his hair matted with blood. Jack had clonked Chrissy over the head with a bulky Chief Wiggum toy, not realising that the sharp points of the policeman’s hat made him more of a blade than a chib.

Different numbers of siblings, and different combinations of genders and ages, make for wildly different sibling relationships. A young girl rounding off a squad of elder brothers might become a tomboy (I hope it isn’t now considered a hate crime to use that word); a young boy at the end of a big litter of sisters might find himself traumatised for all the rest of his days, god help him.

My sister’s role and status as related to me shifted with age, mood and circumstance. Sometimes she was my protector, sometimes my aggressor. Sometimes she was a second-mother, sometimes she was a mother-fucker. But everything was built on a bedrock of love. For every act of torment there came a larger act of kindness. She may have told me there were dead flies in my sandwich to make me hand it over to her, or occasionally bent my legs over my stomach and attempted to pin them behind my head, causing pain that was suggestive of a particularly gruesome interrogation by the Spanish Inquisition, but she also took the rap for me. Hid things for me. Stood up for me. Absorbed the strikes of lightning for me.

When I threw a pillow and broke a bendy, retractable ceiling light of which my mum was especially proud, Alison took the blame. When I was struck with the crippling fear of death, frightened and sobbing, it was her bed I crawled into for peace and reassurance. So I can forgive her for teaching me how to do the fingers and then sending me off to show mum, who went predictably apoplectic.

Siblings fight, siblings grass, sneer and prank, but they love. At least in my experience. (Love you, sis)

Jack and Christopher’s age gap isn’t sufficient to make a second-tier father out of Jack, but their relationship is definitely changing, evolving, growing – away from violence and towards something else entirely. Something great, but something terrible, too. Our greatest hopes for a loving, peaceful union between the two brothers are in the process of being made reality, but it’s a boon that carries barbs. What I’m trying to say is: they’re joining forces.

While whirlwinds of fists and kicks still occasionally erupt from them with the barest of warnings increasingly they’re a team – though not always one where its members enjoy equal standing. Predictably, Jack is the puppet-master. He’s realised the esteem he’s held in by his brother, and the influence this affords him. The fine-print of their accord is less like ‘Why fight, when we can embrace fraternal harmony?’ and more like ‘Why fight, when this pliant young whippersnapper can be the willing and able instrument for my evil bidding?’ They’re like Batman and Robin… if Batman was a total shit.

Jack now wants his little brother to share bedtime stories with him, to lie like best buds and greet the world of sleep together. We often walk past to find Jack whispering in his brother’s ear, usually thinks like ‘Get the pencil and draw on that wall’ or ‘Go slap mummy’s bum’, but, you know, as far as conspiracies go, it’s incredibly sweet.

Last week we’d asked the boys to go upstairs and tidy their room. We knew the chances of them actually tidying their room were a million to one, but – cards on the table – we just wanted ten minutes’ peace. While I expected the room to be actually slightly messier at the end of those ten short minutes, what I didn’t expect when I went to check on their progress was to find water pooling on the floors and carpets, dripping down the walls, and running down the light-bulb and lampshade of the hall light. Christopher stood in the upstairs hall with a giant pump-action water-pistol, his clothes soaking wet, as Jack retreated from his ear with a big goofy grin on his face.

What happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object, and they decide to be best pals? I’m sure we’re going to spend the next fifteen years praying for a return to war.

Jamie on the Box – American Gods

Posted on April 11, 2019 by Jamie Andrew

TV Review: Puny Gods

A half-time appraisal of American Gods’ second season

Last week I said that Ricky Gervais’s new show After Life was greater than the sum of its parts. This week I’m here to tell you that American Gods (Starz, Amazon Prime) is less than the sum of its parts.

Two seasons and five episodes in, I’m yet to make a meaningful connection with its main story or its characters. That’s not to say that it’s a bad show. It’s not. It just doesn’t inspire awe or devotion, which is a grave sin indeed for a show about old Gods battling new for their share of mankind’s awe and devotion.

On the plus side, American Gods looks fantastic. The direction and cinematography are always exquisite; the weird hybrid worlds of man-and-God-hood are mesmerisingly realised and intricately rendered. There are no clunkers among the central or peripheral cast either, whose performances range from perfectly serviceable (Ricky Whittle as central cipher Shadow Moon; Peter Stromare as Czernobog) to terrific (Orlando Jones as Mr Nancy) to tremendous fun (Pablo Schreiber as Mad Sweeney and Emily Browning as Laura Moon/Dead-wife) to, appositely enough, God-like (Ian McShane).

Securing Ian McShane as Mr Wednesday/Odin was a major coup for the show. Like most discerning pop-culture fanatics out there I’d happily watch Ian McShane in pretty much anything: a ten-hour-long art-house movie called ‘Ian McShane Sleeps Peacefully for 12 Hours’; the new 22-part Netflix documentary series, ‘Ian McShane Silently Making Cups of Tea Before Surrendering to the Inevitability of his Morning Shit’. Anything.

McShane is captivating and commanding; his face hangs rich with menace, even when he’s playing relatively benign characters – not that he’s called upon to play many of them these days. His cat-and-mouse/man-and-God game with Shadow has provided most of the best lines and moments in the show so far. My only worry is that Shadow has been denied depth and agency for so long that the de facto star and audience proxy is in danger of being eclipsed by the far more dazzling ensemble around him.

I said American Gods was less than the sum of its parts. But, boy. What parts. The show has a masterful line in cold opens: beautiful, brutal chunks of phantasmagoria that blend fact and fiction, truth and legend, love and horror; powerful polemics on race, greed and corruption; haunting paeans to loss and pain. We’ve had Vikings slaughtering each other on distant and unforgiving shores; Mr Nancy addressing a doomed galley-ship full of slaves; the sad story of Techno Boy’s electro-literate musical prodigy, and, most recently, the tragic tale of a black man being snatched, strung up and burned by a confused and hateful mob, only for his death to carry the flaming torch of hatred far into the future. Each of these artfully-crafted short stories packs more of a visceral, lasting punch than some whole episodes or seasons of other shows.

Like FX’s series about lesser-known X-Men, Legion, American Gods is often a triumph of style over substance. At times the series feels like a patchwork of uber-cool vignettes; mini music-videos and visual slam-poetry that’s been stitched together by a mad Swedish auteur. That, believe it or not, is a compliment. I only hope that the narrative ups its game so the show can coalesce into something truly special.

Later this weekend we go from Gods to monsters, with season 3 of Santa Clarita Diet

Jamie On the Box – After Life, The Walking Dead

Posted on April 4, 2019 by Jamie Andrew

TV Review: After Life and after death

Ricky Gervais’ new show on Netflix, and the season nine finale of The Walking Dead

You can trace a loose autobiographical line through most of Ricky Gervais’ TV characters, from the cauldron of arrogance, delusion and fragility bubbling away inside of David Brent, to the sudden success and equally-sudden disillusionment of Andy Millman, right through to the pain, bitterness, contempt and disdain of Tony, the main protagonist of Gervais’s new Netflix series After Life.

Tony used to be a fun-loving man. He was content to coast through his small-town life as a journalist on a bargain-bin newspaper, because he was lucky enough to be married to his best friend, Lisa, a woman who made his life feel complete and worth living. Since her untimely death, Tony’s lost all sense of purpose, and now the only thing stopping him from killing himself is the existence of his pet dog. He’s miserable and angry, and doesn’t just want the rest of the world to know it; he wants the rest of the world to feel it, too: his co-workers, his boss (who’s also his brother-in-law), his postman, the local sex-worker, the local heroin addict, his own father. All of them.

He doesn’t care whether he lives or dies any more, which makes him unpredictable, unpalatable and pretty much untouchable. He’s free to take up heroin, threaten school-children, tackle criminals and tell people openly and unabashedly exactly how he feels about them. Don’t worry, though. Like all of Gervais’s characters, there’s just enough humanity lingering in Tony to guarantee his eventual redemption – though I wouldn’t characterise it as deserved. His grief takes him to some pretty dark places, most worryingly to a suicide by proxy that lightly skirts the fringes of premeditated murder.

After Life, then, is something of a tonal mishmash. It’s A Wonderful Life meets Groundhog Day by way of Trainspotting. The comedy possesses elements of both the farcical, rage-filled wish-fulfillment of Curb Your Enthusiasm and the grotesque absurdities of The League of Gentlemen, with generous portions of Gervais’s own time-tested, world-weary shtick leveled into the mix.

Some of the situations are so cartoonish and the characters within them so buffoonish and broadly drawn that they seem painfully incongruous when set against the many scenes of real grief, sadness, depression and anger. Paul Kaye’s rubbish therapist and Diane Morgan’s dippy office worker (or Kath Pilkington, as I call her) in particular, while very funny characters, don’t feel ‘real’ enough to exist inside a show so pregnant with death, pathos, suicide and sorrow. Many of the characters seem like their only function is to be totems and stress balls dotted along the trail of Tony’s spiritual journey to redemption, a journey that culminates in a sickly-sweet ending that’s somehow just the wrong side of twee.

But do you know what? It works. It shouldn’t – and it sometimes threatens not to – but it holds together, much greater than the sum of its parts. It made me laugh – boy did it make me laugh – and it made me feel real, unbridled emotion, many, many times. While it’s true that Gervais populates Tony’s world with a legion of convenient idiots, Gervais is at his funniest when he’s tearing the world a new one, and meeting insanity with molten sarcasm – so who cares? His antics at the school gate, or in the cafe ordering a children’s meal, or trading caustic barbs with his workmates had me laughing so hard I could hardly breathe. On a few occasions I almost laughed and cried at the same time, especially when Tony visited his dear, demented dad at the nursing home to tell him he loved him.

Gervais doesn’t always exhibit tremendous range as an actor [I should clarify: as a comic actor, he’s terrific], but he’s surrounded himself with great talent here, exceptional actors who add range and depth to the show, and bring out the best in him. David Bradley does so much with so little as Tony’s dad; Penelope Wilton is exceptional as Anne, the widow with whom Tony strikes up a warm relationship through their regular trips to the cemetery; and Ashley Jensen brings grit and humanity to her all-too-brief role as the hard-working nurse who looks after Tony’s dad.

I don’t know what Gervais has in store for season two – now confirmed – but I’m looking forward to it. There’s definitely life after After Life.

Now we move from the dead, to the undead. The characters of AMC’s zombie juggernaut The Walking Dead spent the season nine finale walking through a winter wonderland, but instead of sleigh bells and snowmen, the emphasis was very much on hypothermia and zombies poking out of the snow to eat them. Most seasons of the show have ended with either a jaw-dropping cliff-hanger or some form of ultra-violent wrap-up, so it was a refreshing change for The Walking Dead to drop pace and close out with a quieter, more thoughtful coda. Since the big shock had already dropped in the penultimate episode (“Don’t tell him, Pike!”) there was time and room for mournfulness and soulfulness.

‘The Storm’, despite pitting our survivors against nature itself across a wide and deadly canvas, contained – amid the howling horror – a lot of strong character moments: Michonne made some tough calls, the freeze between the King and Queen kept deepening, Negan continued his evolution from deadly to cuddly, and a simple snow-ball fight made us feel all warm and fuzzy inside.

Aesthetically, ‘The Storm’ is radically different from anything the show’s attempted before; and it’s haunting, beautiful and horrifying in equal measure. Very apt, too. You can almost hear the words of Robert Frost’s snowy, death-tinged poem scoring the group’s slog through the unforgiving wilderness:

‘The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.’

With the exception of a messy stutter-step to accommodate Rick Grimes’ exit, The Walking Dead has been back on track this season, recapturing the ever-spiking, uneven hit-rate of its hey-day (which goes a little like this: two great episodes, two good episodes, three mediocre episodes and one awful episode, repeat, and not necessarily in that order).

While the show is still stitched through with that same wobbly mix of logic-defying decisions and plot-before-character (sometimes even cool-thing-happening-before-plot-AND-character), it’s managed to claw its way back out of the grave it found itself rotting in throughout its seventh and eighth seasons to become a show to be reckoned with once more. The whisperers have been terrific – if occasionally implausible – villains, injecting a welcome air of threat, unpredictability and menace back into the narrative.

It remains to be seen whether season nine will prove to have been the catalyst for the re-animation of The Walking Dead, or simply ‘one last scare’ before the final head-shot. For now, though, we can tip-toe ahead into apocalypse with a sense of cautious optimism.

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 4, Eps 1 – 3

Posted on April 2, 2019 by Jamie Andrew

Part 15: The Unicorn Meets the Eagle (or ‘America… f*** yeah!’)

Wherein Claire and Jamie are slaves to fortune, and others are just slaves

The shape and boundaries of Outlander’s story changed in steady increments throughout its third season, building to a wave (a literal one) that swept the show off its axis and into the raw, thumping heart of America’s pioneering past.

Drawing purely on internet chatter from the many Outlander fan groups I follow, season four’s new direction seems to be the site of the greatest schism yet between fans. Some consider the season to be an evolution, others a metamorphosis (from a butterfly back into a caterpillar). Some see it as a revelation, others an abomination. The fans have split into factions as surely as the two warring sides at Prestonpans or Culloden, a fierce, head-on battle for Outlander’s heart and soul. The question keeps coming up: is season four a blossoming, or a blooming disgrace?

So far, I can’t see what all the fussing and fighting is about. Sure, the show looks and feels very different in many ways, but it’s still solidly and undeniably Outlander. As a litmus test I spent the duration of ‘America the Beautiful’ playing a game of Outlander bingo: pointless Claire monologue? CHECK! Soft-core pornography? CHECK! Occasional bouts of yukky, stilted, over-literary dialogue? CHECK! An irredeemably psychopathic bad guy? CHECK! Hanging; misery; betrayal; death; wonky accents… BINGO!

Characters may live, characters may die; characters may come, characters may go; here, there, back, forth, but there’s one absolute constant in the world of Outlander.

Rape.

We’ve already established that the old world was a minefield of sexual assault (plus ça change) with defilements and debasements round every corner, so kudos to Diana Gabaldon and the writing team for always finding new and inventive ways of putting a fresh spin on the horror. I swear that Diana’s rolodex must be a veritable encyclopedia of assault-based flights of fancy. I wonder what ideas lurk in there yet to be employed? Hot-air balloon rape? Man serially abused by evil trees? Elks held in sexual captivity?”

This time around the horror belongs to young Ian, who admits to Jamie he’s still traumatised by the Bakra’s blood-soaked predations. The knife to his neck was but the final straw in a campaign of bodily terror that saw his spirit broken, his pride punctured and his memories hijacked, all of it garnished with a liberal sprinkling of shame.

Is it really any wonder that the Outlander fandom idolises Jamie? He’s a thoroughly good egg, isn’t he? Jamie is more progressive, patient and understanding than many social-justice-seeking millenials I’ve met. “Some ghosts can only be banished by naming them and their misdeeds aloud,” he tells Ian, shooting for spiritual guidance and in the process stumbling across modern psychology and the healing science of talk therapy. Jamie’s own experience with sexual violence has given him greater empathy for people in general, and victims of sexual assault in particular, but more than that: he’s a man who’s always been several hundred years ahead of his time (give or take a few ill-judged slaps).

Black Jack Randall may be dead, but his spiritual successor is alive and well in pre-revolutionary North Carolina. Step forward Stephen Bonnet, Outlander’s latest dastardly villain. Bonnet’s a mad, bad Irishman with the nervous, twitchy energy of a thousand Rik Mayalls, but none of his zany, humanising humour. There’s something more shark than man about this greedy, thankless scoundrel, who repays vulnerability with attack, and kindness with death.

After Hayes hangs for a crime of passion, Bonnet – next in line to swing – takes advantage of a diversion caused by Hayes’ angry, grief-stricken pal to flee his own pendulum-based destiny. Claire and Jamie later discover that Bonnet has hitched a ride in the back of their wagon, and against their better judgement agree to hide and harbour him, smuggling him past squads of redcoats.

When they next encounter Bonnett, he’s a robber, rascal and all-round rotter. He boards Jamie and Claire’s riverboat with his crew of criminals and proceeds to beat, terrify and humiliate his saviours, taking Jamie’s gems and Claire’s wedding rings, and even slitting the throat of the aforementioned grief-stricken pal to whom Bonnett indirectly owes his life. He’s… well. How shall we put this?

He’s a bit of a c***, isn’t he?

I wasn’t entirely sold on the use of Ray Charles’ ‘America the Beautiful’ over the scene of the boat rampage. While I understand that the juxtaposition of the song’s cheery melody with the visceral horror unfolding to its accompaniment serves to amplify the senseless horror of the attack, I really needed and wanted to hear the angst, the screams, the threats, the slits, thuds and cracks. Not because I’m an irredeemable sicko, you understand (although in many ways I am). I just felt that the music both dulled the magnitude of Bonnet’s betrayal and softened the impact of the violence. I wanted to see, hear and feel it the way Jamie and Claire did, no holds barred. I wanted to share the totality of their pain, anger and thirst for retribution.

[Granted, though, there was something irresistible in hearing a song about America, performed by a black man in segregation-era America, playing over a scene that typifies the violence upon which modern American was built.]

It’s clear that Bonnet has much in common with the fabled scorpion who hitches a ride on the back of a too-trusting frog, but team Fraser’s not exactly lacking for stings. I’m sure there’ll be a reckoning, and soon. But I fear that before that day comes, Bonnett will do much worse to the Frasers and those close to them. Much, much worse.

So far, barring the obvious robbery-homicide, the very worst thing that Stephen Bonnet has done is… speak. What is it with this show and accents? If they aren’t always going to hire Scottish or Irish actors to play Scottish or Irish parts, they should at least seek to hire actors who can turn their tongues to multiple dialects with ease. Ed Speleers is a good actor, but his Irish accent is a little… off. It isn’t in the same league of aural atrocities as Geillis Duncan’s ear-murdering lilts, but it’s just out of alignment enough to hamper the suspension of my disbelief. I’m sure the people of Minnesota, Rhode Island, Durban and Tokyo aren’t all that bothered about a few stray Oirish (sic) intonations, but I know one picky, prickly Celt that sure as shit is.

Ditto Aunt Jocasta. Now, Maria Doyle Kennedy is a talented actress, still in the midst of a long, varied and successful career – and I adored her in Orphan Black as the world-weary, murky, but deeply maternalistic Mrs S – but her Scottish accent is too clipped and staccato to scan as wholly authentic. Again, it’s just… just… a little off. Ever so slightly. But enough for each syllable to boom in my ears like a bomb.

Anyway, enough nit-picking. It’s time to… well, whatever the opposite of nit-picking is. Putting nits back? Making nits great again? Establishing a comprehensive nit-breeding program? WELL, RELEASE THE NITS, because I think that the fourth season’s second episode ‘Do No Harm’ is among the best the show has ever done.

It’s exquisite: a harrowing tale of conflict, prejudice, hatred, hope, despair, tragedy, ignorance and helplessness, for which there are no easy answers and from which there is no method of escape for Jamie or Claire that won’t leave them drenched in the blood of innocents.

Jamie’s experiences suffering under the jackboots of the English forces in Scotland has given him an affinity with subjugated and dispossessed peoples the world over, which predisposes him to stand up for the slaves’ humanity and freedom. Claire cannot abide injustice, and seeks to overthrow it wherever she encounters it, by any means necessary, and no matter the cost or the futility of the act. But here their noble impulses are prostrate in the face of a system that won’t budge, no matter how firmly they press their pasty-white shoulders against it. Jamie knows that even if he could rally the slaves to overthrow their masters, he’d most likely get them all killed in the process – maybe even his beloved aunty, too. Claire, from her vantage point in the future, knows in which direction this particular path of history is winding, and if Culloden couldn’t be stopped… then neither can this.

With each fresh attempt to do the right thing, Claire and Jamie only succeed in making themselves more complicit in the unfolding horror. Their impotence in the face of systemic racism and cruelty is grueling and horrible, though as a narrative choice it’s delicious: a rich seam of conflict and tension.

What does justice mean, who does it really serve, if its points are calibrated so crookedly? When blind white hatred outweighs black lives and freedom? Slavery is a system and a way of thinking that’s a danger and a detriment to the bodies and souls of all men, women and children, irrespective of colour; although the heavier burden rests, of course, upon the shoulders of those with darker skin tones. Sometimes that burden rests upon them literally, forcing them to exist as human cart-horses.

Jamie can’t abide the sight of Rufus hanging from a hook, awaiting excruciating torture and death at the hands of his hate-filled ‘masters’. It sickens and angers him. Hayes being hanged was one thing, this is quite another. He saves him… or so he hopes.

Claire takes an equally bold stance – placing the Hippocratic oath before the hypocritical oath of hatred – by using her surgical skills to heal the wounded man. I thought Ulysses – Aunt Jocasta’s slave of slaves – was going to thank Claire for her efforts, but he instead rebukes her for having intervened. He tells her with some anguish that when the angry crowd gets its hands on Rufus now, which it will, the boy’s fate will be much worse… that they’ll make an example of him to put all of the slaves in their place

It reminded me of the time I stood up for a homeless person who was being verbally abused and threatened on a cold, Aberdeen street. ‘Thanks,’ the homeless man said to me, once I’d warned his would-be attackers off, ‘They’ll probably come back later and kick the living shit out of me now.’

The only choice open to Claire if she wants to safeguard the rest of the slaves, preserve the time-line and ensure a less harrowing death for Rufus is to kill her himself. Jesus, that’s dark, Outlander. Commendably dark. A different show might have seen Claire and Jamie fake Rufus’ death and smuggle him out of town to safety, but this show likes to revel in its impossible choices.

On that note: Claire’s turning into quite the little serial killer, isn’t she? A real Harriet Shipman. They’ll soon have to rename the show ‘Take Me Out-lander’. Who’s she going to poison next?

‘Claire, young Ian’s got a bit of a sore leg. I think he’s grazed it.’

[Claire nods] ‘You get the kettle on, Jamie, I’ll go fetch the [wink, wink] special ingredient.’

‘NO, CLAIRE!!! JESUS CHRIST!’

Claire’s send-off for Rufus was agonising but tender. In death, she handed him freedom, and returned him to his family – even if it was only in his mind’s eye in the brief moments before it winked shut forever.

Then the lynch mob are handed Rufus’s body. Nothing sums up the insanity of racism more than a bunch of angry, mad bastards hanging a corpse. What awful, terrible bastards we’re capable of becoming given the right (or wrong) circumstances. It’s no great surprise that Jamie and Claire decline Aunt Jocasta’s offer to join them on her estate.

I always start these diaries worrying that I won’t be able to write enough and then, once I hit my stride, I always worry that I’ve written too much. Outlander lends itself well to analysis, and because of my closeness to the country that started it all, and my love of TV and pop culture, there are always multiple routes to journey down off the main avenues laid down by the episodes. And, as you’re by now well aware, I do so love a good segue.

However, whenever Roger and Brianna dominate an episode my anxiety about writing too much vanishes. I’ve never found their arc especially compelling, a lack of enthusiasm that’s only been compounded by my indifference to Brianna – both the character and the actress who portrays her. I feel like I could get away with writing, ‘Roger and Brianna did stuff, and then they did some more stuff, and then all the stuff was done, the end.’

Well, blow me down. What a difference a year makes. Brianna and Roger seem really good together here. And I like Brianna now, both the character and the actress. Sophie Alexandra Skelton has really settled into the role, and the character seems at once more relaxed, and significantly wilder. Brianna definitely has Claire’s tunnel-visioned, devil-may-care-ness, but it’s untempered by the anguish of wars and death. I’m sure her impulsivity will spell trouble for Roger in the long-run.

He’s a real love-sick little puppy, isn’t he? That’s when he isn’t being all whiny, passive-aggressive and entitled. I thought their burgeoning romance, with all its confusion, angst and heartache, was handled very well. And Brianna’s blouse landing on the deer’s antlers like some sexy parachute made ma laugh. Still, say what you like about Roger, there aren’t many men who would travel all the way to North Carolina to attend what appears to be a Scottish-themed church bazaar.

The song that Roger sang on stage for Brianna made me cringe. The lyrics were horrible, the tune was crud, an assessment obviously not shared by Roger’s audience, who sat enraptured; smiling, nodding, and staring ahead with unblinking zeal. I’ve been at concerts, recitals and karaoke nights. At least fifty per cent of the people in any given audience are chatting among themselves; twenty per cent or more are off at the bar; fifteen per cent are asleep; and the other fifteen per cent are staring down at their shoes like they’re trying to figure out how to use them to kill themselves.

Anyway, Roger and Brianna did stuff, and then they did some more stuff, and then all the stuff was done. The end.

A few final, disjointed thoughts

As Claire and Jamie’s first big bonk of the season got underway, my partner shook her head and said, ‘Why is Claire always just wet? No preamble, no foreplay: plop – in he goes.’ ‘Maybe because they’re constantly surrounded by the aphrodisiac of death and danger, and he’s got big muscles?’ She was still incredulous. ‘That’s not how vaginas work.’ It was my turn to shake my head. ‘Maybe this says more about me, than it does about Claire and Jamie.’
When the Scots were all gathered together drinking booze and singing Gaelic songs in a phlegmy warble, it reminded me again of how many similarities there are between Scots and that other long-haired, often-indecipherable warrior race, the Klingons.
So, the historical genesis of the drum-roll is as an accompaniment to hangings, is it? Thank you in advance, Outlander, for helping me to win a pub-quiz at some point in the future. What a wonderful, though slightly disconcerting, sprinkling of detail. I’m more used to hearing drum-rolls during a magician’s act. It’s a bit jarring to hear it accompanying a horrid, neck-snapping death, although what is hanging if not a magic trick without the ‘ta-da’ bit?
I hope we see more of John Quincy Myers – Hagrid’s little brother meets the bearded music teacher from the Walking Dead.
Ditto Phaedre. Good actress, good character. Wise and spirited beyond her years. I hope we see a lot more of her.
I wish Lt Wolff had been this season’s baddy. You can just tell he’s going to be a complete, unbridled arsehole.
What a big man-child I am. I found myself snickering away at the subtitles when they were describing animal noises. My partner shook her head in despair. Come on, though, ‘horse nickers’? A horse wearing a big pair of ladies pants? Who can blame a man for chuckling like a child? And the less said about the ‘gobbling softly’ the better.
Claire see the ghost of an Indian, and it leads her to Jamie. I’m sure that presages the appearance of some real-life native Americans in the show.
Frasers’ Ridge! Now I understand why that Facebook fan group calls itself that!