Christ knows, we’ve all had to find a way to entertain ourselves through these pandemic days. Ok, some of our intelligentsia friends have devoured novels, others have baked their way through, others or learned to macramé. Others have become super fit. But most of us, let’s be honest, have just gorged on box sets and binge watched TV. Talk with friends and the recommendations come thick and fast. This is how the nation relaxes when it isn’t able to go shopping.
The rot set in with me a few years ago, before the pandemic hit. There were two specific periods that broke me into binge watching. The first was the winter of 2014/15 when I was working as resort manager for a chalet company in the mountain town of Meribel. Programmes are a relaxant and after a hard day looking after 80 entitled guests (send the helicopter, we’re in the next valley) and 24 recalcitrant employees (Jason’s taken a tumble and is in the medical centre and Cindy shagged a guest noisily in the jacuzzi last night and the other guests have complained), it was such a blessing to settle into my laptop and stream something illegally. Mainly Game of Thrones.
A few years later I was in Russia, staying at the in laws about 300km north east of Moscow. Leaving my wife to chat with her mum and dad and brother, I was out of the loop (I don’t speak Russian). So I found solace for my linguistic solitude in Narcos. Which, inevitably, led to Narcos:Mexico. Now I was hooked. With a recreational habit like that, of course I was.
Our TV set has been a mixed blessing. Before the pandemic, in the daily drama that was Brexit, the Channel 4 news at 7pm was appointment viewing. There wasn’t a night when a knife edge Parliamentary vote didn’t play out live on our screens. It was compelling viewing of seat edge drama quality. Then it all ended on 31 January 2020 and we had a brief respite before the nightly news became a litany of horror as Covid-19 hit. Even now, as it has (in the UK at least) passed and no longer dominates the entire news agenda – the only story in my lifetime to have so completely knocked out of the ring any other story – I have not returned to the news. Except once: the 1975 Vietnamese-esque parody scramble to get people out of Afghanistan this last August. Compelling if appalling.
No. No news anymore. And no BBC. The BBC seems to be a propaganda vehicle for the government and the royal family swallowing whole and unquestioningly any old bullshit line spun out of number 10 and, obsequiously, closing down its entire evening schedule on the night they announced the death of Prince Philip. Why are we paying the license fee? Having been a staunch defender of public service broadcasting, I feel myself turning. The BBC is increasingly being drowned out, in drama terms at least, by the giants of Netflix and Amazon Prime. The rot that set in up in the French Alps and again in rural Russia has now taken a firmer grip.
So what have we been watching to cosset ourselves against the pandemic and fill the hours with vicarious thrills? There are a few stand out shows: Clarkson’s Farm, for example, which was cheery and edifying at the same time. Great fare from the Marmite King of television. Having re-kindled my taste for Clarkson and having been starved of his peculiar mix of vitriol, inflammatory hate speech and climate change denial since he was fired from the BBC’s Top Gear, I segued into Amazon’s Grand Tour. It was good. Very good. The one in Cambodia and Vietnam especially. And then the one in Georgia. And then the Lochdown one in Scotland. They were all good.
Then there was my own unique contribution to the education of my third son, Steven. Steven is our resident scientist. He wants to be a chemist. So what finer homework could there be than the street version of the Open University: Breaking Bad. Walt and his useless sidekick have taken us through GCSE and are now escorting Steven into A level. We are rationed to watching only one a night (we have three other compulsive dramas demanding our time, too, so, you know, be reasonable). Who knows? If we string it out like we are doing, Steven may even graduate from university as the credits roll on the last episode of season five.
Early in my career on the box, I discovered Peaky Blinders. There’s only so many moody long shots you can watch of besuited and over-coated male gangsters walking in slo-mo through the smoke, past furnaces (clearly smelting nothing but visual effects sparks)towards a…meeting. I jest. I can watch them until the cows come home. My wife asks why men are so drawn to nastiness and violence. Isn’t it obvious? It’s glamorous, of course. What man wouldn’t want a slick haircut and a fob watch? What man worth his salt would like to wield a side arm and sport a duelling scar? War, of course, and ganster violence, too, isn’t really the beautiful, choreographed ballet that TV makes it out to be. Nor is menace so insouciant in real life. Blood and guts and spittle and bone don’t make for 9pm peaktime viewing. But the hint of a razor blade wielding flat cap, a splash of blood all washed down with a generous belt of whiskey and a never ending stream of gaspers transports us all back to a time when men were men and women were glad of it. And once in a while, that’s a nice place to visit. Indulge us.
Twenty years too late and unfashionably so, I have discovered The Sopranos. My, but this is dark. And deep. Tony S. Do we like him or loathe him? His turn-on-a-sixpence Janus-like ability to show two faces to the world in the course of a single conversation and his tortured soul sadness at having to shoot at point blank range his childhood best friend all add up to a brilliantly complex character. It ain’t the Godfather. Or at least, it is, but without the Oscar winning celluloid seduction. It is everyday mafiosi. Mundane in its matter-of-factness in murder and petty misdemeanour. It is like The Office (banal day to day work observed with self-conscious irony) but with bodies and bloodshed. Tony S is a hero for our times. Multi-layered, with a moral compass that points to his own True North and a family that’s just doing its best to get by. There are no instantly quotable aphorisms shedding light on the shadowy world of omerta, as there are in Godfather; no words of advice you can quote in your next presentation. Just the suburban irritation of living with being bugged and hounded by the police and the nagging question: if I had the balls just to do as I liked, would I be like this?
Speaking of the police, we come to my latest discovery. Isn’t it lovely when you come to a series long after it’s had time to prove its worth and run up a back catalogue of eight series? That’s me with Endeavour. I always loved ITV’s Inspector Morse. I introduced it to my wife and she loves it too. Once we’d worked our way through that and been detoured in search of fulfilment by such fripperies and ultimately unsatisfying fare as Downton Abbey, Poldark and Doc Martin, we re-indulged our need for Oxford with the less cerebral but nicely taxing Lewis. But now, out of the blue, comes a series better than the original: Endeavour. This prequel to Morse had us at the pilot episode. Fantastically intricate (and, let’s be honest, incredibly so at times), the plots interlace and tease and are a real brain conundrum to solve. It’s a wonder that the young Detective Constable Endeavour Morse wasn’t made Commissioner of the Met within half an hour of solving his first fifty cases (singlehandedly). He can solve a libretto serial killer clue as easily as Sherlock Holmes played his fiddle, and his encyclopaedic knowledge of the periodic table shames the plods that surround him and constantly call into question his logic. We have to stop every five minutes so that we can compare notes on our own theses; and also for me to interpret for my wife some of the half finished, taken as (see what I mean?) English stock phrases we all take for (there I go again) but which are never, quite, er, completed.
There’s a lot on in an evening in. We can hob knob with royalty in The Crown and indulge this household’s republican scorn for the Windsors, all their hangers on and the chimera that is monarchy. Or watch a little fantasy and mystery such as the obscure and unresolved series Messiah (starts brilliantly and goes nowhere). And we got hooked on the laughable Money Heist. My five year old daughter likes Fixiki, a Russian language cartoon about, well, I am not sure what actually. We leave it to others to crochet, to play the harmonium or to enjoy craft pottery classes. There’s too much human drama out there to waste time making things and being constructive. Give me plot and character and conflict and I will watch it. It is the stuff of life, and life is what we have been missing.