Modern Culture: Nostalgia

May contain spoilers...

Cocaine Bear is set in the 1980s. We got 10 minutes into it and realised the faux 80s style was not a joke, the entire film is made like a poor 1980s porn film - without any sex. Therefore after 11 minutes and 17 seconds we switched off and will never go there again.

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The Boston Strangler is a bit dull and struggles to keep your attention. It stars Keira Knightly and Carrie Coon about two intrepid female reporters, in the mid 1960s - tasked with covering the news, who also end up doing most of the police's job in uncovering probable suspects. 

The film is drab, wordy and lacks in tension or action but it is well made. The script writer has taken a number of liberties with the time line and the context, presumably to make a coherent and linear story. The problem was it failed to hold my attention and I struggled to stay awake. 

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I want to talk about Top Gear - specifically the older one, the one that probably can't be made now - mainly because the show may well be cancelled due to health and safety concerns.  I've been watching the entire back catalogue in snippets over the last month or so for reasons I can no longer remember, but I started to analyse it. Why had it been so popular? Why was the wife a fan? Is it really as naughty/racist/sexist as we seem to remember it being?

Remember 'lad' culture? It was big in the 1990s. When Top Gear restarted in the early Noughties it quickly developed a reputation for not being typical BBC. It was a bit tasty, it was about cars but it wasn't really about cars and the three forty-somethings ticked all the right forty-somethings boxes - the same people who enjoyed Loaded and GQ. Top Gear is also What If Last of the Summer Wine had a bastard child that was more mockumentary than documentary. 

It is casually ... I can't say racist because I don't think wandering into Dad joke territory with national euphemisms disguised as comedy jingoism is actually that bad a thing let alone racist. James is the swot; the boring one who they turn to when things go wrong. Hammond is the childlike buffoon who is guaranteed to give us a laugh and then there's Jeremy who is the stereotypical gammon-type character; middle aged opinionated man who lets his hair down when he's with his mates even if he's a bit right wing - he's a walking talking midlife crisis personified. I'm happy with left wing comedy characters and oddly enough I feel the same way about right wing characters. Clarkson is a complete cunt, but he's brilliant at what he does and he gives me more LOL moments than some of my favourite comedians.

Why does my wife like it and specifically the three of them as a presenting team? I think it's because there's an element of genuine friendship going on. Part of the reason this era Top Gear is so good is the relationship between the three, it is actually very much like Last of the Summer Wine and that was hugely popular for almost 200 years. Oddly enough I don't really think it's a vindictive programme and I don't think anyone thought the opinions of the three of them represented the BBC or anyone else. Top Gear treats everyone who watches it as an equal - there is no sexism on show and if there was it would probably be dealt with as humiliatingly as possible to whichever of culprits were responsible. I think women see an element of everyman in the trio; they maybe see a bit of their husband or their dad in the men and I've not met a women yet who wouldn't fancy doing some of the adventures they've had. We, the viewer, also see copious amounts of silliness; not slapstick just daft.

Top Gear might be about cars and 70% might be uninteresting but it's the way it's presented that ticks the rights boxes. The BBC doesn't have a show like it anymore* and in many ways The Grand Tour, the Amazon thing they do only works when they dispense with the standard Top Gear format and do the things that work best for the viewer - challenges and races.

*The new Top Gear is a variation of the old one with newer, less offensive, presenters. The bond they're building is a good one and eventually there will be the familiarity and fondness that made Hammond, May and Clarkson so popular, the only problem I can see is there's only a finite number of ideas before you start repeating yourselves and now that Flintoff's accidents have alarmed BBC execs Top Gear, which was originally presented by Noel Edmonds, could well be going the same way as a previous Noel Edmonds show because of the danger posed to people involved. As Clarkson might say, 'It's health and safety gone mad!' 

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I'd like to know what Ben Wheatley did or what he knows that has allowed him to make so many bloody awful films? I'd also like to know why I insist on watching them despite knowing that by the end of whatever one I watch I'm going to be none the wiser and angry at myself for watching a Ben Wheatley film.

Both of us had been interested in watching High-Rise for about a decade. It had been billed as a bigger budget Wheatley film with proper actors and it definitely had proper actors. It was also definitely a Ben Wheatley film because I didn't have a fucking clue; nicht die wurst; I could have been given diagrams and I still would have been bemused. I think there was an allegory in there about the class system and the imminent breakdown of society, but equally I might be bestowing something on the film that was never intended.

It was shit. Like all Wheatley films. He can chuckle into his Bovril that yet another sucker has watched yet another one of his wankfest celluloid follies...

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Season two of Ted Lasso isn't as good as the first but it is still unusual heart warming TV. If I had to pick holes in it, it's predominantly a US comedy show with a lot of Mid-Atlantic humour going on, but what makes it different from most US sitcoms is people like Brett Goldstein (Roy Kent) are also script editors, so glaringly obvious mistakes aren't made and British things are inserted to continue with the illusion and this applies almost 50% of the time.

However, donning my football hat for a second and scrutinising Ted Lasso properly, outside of the comedy is a factually inaccurate framework that might work if this was 1980, but in the 2020s it reads like a Hollywood idea - an underdog show. 

For starters, AFC Richmond's entire football set-up would not get them into the lowest Football League division and their management would be bigger and more complex than it is. AFC Richmond's management structure appears to be six people including coaching staff, one of which was the water boy (?!) and the owner/chairperson and the Director of Football Relations handle most of everything else, with a former WAG as the club's PR woman. As a sitcom it works fine, in real life it's a Sunday League team.

Then there's Jamie Tartt, the star player, a shallow facile egotist who feels he's bigger than the club he plays for. This former Man City starlet walked away from a lucrative footballing career to become a reality TV star and failed at that and then couldn't get a single club to re-sign him - despite the utter preposterousness of this idea. If Tartt is as good as is suggested he'd be employed by Real Madrid not a team that is continually 'tying' their matches in the Championship. Clubs would be falling over themselves to sign him.

Some of the language is very American; the aforementioned 'tying matches' is not a phrase anyone in the UK would use. A friend of mine pointed out that everyone was 'mad' and of course there's the way Ted coaches the team, which is a little like how you'd coach a college American football team including phrases you'd associate with that sport. 

Then there's the thorny issue of Ted (or Coach Beard) not having the appropriate UEFA or FIFA coaching badges, which means that when Richmond were in the Premier League they would be fined £45,000 a game for not having a qualified coach in charge - I don't know what the fine is for lower leagues, but he'd be required to do these licences before he could go onto a training ground. Plus the idea of him living next door to a pub in the centre of Richmond, rubbing shoulders with every Tom, Dick and Harry is also a little too far fetched.

Obviously the factual inaccuracies aside it is a very enjoyable comedy; one of the better ones we've watched in recent years, because it isn't really about football. It's about this thoroughly nice bloke from Back Water USA who gets to teach the Brits a thing or two about being human. There's just the right element of surreal about it as well, which suggests to me that much of the factual inaccuracies are planned, because this isn't really 'our' world.

Anyhow, I wasn't expecting Ted Lasso to become a 45 minute per episode, socio-psycho drama, but that's what season two seems to have morphed into. It is unexpected, the directions this show goes off in, despite its stupidity in real life, is probably one of the things that makes it a fun watch even if my inner football nerd wants to hate it.

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Here's another aside; I watch a fair bit of You Tube at times; it has a lot of interesting documentaries and things I never knew about hidden away. It also has a massive comics fandom 'area' and as I spent 15 years writing a comicbook gossip column, I do like to see how the sub-industry I created has gone backwards.

However, I watched something earlier that bugged me a little because it was well made, precise, well thought out and put together and yet has a small following compared to some of the shit out there. An aside within an aside - avoid the channel called Screen Culture, it's essentially fan fiction with a editing whizz. This channel sticks out 'concept' videos and trailers of what they think will get fanboys priapic but is actually clever editing to make already existing scenes from films seem like they're from a new film. Concept videos are fraud; they are digital plagiarism and should be banned.

Anyhow, this channel I found that I enjoyed does what I try to do in quiet weeks and attempts to tell us what's wrong with the Marvel Cinematic Universe and in 8 minutes they do a hugely impressive job, touch on some things I never saw and proved to me that not all You Tube channels are run by wankers who need instruction for wiping their own arses. The station is called Brick Kildaguy and we're on the same page re the MCU, except he's maybe a wee bit ahead of me because he's seen and hated the latest Ant-Man film and has managed to make a very convincing argument as to why there's actually way too much Marvel content and that the quality threshold has been reached so all we get now is quantity. 

He also makes a good point about Marvel films being largely stand alone features now with a little bit of plot fluff to keep the nerds happy, but the majority of fans don't really care about that, they just want to be entertained. It's a bit of an epiphany really because I need to feel that way about the films and so do a few of my friends. Not only are they not made for us, they're not going to follow the path or direction that we want them to. Yes, quality has now got a low setting and Disney will become alarmed that Marvel is just knocking stuff out like a teenager wanking with a razz mag, but as long as it doesn't lose them any money Marvel can flood the halls with their bland, lukewarm, jizzum.

However, box office returns are dwindling, critics scores are plummeting and cinema may never truly return to pre-pandemic levels even if the second Avatar film is baffling most people possessing a brain. Disney could well rein back the money and in the last couple of months one of the VP's has quit/been fired, the release date of Marvels has been put back until November (with a number of officials inside the company very concerned about box office appeal) and there's a degree of panic over 2024's releases with little or no positive feedback after announcements. Oh and there's the fact that two of the last three releases have been rated as the worst and second worst in Marvel's short cinematic life and the 'Black Panther' film sandwiched between them hasn't been scrutinised as much as it needs to be.

Marvel/Disney has got problems and none of the You Tube shows focusing on the company and this specific issue seem to realise what a huge thing it is and how it's now about staving off execution for as long as possible. 

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Also on the Tube of You is this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wNi4w5IsVLY&list=WL&index=5 which is about the five seasons of Fringe, a programme we were huge fans of over a decade ago now. This 'show' is a 90 minute retrospective and is called Fringe: Full Series Retrospective, which, I think you'll agree, isn't the catchiest of titles, but it feels like it has been better produced than half of those shite retrospectives they have on Channel 5.

The first thing I got from it was how little of Fringe I remembered and how reliant on madness and psychedelic drugs it was. Arguably Fringe jumped the shark every series, going off in directions you didn't expect and then going into worlds you'd never have imagined and this was a key point the documentary maker missed because series one and two were so similar, except they weren't as this programme points out. Series one felt very much like the bastard offspring of The X Files, while series two shrugged off the shit storylines and opted for getting closer to what we'd think of as Prime Fringe.

It wasn't a show for sitting still and there was some massive plot shift every single series; not a big bad villain more of a big problematic cast member. Essentially a lot of the villains were the main cast, but because this was a parallel worlds thing it didn't have the impact on the ongoing story that you'd expect. For those of you not familiar with this series it wasn't afraid to end a season in one reality and start the next one in something altogether different - as demonstrated when Peter Bishop disappeared from all of existence and because he'd prevented his own creation none of his team members, including his father and his lover, remembered him. They ended season four like that; I remember at the time thinking 'what the actual fuck?' 

Fringe was television that wasn't frightened to be adventurous and often when it did it backfired, but it didn't stop them from doing weird things with a show that was possibly always intended to be different all the time because of the nature of time travel and interdimensional vagaries. The thing is I expect the series will feel dated and slightly ludicrous if watched in 2023, which probably isn't that different from how it was initially received. This Tube of You documentary does a very good job of allowing you to become immersed in the Fringeverse again without having to sit through all the really naff episodes and it doesn't do a bad job of analysing it either.

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Picard continues to wheel out the nostalgia with the three missing pieces all back in place and the Next Gen crew all reunited in the wake of Ro's death. It has been a cracking series, far surpassing both the previous two seasons and more importantly expectations.

I don't think we're done with guest stars either although it would be simply speculation to throw names in, however Colm Meaney is probably due an appearance and maybe Nana Visitor and more likely than Avery Brooks who I recall reading somewhere doesn't have a lot to do with his Sisko alter ego. Possibly Alexander Siddig or one of the Ferengi, such as Armin Shimerman and possibly an admiral Janeway or some others from the Voyager series. One thing I will admit to is getting the big bad wrong, at least that's what it appears to be, but I'm still not convinced.

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Next time: Yellowjackets is back! One of the best and most unexpected shows of 2022 has returned and I expect it to be as fucked up as it was, if not a little more. Then there's more futuristic retro bollocks, futuristic pensioner madness and conceptually wrong football shows - marvellous.