Pop Culture - I Want My Icons Dead or Alive

Included in this blog are spoilers designed to spoil your entertainment if you've not seen a designated show or program. Please be aware of this before you continue to read.

The Grand Bore

I laughed, out loud, at least a dozen times in the opening ten minutes, but from that point on the shortcomings of one of the greatest three-way bromances of modern times became more than obvious and by the end I was hoping for a quick and painless 'divorce'.

I am, of course, talking about The Grand Tour: Eurocrash the latest instalment in the adventures of Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May; three aging men with a reputation for being cocks. Since the three departed Top Gear almost a decade ago now, they've been working on the law of diminishing returns; a pandemic and Clarkson's propensity to open his mouth and insult half the country, while the other half cheers him on. The truth is the spark that made this trio hasn't gone out but it's dimming and unlikely to come back to life, at least not on this evidence.

Eurocrash suffers from no real cohesion. There isn't really a theme here; just three men in unlikely cars travelling through lesser known parts of Europe and going through the same motions they've tended to go through for the last 20 years. It didn't have the same feel as road trips of the past have, in fact because of James May's ridiculous choice of vehicle, a large part of the one hour and three quarters programme featured Hammond and Clarkson having fun while May - usually the most entertaining one - tried to fix whatever car he was driving; it didn't make for the usual camaraderie we're used to and the episode petered out a little, which was an achievement as it had a low bar to begin with.

The three return to Africa for the 3rd instalment of this series, which might be the last one they do. I hope they go out with a bang because, together, they can barely muster a whimper at the moment.

Tom Walker Calling

Podcasts! I'm not a huge fan; it's an attention thing. I struggle with the radio at times. However, the chance of hearing more of Jonathan Pie meant I went in search on BBC Sounds, with a degree of trepidation. Pie on the BBC? I mean, I'm pleased, but he's a bit lefty and swears like a man who had only been taught four letter words.

Call Jonathan Pie is a 10-part 'sitcom' in that it would probably work as a TV program with a bit of tweaking. The premise is Pie - a 'news journalist' - filling in for a late night Radio 5 phone in and makes such an impression he's offered the full time gig. Then from Podcast #2 on it takes on a different phone-in subject every episode and usually in rather spectacular fashion something goes wrong.

The best bits are when Pie is 'on air' rather than the sometimes tortuous scenes between Pie, his producer, Jules, and Sam, an Asian sound engineer and someone who suffers from some insecurity problems (although the rest of the cast improve as the show gets into its stride). The 'debates' with the callers are hilarious at times and are designed to show us the worst kind of people are usually the ones who phone in with opinions. 

This isn't Pie's news casts, which are concise and focused, with a half hour format there's going to be a lot of obviously scripted stuff. The other key thing is some episodes are genuinely filled with LOLs, while others are absolutely just sharp edged commentary that make you angry - not at Pie but at the injustice he does such a great job of showing up.

The Knights That Go...

It has been over 30 years since we last watched John Boorman's Excalibur. It was one of the wife's favourite films - although she did reassess that last night. It's an epic story adapted in a strange style pinpointing the key events in the life of Arthur, Merlin and the rest of the round table gang.

The problem in 2023 is there's a wee bit of The Jabberwocky about it. Not in the content - that's almost reminiscent of Monty Python and the Holy Grail - but the general odd - surreal - feel, like there's a raging camp comedy fighting its way out of a serious movie. It's all very earnest and typically 1980s, with lots of non-indigenous snakes popping up all over the place - in the 1930s film makers liked to use armadillos in films because not everyone knew what they were and would be weirded out by them. However, much of the last 30 minutes is stylised weirdness and becomes more existential than actual. It goes off on one before regrouping for the finale (which had elements of Monty Python in that as well) that legend has it had to be reshot several times because the cameras used could not pick out the foreground detail against the dark background ultimately giving the cameraman a breakdown. 

The wife still thinks it's a good film, but she feels it has dated and her tastes have changed. I thought it was overwrought and anachronistically wrong, but Nicol Williamson as Merlin is something of a revelation. It's like he decided to play the role as a schizophrenic, with him changing his voice mid sentence sometimes - is he English, Irish, Yorkshire, southerner, Welsh? I think he was told to play the role scattershot to give people the impression the wizard was from everywhere (and nowhere, baby). I'm glad I won't have to watch it again, it drags on far too long.

In the Meadows

We're both big fans of Shane Meadows and literally everything I've seen of his has had some impact on me. He is a great British dramatist and can do no wrong...

Except The Gallows Pole's first episode was a little overlong and didn't appear to do much more than introduce a bunch of characters all down on their luck - so far so This is England, except without the intrigue or interest. It's set in the mid 18th century, the north is being ravaged by the Industrial Revolution and rural communities are dying - literally. Michael Socha's David returns from a mysterious seven years away in Birmingham, almost dies, gets better and sets about helping the community bury his dead father. And that's about it. I'm sure stuff will happen in part two - as there are only three parts - but this meandered around and had a lead female actor who JUST SHOUTED ALL THE TIME!

Episode two at least gave us a premise and a story to work with, despite the shouting, but in many ways very little happened in the second part either, just more groundwork and scene-setting. It was with the final part when things happened and at a pace and almost too much was crammed into it and there was still time to have a twist in the tale, especially when you realise what the title of the episode actually means.

It was ... entertaining. Nowhere near the best thing Meadows has done but it was refreshing, had some disturbing imagery in it and was genuinely touching and funny in equal parts. Not for everyone, but enough for me.

Il Profumo d'Italia

We've started watching Stanley Tucci's Searching for Italy on the iPlayer and there's an element of 'shit, why didn't we watch this when it came out' because it's a delightful series with Tucci showing just what a likeable man he is and because of his love of food and cooking he's the perfect host - and his parents are Italian, so he speaka da language [apologies for the borderline racism].

Italy looks like a fantastic place and it's been a wish of ours to travel there after watching other culinary and arts programmes about the place. Tucci paints this picture while his team fill in the gaps with everything that is bellissimo about Italy, making it a definite for the bucket list - all I need is the money and a passport.

Season one concluded in Sicily and left us feeling like this would be a region we'd avoid if we ever found our way there. The Sicilians eat a lot of strange things - raw donkey probably being the fucking weirdest - and lots of pointless looking fish, usually chopped, ground or partially filleted. That said, I'm glad Italy has 20 provinces as that presumably means there will be a third series, but it would have been better if Italy had 30 or 40 provinces. Maybe he can just do them all again but go to different cities?

The Aye Player

As promised, despite the growing length of this week's instalment, here's an initial list of things you should seek out on iPlayer that originated from BBC Scotland and may never have made it to the rest of the UK.

Grand Tour of Scottish Lochs/Lakes/Rivers/Islands is an umbrella title for numerous series of Paul Murton travelling around Scotland looking at the history and the landscape of different regions of the country, usually with lochs or rivers as the reason for him being there. It's an affable and amiable ramble through history and geography and Murton is a entertaining and erudite host.

Iain Robertson Rambles isn't the same as the above but with a different person... Robertson is one of those actors you'll see and recognise but won't remember his name or where you last saw him - he is currently in River City, the Glaswegian equivalent of Eastenders - which we don't watch. There have been three lots of his rambles - the Southern Upland Way, the West Highland Way and the Hebridean Way, but there might be another one but we've yet to find it. It's a man walking along famous routes with a camera, sometimes followed by a drone and recently with his dog, Molly the Collie. It's like a slightly different version of relaxing TV - you relax while Robertson rambles.

Now, this next one isn't currently available on iPlayer, which I don't understand, but you can see clips of it on You Tube or on the Beluga Lagoon website, at least until it finds its way back to iPlayer, but Roaming in the Wild sounds just like the last two programmes, but it isn't, although much of all three programmes is about how beautiful Scotland is. Roaming is a little on the surreal side as it follows  wildlife cameraman and folk musician Andrew O'Donnell and his pal Mark Taylor as they navigate parts of Scotland using different modes of transport - all man-powered. The music is fantastic as well. The one I'd recommend the most is series 1 episode 3, where the boys ride a tandem across the northern coastline of Scotland. 

Crazy For You

The 2010 remake of George Romero's The Crazies was an altogether slower and bleaker version, which almost ignores those infected by a leakage of a dodgy biological weapon in favour of a depiction of the US Army that is all too familiar in dystopian dramas. There also wasn't that much that was crazy about it.

It's essentially a 28 Days Later type of film with less oomph and everybody's a little crazy and those infected can be a little more crazy or absolutely batshit crazy. Timothy Olyphant is almost believable as the sheriff losing control of his town and fighting to save his own life and Radha Mitchell as his doctor wife who is quick to realise how bad things are going to be.

I suppose the ultimate solution to an contained outbreak is to nuke it out of existence so the conclusion of the film wasn't shocking, but it was brutal and probably what would happen; the epilogue is just unnervingly bleak. The problem is this is a boring film with not enough Crazies or menace from them and too much fascist allegory. It needed to be 20 minutes shorter (which would have made it about 80 minutes) or have a different script.

Trailer Trash

This week's big trailer is Marvel/Sony's Kraven the Hunter and there's almost three minutes of it - that's about two minutes more than any MCU trailers and unlike MCU trailers that tease, twist and obfuscate what is really going to happen, this seemed to tell the entire story in less than the time it takes the trailer to conclude.

Aaron Taylor-Johnson appears to want to be as many superheroes as he can - he's already been Kick-Ass and Quicksilver, now it's the turn of hero/anti-hero and Spider-Man foe Kraven the Hunter. In this film he will dial in his performance (you can work that out from the three minutes of excruciating agony the trailer turns out to be) and apart from a nod to some spiders, I imagine the links this will have to Spider-Man will be so tenuous it will make the watcher groan with incredulity.

Sony need to stop this or Disney needs to buy Sony out.

Skrull & Cross Bones

The MCU's Secret Invasion is here, but has all the hype been worth it? Well... I'm not sure. Yes, the opening episode was intriguing, it set the scene very nicely for a paranoia riddled thriller, but is it the saviour of the MCU after recent set backs? I dunno.

The show starts with what appears to be Martin Freeman's CIA operative meeting with a undercover agent who believes a rogue element of Skrulls are attempting to take over the world by wiping out the human race, except you know almost from the start that this isn't 'our' Everett Ross even if it looks like he isn't - they tried the double switch and it didn't work. That spoiler aside, no real surprises in the opening just the return of Talos and Maria Hill, a sense of genuine confusion and a shock ending.

We then move to Nick Fury returning to Earth, after spending a long time in orbit on the space station that has never really been given much more than a cursory mention before as to why. This is sort of addressed by suggesting he's never been the same since the snap/blip/Thanos business and has been hiding himself away and all fairness to the script writers and Fury he pretty much agrees with this prognosis, but has returned at the request of his friend Talos to sort out a situation that he started, which now appears to be getting out of hand.

There's a lot of exposition here and a lot of reliance on perhaps the viewer not only remembering all the Skrull information from Captain Marvel but also extrapolating from Talos's last appearance in the second MCU Spider-Man film and other snippets that might have been dropped over the last couple of years [none that I can remember]. 

Essentially, if you weren't aware that Talos had a wife (now dead with little explanation) and a daughter (who may or may not belong to the rebel alliance of Skrulls intent on reclaiming the Earth as their new homeworld) and that some of the Skrulls were peacefully relocated here in the 1990s (at the end of the Captain Marvel film) or that Fury and Talos are great friends, you might get a tad confused. There's a lot happening now and going on in the past; it's not stopping to give newbies a refresher course and this is probably where it will fall flat; it already can't standalone. Even if they try to explain all the backstory over the next five weeks; for the uninitiated it's a very confusing beginning and, of course, there are shapeshifting lizard people...

Was it good to see Olivia Coleman in a Marvel thing? I don't know; she is a bit of a one note actor when she plays posh or powerful people and it felt a little like it was Olivia Coleman guest starring - if you know what I mean? I'm also puzzled by something, but hey, this is a common problem not fixed with TV - I've been under the impression from what I've read about the new Captain America film that Harrison Ford wasn't only playing Thunderbolt Ross (replacing William Hurt) but was also going to be the president; if that's the case I expect Dermot Mulroney's President Ritson to be a victim in this six-part series.

Everyone: Did you like it?
Me: I wanted to. It felt like a serious - adult - Marvel project, but there was also this feeling that I'm going to waste the next six weeks hoping for some kind of conclusion and I'm going to feel cheated. Nothing is self-contained at Marvel now; not even that dreadful Moon Knight series and as a result you just know this will end up setting up another film - the critics are suggesting Marvels because Fury is in that, but when this is set is unknown. If it happens before Secret Invasion then the continuity is screwed because Fury admits he hasn't been back to Earth since the snap and he clearly is seen on Kamala Khan's doorstep in the trailer and if it happens after this series then we know that Fury wins and doesn't die and is taking a more active role in things. But do you know something; if I can't watch something without constantly reference other films and TV shows then I think I've lost the will to continue watching TV.
Everyone: Yeah, but did you like it?
Me: Well apart from spotting the impostor in the opening scene, wondering what part of Moscow looks like Northeast London or the city and trying to work out who was what and why, I'd have to say: not really. Jackson as Fury is fine; he's a natural for the character (even if I have massive problems with the continuity of the character and his different appearance to how he was originally portrayed), Ben Mendelsohn is - as usual - excellent and you suspect that if someone else major is going to die in this series it will probably be him, heroically and for peace. My jury's out at the moment; ask me again in next week's column.

The Bear is BACK!!!

One of the best TV series of the last decade is back; the astounding Jeremy Allen White returns as the Michelin starred chef now reopening his own place in downtown Chicago on the site of the family deli/sandwich shop. Series one was quite brilliant, especially the last couple of episodes which took TV filming to new levels of astonishment. So what's season two got to offer?

Carmy, Sydney and Sugar have decided to turn the Original Beef into a fine dining restaurant and the fact they haven't got enough money to do it is immaterial. Richie is again going through his latest existential crisis, while Tina can't get her head around the fact she has gone from hating Sydney's shadow to being her sous chef. It's fast, frenetic and full of life; it carried on literally from where it finished; the same pace, the same feel, the same vibe - it's just visceral TV at its best. I'm so happy it's back.

Next Time...

Just when you think everything's shutting down for the summer, you get inundated with TV and stuff to watch. More Secret Invasion, The Bear and season two of Stanley Tucci's Searching for Italy; all I need it a new series of For All Mankind and a [redacted] from [redacted] until my [redacted] explodes.