Back

In 2015 Channel 4’s longest running sitcom Peep Show ended. With its point-of-view filming and emphasis on internal monologue it revolutionised the genre. Starring David Mitchell and Robert Webb, the two played Mark and Jez, warring flatmates that hated and needed one another in equal measure. Like Steptoe and Son for a modern generation, the pair live the squalid life of cheap lager, expensive crisps and self-loathing. Mark, a white-collar worker, is ostensibly more moral than Jeremy; although darkness lies beneath. Jez, a work-shy freeloader, lives like the world owes him something- despite never once contributing anything to it. The two are interdependent: Jez needs Mark to sustain his unemployed existence, and Mark needs Jez to maintain his social superiority. Like the medieval court, Jez plays the fool to Mark's nobleman: the fact that Jez frequently makes jokes at his friend's expense, perversely makes him master. Throughout the run, the pair become increasingly amoral, dragging one another down in a way that only bad friends can. At the show’s conclusion, Mark is still sitting alongside Jeremy, contemplating how to get rid of him: a pox he’s been scratching for ten years, one that shows no signs of abating.

Jez and Mark.

Fans of the show then were upset when its creators Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong called it a day. The peerless repartee between Mitchell and Webb had been confined to the museum of sitcom, only to be dusted off for retrospective viewing on 40D. Fear not though, because the boys are back, albeit in a different guise- but back nonetheless. To paraphrase ACDC, they’re back in Back: a new Channel 4 sitcom written by Simon Blackwell.  

Now Blackwell is a name I hadn’t heard of before. Normally, I keep an eye out for writing credits because I always feel writers – quite wrongly – have lesser status than actors. But Blackwell was a name I didn’t recognise. I should have because he has written episodes for Peep Show, The Thick of It and Veep ­­­- that's quite a CV.

In Back he’s created a sitcom where Mitchell and Webb resume their roles of uptight loser and immoral bully, only in the less oppressive setting of a village pub. At the start, Andrew (Webb) is giving advice to a taxi driver about relationships: initially, it appears he's advising the man on how to reconnect with his wife; this though is a pull-back and reveal. Moments later, we find Andrew is the devil on the driver’s shoulder, invoking him to cheat on his spouse with a younger woman. Stephen (Mitchell) meanwhile is in town, gathering groceries for his father’s wake: he’s bought sausage rolls – one up from the economy range – ensuring his dad’s buffet will have adequate catering. Andrew is en route because as a once-upon-a-time fostered child of the family, he wants to pay his respects. With the taxi ride indicating malevolence though, we’re not sure of what Andrew’s motivation is. For instance: why, when he only stayed with the family for a few months, does he insist on calling Stephen’s father “dad,” ? How come, if dad meant so much to him, he's only just turned up? Why is he muscling in on their dad's pub?

Stephen and Andrew.

Andrew is the ghost of Banquo, a threat to the dead man’s heir. His appearance feels like a haunting, forcing Stephen to confront his childhood. Whilst Andrew recalls their days together in euphoric technicolour, Stephen perceives them in drab monochrome. Director Ben Palmer does an excellent job in splicing the past and the present, allowing us to see how these memories diverge. Fans of the excellent Garth Marenghi’s Dark Place will also be happy to see Matthew Holness star as “dad” in these pivotal hallucinations.

In terms of the writing, it has the articulacy you would expect from a person that has penned the best of 

sitcom. Stellar lines of dialogue frequently permeate the programme. 

When Stephen's sister Caz is trying to impress Andrew by boasting about the local music 

festival, she effuses, “It’s got four stages.” Stephen’s pithy aside? “Like cancer.”  As well as brevity, 

Blackwell can do baroque. With the will leaving Andrew with  5% of the pub, he pushes through 

modernisation plans. Plans that lead to an increase in footfall and five-star TripAdvisor reviews. 

This worries the paranoid Stephen: they’ve been a three-star  pub for years, what are people 

going to think when they’re suddenly getting critical acclaim? His response is 

beautifully articulate: 

Seriously, you don't stick your head above the parapet with the TripAdvisor guys because you will call down a tsunami of shit. A sudden flurry of five-star reviews, they get suspicious, send the black-ops reviewers in, there's a string of zero-star write-ups and then you're fucked. It happened to The Plough in Harescombe, they flew too close to the sun.

Given that the BBC have been airing their recent sitcom pilots on Wednesday and Friday, and Jack Dee’s Bad Move has just seen the ITV light of day, there is a surfeit of comedy at present. Out of all of the new offerings, however, Back is the best by some distance. It isn’t just a worthy successor to Peep Show, but a great comedy in its own right. Bain and Armstrong may have called last orders on Mitchell and Webb’s biggest hit, but in Simon Blackwell they have a landlord worth every bit of their predecessors. Here’s hoping that when the sitcom ends, Channel 4 raise their glasses and call, “Same again.”

Back is on Wednesday, Channel 4 at 10pm. Past episodes are available on 4OD.

Sleep Well Beast

A new The National album is always an event in my life. Whereas other artists take the guest room: their music comes, their music goes; The National move in. Taking over the house, their tunes set into the plaster, becoming part of the fabric of daily life. Ever since I heard them ten years ago, the band has meant a lot to me. Whenever people talk about The National, they say things like, “their albums take a few listen,” or “you might not think much of it at first, but give it a while.” They are seen as growers: the kind of diffident school kids that people kick into the shadows; the kind, though, that when given time and attention bloom into something extraordinary. Although I understand other people feel this way about the band, it’s not how I would describe my relationship. This wasn’t a Harry and Sally courtship of many years; it was Romeo and Juliet, a sweet surrender, love at first listen.

It didn't take a whole movie for me and The National to get together.

The two missionaries my friend sent out on a conversion course were ‘Fake Empire’ and ‘All The Wine.’ I still remember the MixTape. “Fake Empire’ was the first track and ‘All The Wine’ was near the end – just like the track position on their respective albums. ‘Empire’ was sophistication to my ears. ‘Tiptoe through our shiny city with our diamond slippers on”- I’d been waiting years to hear lyrics like that. In a songwriting world of nouns, someone was using adjectives – gorgeous ones at that. The song is something of a siren though. Its earlier imagery is a deception because by the end there is talk of someone ‘falling through the sky;’ that along with a cacophony of brass suggest all is not well in Bush’s America. This juxtaposition of beauty and horror is what The National do so well. 

‘All The Wine’ struck me as the best distillation of drunkenness committed to song. It captures the sweet spot of drinking, a temporary heaven the demons can’t reach. Tomorrow you’ll feel murky and shit but right here, right now, you feel exceptional: the A-grade ‘perfect piece of ass,’ the charismatic ‘festival,' the showboating ‘parade.’ With lines like ‘the motorcade will have to go around me this time,’ the song is also very funny. The image of a drunk diverting a processional route is hilarious, pointing to an off-beat humour that many ignore when considering the band. After hearing these two tunes, I bought Boxer and then worked backwards through the albums. Then, like every other National fan I’ve had to wait for each new release; the wait for Sleep Well Beast has been the longest yet – four years: was it worth it?

Due to the solo projects of band members, Sleep Well Beast has benefited from a longer gestation period. Guitarists Aaron and Bryce Dessner for instance have been producing albums and movie scores for Frightened Rabbit and The Revenant respectively. The other band siblings, drummer Bryan and bassist Scott Devendorf were instrumental in curating a Grateful Dead compilation that features over 60 artists. And vocalist Matt Berninger collaborated with Brent Knopf on their album Return to the Moon. Although the band’s open relationship might frustrate fans waiting on an album, in the long-run this might be a good thing: the individuals can go out and sow their wild oats and then come back into the fold ready to make sweet music again. It’s better that the band give one another space, than resent the suffocating circumstances of tour-record-repeat.

Because the band have spent time working with others, it’s understandable that their sound has changed. The Dessners, the band's musical force, are friends with Bon Iver; this could explain the band’s evolution into electronica – a move he too has made. Indeed, the difference between this record and the last is the most marked since Alligator and Boxer, which saw the band look beyond their competencies and co-opt outside agents to form an orchestral sound. On Sleep Well Beast the sound isn’t red wine rich; it's more mulled and sketchy.

It begins with ‘Nobody Else Will Be There,’ which has Berninger's nighttime voice summoning his love home. He doesn’t want to be surrounded by strangers, but home with her – a motif that started on Boxer with ‘Slow Show’ and ‘Apartment Story.' It’s an understated opening, one that doesn’t come out of the traps like ‘Secret Meeting’ or ‘Terrible Love.’ Its coil of piano seeps into your brain though, and when Berninger changes pitch half way through at "Hey baby" your heart surrenders to the troubadour. Much has been written about the lyrical content being fictionalised- a Berninger marriage survival guide, if you will, where he writes his fears in the hope they won’t come to pass. Although this gets to the pith and the core of the album, it doesn’t tell the whole story. A later track ‘Dark Side Of The Gym’ doesn’t read or sound like a psychiatrist’s homework task, instead it sways and shuffles like a first dance. It recalls the romanticism of Richard Hawley, in that it’s a big wet rose of a tune, re-positioning him and his wife as Adam and Eve, being serenaded by cherubs in the Garden of Eden.

Critics are right to pick up on the thematic concern of a relationship in crisis AKA 'the seven-year itch.' One wonders how Berninger’s wife, a former New Yorker fiction editor, feels when she proofs ‘Day I Die.’ It’s a fiesta celebrating the passing of a relationship; a dream of an after-life with someone else. Its jubilant reiteration of death captures those terrible moments in marriage where you would rather be six-foot underground than next to the partner you love. It’s a booty call for the Reaper to make him a bedfellow of him. It’s a tune that puts the dark into humour. On ‘Empire Line’ too, the weight of romance weighs heavily. The feeling of not being able to communicate is desperate here though, less tongue-in-cheek, more heart-on-sleeve, "Can’t you find a way? Can’t you find a way? You’re in this too?" Towards the end, the song dissolves into a brass section, redolent of ‘Fake Empire,’ illustrating the enormity of the emotion.

Another preoccupation on the record seems to be mental illness; a theme best discussed with reference to ‘Walk It Back’ and ‘I'll Still Destroy You.’ The first with its blips and beeps is a malfunctioning robot. Our protagonist ruefully puts pay to Gandhi’s ‘Be the change you want to see,’ by decrying ‘nothing I change changes anything.’ He is the paranoid android of Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, alone and adrift, unable to see the wood from the trees. Inertia has displaced body and water; he’s comprised wholly of pessimism and defeat. Towards the end, the voice and guitar gets a little warmer with the concession ‘I’ll need you light.’ As yet he can’t see hope, but at least he knows it exists. 

‘I’ll Still Destroy You’ has Berninger climbing out of the basement of his brain to reclaim his happy place. It tackles the early stages of medication when your body is thrown out of sync. There are moments when the caplets evoke happiness ("this one like your mother’s arms when she was young and sunburned") and shame ("this one’s like your sister’s best friends in a bath calling you to join them.") Even when levelled you feel hopeless, because clarity brings as much trouble as delusion: clear-headed, you realise you’ve got to get your shit together and clear up the house you’ve left to ruin. At the end though, we get that light again: ‘it’s just the lights coming on.’ For me, the coda recalled Bloc Party’s ‘So Here We Are,’ in that it builds to Berninger’s transfiguration: bathed in light, he achieves spiritual transcendence, accepting life is for living.

On the final track, Sleep Well Beast there is relapse, a sense the battle can't be won. The demon has scorched-earthed hope, leaving Berninger lost to nightmares again. This incoherence is mirrored in the surrounding guitar parts, which stir and stalk. Will our hero ever tame his monster? Or like Dr.

Frankenstein is he too afraid to?

Sleep Well Beast is an album full of demons and angels. It will take you into the pit of the human psyche, and elevate you to the skies of human creativity. After four years, the beast has been unleashed. Lie with it and tell me what you think.       

This Country

Kurtan and Kerry are at a bus stop - they aren't waiting for a bus.

Kurtan: (points off camera)  Over there we saw Lawrence Llewellyn-Bowen once and once in the shop and once up Burley Hill riding his bike, didn’t we?

Kerry: (wanting to be part of the yarn) And in the Co-op.

Kurtan: Yeah.

Kerry: Because I was walking in the Co-op and he was coming out and I said, “After you,” and he said, “No, after you.” (In awe) He’s so humble.

Kurtan:  So humble. And I asked him, “When do we get to see you back on our screens. (Getting emotional) Because it’s a crying shame that I don’t get to see you as often. And he just shrugged.

Kerry:   And he just shrugged like that. (Her shrugged shoulders a homage to her hero)  It’s such a shame.

Kerry and her cousin Kurtan are stuck in limbo. Living an unemployed existence, the pair aimlessly tread the land. Kerry Mucklowe lives with her mother, a shout upstairs, that we never see. Like a child with a new hobby, her father has started a new family, which means he 'must' cast out the old.  Lee “Kurtan” Mucklowe resides across the road with his grandmother. He goes by the sobriquet “Kurtan” because of his 90’s hairstyle. 

I appreciate so far this all sounds very miserable and Mike Leigh. 

But Kurtan’s hairstyle is a metaphor for the Mucklowe’s: although they have failed to move out of the Cotswold village like their peers, they’re pleased to be stuck in the past. The two invoke school days like they were yesterday and hang around with children half their age. Afraid of the future, enthral to the past, they’re a couple of Holden Caulfield’s, aware that yesterday is safely familiar; whereas tomorrow is frightfully uncertain. For each other, they’re the catcher in the rye, preventing the other from falling into adulthood. They sustain each other but they restrict each other too. They’re one others jailer; they’re one another’s saviour. They're bound by blood, rooted in soil. They will not be separated.

Young and lost.

Some of you might be thinking that I belong in Pseuds Corner for likening a BBC Three comedy to Salinger’s Catcher. I think great literature and comedy can go hand in hand. This week I was listening to Ben Elton's lecture on the sitcom. He made the intelligent case for comedy, arguing it does something far more powerful than drama, in that it tells truths whilst eliciting laughs. Just because something is funny it doesn’t mean it can’t be profound. The Office has characters stuck in delusions just like Tennessee Williams' creations; Steptoe and Son has a Beckettian pair quarrelling through oblivion; and Fawlty Towers has the thwarted ambition of an Arthur Miller play. These great sitcoms are bank jobs of the mind: they may wear a comedy mask, but peel it back and you're faced with brutal truths. Great comedy is Art- to claim otherwise is pretentious.

This Country ‘s two characters are cousins, when their creators are in actual fact siblings. Daisy May Cooper’s time at RADA had been unhappy and fruitless. Away from her Cirencester home, she suffered from homesickness and class consciousness. On leaving drama school, her CV slipped so far that even her agent forgot about her. Her brother’s life followed a similar trajectory. Staying at home rather than attending university, Charlie Cooper worked in Argos and a sausage factory. With Daisy returning home, Charlie collaborated with her on ideas that would go on to become This Country. To date, it’s one of the most downloaded iPlayer shows, becoming popular enough to transfer onto BBC One. Unsurprisingly, it has been recommissioned for a second series.

In the first paragraph I gave you the backstory of the characters without sharing any of the content. So here is a flavour: in the first episode, Limbo is displaced by Pandemonium as the village gets all excited by the annual scarecrow competition. The residents have been spending the summer stuffing their creations and now want recompense. Kurtan has been working round-the-clock to ensure victory is his (he does have the advantage of having nothing else to do). However, when he arrives at the competition, he finds his scarecrow overlooked by novelty ones, hardly in keeping with the tradition he holds sacred. Without giving away the end, I’ll just say Kurtan has a burning ambition to lift the crown, and leave you to mull that sentence. Meanwhile, Kerry is up in arms over the ‘pluming’ in her home. This isn’t to do with burst pipes or leaking cisterns, but the fact that her house is being attacked with plums. Earlier in a David Brent Reading, Aldershot, Bracknell, Didcot moment she bemoans gang life, 

“I got enemies in South Cerney, I got enemies in North Cerney, I got enemies in Cerney Wick. I got enemies in Bourton-on-the-Water.” 

Kerry’s crew comprised of ten-year-olds will not let sleeping dogs lie; consequently, they stalk the village looking for the perpetrator. A scarecrow competition and drive-by pluming aren’t typical sitcom plot-lines, but due to the upbringing of the creators they circumvent village stereotype, feeling completely natural and authentic.

Kerry and her posse.

Above, I spoke about the influence of The Office, and unlike most post-Brent mockumentaries, this does Gervais and Merchant proud. A lot of sitcoms in this style feel inauthentic because you wonder why on earth a documentary crew would film there. With This Country being an unvarnished look at rural life, it feels like an unexpurgated version of Countryfile. something the BBC would make to provide balance. Kerry and Kurtan also love television, fawning over Dragons Den and Masterchef, so it’s understandable why they would welcome the cameras. And although they’re not as stupid as they look, neither are they as smart as they purport, meaning they can’t maintain a façade: we see them both as belligerent bullies and victims of circumstance. They aren’t just a pair of Holden Caulfieds then; they’re a couple of David Brents. We come to love them because beneath the rhubarb and bluster they’re decent and honest. They are capable of unintentional cruelty and intentional kindness. They do good; they do bad. They're human.

This Country is in the great sitcom tradition of being an underdog story. Six chapters are available on YouTube. So click on and read Gloucestershire’s answer to Catcher in the Rye.