Ladhood

A few years ago I wrote about university, describing it as the best of times; the worst of times. Well, I’ve been thinking about it again while listening to Liam Williams’ Radio 4 series Ladhood.

I’ve been a fan of Williams for a while. I first became aware of him when I saw an excerpt from his debut Edinburgh show on BBC3. He was my kind of comedian: sharp, smart, self-flagellating. The following year I, along with the rest of the Guardian readership, queued up outside Edinburgh’s The Cellar Monkey to watch his follow-up, Capitalism.

Tinned like sardines in a venue that could double as a dictator’s final hideout, we laughed sadistically as Williams tore himself asunder, decrying his own inertia and privilege. Referencing Fight Club, Williams’ alter ego castigated him for feebly attempting to write a free, political show that would never get beyond the liberal bubble. By the end, having taken a microphone to the head, he lay supine on the floor, basted in blood, cooked by fatalism. Merging storytelling, theatre and stand-up, it was his tour-de-force calling card, bemoaning an apathetic generation that had bought the protest t-shirt, but hadn’t been there and done it.

When Williams was interviewed on The Comedians Comedian Podcast, he referred to this time as an unhappy one, explaining how stand-up left him anxious. The fact that he was critically lauded wasn’t enough to sate his loneliness. Perhaps this is why he’s spent the past few years working on other projects. Writing plays, panto and parodies, he's skewered an 'advanced' society that's vain, shallow and selfish.

For me, the most recent series of Ladhood ranks alongside his best work. The first series can best be described as The Inbetweeners meets a library card. It recounts an age where sex feels theoretical- not practical. The thought of it becomes an Everest of the mind: a pinnacle impossible to reach; a man-made mountain of neurosis and shyness: each setback a fall; each rejection an avalanche. Until... what’s this? A house party invite. Well, call me Edmind Hilary. Everest, I’m coming for you! The first series does a great job in showing those intense highs and lows all teenagers experience. 

Williams at school.

As much as I liked the first series, it’s the second that’s really struck a chord. Here, the focus shifts away from school onto university, with Williams leaving his hometown for Oxbridge. Now, I didn’t go to Oxbridge. I had the GCSEs to go. I had the predicted grades. I also had the ethnicity. After all, Oxbridge is more of a white house than an American political building, sketch comedian and 70’s censor combined. What I didn’t have was the confidence. My Head of 6^th Form said, “Ryan, are you going to apply to Oxbridge?” I said, “No.’ She said, “Ok.” And that was that. 

Given that I would go on to struggle at another Russell Group university meant, that in hindsight, I’m pleased my state school -unlike others- didn’t throw a bag over my head, kick me into the caretaker's cupboard, bolt the door, and only permit release when I agreed to the school newsletter headline: ‘Our Pupil Applies To Oxbridge.’ However, in going from a state school, where no one was privately educated, to a university, where it felt everyone was, I can empathise with Williams’ second series of Ladhood.

Williams at uni.

In the first episode of the new series, Williams is the idiomatic fish out of water. Displaced from his familiar home into unfamiliar surroundings, he is self-conscious and adrift. He can’t even speak the language of Oxbridge: words like bop, buttery and squash are alien to him. Everyone’s gone on a Gap Year but him (“I got fingered up Machu Picchu”), and people are genuinely called Portia. With three years ahead of him, he has two choices: adapt or die. In the Darwinist struggle, he chooses the former, feeling all the worse for it.

It wasn’t just what they were saying I couldn’t relate to, it was the way they were saying it. There weren’t many people with northern accents or many regional accents at all. As I nervously conversed, I felt my own accent changing like the protagonist at the mid-point in the Pygmalion story. (Liam Williams, Ladhood)

Feeling alienated, Williams trundles back home, seeking solace in his friends Cranny and Ralph. They aren’t so pleased to see him, thinking he’s become all uppity surrounded by posh twats that just want to ‘suck each others dicks.’ Like Rita in Educating the aforesaid, he’s trapped between worlds, existing in a social purgatory that seems a long way from home.

Education changes you.

By the next episode he has a friend, Aftab, and a Facebook account. Surely things are looking up. Trawling through Facebook, he notices how people seem to be having more fun than him. Before, when he was unconnected, he could at least imagine that others were as isolated as him; but here, now, was pixilated proof to the contrary. The evidence is overwhelming. He can only find himself guilty of the crime of having a shit time at uni. Not only that, but the sexual promise of uni seems as illusory as sourcing talent on a talent show. All the rugby boys, built on ‘chat’ and cliché, seem to be getting the girls.

Always striking specimens these lads, tall or well built, good-looking some of them, girls pecking the guy on the cheek faux-demurely, while he grins lasciviously. One or two girls even kissing the tie. What kind of sorcery was this? What sort of man was I while I was festering in my own lassitude while others were really living.
(Liam Williams, Ladhood)

After the debacle of hearing a pick-up artist address the Union, Williams’ life takes a better turn when he meets Molly at a comedy night. The two go together like Ross and Rachel, like Lois and Clark, like Jack and Vera Duckworth: they have accents in Cambridge. Soon they are kissing against a backdrop of dreamy spires, ancient bridges ... and an Ask Italian. Episode 4 looks at their relationship following university and how the pyjama days of box-sets and toast mightn’t seem so cute when you’ve got a crust to earn.

It's all throw your mortar boards into the sky now, but someone will have to pick them up in the morning. And that person will be you on a zero hour contract.

Ultimately, Ladhood does a fantastic job at documenting a life in transition: from innocence to experience; from selfhood to responsibility. Indeed, when The National’s ‘England’ scores the final scenes you’ll feel moved by Williams’ growth over the show. The song selection isn’t arbitrary: it was released in 2010, just like the year in narration. In this radio show, Williams has painstakingly crafted a modern period piece that could easily make the transition to TV. Possibly, a British Master of None. If not, this series at the very least requires another. A trilogy would be a fine thing.

Ladhood is available on: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b098sdt6 and the BBC iPlayer Radio  

Gilmore Girls

A few weeks ago The Girl and I had a choice to make. A choice that required careful consideration. When you’ve been together for over four years, you want to make sure that in taking the plunge you’re going to come up smiling, not gasping for air. It’s easy to look at your peers for guidance and think, well, they’re the same age as us and they chose this, so that must be the right thing to do. No, in life you have to accept that you are you and they are they. People choose different courses, and just because you choose a different path doesn’t make you any more right, any more wrong.

So when in July we finished 154 episodes of legal drama The Good Wife, we adjourned for a much-needed recess. It was necessary. Our brains had become desks teeming with legal jargon - counter claim, litigation, deposition, affidavit, recusal- we knew the court system inside and out, so much so that if a stonewall murder charge was brought against my beloved, I’m confident I could get her off on a technicality. After having our heads consumed with the justice system, we knew we had to have a declutter: put the papers into storage and leave our work behind. Have a vacation. Take in some air, gather our breath, walk around in concise sitcoms like This Country, which although brilliant doesn’t make you wake up in the middle of the night, shouting ‘Objection, your honour!’

TV show dismissed.

With the school term starting, however, and the nights closing in, we realised it was time to put on our crampons and begin a new mountain climb. What to watch though? This year, we made a thirty-year commitment in signing up for a mortgage. On December 31^st 2016, we spent ten minutes looking round a house, and then on December 31^st 2016 we put an offer in on the house. On October 2^nd 2017 we began discussing what our next box-set would be, and then on October 5^th 2017 we decided what we would watch. It’s a big decision.

Our two choices were The West Wing and Gilmore Girls. Our friends have been raving about The West Wing for years, and in Martin Sheen’s President we thought it might be the perfect antidote to the current Tweeter In Chief, Donald J. Trump. On the other hand, I had read glowing online reviews of Gilmore Girls so was quite fascinated to find out what it was all about. We decided to watch the first episode of each, and make a decision after that. A very grown up way, I think you’ll agree. We really loved both. The Girl was veering towards The Wing; I was inching towards Gilmore. In the end, we reached a verdict: we only have one series of West Wing on DVD, so let’s wait until some benevolent deity (friend) drops them from the sky (gives the other seasons to us), where we can then watch them without charge or interruption.

The President can wait.

Let me start by saying that Gilmore Girls is an exceptional piece of television. Appearing on The WB network in America before concluding on The CW, it never got the numbers it deserved. However, to say it never got the audience it deserved depends upon your interpretation of that phrase. It’s true that in terms of viewing figures it wasn’t a monolith like Friends or Cheers; however, the fans it did get are a complete credit to the show. If you go online and type in Gilmore Girls, you will see fan sites dedicated to quotes, cultural references, trivia, along with a plethora of unofficial blogs and books. It does what all good TV shows do: create a parallel universe that people feel a part of.

What is Gilmore Girls, though? Gilmore Girls is a comedy-drama that follows the mother-daughter pairing of Lorelai and Rory Gilmore through the obstacles of adulthood and teendom respectively. Lorelai, born to an upper middle-class family, had Rory aged sixteen. As you can imagine, exchanging a silver spoon for a baby one sent shockwaves through the WASP set. Teenage pregnancy was something that happened to other people from the other side of town- it didn’t happen behind the gilded gates of Hartford. Consequently, Rory was estranged from her own family and raised instead by mother and strangers in the community of Stars Hollow.

Rory and Lorelai

Without an ocean of age to divide them, Lorelai and her daughter are landlocked in a relationship that is more about friendship than hierarchy. As a young mother, Lorelei still needs to grow up, often using humour as a defence mechanism – think early season Chandler Bing. Whereas Rory is old before her times, preoccupied by money and romantic worries. It would too easy, however, to say they fall into the television cliché of immature parent and wise child; since the writing is more perceptive than this. Despite Rory reading books by Plath and Joyce, she is very much her age: exhibiting bashfulness over her first kiss and concern over fitting it. And even though Lorelai sees life as a punch-line, when it comes to her daughter’s future she is deadly serious. Indeed, her desire for her daughter to achieve her academic potential is why she reconnects with her own parents, praying they’ll grant the loan that will secure Rory’s passage into the Ivy League. This then is a story of what happens when a mother-daughter’s tiny snow globe world is shaken by bigger hands. Is Lorelai agreeing to a pact with the devil or a covenant that'll bring the family closer together?

In writing in praise of Gilmore Girls, it would be entirely remiss of me if I didn’t eulogise over the writing. Amy Sherman-Palladino created Gilmore Girls and her work over six seasons (she wasn't part of the seventh) should be a template for television screenwriting. For me, her writing is redolent of Spaced. In the lauded Channel 4 sitcom, Simon Pegg and Jessica Stevenson created a whip-smart world of movie allusion; Gilmore Girls is similar, only this time the references are literary and music based. Being an English teacher and a fan of Indie music, I’ve really enjoyed picking up on these. There’s an episode called ‘Cinnamon’s Wake’ – a nod to James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, along with another one titled ‘Star-Crossed Lovers’, which features Rory’s first heartache. More than the titles though is the dialogue that references Tennessee Williams, William Shakespeare and Dorothy Parker.

A truly gifted writer.

Like Spaced, you don’t have to get all the cultural commentary to enjoy the episodes. There’s fun to be had in almost all of the dialogue. Take this scene where Lorelai takes her daughter stationery shopping for her new school. Rory is aware that in making the transition from state to private her equipment will have to undergo some changes too.

[Rory and Lorelai are shopping for school supplies.]

Rory: I’m going to a serious school now, I need serious paper.

Lorelai: Paper’s paper.

Rory: Not at Chilton.

Lorelai: Alright, fine. Here is your serious paper.

Rory: Thank you.

Lorelai: Ooh and here are your somber highlighters, your maudlin pencils, your manic-depressive pens.

Rory: Mom.

Lorelai: Now these erasers are on lithium so they may seem cheerful but we actually caught them trying to shove themselves in the pencil sharpener earlier.

Rory: I’m going home now.

Lorelai: No, wait! We’re going to stage an intervention with the neon post-its and make them give up their wacky crazy ways.

This whole routine wouldn’t seem out of place on a Seinfeld episode. From ‘serious paper,’ Palladino seizes the moment, turning in jokes on suicidal rubbers and bipolar post-it notes. The ability to stretch an off-hand comment into a whole routine is what stand-ups do. In Gilmore Girls Palladino has the free-wheeling wit of a comic along with the ambitious scope of an author: she’s a dazzling talent and really should have garnered more praise.

On top of this, it’s apt that The Girl and I chose between Gilmore Girls and The West Wing. Aaron Sorkin, creator of the later, is known for his breakneck dialogue; Palladino is the same.  Normally, one page of a screenplay accounts for one minute of screen time. But for Gilmore Girls scripts, a page was about 20 to 25 seconds. This owes to the fact the characters talk like caffeinated jitterbugs, channeling the repartee of 1930's screwball comedies.

You could look at the picture of Gilmore Girls on Netflix and mistake it for another Dawson’s Creek: this, however, is not the case. Gilmore Girls isn’t an abstract noun that mopes and pontificates; it’s a verb that swings and smiles. It is a lock-in at a library with one's wit being the condition of an extended stay – it really is as good as that.

Don’t get me started on that theme tune though. The Girl knows I find it insufferable and has taken to singing it in the shower, over dinner and during sex- just to annoy me. I can’t escape it. And nor will I. Because for all its faults, it soundtracks a fantastic TV show.

Gilmore Girls is available on Netflix.

Winne-The-Pooh

Once a week, every week, I take my class to the library. For some pupils it’s something to enjoy. For others it’s a trial to endure. For me it’s as necessary as water. Without it, I doubt I'd survive.

Teaching takes its toll on the quiet. The job demands that one stands and leads, despite the opposite being at times preferable. Typically, I live my life as if I'm on Twitter. A 140 character limit on my interactions. I’ll say a few witty comments here and there, but then I’ll keep my counsel and retire to the daydream room.

Yet in the classroom talk is king. I can’t turn to my class and tell them to join me in silent meditation as we seek answers to literature’s great truths. No, I must use words as igniter fuel, hoping beyond hope for something to catch fire. I must hold court. Be an agent of talk. Take to the floor. Ask question after question. Interrogate the answers in response. Root out bias. Demand claims are evidenced. Question. Question. Question. All to try and answer life’s big question: Why on earth did George, a man of pragmatism, leave Lennie, an accident waiting to happen, completely unsupervised? The fool.

Why did you leave him, George?

But in the library I don’t have to talk. Court is in recess. I sit in the middle where my two eyes can keep an ear out for thirty mouths and I get my book out and read. Given that students will from time to time act in opposition to my hopes and dreams, I never choose a book that will demand 100% concentration. I still need to be alert to whispers and distractions. As a result, I’ll often pick a children’s book and get stuck into that. In the last year I’ve read Paddington, Matilda and War Horse. Yes, you the taxpayer have been paying me to read. You’re welcome.

Teenagers be quiet: Boss Man needs to read.

This week, I’ve been hearing a lot about Winnie-The-Pooh. This is because the story of its impact is the subject of a new film Goodbye, Christopher Robin. I haven’t seen the film, but I’ve heard the great Mark Kermode pronounce kindly on it. Whilst hearing him, I got to thinking: I’ve never actually read Winnie-The-Pooh. Sure, I’ve heard extracts from it: a Head of Year in my last school liked to illustrate her assemblies with Milne references. Yet I’ve never read a story all the way through. In fact, up until I sourced the book, I never knew it was so vast and wise. I just assumed it was a short picture book that could be turned and consumed in seconds.

Winnie-The-Pooh was a huge commercial success in the 1920’s. Like its author, the world had just come out of war; consequently, people were in desperate need of escape. Milne, a playwright and satirist, conceived the idea whilst at his East Sussex retreat. Seeing his son blur reality and fantasy while playing with his toys, Milne was inspired to create a world where he too clouded the truth: his beating heart of a boy Christopher would be transposed into a fictional world where his stuffed toys would be brought to life. In turning fact into fiction, Milne profited from his son. The balance sheet though would forever read loss. Unhappy with his childhood being made into a business, Christopher dissolved the partnership, shunning his parents in adulthood.

Milne and his son.

So the postscript of Winnie-The-Pooh is a sad one, but the tales themselves are far from depressing. Set in Ashdown Forest, where Milne and his family lived, the stories revolve around Christopher Robin’s toys, and the tales his father invented about them. There’s Pooh, the loyal, clumsy bear; Piglet, the shy, timid pig; Eeyore, a depressive donkey; Rabbit, a practical leader; and Owl, a learned creature. Over the course of the chapters, the characters get themselves into some classic scrapes, which typically end in Christopher Robin consoling his best friend Pooh.

Reading it, I see its DNA in the Toy Story franchise. Andy’s relationship with his toys change, just as Christopher’s does in the book's sequel, A House in Pooh Corner. Witnessing how a child neglects their toys can either be seen as a symbol of maturity or a shattering of innocence; whichever way you look at it, it's a moment of real power. Also, Pooh’s paw prints are all over Julia Donaldson’s superlative tale The Gruffalo: as Piglet’s head-to-head with the Heffalump is akin to Mouse’s confrontation with the Gruffalo. These are just two children’s stories that I can think of; I’m sure Milne’s inspiration is felt in many others.

Andy is like Christopher.

To dismiss the work as lightweight because it’s for children would be churlish though. The book is one adults find themselves reading to children, as opposed to the other way around. There is an economy to the writing, typifying all good children’s fiction; yet there is also a level of poeticism and profundity that would embarrass most adult writers.

Take this description of the Forest recovering from a flood:

ONE day when the sun had come back over the Forest, bringing with it the scent of may, and all the streams of the Forest were tinkling happily to find themselves their own pretty shape again, and the little pools lay dreaming of the life they had seen and the big things they had done, and in the warmth and quiet of the Forest the cuckoo was trying over his voice carefully and listening to see if he liked it, and wood-pigeons were complaining gently to themselves in their lazy comfortable way that it was the other fellow's fault, but it didn't matter very much; on such a day as this Christopher Robin whistled in a special way he had, and Owl came flying out of the Hundred Acre Wood to see what was wanted.

Milne has teased and tantalised an idyll from his pen. Just savour that language for a moment. Luxuriate on those verbs ‘tinkling’ and ‘whistling;’ bask in the hazy idleness of ‘complaining gently’ and float downstream with the ‘little pools’ that lie ‘dreaming of the life they had seen.’ This is the paradise Steinbeck painted at the beginning of Of Mice and Men; however, this is one that doesn’t succumb to the meanness of man; instead it represents the best of humanity, for man (Christopher) and nature (Winnie et al) work alongside one another to create a refuge of love and harmony. It’s a story that promoted peace and quiet at a time when people really needed it.

If you missed the book during your childhood, I recommend you pick it up now. To lift Milne's style: It’s a Sustaining Book that will bring you Great Comfort at a Time of Trumpian Upheaval. In a world of Terror and Cruelty, Pooh and his Forest are needed now more than ever.

Winnie-The-Pooh is available from all good bookshops.