In Cold Blood

This week I finished watching The Staircase, a thirteen-part documentary on the death of Kathleen Peterson. It’s the third True Crime series I’ve watched on the network; the others being Making A Murderer and The Keepers. The most famous programme in this genre though dates back twenty years. In 1994 the NBA finals were interrupted when film crews left the major tournament to centre their cameras on a car chase involving former American footballer, O.J. Simpson. It was alleged that Simpson had killed his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend, Ron Goldman. After Simpson gave himself up to the police, he was tried in Los Angeles County Court – more significant though, in the court of public opinion. Millions of people watched, deliberated and returned their verdicts. Many gasped in disbelief when the foreman of the jury announced ‘Not Guilty.’ From here America and the world were hooked. Television, from this point, knew that true crime equaled ratings.

Other than Adam Sandler's multi-million dollar deal, Netflix is responsible for other True Crimes. 

Other than Netflix, I’ve enjoyed the podcasts Serial, that looks at the Adnan Syed case where journalist Sarah Koenig scrutinises the evidence behind his guilty verdict; and All Killa No Filla, which has comedians Kiri Pritchard-McClean and Rachel Fairburn cast a very funny eye over serial killers. (The jokes I should hasten to add are always at the expense of the murderers. Frequently, we learn they’re pitiful misogynists; it's therefore poetic justice to have these funny women castrate their egos.)

I guess this points to a fascination in crime and punishment. Given I have no criminal record and a clean driving license (Speed Awareness Course alumni notwithstanding), this may seem strange. However, I think most people are interested in the darker side of life. Horror and crime fiction is the most popular on our shelves: why is that? It’s because people want to vicariously experience something in a secure environment. We want to see grotesque lives at a safe distance. We want to acknowledge that these things happen without wanting to encounter them ourselves. Also, the binary nature of verdicts allows us to celebrate or commiserate with our inner jurors. For us, it’s a game. I guess for others what we have to remember it’s real life.

A person who was maybe guilty of conflating the two was Truman Capote. His book In Cold Blood was based around an event on the 15^th November 1959 where ‘four shotgun blasts … all told, ended six human lives.’ Capote, a novelist first and foremost, writes real events in poetic prose. The six lives comprised four victims and two assailants. The victims were the Clutter family, headed by Herbert, a prosperous farm owner and pillar of the community. He along with his wife, Bonnie, and children, Nancy and Kenyon, were killed in their homes in cold blood. The perpetrators lives ended too following their state execution.

Capote was quite the showman on the social scene. He is you might remember the man who wrote Breakfast At Tiffany’s, a novella about a humble country girl that masquerades as a fashionista. In many ways this was semi-autobiographical, Capote wasn’t born into riches and had an unhappy childhood. He was passed from pillar to post, finding escape in writing. Just as the book’s Holly Golightly talks her way into high society, Truman Capote did too. One may wonder how a man that wrote a comedy of manners could produce a work quite as dark as In Cold Blood.

Again, the reason lies in Capote’s backstory. When he stayed with his aunt in Alabama, he met Harper Lee, whose father was a lawyer. Instead of going to the pictures, the two opted for the human drama of the courts, watching criminal cases from the popcorn seats of the gallery. They would stare open mouthed at the protagonists and antagonists before them. When the scene ended and the trial was over they would come back the next day for a new picture with different performers in the main roles. This fascination with the law was what influenced him to follow up a New York Times piece on the Clutter family.

Harper Lee and Truman Capote as older friends.

Decamping to Holcomb, Kansas, Capote became a quasi-method actor. His previous champagne life of tittle-tattle and literary squabbles was a long way from the rural life of Southern hospitality. He was an outsider in an insiders world. Capote had to re-adopt his humble childhood personality to gain the confidence of a grieving community. The research is startling. Along with Harper Lee, he gathered the testimonies of friends, rivals, colleagues, officers and culprits to tell a richly layered story. Along with the disparate voices, he has a lawyer’s eye for evidence gathering, chronicling letters, psychiatric reports, diaries and statements to give his story journalistic rigour.

Many see the work as the greatest work of non-fiction. Some even believe its literary approach to fact was the first of its kind. The opening chapter sure is compelling with its predator and prey structure. We know early on that the Clutter family are alive on reprieve. Death is coming. This is because their movements on the 14^th November are juxtaposed with the movements of the killers. The going back and forth between victim and killer is, I hate to say, distressingly entertaining. It’s the beauty, the tragedy, of dramatic irony. We, unlike the Clutters, are aware of what is heading their way; unfortunately, they’re not.

Capote was maybe the first to humanise killers in art too. Today, we see the man as well as the beast. We appreciate that killers are often man-made, not immaculately conceived from Satan. Capote’s intimate interviews with Richard Hickock and Perry Smith allow us to see the failings in a justice system that hasn’t rehabilitated criminals. Also, we see how childhood abuses can have a huge impact on adult character. For all of that, it could be argued that Capote like so many other storytellers has fallen for the killers. His sympathetic portrayal of Smith, in particular, makes you question whether the account is biased in his favour. I guess it makes me question modern True Crime narrators too: in The Staircase the editor fell in love with Michael Peterson, which makes you question its impartiality.

Hickock (left) and Smith (right).
Murderers like to show off their tattoos. Let that be a warning hipsters.

In Cold Blood was pre-Netflix and O.J. It is the true definition of a classic because it heralded a new genre. Whilst you're in recess, give it a read. I really do recommend it.

In Cold Blood is in all good bookshops.

Father Ted

Given Father Ted is over twenty years old, I could be criticised as a johnny-come-lately for the sermon I’m about to deliver. Even though it’s old and many of you would have seen it, I still feel inclined to take to the pulpit and spread the word on this brilliant sitcom. After all, if people can celebrate Jesus two thousand years after his birth, then it should be more than fine to talk about Ted long after transmission.

Brothers and sisters I have a confession. I know you see me as a totem, a figurehead, a candle in the darkness, but I am human. I burn my toast. I split my trousers. I embezzle money from the tortoise charity I founded. I've made mistakes. Just like you. A mistake I've made in my life - and it's not one I'm proud of - is Father Ted as a sitcom has passed me by. Hear me out, children. It came out in 1995 when I was ten-years-old, too young a man to follow its offbeat surrealism. At school I was never really a comedy obsessive that would go back and watch past programmes; my taste was informed by what was on at the time. Consequently, I was a huge fan of Only Fools and Horses, Friends and The Office, but of little else. Therefore, there are huge gaps in my knowledge. I'm aware of that, and I've tried to change. In the past few years I’ve caught up on Spaced, Knowing Me Knowing You … with Alan Partridge and The Day Today ­– all comedies that were transmitted before my adolescence, when one’s funny bone is most susceptible. 

Father Ted, for those of you who are uninitiated (heathens), is a title rooted in a pun. Ted is a Father in a religious sense; he performs mass to people of his parish. However, he is also father in a paternal sense, caring as he does for Jack, the tourettic grandpa figure, and Dougal, a colleague more dumb son than priest. He heads the household with the charwoman Mrs Doyle. It is classic sitcom territory where a group must co-exist, despite the fact they get on one another’s nerves. (See Steptoe and Son, Fawlty Towers, Peep Show etc.)

A family dynamic.

The thing that always establishes greater laughs in sitcom is the claustrophobia of the setting. The fact that much of sitcom unravels in a single location exacerbates the friction that gives rise to the humour. Ironically for priests, these characters find themselves in situational purgatory. All but Mrs Doyle have been confined to Craggy Island for sins in their previous life. Ted has been sent there for financial impropriety (a joke that runs through the series), Dougal for causing a group of nuns emotional damage, and Jack for his bad behaviour at a wedding in Athlone. The three cope with their remote Ireland life in different ways: Dougal finds solace in his own stupidity, unaware that this position is indeed a punishment; Jack finds spiritual healing in …well… spirits; and Ted retreats into dreams, praying celebrity comes calling – a calling he could really get behind. Father Ted Crilly then occupies a similar terrain to most sitcom characters: the thwarted hero. These types have ambitions above their station, which are impossible to realise because of the company they keep.

Arthur Matthews and Graham Linehan conceived the show, following their successful contributions to sketch shows The Day Today and The All New Alexi Sayle Show, and this vein of sketch runs through Ted. I’ve seen catchphrases repeated through sitcoms, but I’ve never seen recurring gags run through them. These running jokes are interwoven so skilfully into each new episode, allowing you to experience new gags alongside re-worked favourites. The ‘sketches’ that run through the show are Father Ted’s phone calls, which bring calamity to all that answer, and Mrs Doyle’s different methods of persuading people to drink her tea. The set-ups- as in sketches- are the same; the payoffs though different.

Matthews and Linehan, comedy writers - not an ITV detective duo, despite how the picture looks.

What makes Ted such a wonderful sitcom though are its characters. Ted is the one rounded character amongst a sea of flat ones. The priests that come to visit Craggy Island are a circus show of grotesqueries; they could be brick wall boring like Father Stone, wall-to-wall nuts a la Father Stacks or just wally's of the highest order, enter Father Damo. Whatever shape and size the priests come in they make Ted’s dysfunctional ‘family’ seem relatively normal.

One of my favourite aspects of Father Ted are the characters that comes from outside the ‘cloth.’ John and Mary, who own the hardware store, are often devising new, innovative ways to kill each other, but whenever Ted and Dougal come round they put on their church behaviour and appear perfectly happy. Also, in the episode ‘Speed 3’ there is the brilliantly named Pat Mustard. Fans of Toast of London, co-written by Arthur Matthews, will see the blueprint for those character names here. Pairing a regular forename with an incongruous surname is Matthews’ stock-in-trade; one he has a real talent for. Mustard is a glorious invention, a milkman more interested in delivering his penis than bottles. His sexual boasts run counter to the priests we root for. (In all honesty Ted and Dougal would like to get their end away, but their end is strangled by a dog collar inscribed 'Owner: God.') Soon Ted and Dougal are at war with Mustard, causing an action movie face-off between priests and milkman. That sentence gets to the heart of Father Ted. It revels in the daft, the absurd, imposing high stakes Hollywood on little village life. (It’s clear to see where the inspiration for Hot Fuzz came from.)

Forgot to mention this character's name: Dick Byrne. What a great name.

For all the mirth and mischief of Father Ted, there is satire too. Despite how we hear how priesthood is a calling, none of the characters appear religious. Obviously, this is a stereotype for laughs, but it does have some element of truth. In reading Johnny Vegas’ autobiography, he exposed how he nearly became a priest to impress his Catholic family. In a Catholic community, if a child becomes priest then that family's social position is elevated; thus you have a danger that people are in it for the wrong reasons. The programme isn’t anti-religious but it does ask questions of it. When Ted is unsuccessful in sweet-talking a desk sergeant into dropping charges, he moans: 

‘There was a time when the police in this country were friends of the church: speeding tickets torn up, drink driving charges quashed, even a blind eye turned to murder.’  

Here, Linehan and Matthews attack the pedestal priests are put on. 

Another political moment comes when Ted is listening to horse racing:  

'And it's Divorce Referendum in the lead, followed by Glory Be To God. 'Glory Be To God creeps ahead of Divorce Referendum. ' Come on, Divorce Referendum! Come on! 'Divorce Referendum is way in front.' Divorce Referendum is speeding towards victory. ' - Yes, yes! - 'Oh, no!' 'Disaster for Divorce Referendum 'as he turns in the opposite direction 'and simply runs off the course.’ 

During the time divorce wasn’t legal in Ireland, this throwaway skit has the writers put forward a liberal view on what would have been a political hot potato. Amongst all the silliness, there’s a lot of clever stuff going on as well. This bodes well for the Father Ted musical that's in the works. In a recent interview Linehan revealed that the premise would centre around Ted becoming Pope, an idea that came from seeing Trump become President. No doubt there will be catchphrases from Jack and Doyle, but don't be surprised if there's satirical comment on populism and its consequences.

I've got a cup of tea waiting, so I'm going to wrap up now. All that it leaves me to say is the mass has ended, go in peace. Thanks be to Ted.   

Father Ted is available on the Channel 4 iplayer thing that they keep changing the name of.

Lieutenant of Inishmore

For my birthday this week I was taken to see Martin McDonagh’s The Lieutenant of Inishmore. McDonagh is one of my favourite screenwriters, responsible for the peerless In Bruges and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. It wasn’t until a few years ago though that I discovered his reputation originated in theatre. This realisation came when I went with my brother to see his new play Hangmen at West End’s Wyndham Theatre. Like all of McDonagh’s work, the piece was dark and comedic. Set at a time when capital punishment is coming to an end, the play centres on Harry Wade, Britain’s second most famous hangman, and his professional jealousy of Albert Pierrepoint, the executioner famed for hanging Nazis.

Hearing Wade complain over Pierrepoint getting the Nazi gig (it made him a national hero and took his tally passed his competitor) highlighted how hangmen weren’t anonymous cogs in a justice machine, rather vain anecdotalists, desperate to extend their brand by boasting about their role in the death trade. Amongst all the hilarious point scoring between hangmen, there’s a message about how killing – justified or not – makes monsters of us all. This is McDonagh’s calling card: he smuggles profound anti-violent messages through violent characters. The reason despots are sensitive to satirists is because the worst thing you can do to is laugh at them. If people think they’re ridiculous, then all power is lost. McDonagh recognises this and delights in challenging them.

The Lieutenant of Inishmore was written in 1994 but not staged until 2001. It’s set in 1993, a tumultuous year of IRA bombings and retaliations. As an Englishman, it would be remiss of me to explain the problems in Ireland (I don’t want to occupy territory that’s not mine – this, after all, is where the problem started), but needless to say Cromwell, Bloody Sunday and Shankill Road are cornerstones of Irish history. McDonagh was born in London to Irish parents, spending his summer holidays in Ireland; he’s therefore both insider and outsider, knowledgeable on the land, but not so allied to support it.

The play opens with a body being brought into a living room. A cat. A decapitated cat. A moggy missing a head. A meow short of a mouth. Davey (Chris Walley) whose brought it in is upset. When you take your bike out for a ride you don’t expect to come across such a scene. Donny (Denis Conway), whose living room we’re in, is beyond upset. The cat didn’t belong to him; he was just minding it. Its owner is Padraic (Aidan Turner), Donny’s son. Typically, the son fears the father, but here it’s the other way round. The reason? Padraic is a headcase. Whilst his cat has no head, Padraic has no brains. He is a man of gut and instincts, a mad man that's deemed too insane for the IRA. Unable to be official, he's a member of the unofficial INLA, a splinter group that when asked about peace would likely invoke Tybalt: 'Peace, I do hate the word.'

I won't make a joke about these upstanding gentlemen in case anyone from the organisation is reading.

To illustrate how deranged Padraic is, we’re led into a scene where a man is suspended from the rafters. Padraic isn’t happy that this man, James, is pushing drugs on Ireland’s youth population. How can freedom for Ireland be achieved when teenage boys are too comatose to realise it? People need to be hungry for independence, not Doritos. Padraic pontificates over what nipple to take first, but then the phone rings. Dad, I’m busy at work. Herein lies McDonagh’s genius. The incongruous dialogue of the workplace against the true reality of what the ‘work’ entails is hilarious. When Donny spins a lie that his cat is unwell (the plan is to exacerbate the cat’s illness week by week to let Padraic down gently), we witness another juxtaposition as a psychopath dissolves into a blubbering mess. In a wonderful piece of direction, James takes advantage of his tormentor’s vulnerability, circling him with his hands, concocting commiserations and explaining that it’s probably just ringworm and Wee Thomas will be right as rain in no time. McDonagh knows his way to a joke, having James instruct Padraic on how best to apply the medical treatment whilst suspended in mid-air. Hearing pally chitchat during a torture scene had us all in pieces.

From here, Padraic vows to return home immediately to attend to his ‘ailing’ friend. This obviously is not what Donny and Davey wanted to hear. Why couldn’t the mad bastard just wait to come home? Why couldn’t he prioritise the bombing of Ulster chip shops over his stupid cat? The farce that follows is the stuff of sitcom. Donny and Davey are from the Father Ted school of crisis management, so their plan to resurrect a dead cat is doomed to failure. Also, ensuring that Padraic’s day is about to get worse is the arrival of INLA members. That fellar suspended from the rafters was one of their own. Much of the INLA’s funding came from the supply and distribution of drugs. They aren’t best pleased that Padraic hasn’t followed the party line. When the curtain comes down at the end of Act 1, we know we’re set up for a reckoning: that the splattered brains of Wee Thomas is Coleridge’s albatross, an omen for things to come.

Aye, it's that fellar from Poldark. That programme your ma watches.

Even though what I’m about to say might seem absurd, I believe it to be true. In my mind, the problem of the second act is that it’s too funny. Much of the dialogue is set-up/punchline/repeat, which proves exhausting. It’s not that there’s not variety in the jokes: every type of joke is covered. In fact many comedy shows in Edinburgh won’t come close in terms of laughs per minute. There’s wordplay, sight gags, surreal arguments over quotations and whimsical references to brand names (Frosties). What I felt was lacking was tonal variety. Family Guy might have more jokes than The Office but it isn’t a better comedy. It isn’t a better comedy because there’s not the character development that there is in the latter. What’s special about McDonagh’s later work is he’s married the jokes with rounded characters.

As an early look at McDonagh’s work though, I couldn’t recommend Lieutenant of Inishmore enough. Everyone in the audience, including me, had a great time and laughed more at this than most stand-up. It’s just his later work is superior in terms of characterisation. If this 90’s work is Lieutenant, then McDonagh’s recent output is Admiral, a rank above. With a new play out in November, I can’t wait to see what he does next.

The Lieutenant of Inishmore is booking until 8^th September.