Brooklyn 99

Galton and Simpson. Linehan and Matthews.  Iannucci and Morris. Larry David. Victoria Wood. Most comedy fans will be familiar with these names. These men and women didn’t just produce one excellent show but a series of them. To have one success in television could be considered fortunate, to have multiple suggests carefulness. Out of the names I’ve listed above Graham Linehan is perhaps the most mercurial: his hit-rate is astonishing. Big Train, Father Ted, Black Books, IT Crowd, Count Arthur Strong and Motherland all owe something to him. Five of those are sitcoms, one of the most difficult mediums to write in. Just because you’ve mastered it once, doesn’t mean you can again – take the diminishing returns of Ricky Gervais. Getting the sitcom right is harder than sketch: in sketch if characters don’t fly you can ground them; also, also the ideas are three-minute singles, not coherent albums – don’t like one sketch, then skip to another. In sitcom the characters you start with invariably are the ones you end with. The audience has to like those characters early, enjoy the situations they’re in, otherwise they may not return for another season.

In my mind, the greatest comic writer right now is Michael Schur. Haven’t heard the name? Well, neither had I until last year. Watching NBC’s The Good Place I noticed his name standing alone in the credits. In his previous sitcoms The Office (the US version of the British one) and Parks and Recreation, he worked with others contributors, making his name fade into obscurity along theirs. It doesn’t surprise me that The Good Place was a single enterprise, authored by one, since it’s so groundbreaking that two people could never have shared the idea. The comedy set in the afterlife is inspired by Jean-Paul Satre’s existentialist play, No Exit; no two people would think, ‘Now here’s an idea for a sitcom.’ Now in its third season, The Good Place raises philosophical questions all whilst providing regular laughs.

I'm quite interested in reading the plays at the bottom, particularly 'The Respectful Prostitute.'

 

We often hear how filmmakers are auteurs (see Lynne Ramsay and Quentin Tarantino), people possessing a singular vision that puts them on a pedestal well above box-office mortals; they are artists, artisans; painting, crafting the scene with a style like no other. The term is never applied to comedy. In the arts pathos is valued more than laughter. The truth is great comedy writing involves more textures than tragedy. For comedy to work we must care about the characters it’s being done too, therefore, there must be pathos too. Comedy involves tragedy as well as laughter. Tragedy, on the other hand, can just have the pathos without the gags. For me, Michael Schur’s work on The Good Place is every bit an auteur’s work – will he be called it? No. Will he mind? Definitely not. He has a comic sensibility – worthiness is poison to comics.

Schur’s other three sitcoms aren’t as dazzling as The Good Place, but they are as funny. His first The Office didn’t get off to a great start. Showrunner Greg Daniels made a sensible, but incorrect, decision to remain loyal to the source material. The American audience found the Brent character unlikeable, the authenticity too much. Daniels, Schur and the other writers listened. In the second season the show went its own way, making the principal character more likeable and breaking out of the cubicles to explore settings outside the workplace. From there, the show became a huge success; perhaps teaching Schur a valuable lesson on how sitcoms can be improved.

The first sitcom Schur worked on.

 

Schur used this experience in co-creating his own workplace sitcom, Parks and Recreation; this time set in local government as opposed to a paper merchant. In many respects the characters are similar in that you have an over-enthusiastic boss paired with employees that would rather be anywhere else. Also, the same problem befell Schur on Parks as it did on The Office: the protagonist was not as likeable as they needed to be. Leslie Knope, the Deputy Director of the Parks and Recreation department, was simply too annoying in season one. If it wasn’t for Ron Swanson, sitcom's great character, the programme may never have been recommissioned. As it was, the writers learned from their mistakes and recalibrated Knope’s character, making her more humane, turning her into a political heroine we could all believe in - Hilary without private e-mail.

From there I jumped a Schur sitcom and landed on The Good Place. The one I swerved was Brooklyn 99. I had seen the pilot on E4 a few years ago and wasn’t sold on it, mainly due to the fact it was on E4, a channel the comedian Stewart Lee described in a routine as, “Channel 4 is like a flood of sewage that comes unbidden into your home whereas E4 is like you constructed a sluice to let it in.” Typically the output of E4 is shitshow of reality TV interspersed with episode 782 of Big Bang Theory; however that wasn’t the only reason I didn’t return to watch. I didn’t really like Detective Jake Peralta, the protagonist of the show; he seemed too handsome and snarky to be the lead in a sitcom. As a British viewer I’m used to rooting for the loser; the kind of person that thinks they’re popular despite daily reminders to the contrary; the type who think they’re the fashion bible when their clothes disprove intelligent design; a character who believes they’re a success when their bank manager does not. Played by Andy Samberg, Detective Jake Peralta, seemed too handsome, good at his job and well-adjusted to lead a sitcom.

Andy Samberg: too handsome to lead a sitcom?

 

A few years later and The Girl and me have completed all manageable Netflix shows. (We can’t devote hours to Mad Men and House of Cards ­– we’ll commit to marriage, but not a long-running box-set.) I said to The Girl, “Should we watch Brooklyn 99? I just read yesterday it’s by the same guy who did The Good Place?” She said she would. Knowing it was by Michael Schur meant I was prepared to give it more of a go. I still felt the same way about the Samberg character, but appreciated the others. I particularly liked Rosa Diaz, an attractive scowl, written from the same playbook as Parks’ April Ludgate and Charles, a more intelligent puppydog than Andy Dwyer, another character from Parks. Like April and Andy, an unrequited love affair is established early, giving the sitcom a throughline to pin its romance on.

We liked it enough to continue and I’m glad we did. Over the course of the first season we see Jake Peralta become more and more likeable. He may be the best (or second best) detective in the precinct but in true genre cliché his private life is a mess. He’s racked up debts that overtime won’t clear and has a level of emotional baggage no airline would let on board. Being a sitcom this is humorously played out, so the damaged detective trope never becomes a burden for the viewer. The other characters around Peralta are fantastic too. Captain Holt initially seems to be all the deadpan of Ron Swanson without the accompanying humour, over time though he morphs beyond one-note ‘aren’t my colleague zany?’ into a figure that can provide the jokes as well as the reaction to them.

All of the great characters of Brooklyn 99.

 

In Brooklyn 99 Schur retained the best bits of his office based sitcoms: the hierarchical, interpersonal and romantic conflicts, whilst doing something new in moving away from the mockumentary format and addressing social issues. The precinct is headed by Captain Holt, who we learn in the pilot episode is gay. Given the events leading up to this moment have involved an investigation into a stolen ham, the fact this revelation is so powerfully understated is a tribute to the writing. Unlike some sitcoms, Brooklyn is progressive in that it doesn’t reduce its female character to ‘what are these guys like?’ reacting. The females are all funny in their own way, whether it be Santiago having Monica Gellar levels of competitiveness or Gina having the quirks of Phoebe Buffy, they’re all brilliant.

And what about the jokes? Well in the great American tradition they come thick or fast. Or intelligent and fast as in this case. Creating characters with distinguishable traits means that you can have a full variety of jokes. Take Rosa who has fallen out with Charles over not being invited to his wedding:

Terry: Talk to him, that's what friends do.
Rosa: Nope. I'm gonna wait 'til I'm on my deathbed, get in the last word and then die immediately.
Terry: That's your plan for dealing with this?
Rosa: That's my plan for dealing with everything. I have seventy-seven arguments I'm going to win that way.

Here Rosa’s black soul personality gives rise to dark jokes. I love the specificity of seventy-seven there too. This is from the Victoria Wood school of nomenclature. In comedy it’s best to give a set number or name to elevate a joke – Schur knows this better than anyone.

 

And on the flip side of this, there’s running gags about daft things. In The Office the callback line was ‘that’s what she said.’ The sitcom made this funny; it was the rest of the world that made it annoying. Here, Schur has invented a new one: ‘Is that the name of your sex tape?’ Below we see Santiago and Peralta turn a workplace argument into their office ‘in joke’:

Amy: I'm horrible at this.
When can we stop?
Jake: I'm horrible at this -
Amy: I know, I know. Title of my sex tape.
Jake: Huh. Well done.
Title of my sex tape.

It is daft and stupid but so are most jokes in the office. What someone says one day can be used against them for the rest of their career. The only way to beat the joke is to hand in your notice and find refuge in the employ of someone else.

Michael Schur has had a role in four of the best sitcoms of the last ten years. With Brooklyn 99 being revived by NBC and The Good Place recommissioned for an extra life, Schur’s output shows no signs of abating. The question now left is does he have the creative energy to conceive new comedies? With his high gag count (is that the title of his …), there’s every chance he can do it again and again. (Is that the title of his …)

Brooklyn 99 and The Good Place are both available on Netflix.

Normal People

Last week I went into the library to return Anne Tyler’s Dinner at The Homesick Restaurant (I loved her A Spool of Blue Thread, but didn’t get on with this one), when I saw a book that I’ve had my eye on for a while: Normal People by Sally Rooney. Now, I’m guilty of reading a lot about books without actually reading them. I regularly check those Guardian features where authors recommend holiday reads. (I have no idea how long these vacations last, as typically they choose the kind of obese tomes that Ryanair would charge an extra seat for.) Usually, I just scroll down to authors I like, who aren’t pretentious, and read what they have to say. Normal People is the book that most people seem to be talking about. I’d read Rooney’s previous Conversations With Friends, which topped many end of year lists; a work I enjoyed without completely falling for. But this one seemed more mature with Rooney herself even acknowledging her first was in some ways a ‘trial novel’ that gave her room to experiment and grow.

Her first novel.

I had only a week to finish Normal People (it’s a ‘Hot Pick,’ which means it self-destructs into a library fine unless you dispose of it fast), and it’s a testament to the writing that I did. The book revolves around two characters, Marianne, a loner in school, who lives in a big house in the country; and Connell, a popular kid in the same school, whose mother works as a cleaner in Marianne’s house. At school the two never cross paths: Marianne evades company- her claim? she is above it, too bright for it - the reality you feel is different; meanwhile, Connell doesn’t so much embrace crowds, but accepts them, recognising the status and security they give him. When he goes to pick up his mum from work, the hierarchical lines break down between Marianne and him. He’s disarmed by her intellect and flirtation. So far I appreciate this sounds like a John Hughes movie: boy from the wrong side of the tracks meets girl who owns the station – or something like that. But it never succumbs to cliché. This is because Rooney never concedes to caricature. Connell isn’t the working class hero: he keeps Marianne at arms-length in school, afraid that she’ll infect his reputation; Marianne isn’t a middle-class snob: she values Connell’s intellect, regarding him her superior. There’s a naturalness to the dialogue too that give the work its verisimilitude. Sure, some moments give rise to humour, but nothing is telegraphed, scenes aren't contrived into set-pieces.

As well as the dialogue and characterisation, Rooney has a way with structure. The novel is shaped into a series of vignettes, where we drop in and out of the characters lives. One chapter might move us on five months, another five minutes. What’s clever is how Rooney handles this. Amidst the scene being described, she invokes flashback to fill in the blanks. A precursor to this approach is David Nicholls’ One Day; like that work, the form enhances the story without becoming it. We’re locked in rooms with these characters and then thrown out at the end of each chapter; consequently, we’re desperate to find out what happened while we were away: how are you? where have you been? we were worried about you.

A similar structure.

Because both characters are bright, they’re accepted into Dublin University. They have left the country and joined the city. Untethered from everything he knows, Connell struggles to adapt. Free from past traumas, Marianne prospers. The roles have reversed, and now Connell needs a friend. Later in the novel, Connell explains his position, 

I just feel like I left Carricklea thinking I could have a different life, he says. But I hate it here, and now I can never go back there again. 

(Why haven’t I used speech marks here? Rooney doesn’t use them. There's no punctuation to distinguish between dialogue and narration, meaning you have to pay attention.) Connell’s words remind me of how I initially felt at uni. I thought doing my English degree would allow me to meet people like me. In time I realised that a course isn’t a personality. Just because someone reads doesn’t make them nice. So often students are sold ‘The University Dream’ of “Meeting Your People.” The reality can be quite different. Some universities are middle class to the extreme. In a dress code of pashminas and chinos, poorer students can feel excluded, barred entry.  

How great are her front covers?

Despite orbiting around one another at college, there exists a pull between the two. Just as they seem to fall into alignment, something happens that sends them on different paths. This never feels like romcom territory. The reason the two struggle to be together is messy, rooted in class ignorance and psychosexual kinks. For all of this, there are moments of real beauty when the two are joined, with Rooney demonstrating an uncanny knack for choosing exactly the right description.

He holds her tightly. His body adjusting itself to hers like the kind of mattress that’s supposedly good for you.

How often would you hear a simile like that? The figurative of the domestic. It’s the kind of line John Cooper Clarke would write.

Connell and Marianne mightn’t endure as characters like Dexter and Emma in One Day – they’re not larger than life; rather life itself. I thoroughly enjoyed Normal People. A literary work that normal people can enjoy. An intelligent book that can be read in a day - how novel.

Normal People is available now.

Bobby Robson: More Than A Manager

Italia ’90 will always go down as my favourite World Cup. The irony is I never watched it live. I was just five years old at the time, too young to cry foul on mum’s TV choices. However, when my brother and me began to show an interest in football, our dad went out and bought us the highlights. The competition had it all. Platt’s turn and volley, Robson’s jig, Lineker from twelve, Gazza’s tears, Waddle’s blaze. I think part of the appeal was we watched this during Graham Taylor's era (England’s worst period, which saw us crash out of Euro ’92 and fail to qualify for USA ’94.) As a huge Watford and Taylor fan, there were mitigating circumstances- namely Carlton Palmer. Palmer in your national team indicates a talent pool more paddling than Olympic.

For me and my brother Italia ’90 was truly special. Instead of ‘Do I not like that,’ it was ‘I do like this.’ In many ways the tournament was redolent of this year’s. In both we didn’t beat quality opposition, progressing through the tournament with an obdurate defence and a clinical number nine. Despite having quality players, the team was the thing; both led by men who'd survived national failure. (Southgate missed a penalty in Euro ’96 and Robson failed to win a game in Euro ‘88.) Both men, both teams, achieved success through shaking hands with pressure, thereby avoiding its throttle.

I’ve been thinking again about 90’s football because I’ve been going through the Quickly Kevin, will he score? back catalogue. The podcast presented by Josh Widdicombe and friends Michael Marden and Chris Scull interview ex-players, managers and fans about their memories of 90’s football. Recently, Stuart Pearce was on to chronicle his experiences of the decade. Listening to the episode, it was evident that he held England manager Bobby Robson in high esteem, speaking fondly of the camaraderie within the camp, attributing it to the gaffer’s enthusiasm for the game. I’ve always held Sir Bobby Robson in regard; he had a twinkle in the eye that belied his age. He struck me as a manager that knew how to combine the tactics board with jumpers-for-goalpost zeal. As a teenager, I remember feeling devastated when Newcastle sacked him. He was England's dancing smile: how could he be treated this way?

Today I watched Gabriel Clarke and Torquil Jones’ film Bobby Robson: More Than A Manager. The feature documents his life from humble beginnings to football’s high table. Born into a Durham mining community, Robson's father was a miner. Each week he and his dad would go to watch Newcastle come rain or shine. They would be at those gates at 12pm – three hours before kick-off- to elongate the ninety-minutes into an escapist's day. Bobby was a gifted footballer with teams in the north-east making eyes. However, only Fulham asked him out, causing him to up sticks and move south. He was a good player, capped twenty times for England, but unfortunate injuries meant he never achieved greatness.

This was to come in management. 

Ipswich Town gave him the opportunity to make a difference. At the time they were languishing at the heel of football; by the time he left they were heading it, winning the prestigious UEFA Cup. Soon England came calling. The ’86 World Cup was infamous for the Hand of God, the 90’s for the Foot of Wadd. He was desperately unlucky in both cases. What the documentary reveals though is how resolute Robson was. Sloth-cum-manager Iain Dowie would define it as ‘bouncebackability;’ a pretentious twat like me, Kiplingesque: (‘If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster and treat those two imposters just the same … Yours is the earth and everything that’s in it.’) Whether he succeeded or failed, he woke up the next day ready to face a new challenge.

The documentary shows these challenges in non-chronological form, keeping lots of plates spinning, returning to them at regular intervals. This start-stop structure makes for an engrossing watch as it means you don’t know what’s coming next. Adopting a linear approach to storytelling, particularly in biography, can feel tired, especially for fans familiar with the subject. The ebb and flow of Robson’s timeline is altogether more interesting and suits a man who revolutionised the game.

Typically, a lot of documentaries I watch on football have been screened on ITV4, featuring top draw contributors. With More Than A Manager though, the talking heads on show are another level, a who's who of football. There’s ex-players Lineker, Gascoigne and Guardiola; a former colleague in the face of Jose Mourinho; and importantly his wife and son. Most affecting for me was Gazza’s testimony. I hope I’m not being unfair in saying that Paul Gascoigne seemed to get from Robson what his own son missed: a father. With Bobby away so much, his son concedes that he never got to talk football with his dad, something he would have loved to do. In contrast, Gazza seems little boy lost without Robson. He describes how he felt ‘safe’ under Bobby; with Lineker confirming they had a special connection. Towards the end of the film, Gazza wells up. The tears aren’t Italia 90, ones of personal disappointment, rather those of a pained orphan.

I guess that’s why the film is called ‘More than a Manager.’ A manager is in the results business: win at all costs. For Robson the scoreline wasn’t enough. Just as important were the men that got the scoreline. Were they humble in victory? Motivated in defeat? Were they a privilege to work for? Or impoverished in worth? He didn’t just create players. He created men. Loyal in life; loyal in death. In one telling moment, Robson says ‘If you are a fantastic painter, you are never rich until you are dead. And I think it’s the same with managers. You’re never appreciated until you’re gone.’ Bobby Robson: More than a Manager is that appreciation. Gone, but not forgotten, the film is the deserved eulogy to a great man.

Bobby Robson: More than a Manager is on Netflix.

A Northern Soul

These are the five elements of hip hop. Very few art forms require mind, body and soul.

 If you work in a school you appreciate that hip hop, along with its rap offshoots, is a popular form of cultural expression. The issue with education is that is driven by white middle-class men, more interested in the traditional, the canonical, than the contemporary and fresh. In the last few years GCSE English Literature has been adapted to include a pre-19^th century text, which means students no longer study a text written after 1945. Don't get me wrong, there is a place for heritage literature: there’s no denying that Austen, Dickens and Shakespeare require study; in fact, it’s a thrill when students see the connection between their lives and these ‘ancient worlds.' However, education shouldn’t just project institutional taste onto young people, it should respond to theirs too.

Steve Arnott is a person trying to do such a thing. He’s discovered by filmmaker Sean McAllister at an arts meeting. Now, Steve doesn’t look like a tastemaker. Everyone around him is younger, displaying a social ease he finds uneasy. Indeed, he's right to observe that ‘these people look like they’ve got nothing to worry about.’ Steve, on the other hand, does. He works in a warehouse on relatively low pay; his marriage has broken down, forcing him to move back in with his sick mother- and he has up to his neck in debt. Steve doesn’t have the lightness of being as many artists do; there is no trust fund to catch him if he falls. Despite not wanting to be, he’s a "starving artist" in every sense. And unlike the poverty voyeur of Common People, who 'could call their dad (to) stop it all,’ Steve's bank of mum and dad is payday loans.

Poster art of Steve Arnott

McAllister is drawn to him. Up in Hull to direct the first night of its Capital of Culture celebrations, he sees Steve as a kindred spirit. McAllister left school at 16 and got a job in a factory for nine years, before leaving to become a filmmaker. He understands how people can be trapped in financial and aspirational poverty. The arts were McAllister’s way out. Since leaving Hull, he’s produced documentaries on Iraq, Yemen and Syria; the latter Syrian Love Story was one of the best films I saw last year. Steve is different in that he doesn’t want to leave Hull. Instead he wants to expand it. I’m not being facetious when I say this. I appreciate Hull is often used a punch-line by southerners for all that is shit and dirty; however, it’s a city with pride. Its fisheries were once the envy of Britain, bringing huge sums of money in. William Wilberforce, the English politician who argued against the slave trade, came from there. Further, Phillip Larkin, the great post-war poet, worked in its university library. Steve’s big concern is that the City of Culture might pass the satellite estates by. He explains how some families don’t have the money to come into town, which stops them from benefitting from the artistic provision on offer. (When I worked in West Leeds there were children who had never been into its city centre- their world globe had just one location: home.)

Steve’s dream is to take a bus into deprived schools and communities, where he can then deliver hip hop tutorials to youngsters. The medium is something they are used to, which may make them more willing to communicate. His hope is that it empowers children to express themselves creatively, rather than aggressively. At the start everything seems to be going well: the company he works for donates a bus that he has kitted out with recording equipment. Soon Beats Bus is pulling into schools, teaching children how to breakdance and flow. The children are drawn into this fast vibrant world, one every bit as colourful as Alice's Wonderland. There are two kids in particular that stand out. Harvey, a boy with a stutter, who finds articulating his feelings difficult; and Blessing, a bodyshaker, who is made of charisma and light. Steve continues to go from school to school, but he also enlists the pair into his crew that perform in city festivals over the year.

Steve, the crew and the beats bus.

I appreciate my description so far might make this seem like School of Rock. It isn’t. Steve is not a hype man in the vein of Jack Black. He’s quiet and sensitive with the children - and McAllister. The time he puts into this social enterprise costs him at work, as he struggles to juggle what is effectively two full-time jobs. The daughter that he dotes on lives an hour and a half away – difficult, given he hasn’t got a car. This all occurs whilst the debts continue to mount. If he was up to his neck in it before, he’s now up to his eyeballs. Watching a man trying to keep his dignity when it’s being stripped from him is a difficult watch. Frequently, Steve’s eyes threaten tears. The trauma of witnessing abuse as a child clearly had a profound effect on him; now it’s capitalism slapping him down. Ironically, in many senses, he’s a Conservative poster boy – The Big Society in action; he should be put on a pedestal, held up as a totem for social change; instead, he’s starved out, kicked down, warned not to dream.

I’ll end by ruminating on Blessing’s words. In his first performance, he said he had ‘butterflies in his stomach’; by his second ‘dragons.' From the frantic flutter of apprehension to the focused expulsion of confidence, this is progress. White men in graves can inspire our children to learn, so too fortysomethings in tracksuits. Whomever the person, whatever the medium, it’s just important creativity catches fire.  Since the documentary £26,000 has been raised for Steve’s Beats Bus. Money that will go to supporting children like Harvey and Blessing realise that there is more to art than grammar and punctuation. 

A Northern Soul is available on iPlayer. Donations to Beats Bus can be made here: 

https://beats-bus.co.uk/

The Play That Goes Wrong

‘The show must go on.’

(A nineteenth century show business phrase)

When Laurence Olivier first stepped onstage as a professional actor, he botched his entrance by tripping over the door frame and falling into the footlights. Things can go wrong for even the greatest actor. They can miss their mark, forget their cue, lose their prop. Every person, however revered, can suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous misfortune. It can happen because actors – despite their claims – are fallible. They are not divine beings, omniscient Gods, able to circumvent embarrassment and failure. They are shit in a bowl, fart in your pants, human beings. The fact they make mistakes doesn’t make them lesser actors; the fact they can find a way out of them is what makes them great.

Yeah, but you stacked it mate.

I talk about this because last night we went to see The Play That Goes Wrong. The play is a sleeper hit. First performed in The Old Red Lion in Islington, the show benefited from word-of-mouth reviews. From there, it enjoyed huge success in Edinburgh before transferring to London. Over the last four years it’s been packing them out on the West End, earning an Olivier Prize for Best New Comedy. The premise of the play is indebted to Michael Frayn’s Noises Off, a 1982 production that centred on the backstage rivalries of a failing theatre piece. The Play That Goes Wrong is purely centred on what happens onstage and the chaos that ensues when you pair incompetent stage crew with risible actors.

This is the Cornley Polytechnic Drama Society’s production of Murder at Haversham Hall. Director Chris Bean introduces the performance apologising for the box office mix up that has led us here. He hopes we’re not too upset that our Hamilton tickets haven’t materialised, causing us to watch his play instead. Bean is in good spirits; he believes we’re in for a treat. Previous productions have not gone well. Technical challenges hampered James and the Giant Peach (a giant one couldn’t be sourced; the normal one lost. The end result: a work titled James). But this one would be different. They had the costume, the stage, the cast and most importantly, the rights. (Legal wranglings in the past left them without a plural, consequently their musical Cat did not generate the sales they hoped.)

The acting is as stiff as a corpse.

The play begins with Charles Haversham laid out on a sofa. His friend Thomas Colleymore and butler Perkins try to revive him- but he’s dead. Or at least he should be. Acting is a craft. It takes years of training and experience to convey a life not lived. Facial expression, tone of voice, timing, pacing, body language and movement. These are the constituents of acting. However, being a corpse demands none of these things. It is easy. Children do it in primary school. Dead lions on the mat is all the research you need for playing dead. All you have to do is lie there and think of interval – when you can then get up and stretch your legs. The trouble with Charles is he reacts to his company’s mistakes. When they sit on him, he recoils. When they drop something, he hides it. When the stretcher breaks, he wriggles off-stage - this to him is 'covering.'

It’s not just playing dead these characters can’t do: they can't perform for their life. When the body is removed and the inspector is called, havoc soon ensues. Props are misplaced, so instead of the inspector using his pen and notepad to make notes, he must use keys and a vase. As for the performers, they can barely speak let alone act. The actor who plays Perkins enunciates in a style akin to Matt Berry’s Steven Toast, delivering the word ‘morose’ in a way a head injury might. In one hilarious moment, an actor comes in too early, meaning they pre-empt their partner’s line – it’s the Two Ronnies ‘Mastermind’ sketch put to murder mystery dialogue. 

If it isn’t enough the actors have to deal with each other’s efforts, they also have to contend with the stage. Before the production began we saw Trevor, the Sound and Lighting Operator, leave his sound booth to attend to a few things on stage. One of which is a loose floorboard; the other a mantelpiece that won’t stay up. Of course, problems with these feature later. More than that though, the scene walls are shakier than a Crossroads set, and the front door, which connects performer to stage, just won’t open. Everything about this production is doomed to fail: from the corpse that won’t stay down, to the stage that won’t stay up, the play is an unmitigated disaster. So what do the actors do? Break the fourth wall and laugh at their mistakes? End the play early and preserve some dignity? Of course not. They soldier on. They cover each other’s mistakes with more mistakes, creating a house of mistakes, which will of course topple, allowing the process to begin all over again.

At the end of the piece, there’s echoes of Buster Keaton, Knowing Me, Knowing You with Alan Partridge and Only Fools and Horses. With all these disparate influences, it’s no wonder that the play has been successful. It really is one for all the family. A teenager will enjoy the pratfalls, a millennial will appreciate the satire, a parent will recognise classic sitcom and grandpa will enjoy all the carry on.

The show must go on. 

This show surely will for years yet.

The Play That Goes Wrong is on in the Duchess Theatre

There She Goes

BBC4 doesn’t have much in the way of original British comedy and drama, but when it does it’s often exceptional. Burton and Taylor and Detectorists spring to mind as to the channel's quality programming. Its latest offering There She Goes is currently my favourite programme on television. Writer Shaun Pye, responsible for Monkey Dust and The Increasingly Poor Decisions of Todd Margaret, has created a family sitcom that is both hilarious and vital.

Pye has written the sitcom from personal experience. The sitcom revolves around Rosie, a child with a severe learning disability, and her parents’ failure to cope. Pye and his wife had a child, like Rosie, with a chromosomal disorder. The sitcom is the transposition of the their life into thirty minute episodes. Some of the events are of course embellished, but the kernel of them is true. The idea for the sitcom came from years ago when Pye wrote Facebook posts about his domestic situation. His humour was gallows in nature, laughing in the face of condemnation; his daughter the jailer, he the prisoner. The posts were well received because people admired the honesty behind them. In the play of life, disability is often depicted as an interminable tragedy that doesn’t allow for levity. Pye though realises disability can be funny. And to laugh at disability is not to laugh at the disabled, but to laugh at the situations it throws up.

Shaun Pye. (You might remember him from Extras.)

There She Goes begins with dad Simon (David Tennant) and brother Ben (Edan Hayhurst) taking Rosie (Miley Locke)  to the park for a kick-about. The trouble is Rosie  isn’t interested in going. She performs a sit-in on the pavement in way of protest. Simon is reduced to calling his wife Emily (Jessica Hynes) for assistance. Emily opens the door and sees the civil disobedience in action. It’s down to her to break the strike and send the striker back to work. She and Simon pick Rosie off the floor and bundle her - like a murdered body - into the car. The journey to the park? About ten seconds. Immediately this scene establishes the humour and challenge in having a disabled child. Tasks that should be simple are bloody difficult when someone doesn’t want to play ball; the only option is to laugh in the face of defeat.

Rosie’s ability to outwit her parents at every stage- despite being learning disabled- is a real joy to behold. In episode two we see Rosie get excited over a picture of a bubble bath. Simon and Emily knows what this means. Their daughter wants to be bathed, and bathing means bubbles, and bubbles means trouble. Simon excuses himself with a carrier bag of food; an ‘I have to cook’ get out of bath time free card. It falls on Emily to perform the kind of mission that Ethan Hunt would refuse to accept. Getting Rosie in the bath is easy; getting Rosie out of the bath is impossible. When bath time is over, she tenses her body, becoming a dead weight. Even with two of them, Simon and Emily can’t get her out. Rosie is the ruler of her kingdom; she will come when she’s ready. Emily’s attempts to bait Emily out of the bath is comedy gold.

There’s another side to There She Goes though that elevates it beyond entertainment. The story flashes back and forwards over ten years. The scenes I’ve touched on are set in 2015-16, hitting the sitcom beats of build-ups and pay-offs. In these moments we see a united family that love Rosie in all her exasperating glory. Running alongside this though is Emily and Simon’s past, which to excuse the pun, isn’t so rosy. Here, we see how Emily struggled to cope with the realisation that her daughter wasn’t like her son. We see a mother’s struggle to connect with her daughter. Jessica Hynes is fantastic in these scenes, reflecting the confusion that stems from things not turning out the way you planned. In one heart-breaking moment, she explains her feelings to Simon, ‘What if you lost a child, but there was something there, just reminding you of it all the time?’ She sees Rosie as a haunting, a ghoul reminding her of the child she never had. On the other hand, Simon finds connecting with his daughter simpler; what he finds difficult is understanding his wife’s depression. Where he should be helping to pull his wife out of the abyss, he instead drinks himself to oblivion. The fact that we still empathise with Simon is a testament to David Tennant’s nuanced performance.

So There She Goes has it all. It has comedy that will make you laugh, and drama that'll make you cry. It has the happiness of seeing a family laugh in dysfunction. It has the edge of parents making fun out of their disabled child (in a good natured way though). It really is wonderful.

There She Goes is on BBC4, Tuesday at 10pm. Previous episodes can be watched on the iPlayer.

First Man

The only thing I know about space is ‘my very easy method just shows us nine planets.’ Given I’m often accused of having my head in the clouds, I have zero interest in what happens above me. I blame my science teachers. They weren’t bad teachers, but they weren’t inspiring ones either. I have no recollection of them showing any enthusiasm for the topic at all. When it came to the school of presentation, they were less Michael McIntyre, more Jack Dee: we were impositions on their time, obligations to be endured. In my science GCSE I got a good mark, but this was through memorising a revision guide, not because I had any actual understanding of the subject. My big fear as a teacher is my students will leave school and never read a book again. (I think the ultimate index for measuring my quality as a teacher is whether school leavers scour through a hotel bookcase or not? If they do, then I did a decent job. If they don’t, then my practice should be called into question.)

This year I listened to ‘Tranquility Base Hotel and Casino’ by Arctic Monkeys. The record is a concept album: taking place on the moon, its story consists of a fictitious band playing for guests at a space hotel. Being a huge fan of lyricist Alex Turner, I did some homework and discovered that Tranquility Base is the site on the moon where humans landed and walked on for the first time. My interest was a little piqued and I re-watched the moon landing again as a result.

This week I went to see First Man which tells the story of said moon landing, focusing on the leader of that mission, Neil Armstrong. I have seen space movies before – Gravity, Apollo 13 and Moon - and they’ve always left me a little cold. This one though I was excited about because it’s by Damien Chazelle and Justin Hurwitz, the pair behind Whiplash and La La Land. I talk about them as a pair because along with Christopher Nolan and Hans Zimmer, their movies wouldn’t work without the other. Chazelle’s movies have always had music at front and centre, with his first two having jazz musicians as lead characters. Chazelle has the eye; Hurwitz the ear. The latter's scores have been both muscular and propulsive (Whiplash) and melancholic and romantic (La La Land).

Their previous work is rooted down on the ground in the tarmac of small town America, featuring aspirant characters who look up to the stars and get disappointed when they don't look back. How then were they going to make a film about an all-American hero who aimed for the stars and hit the moon? If their stock in trade was creative underdogs, how were they going to create a film about a renowned victor without it descending into bland patriotism?

The first thing I should say is despite being more ambitious in scope than Whiplash, the themes and concerns aren’t so different. First Man, like Chazelle’s other features, is about obsession. Whiplash was about going to wild extremes to perfect drumming; La La Land was about the emotional sacrifice that comes from an individual pursuit; and First Man is no different. It’s a movie about commitment and the cost of it to the individual and their loved ones.

La La Land (left) and Whiplash (right)

It begins in 1961 where Neil Armstrong (Ryan Gosling), a test pilot for NASA, runs into some trouble. The rocket plane inadvertently bounces off the atmosphere, meaning the mission must be aborted - our hero must face the consequences. This remember is a time of space race where the Soviets and Americans were locked in brinkmanship, each trying to outdo the other without causing all-out-war. Essentially, space programmes were multi-billion dick swinging enterprises. Any failure would leave a nation feeling limp and emasculated; any success would give them a raging hard-on that would last for Viagra days. So Armstrong is not the flavour of the month at the beginning, in fact, his failure leads to him being grounded.

Meanwhile, the atmosphere in Armstrong’s home is heavy. His daughter has a brain tumour that shows no signs of abating. Despite the research he does, there appears to be no way of decelerating the effects. These intimate moments at home, shot up close on jerky cam, are deeply profound. We see a father powerless to prevent his daughter’s demise. At the subsequent wake we experience heartbreak as Armstrong shuffles off into an empty room to be alone with his tears. Gosling is often accused of being blank and dead-eyed in his roles; here though he emotes, the glacier melts, the result is deeply moving.

Thinking deeply or looking vacant?

This is not the Ryan Gosling show though. Claire Foy plays Neil’s wife, Janet, and through her we appreciate the fallout of masculine repression. Armstrong doesn’t talk about his feelings with anyone – his feelings are as inaccessible as the moon. He’s still a loving husband and father, but he’s distant and struggles to connect. This disconnect makes him more and more obsessed about landing on the moon. Back on the programme, relocated to Houston, he stands in his garden, binoculars in hand, and stares wistfully into space, imagining being there than here. It begs the question: can one only accept the dangers of space if they don’t feel the comfort of earth?

I didn’t mention Hurwitz at the beginning of the piece and have neglected to mention him since. The soundscape of the film was inspired by a 1947 piece, Lunar Rhapsody, by Harry Revel with theremin player Dr. Samuel J. Hoffman. The composition was an Armstrong favourite that he played on Apollo 11. It’s the sound of a slow dance between earthling and alien, piano and theremin; a lifting off of an old jazz number into the cosmos, a human walking into space. This song features along with Hurwitz’s only masterly compositions. Up until the end, the music is mood, punctuating the small and big dramas on earth; the final number ‘Landing’ though has all the gravitas of a history-defining event. Just as Chazelle proves he can leave his independent Whiplash roots behind, Hurwitz demonstrates how-should he wish- he can throw the whole Hans Zimmer at the screen.

On the way home I asked The Girl so many questions: ‘What happened to Michael Collins?’ ‘Did Neil Armstrong go into space again?’ ‘How big is the moon?’ ‘How big is the Earth in comparison?’ She answered all of my questions with good grace, and as a primary school teacher promised to bring me home a book so I could learn more. (This will still be above my level). So what years of secondary education couldn’t achieve, a film did. Science is more interesting if you hear about the human first, isn’t it? That’s the angle teachers should go for. I’ll happily learn about evolution if someone told me about Darwin first? Maybe how he grew that beard? I’ll be fascinated by Newton if someone told me what brand of apple fell on him? Show me the person first; the science after – it’s what First Man did, and now my head’s in the moon as well as the clouds.

First Man is in cinemas now