The Things We Talk About When We Talk About TV

Posted by litlove

I have always been aware that Mr Litlove and I are opposites and generally this works out okay. We worry about different things, and can therefore count on one of us being sensible for the other in a crisis. Although our interests are wildly different, they both require space alone and time to indulge, and so we’re usually sympathetic to each other’s needs, particularly now we don’t have childcare to share out. But every so often, the deep-down difference in our natures makes itself felt to my surprise.

We were watching The Good Wife – the first season, as I’m on average six years behind the curve when it comes to television and films – and in this episode, the legal drama concerned a wife and a mistress who were wrangling over the body of the man they shared, as he was being kept alive on a life support machine after a motorbike crash. One wanted to turn the life support off, the other to keep it on. Thrown into the discussion was testimony from a doctor who’d witnessed a patient suddenly revived and healing after twenty years of comatose inaction.

So naturally, I expressed my feeling to Mr Litlove that I would never want to be maintained in a vegetable state. That if the lights go off, then that’s it for me and no regrets. A bad virus gave me thirteen years of chronic fatigue syndrome, and I can’t imagine what the payoff would be for twenty years in a coma. Not worth considering in any case.

‘So what about you?’ I asked.

Mr Litlove didn’t say anything; he just scanned the ceiling for a while with his eyes.

‘Oh my Lord,’ I said. ‘You want to be kept alive, don’t you?’

‘Well,’ said Mr Litlove, batting his eyelashes, ‘if I wasn’t being any trouble.’

‘I think you might be a little bit of trouble.’

‘Well,’ said Mr Litlove, still batting, still reasonable, ‘if I wasn’t in any pain.’

‘No pain, for sure. You’d be dead.’

I still can’t quite believe he’d want that, I mean, who would want to exist in a vacuum of thought and sensation, with no relationships, no creativity, no feelings to access? And then I thought of Mr Litlove on the weekend, and how he works his way through hours of seven-minute-long clips of The Graham Norton Show on youtube in order to be in exactly that insentient state… and I suppose it came a little clearer.

As for The Good Wife, I absolutely loved the first season, but having reached the end of the second just last night, my admiration is waning a teeny bit. For anyone who hasn’t seen it, it’s essentially the story of Alicia Florrick, the wronged wife of a politician caught in a damaging sex scandal. Alicia has to return to work as a lawyer in order to support her two teenage children while Peter is in jail, but then he gets bail and comes home and wants to get back into politics. (I don’t understand the American system – he’s state attorney, which somehow seems to be political.) The question in the first season is whether Alicia can forgive him for what he’s done to them all. She’s remained loyal on the surface, partly out of the paralysis of shock, partly because she wants to do the right thing by her family. But you can see that forgiveness is almost beyond her. In this second season, it’s looked as if the marriage is healing, until we reach the end when a new revelation splits them up again.

The thing is, I understand the television series requires oodles more conflict in order to keep going. But the lovely purity of motivation that powered the first season seems to have gone. Now it looks as if Alicia never really forgave Peter, that she was always holding out for a good reason to leave him. She has no statute of limitations on past misdemeanours, and she seems to think that people are good or bad, with any fault or crime putting someone beyond the pale in her life. She’s also become very controlling, which sure, is a response to having been put out of control through no fault of her own, but it also speaks to the litigious nature of American legal practice, and it never works as a life strategy.

Anyway, I’ve watched two seasons in a row and it’s probably just time for a break. I need a new box set!

More Fool Me

Posted by litlove

Stephen Fry is in danger of becoming a ‘national treasure’, the term applied to people in the public eye who have managed to find the stamina and resilience to live through the praise and the brickbats of the media, and keep performing nevertheless. Whatever happens now, he will have left an impressive legacy to popular culture, from his comedy acting in A Bit of Fry and Laurie, Blackadder and Jeeves and Wooster, to his novels like The Liar and The Hippopotamus, his narration of the Harry Potter books, his earlier memoirs and his television game show, IQ. No matter what time of day and night you turn the television on, an old episode is playing somewhere, which might be normal for American friends, but is still a bit disconcerting in the UK.

And throughout it all, Stephen Fry has remained a remarkably coherent character. His voice is so easily conjured up in the imagination, his face so familiar and so redolent of what we believe is his real self. I remember a colleague telling me that he’d just decided to go and watch Fry playing the lead role in the new Oscar Wilde biopic when he walked into the SCR and overheard the film being discussed, the comment being made that Fry ‘played Wilde like a self-satisfied Winnie-the-Pooh’. ‘And I thought to myself, oh thank you very much,’ my colleague told me. ‘Now I’ll never get that image out of my head.’

But what of the man behind the Winnie-the-Pooh mask? Stephen Fry has been parcelling out his memoirs over the years and has currently reached his third volume, one that roughly covers the era 1984-1993, or in keeping with the spirit of the book, his cocaine years and the time of his rise to fame. More Fool Me opens, however, with a 70-page synopsis of the two books that preceded, covering his rural childhood living in a large rambling house with servants but little in the way of income, his father a sort of Caracticus Potts figure, creating mad and brilliant inventions in the barn. There’s some issue there that isn’t fully eviscerated, but Fry ends up a very clever, very troubled teen, cruising towards an eventual jail sentence for credit card theft. He then worked hard to get into Cambridge where life came right for him with his Footlight friends – Emma Thompson and Tony Slattery among them – and his subsequent career writing and performing.

‘I consider myself incompetent when it comes to the business of living life,’ Fry writes. ‘There was ever something darker, more dangerous and – let’s be frank – more stupid about me than about my friends. Socially, psychologically and inwardly stupid. Imbecilic. Self-destructive. More of a fool.’ The self-excoriation comes as a prelude to his account of cocaine addiction, and I always find it fascinating to read people writing about things they have done in life which they know will be viewed poorly. I have this theory that it is almost impossible to avoid self-justification. Only the most brilliant writers can do it, because a) you need to have reached a certain level of wisdom to be a brilliant writer and b) they put the narrative first, above the demands of ego. Sometimes being a bit bonkers helps, too. But Stephen Fry goes a much more classic route – he beats himself up and then he reaches for the familiar justifications: he wants to belong, he’s fascinated by transgression, he just plain likes the experience of it (and doesn’t suffer too much from evil side effects). More intriguing to me was the list he posts at the start of the chapter of places he’s snorted coke. It begins with Buckingham Palace, continues with Windsor Castle and the House of Lords, and trots gently through every famous club, hotel and restaurant you might ever have heard of, including The Ritz and the Savoy, The Garrick and The Groucho, before ending with BBC studios, 20^th Century Fox and the offices of all the major newspapers. Now what is that list really trying to say?

Not that he’s incompetent at living, I might suggest. The middle section of the memoir is a hodge-podge of anecdotes about events like Charles and Di dropping in for tea, and room-sitting a suite at Claridges where he hosts a dinner party for great elderly thesp Sir John Mills and his wife. Names drop like summer rain. And this section is followed by a diary he kept in the early 90s in which he manages to write a 90,000 word novel over the course of about 6 weeks, immediately followed by a period of creating sketches with Hugh Laurie for the show they did together, as well as earning a healthy living from voiceovers and making a dizzying number of public appearances. To say Fry has a prodigious capacity for both work and play is a wild understatement. The amount of performing, creating and hob-nobbing he gets through is eye-popping. It’s no wonder he took cocaine though, to be fair, that novel gets written while he’s at a health farm. Lesson number one to all would-be stars: you must have outrageous amounts of energy, and be able to perform well off the cuff, hungover and without sleep. That’s the secret to success.

But where is Stephen Fry in all this? I wondered in the end whether he even knew himself. This is a period of his life in which he is celibate, not something that’s up for discussion. And the discussion of drug taking feels, oh I don’t know, just not quite convincing. The ‘Stephen Fry’ living the high life on the crest of a stellar career doesn’t tally with the breast-beating author who opens and closes the memoir, berating his stupidity and incompetence. ‘Where might my life have led me if I had not all but thrown away the prime of it as I partied like one determined to test its limits?’ he asks, without providing an answer. You can’t call productivity like his ‘throwing life away’ by any score. ‘I became something of a licensed fool in palaces and private houses,’ he writes as if any of the previous anecdotes actually reflected on him in a bad way. Of course, 1995 saw his breakdown and his subsequent diagnosis as bipolar, so maybe this is more a trailer for volume four than a conclusion. And a lot of the people he might want to write about are still alive, so there are evidently all kinds of stories he cannot tell. But my own feeling is that the answer lies in his childhood sensation ‘of being watched and judged.’ That sensation leads to consummate, life-long performers, and perhaps what Fry can’t even manage to say himself is that this performance took over every part of his life, and he needed cocaine to continue to function at that vertiginous level without losing his nerve and looking down.

This is an interesting memoir if, like me, you enjoy taking a scalpel to subtext, but I think the volumes that preceded it, Moab Is My Washpot and The Fry Chronicles are probably much more satisfactory from the point of view of writing and event. Though if you like theatrical reminiscences, Fry always tells a good anecdote.

The Week In Bullets

Posted by litlove

1. I seem not to be reading at the moment. I absolutely hate it when this happens as my head becomes progressively messier and messier. The reason I am not reading (I think) is that I have several new projects to start, and because I can’t decide where to begin, I am rushing about in a state of confusion, not actually doing anything. I need to start on one and focus, and frankly any one will do. I don’t know how I can manage to be so busy and yet achieve nothing; it’s a complete mystery to me how easily this happens.

2. Mister Litlove told me about a stirring speech by Armando Iannuci, given at the BAFTA television awards. Iannuci is the creative force behind programmes such as The Thick of It and its American counterpart, Veeps. He argues that the system in the UK for commissioning new television programmes is dysfunctional; the relationship between the people holding the money and those with the creativity is all wrong in its power imbalance. Money rules, leading to what he terms ‘a culture of caution and compliance’. In other words, too many programmes are made to order, based on previously successful shows, spawning that irritating rash of clones, and pared back to the bone economically, all of which strangles the proper creativity that could actually produce exciting new television. You can read the lecture here. I think it’s perfectly applicable to publishing at present, too, and it’s good that someone important is speaking up about it. It pains me that creativity, one of the very best human assets we have, is so beleaguered and undervalued. On a different note, when I asked Mister Litlove to give me the details of this story again, he had just taken a bite of lunch and so I thought the guy’s name was Amanda, which was very confusing. Once we’d sorted that out, I asked for the surname again. But he’d taken another bite and we could both see the wisdom in giving up at that point.

3. Last night the bookshop where I work had a party. This was perplexing to all the people walking by on the street who could see the lights on and the staff milling about but couldn’t get in the locked door. It was a very pleasant evening, although I wasn’t in a party mood. I’d sat down in the chair at a quarter past four and the next thing I knew I was waking up at six, and all evening I had that feeling of not being fully conscious. I do work with some amusing people, though. When I arrived, it was to find the manager and one of the most senior volunteers sizing up whether to have another glass of wine (or at least persuading themselves that they could). ‘Now that I’m past 70,’ said the senior volunteer, ‘I find the chances of having a really wild night out are few and far between.’ That made me laugh.

4. Mister Litlove was also telling me about a new kind of predictive text that analyses your messages and starts to make suggestions for words before you have typed anything at all. I call that plain presumptuous. He told me about this after I’d described texting on my ancient phone under the benignly contemptuous gaze of my son, who marvelled at the inconvenience of it beeping with every key I pressed. But at least it is not so rude as to claim to know what I’m going to say before I’ve even said it. It made me want to take the app on, just to prove to it that there would be some people whose messages it could never guess. It makes me want to shout: Resist these attempts to curtail your individual uniqueness! I really do not think I am the prime recipient of new technology.

5. This weekend. Clear head. Finish books that have been hanging around for ages. Fresh start. I don’t even want to suggest titles of books I might read next. I feel the need to surprise even myself. What’s everyone else doing?

6. Oh and I forgot! I happened to catch this blog on technorati, where it turns out I’m in the top hundred book blogs. I found that really cheering as I usually do dreadfully on league tables. So that was a good thing. I must remember now never to check it again, and thereby avoid the inevitable disappointment. 😉

Sunday Mishmash

Posted by litlove

I’ve been under the weather the past couple of days. How poorly? Well, poorly enough that all I was keen on reading was a Lee Child thriller and all I could face watching was the second series of Dynasty. Hands up who remembers Dynasty from the first time around? The mid-eighties were my TV era, when I actually watched TV and really enjoyed it. I was glued to Fame, and Dallas and, less often, Dynasty. I can remember watching the episode in which J. R. was shot (that revolver, peeping

Whose contract was renegotiated?

around the half-opened office door). And who remembers the Moldavian massacre from Dynasty? It was when the lifeless Catherine Oxenburg was married off to Michael Praed, who suffered dreadfully from excessive hairdressing in this series, and then masked men broke into the church and gunned down the wedding guests. It was apparently the most-watched episode of anything on television, garnering a huge 60 million viewers. I was certainly one of them.

It’s all the fault of my manager in the bookstore that I’m watching it now, over twenty years later. She is working her way through the series and keeps telling me details of the plots. Eventually I decided I was curious enough to watch it again and found a cheap set of discs for series two. When I started to play them the colour looked all wrong and washed out, like they’d been filming it in an aquarium. I thought, goodness me, these programs have not stood the test of time. Then when Mister Litlove arrived home, he said ‘Why are you watching it like that?’ and fiddled around with the cables at the back of the DVD player, until, lo and behold, the proper colour came back. I suppose that a certain blue-green haze must have represented the veil of nostalgia for me. Anyway, series two is a long way away from any massacre, although you can see already how the minds of the writers could have got them there. It has crossed my mind to wonder why I watched it so avidly as a teenager, or why anybody would watch it, to be absolutely honest. The acting is

Remember the cat fights? Ah, happy days!

dreadful, the plot hilarious and only Joan Collins holds the entire thing together by being her old scheming self. But you really never know what’s going to happen next – although you are assured it will be dramatic to a ridiculous degree. I am still being entertained, although not for entirely the right reasons.

It may be a while before I manage another book review, as I’m currently reading George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda. This could not be further from Dynasty in terms of crazy plot and cardboard character, although its underlying social concerns are not all that different. There’s a fair amount of scheming going on, and marriage, wealth, race and rank are all of huge importance. The main difference is that people can’t pick up a tea cup or get on the back of a horse without Eliot describing and analysing them for a couple of pages. I do like Eliot and I think she is a fine and insightful writer; I just occasionally wish she’d get on with it. The story revolves around two very different women: the spoilt Gwendolen Harleth, who is narcissistic and manipulative, but also strong and tenacious, and the Jewish refugee, Mirah Lapidoth, whom the eponymous Deronda saves from drowning. Both of these women are in trouble, Gwendolen because her family has lost all its money and an ignominious future awaits them unless she can find a way out, and Mirah because she has travelled to England to find her long lost relatives but cannot track them down. Of these two characters, I confess a distinct preference for Gwendolen, because she is interestingly flawed. She annoys me, but I really want to know what she does next. Mirah is too saintly to be real. But it’s early days yet, and anything could happen. What I really must stop doing is seeing pernicious analogies to the feisty Alexis Colby in Gwendolen and the wet Krystal Carrington in Mirah. That is so not going to help!

And I am still behind on responding to comments. But I will catch up.