Up the revolution

Wouldn't Charlie Brooker make a brilliant Jacobin?


Having just finished his Screen Burn collection for about the third time since buying it in the post-Christmas sale at HMV, I think I'm well qualified to say that he would have made a great addition to the Committee of Public Safety.

Never hesitating to preach the most violently radical solutions to the perennial problems that beset human society, this is a man who has studied at the feet of the masters.

He’s tough, he’s uncompromising, he’s a man who stays true to the purity of his vision through thick and thin.  And most importantly of all, he commands the rhetoric (if not the crowds) to prove it.

Misanthropy, he insists in Like The Doritos Friendchips Crew, But Worse (31 May 2003), is “not a personality flaw, it’s a skill.

 “It’s nothing to do with sheer numbers.  Move me to a remote cottage in the Hebrides and I’d learn to despise the postman, even if he only visited once a year.  I can’t abide other people, with their stink and their noise and their irritating ringtones.  Bill Hicks called the human race ‘a virus with shoes’, and if you ask me he was being unduly hard on viruses: I’d consider a career in serial killing if the pay wasn’t so bad.”

Whatever the time, wherever the place, Brooker insists on nothing but the highest standards in both ethics and practice.

“They say the first casualty of war is truth, but actually it’s picture quality,” he complains in his review of Gulf War II news footage The Third World War In Low-Res JPEGS (29 March 2003).

Well, if we will insist on inflicting our Weltanschauung on an unwilling nation, then surely we’ve also got the right to see for ourselves the full extent of the damage.

“I’m not being callous … it’s just that this being the twenty first century I thought we’d get a digitally perfect, Dolby Surround kind of war, with swooping Michel Gondry camera moves and on-the-fly colour correction.  But no.  It’s all shots of empty skylines and blurry videophone bullshit.  Most of it isn’t even in widescreen, for Christ’s sake.”

He’s quite right to have us all pinned down as ghouls.  Myself I remember watching all the news reports on the television in the pub, whilst feeling more than a little disappointed with the results of modern technological progress.  Quite often the video-phone footage used to freeze or even break up into tiny pixilated fragments during the actual news bulletin, leaving me feeling somewhat shortchanged.   

“This obsession with live coverage reached a ridiculous nadir last week on the ITV News Channel,” he continues.  “ Alistair Stewart breathlessly announces incoming live footage of behind-enemy-lines conflict: cut to an indistinct green blur with the odd dark blob wobbling around, like a plate of mushy peas behind a layer of gauze.  But the viewers’ bafflement was nothing compared to Alistair’s – because he’s got to explain what’s happening.  ‘And there you can see … uhhh … well, it’s hard for me to make out because my monitor is situated quite far away, but I’m sure at home you can see more.’ Nice try, but all I could see was my own bemused reflection.  Sod the Second World War in Colour – this is the Third World War in Low-Res JPEGS.”

Yes, I can just hear good old Sir Kenneth Branagh doing the narration for The Third World War In Low-Res JPEGS, sandwiched somewhere in his future daily schedule between playing King Lear to Frankie Boyle’s Fool at the Globe Theatre on the South Bank, attending Lord Simon Russell Beale’s memorial service at St Martin-in-the-Fields and watching the bouncing bosoms of the latest female streaker to come running on the pitch during the first over at Lords.

That’s the sort of imagination you need to kick off on behalf of an entire disgruntled generation. 

But Charlie Brooker also has a soft side.  And he’s not too proud to reveal it to his more dedicated readers.

“Really, it feels rubbish being a man at the moment,” he admits in Skull-Flaunting Cueballs (5 April 2003), “assuming you base your self-perception on the images pouring from your TV set, that is.  I know I do, and I’m beginning to feel like scum simply for owning my own testicles.”     

The secret life of Her Indoors

‘Her indoors’.

The phrase alone is enough to strike terror into the heart of every loveable scamp and scallywag in sitcoms and popular dramas stretching all the way back to the very dawn of British television.

But who is this elusive figure?  And why is this type of unseen fictional character so popular in drama?

Most people these days know ‘Her Indoors’ as the delightful euphemism employed in Minder  by Arthur Daley to describe his wife.  Like Samuel Pepys, he prefers never to refer to her by her proper name, though like Elizabeth Pepys presumably she must have one.

For some strange reason, many of these women ‘feature’ in comedies.  Although you never actually see or hear them, they still interact with the characters that we do meet.  Sometimes they even manage to influence events in the current storyline.  Apart from Mrs Daley, other classic examples include  Mrs Elizabeth Mainwaring from Dad’s Army, Maris Crane from Frasier and Mrs Doomes-Patterson from The Good Life.

From time to time, Her Indoors is also encountered in popular drama.  It seems to be considered particularly funny if you have one of these characters in a radio programme.  Indeed, The Archers enjoys this type of joke so much that they’ve had several of these silent characters over the years.  (Well, there’s not an awful lot else to do out there in the sticks and the rural sense of humour appears to be a bit on the simple side, to say the least of it … )

Silence is the outstanding characteristic associated with Her Indoors.  She can never ever speak.  The scriptwriters on The Archers used to compete with each other to come up with the most outlandish and unlikely reasons why Pru Forrest never talked.  (Eventually, however, Terry Wogan’s guest appearance on the show in one famous episode aggravated her so much that she erupted into a positive torrent of words.  Game, set and match to whoever thought up that one.)

Mrs Mainwaring, on the other hand, prefers to exert control over her husband through frequent phone calls.  However, you never even hear her voice or side of the conversation, which means you are left to work out her likely words and attitude through her husband’s replies and body language.  This has the effect of making her even more formidable and frightening in the eyes of the viewer.

Probably the unspoken cultural equation says that the public sphere is the space for men and the private sphere the space for women.  A television/radio series/book is seen as a form of public space, while silence counts as the private space.

As well as not speaking, Her Indoors never goes out.  Just one of many examples, Mrs Mainwaring ‘hasn’t left the house since Munich’.

This does tend to make you wonder - WHY THE HELL DO SO MANY OF THESE WOMEN NEVER EVEN LEAVE THE HOUSE?  Are they all suffering from agoraphobia or what? 

If that is the case, then they are surely begging for more sympathy, understanding and support on the part of their husbands. 

If not, then perhaps something more sinister might be going on.  In one episode of Dad’s Army, Mrs Mainwaring has apparently accompanied the platoon on their  manoeuvres and is sleeping in the tent next door.  Despite being a cast-iron bitch on roller-skates, there is no mention of her suffering anything like a panic attack whilst there. 

Meanwhile, in an episode of Minder, Mrs Daley puts her husband in a panic by leaving the house.  Of course she has returned home safe and sound again by the end of the programme.  So maybe she has been making a sneaky and devious protest against social injustice, just like Mrs Tucker from Citizen Smith.  

Naturally the man is the one who enjoys the exciting adventures you see onscreen, while Her Indoors thinks there’s nothing better than being the good little housekeeper for the male characters.

While you watch them getting up to various jolly scrapes and wheezes in the programme, she is sitting at home ironing their paisley print nylon Seventies Y-fronts (this is PRECISELY why I sincerely hope that Harry Fenning doesn’t take his smalls and socks round to Joan Tofkin’s house to be washed instead of learning how to do it himself.  Knowing that Harry possesses something of a penchant for loud, lurid clothes already, it is sadly all too plausible to imagine him prancing about in tight red paisley print Y-fronts with navy contrast piping round the edges to Hot Chocolate albums whilst spraying himself liberally with Hai-Karate before hot-footing it down The Vigilante to threaten Wolfie Smith with extreme GBH for daring to use Blu-Tack to stick posters on the newly papered bog walls.).

(Wonder if Mrs Daley got up to no good visiting a gigolo on her single trip out of the house?   Hee, hee, hee ... ) Mind you, if Groutie the gangster from Porridge can still manage to keep running all his operations when he is banged up inside, there’s no knowing what type of businesses any of these so-called invisible women might be running from home on the quiet with the aid of modern technology …  

When Her Indoors lacks a proper name of her own, it suggests that she is not regarded as an important person by either the male characters or the scriptwriters of the  show.  If she does have a name, it shows the male characters respect and fear her enough to recognise her as an individual in her own right, but they still don’t like her very much.  Elizabeth Mainwaring and Maris Crane are the two perfect examples here.

Usually if she does have a name, you soon find out that the male characters probably fear her because of their own problems, weaknesses and personal deficiencies.  Some male characters find it easier to admit to their fear of Her Indoors than others.

Both Captain Mainwaring and Niles Crane are uneasily aware that the problems they have experienced with their wives are at least partly of their own making.  However, Niles can own up to this fact a bit more readily than Captain Mainwaring – partly because he is American, partly because he is slightly younger, partly because he lives in a more recent historical period in which it is more acceptable for men to admit to difficulties like these, and partly because he and his brother are both shrinks.

The main reason Captain Mainwaring is so keen to devote all his spare time and energy to the cause of the Home Guard is to gain a sense of purpose and comradeship so woefully lacking from his own marriage.  This went right down the tubes just as soon as it got started.  Indeed, Mainwaring learnt how to play the bagpipes on his honeymoon in Scotland ‘because there was nothing else to do’ – instead of wangsting on at great length and considerable wit about the lack of sex and love like Niles Crane would no doubt do.

So why do the male characters fear and dislike these unseen women so much?  Well, apart from being rampantly sexist gits, they seem to blame them for everything that is wrong in their marriages.  Okay, so Elizabeth Mainwaring seems to be pretty domineering, neurotic and withholding of affection, to judge from the way that her husband reacts to her phonecalls.  Yet it can’t be the easiest business in the world being married to Captain Mainwaring, I wouldn’t have thought.

Yes, Maris Crane is rather difficult and neurotic too, we gather.  But her ex-husband Niles can get too bound up in the many failures and shortcomings of their relationship to stop and consider just why he decided to get married to a woman so like himself in so many ways.

It’s usually men that fear these characters.  Women often seem to quite envy figures like Jenny Piccolo from Happy Days.  Margot Ledbetter’s unease with Mrs Doomes-Patterson seems to be an exception to the rule (although there still tend to be far more male than female characters portrayed in modern popular drama.  Perhaps if the gender imbalance was resolved, we would see more female characters who fear, loathe and detest unseen women).

Cuddles and Bubbles

Just in case anyone out there in the worldwide blogosphere (sorry, this is still the most appallingly inept neologism imaginable - but at least I've got nothing to do with it) is wondering (somehow I doubt it - but then, you never know these days ... ), this particular entry has been prompted by a protracted bout of watching Citizen Smith online.

My ostensible reason for hanging out in the YouTube version of late Seventies Tooting was to attempt to learn more about exactly how many scenes and how much dialogue a sitcom writer can hope to pack in the space of half an hour.  I'm currently writing the first of two 25 minute sitcom episodes for my MA course at the moment - which can prove a bit of a bugger when you don't have all that much practical experience just yet.

However, coughing, snuffling and sneezing all over the shop as I was yesterday afternoon made this sort of sustained concentration rather more difficult than initially anticipated.  So instead I got in some concentrated Harry Fenning watching.

And guess what?  Turns out that Stefan Elnore Travis is by no means the only misunderstood 'psycho' out there in tellyland.

So why did Stephen Greif decide to chuck in his lot with Harry in the end?

Well, according to this interview here: 

http://www.denofgeek.com/television/43623/interview_stephen_greif_on_blakes_7.html

there were as always a lot of rather complex reasons.  Back in its Terry Nation incarnation, the Federation appears to be a grim and bitter place where laughter and good cheer are in short supply.  So the sunshine and bonhomie of Citizen Smith’s failed revolution must have come as a great relief to him.  Greif’s subtle sense of the absurd gives him a fine touch indeed in comic roles – and it is Harry Fenning who lives in a society relaxed enough to be able to laugh at revolutionaries and criminals, rather than locking them away or zapping them into oblivion.

Happily there was rather more room for manoeuvre in this role – and Greif seems to have relished the challenge.  Indeed, the way in which he managed to broaden out Harry Fenning shows perfectly just how actors can actively collaborate with writers and directors to lift a script and create a real work of art out of it.

Because he is a fine actor, Greif’s touches of comedy never diminish Harry Fenning or his potential for serious aggression.  Instead, they really help to turn him into a three-dimensional being.

Take his outfits, for example.  Even by the standards of the late Seventies (and remember, fact fans, this was the decade of my childhood, so I was actually priviliged to live through such sartorial traumas for real), tartan tuxedoes and black shirts worn with kipper-width white satin ties count as serious offences against manhood.

However, if you watch the programme for longer than five minutes, you soon discover that, strange as it may seem, the frankly rather disturbing Harry Fenning also has a more endearing, almost childlike side.

It's probably this gauche teenage part of him that reckons all the awful, slightly cartoonish outfits he sports during the series count as the ultimate in gentlemanly 'smartness' and 'sophistication'.  (So quite how Wolfie and co came to mistake him for the MP they wanted to kidnap in that famous episode The Hostage, I couldn't tell you.  And why Fenning didn't start shouting and bawling as soon as they laid hands on him outside the Conservative Club in the first place also remains a mystery.  Might have guessed Harry would be a paid-up grovelarse junkie of Maggie-Maggie-Maggie-OUT-OUT-OUT, though.  Can you IMAGINE what he would have been like during the Eighties????????!!!!!!!!!!!!!) 

When he's not bowling round the local hostelries putting the frighteners on susceptible rival publicans, Harry enjoys nothing better than winding up Wolfie and his mates.  Like Stephen Greif says, this probably counts as a very welcome interval of light amusement in what must usually be a very aggressive, somewhat stressful daily round.

Now as a child, I must confess I never quite understood the Fenning sense of irony.  I probably drove my dad round the bend and up the wall by constantly asking him why Harry kept referring to Wolfie and Ken as 'Trotsky' and 'Gandhi' when those were certainly not their proper names.

I know for a fact that euphemisms like 'legitimate businessman' and 'fell off the back of a lorry' continued to puzzle and disturb me for years.  I also never could work out just why Harry Fenning needed to pursue his so-called ‘respectable’ careers as a publican, businessman and mini-cab company owner when his true love was always crime and violence.  After all, the villains in Batman never wasted any time in putting on a front.

Later as a teenager, I got the impression that Fenning was one of those men who think they are a lot more intelligent than in fact they are.  Watching the series yet again today, I am not so sure.  Yes, he certainly has a childlike side.  I imagine he probably uses this to lull a lot of people into a false sense of security.  But all in all, like Commander Travis, when it comes down to it, Fenning is actually a pretty astute bloke.

Presumably his childlike side is what may account for the fact that he appears to have a reputed mistress with the nickname of 'Cuddles'.

Now, I don’t know about you, but to me 'Cuddles' seems a very old-fashioned nickname for a funky Seventies chick with blowdried hair to have ended up with.  

‘Cuddles’ sounds much more like some sort of plus-sized goddess played by Hattie Jacques in a red and white spotted Fifties bombshell halterneck dress, plus a pair of outrageously vertiginous scarlet peep-toe fug-me winkle-picker shoes and a Kiss Me Quick Squeeze Me Slowly hat that Harry has bought for her on that daytrip they took to Margate.  Underneath it all, she no doubt wears a black lace basque complete with stout stockings and suspenders.

When she is in a good mood, Cuddles laughs her head off at all the rude jokes on the telly (Frankie Howerd and Kenneth Williams are particular favourites) and thinks nothing of whipping you up a huge tea of shepherd’s pie, carrots and peas with pineapple upside down cake swamped in half a can of evaporated milk for afters (typical menu that Harry gets fed round her place before having certain other bodily comforts seen to.  Hope he doesn’t take his washing down there – but at least Joan is probably British rather than American, so did not receive lectures in ‘Introduction To Marriage’ whilst she was at college.).

Of course, Joan 'Cuddles' Tofkin is just one of the many, many characters referred to in sitcoms who you never ever see.  Therefore, viewers and listeners are at perfect liberty to imagine them however they want.  The above description is just my personal idea of what Joan may be like.  (Certainly my investigations into fan fiction for both the article that I am writing and the panels I took part in at Redemption 2011 have revealed that it is sometimes the characters just like this who capture the imagination of the aspiring writers.  As we saw previously, Vila Restal’s mum is a good example.  So maybe the above is my own personal mini-example of Citizen Smith fanfic?  God only knows what Citizen Smith slash fiction is like, though I can now hazard a reasonably accurate guess ; ) … )   

Remember, her husband Tofkin does appear onscreen (quite prominently in two episodes) – and he certainly doesn’t seem the type to have an especially young or conventionally glamorous wife.  From what I know of John Sullivan’s work as a writer, if Joan was ever meant to be like that, then someone would have said so right away.

So menacing psycho-racketeer extraordinaire Harry Fenning may possibly have a pleasingly plump mistress – and he definitely likes nothing better than being cuddled.  This reveals him as more sympathetic, quite surprisingly and delightfully human.

Good luck to the bugger.  

What bothers me most about Citizen Smith on the current viewing is the sheer bloody blokiness of much of the humour.

Okay, nearly all the main characters in the series are male, so obviously you might expect the masculine point of view to be fairly predominant in the scripts.  However, what I am talking about here is sexism.

By ‘sexism’, I mean the really wearing way in which the men all jockey to constantly score points off each other, thus establishing the Tooting social pecking order from alpha to omega male.  Harry is obviously the alpha male par excellence in their tiny community – and Joan is regarded as one of the prime proofs of his high status.

Brazenly shagging some other bloke’s bird brings Harry extra kudos amongst the habitués of The Vigilante.  Such roguish behavior only makes him even more of a man – hence all the tiresome posturing and over-exaggerated pronunciation of vulgar demeaning expressions like ‘rumpy-PUMPy!’.  Meanwhile, Joan seems to be regarded as basically a bit of a slag.

If you just pause to look at the situation from the female point of view, it starts taking on a radically different complexion.

Poor old Joan Tofkin has a bit of a sad life, so in some ways you can't really blame her for her behaviour.  Her husband is suffering from serious long-term mental health issues, he has had to be put away in the bin, people probably gossip about her in the supermarket and avoid her on the street, and she can't divorce him for fear that it might send him totally over the edge.

Probably her affair with cousin Harry is meant as a bit of company and comfort during a time of trouble and need, rather than an all-in assault against respectable morals.

It would be very interesting indeed to talk to her and the other women characters from Citizen Smith while the men were absent and hear just what they had to say about the situation. 

I know some people criticize John Sullivan for a perceived over-reliance on stupid female characters (Shirley’s mum from Citizen Smith and Marlene from Only Fools And Horses and The Green Green Grass being the two main offenders here), but speaking as a woman, it is entirely possible that some of their silliness could be exaggerated or even feigned.

After all, if you had the choice between Harry Fenning dismissing you as being a few sandwiches short of a picnic or roaring with rage and chasing you down a dark corridor brandishing a broken-off chairleg, which would you pick?  (If you are my mother, Fenning would know immediately that your reference to his ‘foster children’ was meant in deepest irony.  But you would manage to get away with it big time because you combine the face of Elizabeth Taylor with the devastating posh charm of Margot from The Good Life.  Not that you ever see any women like that round The Vigilante of a Saturday evening during the Seventies.)

Mrs Tucker always had me seriously impressed.  I strongly suspect that knitting the set of balaclavas with the smiley faces on may have been her particularly creative way of making a veiled political protest against the so-called ‘revolutionary’ activities engaged in by Wolfie, her husband and their various equally daft mates.

Poor Shirley was so fed up with the lot of them that she became one of those many people who got the hell out of the country shortly before Mrs Thatcher swept to power.  Wonder if she ever came back?  Or was she another who started a completely new life abroad?

While we’re still on the subject of sexism in sitcoms, I need to agree wholeheartedly with Andy Merriman when he states that Hattie Jacques probably would NOT have been a fan of Little Britain.

Yeah, yeah, I know that Matt Lucas and David Walliams would no doubt lose no time in telling me that greed, hypocrisy, fear and loathing are all worthy and venerable targets for humour and satire.

As a larger woman myself (size 20, in case anyone is wondering), it disturbs me that big women characters like Bubbles DeVere and Ting Tong the so-called ‘mail order bride’ are presumed to be physically unattractive to the opposite sex, so therefore reveal themselves as both presumptuous and deluded when they persist in acting as if they are.  If they display any sexual desire for one of the men, then that is considered a monstrously greedy and rapacious lapse in good taste, rather than a simple fact of life.

At the same time, the Rob Brydon character and the mail order groom bloke are both only too obviously up for it with fat slappers – only they are careful to do it well out of the eagle eye of society, so that they do not lose precious points in the pecking order by getting it on with ugly useless women rather than beautiful desirable ones.  This suggests that fat women with sexual feelings and intelligent minds are regarded by these men as a sort of guilty secret indulgence, on a par with a woman pigging out on huge tubs of triple chocolate ice cream when she’s alone at home and pretending to like quinoa and alfalfa salads.

If Ting Tong really is a mail order bride (or feels she has to pretend to be, for whatever reasons), then like many women living in less economically advantageous societies even today, she might well have to employ her femininity and sexuality simply to ensure her survival.  Rather than starve on the streets, she might have to grit her teeth and charm the pants off a pompous, hypocritical, deeply unattractive man in order to lay her hands on his wallet.

Meanwhile, Bubbles DeVere seems to get slapped down because she has the temerity to want too much – food, sex, money, beauty, men who should be off-limits (hang on a second – why’s it apparently just fine for Harry Fenning to knock off his cousin’s estranged wife when Bubbles DeVere is roundly condemned for seducing her newly remarried ex-husband?  And how come Joan and Bubbles end up castigated as greedy sluts whilst Harry and whatisname are lauded to the skies as the toast of the lads?).