Car Share Outtakes

Recently I have been asked, at work, as part of an 'away day' (where a team gets together outside of the office to gather and do things that aren't their day-to-day work to improve morale or some such shit), to share my favourite Youtube clip.

The idea of the game is that everyone in the team will share their favourite Youtube clips anonymously and then we can all try and guess who selected the clips.

Whether or not people will be able to identify me from the clip I am putting forward is neither here nor there as far as I'm concerned. I'm just thrilled at the chance to get people stuck in a room having to watch the clip I am suggesting to see how they react.

The clip I am putting forward is of a collection of outtakes from a British TV series called Car Share. You don't need to have seen the show to enjoy the clip, I don't think. It's a simple show about two people who travel in the same car to and from work and how they get along. Yet the outtakes are a sequence where they have an annoying passenger (played by Reece Shearsmith, who is a personal favourite of mine for other work he has done) who is singing along to a tune on the radio.

The outtakes are basically Reece singing outrageously along to the tune and the two stars of the show, Peter Kay and Sian Gibson, left struggling to keep their composure and not crack up laughing. Obviouly, as these are outtakes, they utterly fail.

Just watch the clip, then you'll see what I mean.

Peter Kay's Car Share Outtakes

There's just so much about it I like. Those moments where Reece clearly knows what he's doing and is deliberately trying to get them to laugh are my favourite. At just over the 1 minute mark you can see this, with him looking at Peter and seeing he's making him laugh and then innocently saying, "What?" as though he doesn't know why he's ruining the take. He then starts tapping them both on the shoulder as he's singing, just trying to get them to break character.

I like the way he perverts the words of 'dance-floor' into 'dance flap', and somehow manages to force in the sentence "rape my ass" at the 1' 50 mark (note how he immediately looks to see Peter Kay crack up and then settles back in the seat, his work done). Peter Kay near-bursting with laughter, "I can't fucking cope".

It's just glorious.

Here we go now, here we go now. . . Here come the hotstepper. . .

EU and Me

I've just returned from a trip to Germany. My family and I stayed with another German family we are friends with, in a town called Freiburg. The interesting thing about the geography of Freiburg is that it is located close to the borders of both France and Switzerland. Indeed, there's a spot close to the Black Forest where you can look out to the horizon at both France and Switzerland in the same eyeline view whilst standing in Germany.

During the trip there were moments that made me feel sad about how my country, the UK, had managed to engineer itself into Brexit. We are now, at time of writing, a country decided upon a course of action that will extricate us from the European Union. We're leaving Europe. The country , my country, was called upon to vote and after months of misinformation and pledges that didn't have a valid underlining of truth. . .

. . . and a campaign built on generating a sense that the UK, this precious little island of ours, was under threat by foreign invaders, 52% of the country determined that leaving was the best course of action. Actually, that's not true. It wasn't 52% of the country - it was just 52% of the people that voted. There was somewhere in the region of 30% of the population who didn't, or couldn't, vote. 

The remarks about that vote have long been voiced and picked apart and argued over; that it was mainly the old that voted to Leave and are determining the future for the young that wanted to Remain; that the vote was based on a campaign where truth was scarce and rhetoric was everywhere. The PM who arranged for the vote, David Cameron, resigned once the Leave vote was won. The chief co-ordinators of the Leave campaign - Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage - have faded from any form of political sway. 

It was like boisterous revellers barged into the house, staged an unwelcome and unsavoury party, and then left in the morning, hungover and wearied, leaving a mess for the rest of us to pick up.

Driving into Freiburg I saw there was a large, wooden building. It looked new. I asked my German friend what it was and she explained that it was a place that had been quickly pulled together for refugees to stay. There were a number of other similar buildings in the town. I looked at that building - just a simple, relatively cheap gesture - that spoke of what was the only decent thing to do for people that were escaping horrors and terror. I felt shame for my own country, a country that had predicated an entire departure from Europe on the basis of refugees being this verminous blight threatening to pour in through the continent. 

The predominant English mentality towards refugees, generated through a vile free press that likes to plaster the front pages with the demonising of these people, are that refugees should not be our problem. Refugees are depicted as rats, threatening our jobs and safety. 

I felt shame that this was the country I was from.

Look, don't get me wrong. I'm not here painting the rest of Europe as some glorious, holding hands, singing together haven of harmony. There are countries similarly beset by right-wing politics and loathing of refugees. Even my German host complained that the seemingly idyllic town of Freiburg where she was lived was, frankly, boring. Europe isn't perfect. But, in my opinion, we were better off in it and being a part of it than cutting ourselves off.

For one day of the trip my host gave me use of her car so I could take my family for a drive through Germany and over the border into France. We visited Strasbourg and Colmar. We drove freely across the border, despite (with our typical British sense of prudence) carrying our passports with us in case we were stopped and checked. I mean, surely we would be stopped and checked! Yet of course we were not. And we were free to drive into another country, another town, where they spoke a different language and had different customs and cultures.

Aside from one pissed-off French waiter in Colmar, I found every foreigner encountered to be congenial, polite and friendly.

Spending time with my young son, explaining to him about the place we were in, trying to teach him the basics of French and German, and I could think of nothing worse than closing his mind off to this wider world beyond our British mindset. I want my son to want to be a part of a wider world and to embrace different people, different ideas, different cultures. I want him to experience them and consider them and then make his own mind up about whether it is better or worse, good or bad. 

The German family we stayed with had a daughter of a similar age to my son. She, naturally, spoke and understood far better English than my son did of German (just another of those facets of the English; we don't generally bother to learn other languages except for in school and, once we're out, we're done with it). So they couldn't communicate, particularly. But it didn't matter. They played happily together. Football in the garden. Connect 4 on the iPad. Other games they conjured between themselves that set them off running and giggling for reasons I didn't know. It was lovely. I was proud of him.



I don't want my son to shackle himself with the siege mentality of the UK. We are a nation so sure of our superiority to the entire European Union we decided we were better off out of it. It's embarrassing. It's shameful.

I can't believe it's really happening.

When we were driving into Colmar we crossed a bridge that had flags from all manner of nations fluttering proudly along it. The Union Jack was there, a flag amongst those other nations. I looked at it and wondered how long it would stay there. And even then, at that moment, it already felt like an artifact that didn't belong - and would be one day left behind.

The Walking Dead Season 7 Finale

If you don't watch The Walking Dead, or if you do watch The Walking Dead but haven't seen Season 7, and in particular the finale, it's best you get out of here. I'm going to be talking about it, and spoiling it merrily.

So we're all clear up front, I have not been happy with how Season 7 of the show has played out. I'm aware I'm not alone in this, although reading a few reviews here and there and speaking with some friends, people seem to look more favourably upon the Season 7 finale than I do.

I've been a fan of the show from the start. It's only this season that has even slightly tested my resolve in being able to defend it and stick with it. I didn't mind Season 2's slow-pace at Hershel's Farm, or the episodic nature of the journey to Terminus. And furthermore, the first episode of Season 7 - as in the above image - where Negan's punishment to Rick's group saw off Abraham and then, in a genuine jaw-dropper of a twist, also ended Glenn. . . Yeah. Take the glory, The Walking Dead, because you delivered a home run.

For that first episode alone they earned the grace of my patience, even when the very next episode forced me to swallow the ridiculous Ezekiel and his tiger.

I tried. I really tried. But right up to the very end, in the finale, when this self-confessed actor was still playing his part and spouting ludicrous vernacular during a gunfight, I could no longer sustain my patience. Let's have it right. He's fucking stupid. He makes the show laughable. All sense of grit and realism goes out of the window the moment he shows up.

And whilst I'm here, how the fuck did Shiva the Tiger know which were the Saviours to attack and which were the Alexadrians to not pounce upon and eat the face off of?

Anyway.

The Walking Dead also delivered unto us the utterly dumb as shit dump people, lead by this Jadis woman.

Now here was another character, and group, that strained credibility of the show beyond breaking point. That these people have formed an isolated group surviving in a giant dump is tricky enough to fathom. That they have, in the few years since the zombie apocalypse, become a weird Mad Max style cult that has generated their own insular way of speaking and ritual practices is absolutely not being sold to me.

No way. No fucking way.

These are people that are still able to retain memory of the internet. Of what Coke tastes like. These are people that were ordinary, regular folk that watched Friends. And you're telling me they've all swayed over into this weird bullshit in just a few years? Nope. No. Not having it.

On balance this group was responsible for the only element of surprise that garnered a reaction from me during the finale with their double-cross of Rick's group. It was the best moment of the episode. I liked that it had been hinted at, in the previous episode, where Negan mentioned that he knew Rick was up to something because a little bird had told him. Jadis being that little bird was a kick of a twist, mainly because everyone was so hurriedly trying to forget she existed in the show we completely overlooked her.

Still, stupid King Ezekiel and whackjob from another genre Jadis weren't the real problem I had with The Walking Dead finale. The real problem I had was that, after all this interminable waiting the entire season had made us viewers sit through, the show thought it was just fine to make us sit and wait and linger some more.

To be clear, from the moment Negan battered Abraham and Glenn and reduced Rick to a gibbering wreck, we've been waiting for him to get his balls back and deliver some payback. And The Walking Dead spent the entire first 8 episodes before the mid-season break getting Rick back to the point where he'd actually decided enough was enough and they were going to have to fight back.

Or, actually, 'rise up' as all the promotional materials were heralding the second half of the season.

Well we fucking waited and watched whilst Rick went off to various places to obtain guns to give away to form an army, and every now and then that revolutionary journey was abandoned to give us some stories about other characters. Some of the episodes were good. Some were a bit flat. But none of them gave us what we were most interested in.

I, as a fan, kept my patience. The show was going to get there. It was going to keep up the foreplay all the way to the last episode, but rest assured it was going to deliver the fucking goods.

And then it didn't.

What was most frustrating was that all the elements were in play. They just elected to fuck them all up. Let's take what happened with Sasha as a clear example. In the finale we were left initially confused as we saw her lying down, confined in darkness, listening to an iPod and not looking particularly 100% OK.

We would be treated to scenes of Sasha in this manner repeatedly during the episode, and these scenes would give way to various sequences - most notably Sasha and Abraham in a flashback memory on the fateful day Abraham was killed, and Sasha and Maggie talking. Whether you buy into Sasha and Abraham as a couple is almost irrelevant (for the record I bought into them getting together and finding a soul mate of sorts - but the grand romance The Walking Dead has tried to retrospectively paint it as just wasn't justified on the show).

We got these flashback scenes, and the headshot of Sasha in the confined space with the sound of a vehicle, so often that we could pretty much already piece together what had happened before they eventually showed her taking the poison that would kill her, courtesy of Eugene.

But these interminable interruptions to the action were just another way of the show dragging its heels and messing up the flow. Imagine it another way. Imagine they let the whole thing play out in order. So we see Rick and the gang getting ready at Alexandria. Then we cut to Sasha agreeing to Negan's plan. We watch her get in the coffin, and then we see her take the poison. Then we're with her as she drifts in an out of consciousness, seeing Abraham and Maggie in memory, before she closes her eyes and dies.

Now, when Negan gets to Alexandria and wheels out the coffin and is talking about Sasha suddenly we, as an audience, are in on something no one else knows. We know she's dead. We know all his talk about Sasha is about to get shot to shit. This is pure dramatic tension. This is the classic trick of showing an audience a loaded gun in Act I for it to be used in Act III.

With the Season 7 finale The Walking Dead just fucked all that old-school shit like drama and tension aside in favour of frustratingly lyrical dream sequence interruptions. By the time the action then did eventually start it was a confused mess of bullshit. All the Alexandrians that were fully-armed and set to go down fighting somehow got rounded up by Negan's people who were somehow all inside the town. And then there was that shitty fake out of Michonne screaming to her death even though we fucking knew she wasn't ever dead. (This show pulled that same shit when it tried to make us think Rick was dead instead of the worst CGI deer ever just a couple of episodes ago!)

No one notices a fucking great big tiger rocking up. Bullets are sprayed everywhere and no one of any consequence gets hit. Carol and Maggie and Morgan all show up but that raises more of a shrug than anything. The dump people run off via smoke grenade screen, hopefully to never be seen again. And by the end of the sorry spectacle Negan and his people are untouched and ready to wage war against Rick.

Oh. Right.

 

It's just I thought I spent the whole of fucking Season 7 building up to war? You know, "rise up" and all that shit? And basically the show stuck up a Negan-shaped middle finger in my direction and said I can fucking wait until next year.

Not only did this finale not have the goods, it didn't even have the decency to non-deliver it with any excitement or thrill.

I've read earlier that Greg Nicotero, one of the key showrunners, has stated that they will not change the manner in which they are making and presenting the story and the show just because of how people react. I suspect that's absolute bollocks. Falling ratings and vocal backlash do tend to generate reaction. I just hope, next season, we're looking back at Season 7 as a poor blip the show learned and recovered from.