Simon T. Kaye

So here are couple of things I want to write aloud about. They interest me enough to drag me out of the hermetically-sealed Study Capsule into which I have intentionally interred myself for the duration of this final term of undergraduate study. Let me tell you what these things are, let me tell you why.

The first thing isn’t really a big thing, and it certainly isn’t a new thing. But when did there start to be just so much television programming about… television programmes?

The second thing is big and startling. It is that something original has happened on ITV. I’m not talking about introducing a presenter to News broadcasts, that was decades ago. For the second time in its history, ITV has done something original with its programming.

So let’s think about this astonishing post-modern reflexiveness that’s inflicted itself on the television media over the past- well, five years or so? I don’t really know. It probably started with one of those fly-on-the-wall documentaries that was so popular in the 90s. And don’t forget the shows that popped up to mock those- I’m talking about Chris Morris, with the Day Today and Brasseye. They were focussed on News, Current Affairs and Documentary spoofing, granted, but a more self-aware comedy show hasn’t been produced since.

Until now, that is. But we can come back to Moving Wallpaper.

So we woke up to how incredibly contrived TV news really was as Chris Morris orchestrated a war between Australia and Britain, just so he could use the shiny new WAR!!! graphic on his current affairs show. And maybe this is what started the trend. Big Brother became boring to me after two series or so, and I can only assume that the rest of mankind is just four of five years behind me. But then Big Brother’s Little Brother came onto the scene.

A little Montel/Kilroy thing, half an hour long, with people talking about… nothing. I honestly thought Chris Morris had struck again, only too subtly to be funny. Is this a kind of a Seinfeld thing? No. It’s a show about another show. If the other show didn’t exist, this one wouldn’t either. And… it’s popular. The new(ish) digital channels proved to be a perfect venue  for these televisual nonentities, and soon they were everywhere. Each Reality TV programme had (and has) its very own companion-piece, a few seconds later and just a channel-flick away.

And then came Doctor Who Anonymous. Material that would otherwise (and rightly) have been consigned to a DVD special edition or slick website was suddenly thrust out as a part of the main event. Like the cartoon they used to show before the main feature at the movies only, you know, a bit shit.

Perhaps something similar has been happening in the USA. I can’t claim to be that up to date with it all. But I do know about Aaron Sorkin’s abortive, disappointing and unctuous Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. Don’t we all! The man who created the west wing got to work with two of the most entertaining american language-comedians… and decided to mop up the two dozen or so plot lines he had left over for the West Wing when he left that instead of actually telling us something interesting about his new characters; instead of telling us a story. The language was great. Nothing else was. But here’s something worth pointing out: a dramedy about the creation of television. Just like its (much better) estranged, battling brother: 30 Rock.

Oh how we laughed. Not just at the smart funnies, the slapstick, the timing and Alec Baldwyn. At the coincidences. Because 30 is, like, half of 60. And Rock is for Rockefeller Plaza and the Sunset Strip is a place as well. It’s TOO WEIRD.

So America has its share of navel-gazing television material. Exactly half of it is brilliant, and accordingly will keep on getting made. Law of the JUNGLE.

So, given all of this, what do you think is the least likely television network to take notice of a zeitgeist, to extrapolate it, to have a genuinely brilliant idea and execute it at high speed? ITV?

Well, it’s a funny old world. Obama lost New Hampshire. David Davis lost the Tory Leadership. And ITV created Moving Wallpaper and Echo Beach.

If you’re not familiar, the concept is, like all good concepts, incredibly simple. Echo Beach is a moderately racy soap opera. Moving Wallpaper is the half-hour comedy about the team that creates it. Who really created both? Kudos, naturally, the production company responsible for practically every decent new fiction to be found on British TV these days (can you say Life on Mars?).

So in this first episode, for example, Moving Wallpaper showed the creation of the Echo Beach pilot, and ended at the exact moment that the writers and producers sat down together to watch it air. Queue brief ad-break to herald the return of News at Ten next monday, and we’re into the action at Echo Beach.

This stuff works best when we can wiggle into the sofa and congratulate ourselves for belonging to the club. The genius here is that Kudos has already generated the kind of in-jokes and knowing winks that most shows would need half a dozen episodes to set in motion. A wry comment in Moving Wallpaper about sticking someone in a miniskirt? There she is in the background. A funny moment with a child actor being made to cry? She’s howling in Echo Beach. A desperate actress gives an executive a blow job to get to say one line in Echo’s pub. And there she is, saying it, milking it (is that good acting or bad acting? Who knows?) and then instantly eclipsed by two other minor characters.

Moving Wallpaper is the clever half of the relationship. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not brilliant. It has an awfully long way to go before it can live up to its promise. But our protagonist is a somewhat likeable Simon Cowell impersonator. And they’re making an effort to make little jokes, and there’s no laughter track. It’s trying so hard! Impossible not to be a little wooed. Now they just need to tell their worse actors to do what bad american actors do- say it fast, and at least you’ll come across as quick and smart.

It’s the perennial problem of British TV: for whatever reason, we’re incredibly short of decent actors. Everything always seems as though it ought to be on stage. It troubles Moving Wallpaper. It completely blights Echo Beach.

Martine McCutcheon is almost certainly an absolute sweetheart, but she’s desperately unconvincing. Echo quickly reveals its hand- this isn’t clever meta-telly at all; it’s a cynical answer to Channel 4’s Hollyoaks and, latterly and more pressingly, Skins (Skins may be edgier, but it’s also stupider. It’s alienating me and almost everyone who isn’t over 30 or under 14, because we KNOW that high school is nothing like that).

It’s basically The O.C. set in Cornwall. And it’s exactly as dumb as that sentence looks. It also completely fails to make up for this, Californication-style, by including loads of sex, despite the fact that it airs after the watershed. It’s a pity, because if it was just a little more rubbish it could be merrily accepted as an intentionally bad appendix to the otherwise rather watchable Moving Wallpaper.

But both shows have time to improve. We can find out tomorrow night if they do, when the second episodes air on ITV1. In the meantime, let’s celebrate a really very, very clever idea. And mourn that it wasn’t made in America first.

Got the urge to write a list (perhaps you know what I mean?)

So here we are: my own personal current Top Five Albums for listening to all the way through. Properly. From Start To Finish. AS ALBUMS.

In no particular order, and liable to change:

Johnny Cash: The Man Comes Around

Cash’s voice only got better as he aged. This is probably the most depressing album I’ve ever listened to. It is almost utterly maudlin, a descent into musical grief- over ageing, over lost friends, over missed opportunities and loneliness. Even the higher-tempo songs and the occasions of lighter bluegrass seem deeply ironic, or skewed somehow toward sadness. But the lyricism is phenomenal, the cover-versions beautifully selected, the recording treatment tastefully textured and Cash’s voice cracking, dry and warm. And then there’s the final lift, We’ll Meet Again. And with it, the sun emerges. Here is Cash’s final video, which he made for his cover of Trent Reznor’s Hurt.

Pulp: His n’ Hers

Not as successful as Different Class, but a stronger all-over album. Pulp here give us the absolute apogee of the Britpop episode, with an album that’s infused with energy and humour, Pulp’s trademark intelligence allowing for guilty-pleasure songs that are pure adrenaline from start to finish. She’s a Lady is seminal.

Brian Wilson: Smile

It was such a long time coming. But this is simply happy on a disc. The production values are immense and the anachronistic optimism of re-approaching a Beach Boys album- say, Pet Sounds- is brought to a new, popular and ageless life. Plus a much, much stronger new version of Good Vibrations to chew on.

Supertramp: Breakfast in America

I do love a good concept album. This is certainly the best I can think of off the top of my head, essentially a musical dialogue between Britain and the USA, both in terms of style and lyrics. The songs sweep from powerful hooks to adrenaline-buzz finales via the best bits of a dozen genres, and none of it has aged even a single day. The title track has been essentially raped by some heav sampling in appalling music recently.

David Bowie: Aladdin Sane

My favourite Bowie album seems to change every time I listen to one again. Right now, the filthy, cheekily debauched antics of Aladdin Sane are rocking my boat. It’s never been appreciated on the same level as Ziggy Stardust, and this is a huge mistake. Aladdin essentially does for the American rocker what Ziggy did for a more British tradition. He’s a remarkable character, and rewards repeated listening.

How about you guys?

First let it be established that I am by no means an expert on comic books. I read few of the super hero serials as I grew up (it’s an aspect of childhood far less common than in the states). I did read a few of Spiderman, quite a lot of Hulk, the occasional X-Men, and a few ‘themed’ graphic novels or one-offs that could be found in my local library. I was initially fond of Peter David, whom I stumbled into from his Star Trek novels, a childhood fascination of mine. Even then, David’s were just a little bit less rubbish to my developing snobrain (new word!)

More recently, I’ve made a point to catch up where it counts- Warren Ellis (in particular Transmetropolitan), as well as classics like Watchmen and some of the more celebrated Batman books (Dark Knight Returns and so on). I’m currently working my way through Neil Gaiman’s Sandman. If only my dissertation wouldn’t keep interrupting me. Oh, and Next Wave rocks. COME TO PAIN MOTHER.

So, as any decent comics fan will tell you, I am very much a newbie. Interestingly, I’m also probably exactly the sort of casual reader that comic books could really do with attracting. I may be a symptom of broadening appeal and pigeonhole disintegration. Which is new for me, I think.

Anyway, Phonogram. I read it yesterday, and it didn’t come out very long ago. It’s essentially a protracted essay on the way that music constructs us, the Britpop movement taken as a particular example. In the vivid, wonderfully pretentious world evoked by writer Kieron Gillen and artist Jamie McKelvie, music is the same thing as magic, manipulated by two groups- phonomancers, like our protagonist, and retromancers, who are to all intents and purposes the baddies. When the semi-deity patron-queen of Britpop, Britannia, disappears, David Kohl is ‘recruited’ to find out what’s going on. But his own intense personal connection with the Britpop era is involved as well, especially when Kohl realises that his own past is at stake…

It’s a quick and very easy read. Gillen subjects us to a niche culture without ever descending into the worst of geekiness, and the book is never less than accessible. The art is very clean and crisp, with a sort of graphic-design sensibility running throughout. The combination is very effective, and will surely sweeten the pill of all the philosophy which the tale carries along with it, as we deal with the nature of personal construction and, implicitly, art itself.

Happily, it all coalesces to a bit of a classic comic-book ending (insane cultists must be STOPPED!). And Kohl himself is pleasingly arrogant, the supporting cast witty enough to keep the whole thing bubbling along nicely. Laugh-out-loud moments are few, I suppose, though I’ve been spoiled by Next Wave lately.

Perhaps the greatest impact Phonogram had for me was strictly personal. I grew up during the height and tale-end of the Britpop phenomenon (I remember Common People being the first time I enjoyed watching Top of the Pops). I was only old enough to start appreciating the whole thing by the very end. I was actually rather fond of Kula Shaker, a band I stole from my older sister and which (amusingly) comes in for a pretty rough ride in Phonogram. But I also remember owning an Echobelly cassette, and my love affair with Blur kicked off pretty early. And, of course, Britpop has informed much of the music I listen to today, and my retrospective approach to many of the classics of that age is more important to me musically than any delving with truly contemporary bands. In short, Britpop was the first cultural phenomenon that I was actually aware of; the first tiny way in which I understood that there was a zeitgeist to be tapped into.

Now look what’s happened. Thanks to this comic, I’ve started digging it all out again. And it’s great.

Part of this is also because I associate Kieron Gillen quite strongly with my mid-teen interests. He’s cut his teeth as an excellent games reviewer. Specifically, he once wrote a Dear John letter to Descent 3. I don’t think I’ll ever forget that.

Anyway, if you want to see the first proper step in imbuing 90s Britain with a character, look no further. A great graphic novel, and especially worth the attention of anyone who’s even vaguely interested in music.

Here’s a nice preview to get you started.