Tag: comedy

TV review: The Durrells

Still from TV show The Durrells

Soon after we moved to Bristol, I stumbled across three of the books from the Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell in beautiful matching Faber editions. Tim bought me the missing fourth book and in 2012 I embarked on reading this complex tale of love, politics, friendship and betrayal in Egypt written in the 1950s. I loved them. I loved the language, the settings, the obfuscation of multiple layers of narration. Ever since, I have intended to read more by Durrell and learn more about him.

A couple of years ago I became aware there was a TV show called The Durrells (ITV, 2016–2019) and wondered if it could be about the same man. Well – yes and no. I’m three seasons in, so I’m enjoying it. But what have I really learned?

Lawrence Durrell was the eldest of four children (technically five, but one sister died very young) born in India to British parents. When their father died, Lawrence was already in the UK at boarding school. His mother Louisa decided to move to the UK with her three younger children. After an unhappy few years, all five of them moved to Corfu in 1935. (Right now, in a cold wet January, it is easy to sympathise with the idea to leave Britain for sunnier climes.)

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Book review: The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers’ Guild by Mathias Enard

The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers’ Guild coverWhen Tim mentioned our planned France holiday on a night out back in August, a friend recommended a book set (roughly) in the region of France we were heading to. Which seemed like an excellent idea for a holiday read. I duly bought The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers’ Guild by Mathias Enard (translated from French by Frank Wynne) and started reading it during our idyllic week on l’Ile d’Yeu.

I didn’t completely love this book, but it definitely added a certain something being in the same landscapes I was reading about. The story is (mostly) set in La Pierre-Saint-Christophe, a small village at the border of the Vendée and Deux-Sevres departements in west France. It’s a rural landscape of farms and villages, getting marshy as you get closer to the Atlantic coast. The Vendée is famous for its salt. Salt pans border the roads, between a grid of narrow channels that help to guide the water, with grazing animals and water birds far outnumbering the signs of human life. It honestly looked a lot like the Somerset levels from the bus we took through the area. Similar weather too!

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TV review: Call My Agent

Call My Agent poster

I loved this show. After our holiday in Paris at the end of January I wanted to keep the holiday magic alive. So I finally checked out French comedy Call My Agent/Dix Pour Cent (France Télévision/Netflix 2015–2020) several years after I heard the recommendation from TV critic Rhianna Dhillon. It’s so good I devoured all four seasons within a couple of months.

The show is set at a Paris talent agency, where established agents Andréa (Camille Cottin), Mathias (Thibault de Montalembert), Gabriel (Grégory Montel) and Arlette (Liliane Rovère) manage stars’ – mainly actors – careers, egos and dilemmas. We’re introduced to their world through Camille (Fanny Sidney), a young woman who has come to Paris to confront her estranged father and stumbles into a job as Andréa’s assistant.

This is a light, workplace comedy very much in the vein of W1A, the BBC comedy that satirises the BBC. Genuinely great actors with excellent comedy chops are placed in largely frothy and/or satirical storylines. The guest stars are actual, mostly French, celebrities playing themselves. (Which I admit I did not realise for the first few episodes as I did not recognise the names of the early guest stars. I guess huge celebrity in France does not necessarily mean huge international star.)

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Book review: Sunset by Jessie Cave

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Sunset book coverSometimes I love a book while I’m reading it but two weeks later I have largely forgotten it. In other cases, I not only remember details but find myself reflecting on them day after day. Sunset by Jessie Cave falls into the latter category: a highly enjoyable but also profound novel.

I really want to share this recommendation with everyone, but it’s going to be tough to talk about Sunset without spoilers. Even my one-sentence review on Instagram arguably included a spoiler! So I’m going to do a brief spoiler-free review, then a very clear spoiling warning before delving into the key subject matter. (The plot summary on Storygraph does an admirable job of getting the essence of the book while remaining spoiler-free.)

This is the story of sisters Ruth and Hannah, narrated by younger sibling Ruth. They’re very different people but have maintained a close relationship into their late 20s. Hannah is grounded, always in a serious long-term relationship, has a career and runs a charity on the side that gives books to children who can’t otherwise afford them. Ruth’s life is…messier. She has been floundering since art school, working zero-hours contracts, mostly at fast-food outlets. She sleeps on a mattress on the floor and survives largely on caffeine and sugar.

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Who would put Jane Austen to an evil purpose?

The jane austen book clubThe Jane Austen Book Club
by Karen Joy Fowler

I picked this book from my TBR because I suspected it would be light and fluffy and that was all I felt capable of reading this past week. It was exactly right.

I should say upfront that I am not a big Jane Austen fan, and have not read all her works, and that didn’t impede my enjoyment of this book. In fact, it gently mocks those characters who are major Austen fans – then again, it gently mocks all its characters. I have read four of Austen’s six novels, but if you were to come to this as a complete Austen newbie, Fowler includes synopses and select quotes from literary critics at the end of the book.

The format is that each chapter is based around a meeting of the book club – so it’s a new month, a new book and a new setting (the club’s six members take it in turn to host). As is perhaps predictable, the earlier chapters contain more earnest dissections of Austen’s work, while later on it is the club members’ lives that are being analysed, for the most part.

They’re a disparate group to begin with. The club is started by Jocelyn, a middle-aged dog breeder who is worried about how her childhood friend Sylvia is handling the break-up of her marriage, so she decides this will be a useful distraction. I’m not sure that Austen’s concentration on love and marriage is actually the best distraction for Sylvia, which of course tells us something about Jocelyn.

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K-drama review: You Are Beautiful

Tae-gyung, Min-ho/Mi-nyeo, Jermy and Shin-woo are the members of fictional K-pop group A.N.Jell.

This has not been a great few months for me, healthwise, so I am always glad to find TV shows that are entertaining, ones that don’t use too much brainpower but aren’t, you know, shit. You Are Beautiful (SBS 2009) perfectly fit the bill.

This light comedy romantic drama starts with a major nod to Sound of Music, as our heroine, a novice nun, runs clumsily late to mass. This is Ko Mi-nyeo (played by Park Shin-hye, who I know from Doctors and Pinocchio – which I loved – and Memories of the Alhambra – which I did not love – among others) and we learn that she is planning to take her vows soon, but her Mother Superior isn’t convinced this is the right choice for Mi-nyeo, and so enthusiastically encourages her to take a leave of absence to join a singing group as part of a ridiculous plan that is brought to her by music manager, Ma Hoon-yi.

Mi-nyeo’s brother Mi-nam has apparently won a talent contest to join K-pop group A.N.Jell, but he then had some botched plastic surgery that means he needs to secretly stay in hospital for a while. Handily, Mi-nyeo is his identical twin, so could she dress up as a man for a month so that the music label doesn’t find out? Also handily, her singing voice sounds a lot like her brother’s, so the only training she needs is to add emotion. Oh, how will she find emotional meaning surrounded by handsome young men?

Mi-nyeo agrees to this plan based on lies and dishonesty both to save her brother’s career and in the hope that if her brother becomes famous, their mother will come and find them. The twins were raised at an orphanage run by the convent after their composer father died, and never knowing their singer mother is their greatest sorrow. Hoon-yi and the band’s stylist Coordi will help keep Mi-nyeo’s secret until the real Mi-nam returns.

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K-drama review: Oh My Ghost

oh-my-ghost

This was largely a random Netflix find, possibly loosely inspired by a recent conversation at work about how ghosts occupy a different place in East Asian culture to Western culture. Oh My Ghost (2015 tvN) also heavily features chefs and cooking, which I have recently realised I am a big fan of in my TV choices. And the trailer for it looked light and silly, which appealed to me.

Oh My Ghost is a combination of sweet romance, crime drama and supernatural comedy, and it handles all those elements really well. It discusses sex and passion reasonably openly, for a K-drama. And the leads are very beautiful. Which means this comes pretty high in my ranking of K-dramas, despite my low expectations.

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That summed up the whole mess: heartburn

heartburnHeartburn
by Nora Ephron

Man, Nora Ephron was funny. Sadly this was her only novel, but as it is the thinnest veneer of fiction over autobiography, I guess it’s not so far from her brilliant essays. This beautiful new edition from Virago Modern Classics was the centrepiece of a Waterstones window display and tempted me into the shop to buy a copy, then also led me to buy three other books because, you know, I was in a bookshop.

It’s the story of Rachel who, seven months pregnant with her second child, discovers that her husband is not only cheating on her, but has fallen in love with the other woman. She must now figure how to move on with her life while protecting her toddler son Sam. And she has to reassess her marriage to Mark, which turns out to have been on rocky ground from the very start.

“When Mark and I married we were rich and two years later we were broke. Not actually broke – we did have equity. We had a stereo system that had eaten thousands of dollars, and a country house in West Virginia that had eaten tens of thousands of dollars, and a city house in Washington that had eaten hundreds of thousands of dollars, and we had things – God, did we have things…now, of course, I understand it all a little better, because the other thing that ate our money was the affair with Thelma Rice. Thelma went to France in the middle of it, and you should see the phone bills.”

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Recent reads in brief

Giant Days: Volume 4
written by John Allison, illustrated by Max Sarin

I love this series. Room-mates Susan, Daisy and Esther are still battling through their first year of university. This volume opens during the Easter holidays. Esther has decided to drop out, so Susan and Daisy travel to her hometown of Tackleford (the main setting of Allison’s ongoing web series Scary Go Round) to talk her out of it. Hijinks and bonding ensue.

This volume is preoccupied by romance: break-ups, the aftermath of break-ups, the hint of something new. There is a corresponding lack of the surreal weirdness that usually characterises Allison’s work, but the story and in particular the girls’ friendship are so sweet and wonderful that I love it just the same. It’s adorable and it makes me happy.

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Jack Parlabane: books 1–3

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As of April this year, there are nine books in Chris Brookmyre’s series about Glaswegian investigative journalist Jack Parlabane. I read a lot of Brookmyre back in the early 2000s, so I had read the start of this series before, but then years elapsed and rather than pick up where I left off, I thought I’d start from the beginning again. It’s been a real pleasure.

Quite Ugly One Morning
by Christopher Brookmyre

Parlabane is introduced in style in this action-packed romp. Recently returned to Scotland from LA after a difference of opinion with someone powerful who wants him dead, he is laying low in Edinburgh, until suddenly he’s face to face with police. It turns out there’s a dead body in the flat directly below his, which he discovers when he has locked himself out of his own flat, half undressed. By the time he has persuaded the police that he’s an innocent bystander, his journalistic interest has been piqued and he is pulled into a complex plot involving nefarious businessmen and Tory Party shenanigans. Each of these books has a political angle and in this case Brookmyre’s target is the Tory restructure of the NHS. It sounds like a dull basis for satire, but he efficiently finds the interesting angle and digs the knife right in, mercilessly mocking Tory policy. I can’t say I mind, as a fellow liberal lefty, but I do wonder how right-wing or non-political readers would take this. Personally, I think it’s a lot of fun. And I do love the character of Dr Sarah Slaughter.

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