Band of Brothers: Can You Feel the Man-Love Tonight

A few months ago, an actor friend of Monkey's revealed he was in Band of Brothers. "Second private from the right, probably," he said. "I think I got shot. Lots of mud and running." I expressed surprise and interest, explained my love for the series and prepared to wax lyrical about my adulation. He looked bored. "Every British male actor who was under 35 was in that thing," he said. And it's true.

Leaving aside this (with all due respect to him, extremely minor spot), you have a positive galaxy of British youths who were on bearings to better things: Simon Pegg, Marc Warren, Jamie Bamber (errr...actually, scrap that. Jamie Bamber was on a bearing to Ultimate Force at the time), James McAvoy (who I swear to God I still confuse with James D'Arcy but as he has done a film with Angelina Jolie it is beside the point whether little old me gets his name right. I do know he's Mr Tumnus!), Tom Hardy (not as well known as the others, but I've seen him starring on stage twice and he's a truly talented actor) and of course Damian Lewis, whose career has recently stalled in the dull Life, but who in Band of Brothers is little short of a star, partly because he wasn't playing a pillock and therefore it was like a reinvention. There are a few other "oooh I know your face!" types also like the guy from Hotel Babylon these days, but who I know from Press Gang.

There are two things that have always predisposed me to like Band of Brothers. The first is that the titles are so long you can put on the DVD, have a shower and make a cup of tea and come back just as it gets going. I remember when it was on TV you always knew you could miss the first 10 minutes and it would still be merely a dramatic montage with stirring music. The second is that it was filmed down the road from where we briefly lived at the time and my brothers and I would spy through the fence at the site. You could see very clearly a set that at that point everyone knew was a "shelled French village" (someone must have got that from a crew member, because this description was exact amongst the kids). I think the bit of Shelled French Village I remember seeing was probably Carentan, actually, but I may be wrong about that. I also don't recall if it was Band of Brothers or one of the Bonds where they got in trouble by setting off a massive explosion without warning and the population of Hertfordshire hid under their sofas quaking while imagining battalions of Equity members storming the county with fixed bayonets.

The series follows the trials and tribulations of the hopelessly inaccurately named Easy Company of the 101st Airborne. Band of Brothers is mildly constrained by being anchored in the vague vicinity of reality, and for this reason characters die frequently and unexpectedly, so it's as well not to grow too attached to them (it is similar to The Bill in this respect). Putting names to faces is all but impossible, even after you've seen it a million times. Even differentiating the faces can be tricky, since according to the series Easy Company was little short of a beauty contest for the conventionally attractive.

Now, I don't much like action or war films. I certainly didn't like Saving Private Ryan, which is Band of Brothers' illegitimate father. So why do I not only like Band of Brothers, but have a copy of the DVD, which I treasure? It's quite simple, really. As a television series, it's close to faultless. Oh, sure, the wimmin (when they turn up) have been waiting their whole lives to lay the Americans, the Germans are aquiline and brusque, the British are bumbling idiots. Who cares? Band of Brothers conveys the war through certain eyes: one company of the US Army, and as such it tells us more than any film. You live it with them, even if (like me) you have no clue what the relative sizes of platoons, companies and battalions are.

Well, the difference is the canvas upon which it is writ. It is not like with your The X-Files or The West Wing DVDs, you can't sit there at 11 o'clock with time to watch one episode and think, "I'm going to watch that great episode where so-and-so's legs get shot off", it doesn't really work like that. Band of Brothers only works when watched as a whole, a snapshot of the war with all the inaccuracies you would expect from recalling from first hand experience, as I have forced Monkey to do this weekend. He had previously dipped in and out, and hadn't got the appeal. He gets it now.

They are of course all immensely brave, and of course to a casual British viewer with a jaded sense of humour there is occasion where this reverence for the courage of soldiers becomes pretentious. They say things like, "We're paratroopers. We're meant to be surrounded." They march purposefully into the jaws of death. But, and this is the saving grace, the series doesn't judge those who are not Thor-like gods of war. Those who aren't latter-day Alexander the Greats are treated sympathetically - men out of tune with the situation they find themselves in, but men all the same and not cowards. Equally, it doesn't shy away from the nastier sides: the men fall out with each other, they loot the Germans, they shoot unarmed scared enemy fighters, they get demoted because they drink too much, they are successfully faced-down by scary elderly German ladies. They get trashed at the Eagle's Nest. (I've been to the Eagle's Nest and climbing in Hilter's golden lift was the spookiest moment of my life).

There are also several genuinely moving moments. You feel the horror the first time Easy are confronted with tanks, and the enormous relief when Shermans turn up. I have never physically jumped at a war film until watching the barrage at Bastogne, it is impossible not to flinch. The company liberating a concentration camp, without knowing what a concentration camp is. The celebration of VE Day. The final baseball game where we learn the fate of the real characters (I love that last baseball game, so all-American, yet so many of the actors are British, I have to wonder whether they had to do a "Basics of Baseball" course).

It is magnificient television. And like most magnificient television, it has magnificiently attractive actors. One of the episodes is fantastically told through the eyes of the Company medic, inhibited but gorgeous Doc Roe, who sort of sprang into being whenever anyone howled "MEEEEDIC!" for three or four episodes , but actually turned out to have Feelings too (mostly for a pretty, doomed French nurse). And of course the mildly creepy but head-swimmingly gorgeous Lt Spiers. How about drunken but gorgeous Cpt Nixon? Let us not forget troubled but gorgeous Cpl Liebgott. It's only fair to include the awfully untalented but nevertheless gorgeous Pt Webster. And, presiding over all, gorgeous Major Winters, just busting at the seams with love for all the men, equalled only by the love returned until the whole thing became a huge love-in with everyone filled with a warm glow of loveliness that is most welcome after 10hours of purest hell.

Seriously. Make a weekend of it. If nothing else, it will remind you on Monday morning that your life could be a lot worse.

Being Human: A Bit Jacob's Creek-y For Me

Do the History Boys have the careers they currently enjoy because of their former History Boy status, or are they so naturally talented it would have happened anyway?

I saw the play a few times, and each time was completely taken by Jamie Parker. He was entrancing. Hypnotisingly good. Enchanting. I was hugely moved by Russell Tovey too. I was profoundly irritated by Dominic Cooper, who I still think is vastly overrated. And I recall James Corden as being quite funny.

In the film, Jamie Parker got woefully short-changed in favour of Dominic Cooper, who has since applied his limited talents to such fare as Jane Austen and Abba, the twin titanics of the contemporary British film industry. I'm convinced his career is entirely based on "The History Boys", considering that he isn't that great-looking nor that great-acting. Jamie Parker re-emerged in the superb production of The Revenger's Tragedy at the National, and, in a slight change of pace, "Valkyrie". I still love him. He simply fills the theatre. If he doesn't become a huge name (and time is running out) there is no justice. He is such a talent.

Meanwhile, on BBC3, James Corden is now king of the comedy castle, and now Russell Tovey has shaken off the Little Dorrit clasp of somnolence to lend Being Human a bit of dramatic clout. Well, not really dramatic clout. Name and face recognition, maybe. He's playing a sensitive werewolf, alongside a tall, dark and handsome vampire and a pretty but dim ghost in a wonderfully quirky house that is a true find for the location manager, who I applaud. Being Human is ever so slightly too obvious - and, like a lot of BBC3 stuff, cooler-than-thou - the aim is so squarely at 20-somethings that it's liked being locked onto by a missile. 20-somethings are capable of registering things beyond their immediate experience, despite what the head honchos at BBC3 think, who constantly underestimated their audience by assuming "youth" means "special educational needs".

Being Human also has a slightly weird stance on real-world morality. From episode one, our tall, dark and handsome vampire is a murderer, but we are encouraged to sympathise with him. This week it turns out our ghost was the victim of domestic violence - a sobering and serious subject which doesn't meld well considering we are already suspending our belief in justice and morality from a twelve-storey building. Of course we abhor domestic violence, and the show agrees, this violence led to the death of Annie, our ghost. The same show which allows our vampire to roam free after however many murders with our full support? It's weird. I don't like the vampire, whose name I have conveniently forgotten. I don't like brooding types and, despite what I am being told by the show, I don't like killers.

Joe Chamberlain, the delectable Rupert Penry-Jones, doesn't like a specific killer, his Jack-the-Ripper-copycat in Whitechapel, who, despite the crack team of police officers knowing where, when and how the victims are going to be killed, has yet to stop anyone being murdered. Well done, chaps. We in London will sleep feeling safer in our beds knowing you are protecting us.

Working from Home is Snow Joke

Generally speaking, I am not a great one for succombing to the mass hysteria usually prompted by a faint dusting of snow in London. But this morning, when I literally had to shove the door open because of the drift against it and found the Tube suspended and buses vanquished, I buried my hands deep in my pockets, mooched back home and declared myself defeated. It has finally, actually snowed in London. Properly and realistically disruptively.

And bloody inconvenient it is too. Marie has gone off up to the Heath to partake in the general air of festivity which has descended, but I am holed up by the fire, occasionally clicking 'Refresh' on my Outlook and finding working from home lonely, boring and difficult. Planning a shoot in 24 hours is tricky enough, not least when your team are spread across London all feeling grumpy and cold and wet.

It is all a bit retro in these parts in 2009, a bleak midwinter if ever there was one. While we all huddle around our fireplaces in Dickensian/Little Matchstick Girl-stylee, we are galloping towards a recession which has a distinctly 1930s feel about it (tea and bread and butter at the Lyons Corner House, anyone?) and the trade unions are bafflingly rising like a phoenix from the flames to recapture some 1970s glory. Votes for women!

Anyway, work...

Turning all you touch to lead

It's hard not to feel sorry for ITV as far as drama goes. It's not been a great few months.


Firstly, the attempt at marrying two popular previous programmes Bad Girls and The X-Factor, Rock Rivals, was a total, embarrassing and unimaginative disaster. Then they cancelled Foyle's War, a hugely popular series, while in full flow for reasons beyond understanding. This decision was followed by the premiere of The Fixer from Kudos, company behind the likes of Spooks, Life on Mars and Hustle (and Bonekickers, but this was before that catastrophe), which was strangely subdued and mostly uninvolving (although, thankfully for ITV, somehow earned a second series). A valiant attempt to update the period drama, Lost in Austen, didn't work through being bloated and poorly paced and, er, just not that good. And now Demons, from the makers of the successful Merlin was their answer to that show but more specifically Doctor Who. It even starred current hotshot Phillip Glenister. What could go wrong? Everything.

1) The Accents. Philip Glenister cannot do an American accent. Moreover - why should he? You want to appeal to American audiences, get an American. I could tell that accent sucked fifteen seconds after he began talking, did no one notice through the rehearsal stage? And why is everyone northern when it is set in London?

2) The Mythology. What are half-lives and inhumans? How do you grade them, and why do you? Why did you keep saying 'smite'? What happens to them after they are smited? From where do they come, where do they go, and what precisely do they do and why?

3) The Scripts. The gang do nothing but create problems for themselves, notably by leaving anyone identified as potentially vulnerable alone. They just aren't very good at their jobs. Why not just employ Mina as a double agent? Why not just open that grid and not drown? Why not just drag Mina out of the sewer and let the bomb explode? Why? Why? Why?

4) The Clothes. The girls dress like charity shop rejects and Luke dresses like he shops in Miss Selfridge.

4) Ruby. That is all.

The usual ITV thing. It looked cheap. It was flat. The characters were cold. What is the answer? There isn't really one. ITV lacks class. I don't know why. One of the great mysteries of British broadcasting today, if you ask me. Kudos and Shine can do class. ITV can't. Baffling.

Is there such a thing as an anti-Midas touch? Because ITV has it in spades.

Yuletide on the Gogglebox

Gavin and Stacey has done the impossible and out-underwhelmed Doctor Who. From personal experience, this is an unrivalled occurrence. Doctor Who is my problem child, so promising yet forever missing its potential by a mile. But Gavin and Stacey? Former blue-eyed boy currently not only bottom of the class but in fact warranting getting its parents in. Ruth Jones and James Corden, you need to come into school for a chat.


Part of Gavin and Stacey's appeal - and I find it hugely appealing generally - is its bruising yet warm portrayal of everyday life. One of the funniest moments in the episode was Gwen and Pam's kitchen politics with the constant cry of "is there anything I can do?" perfectly mirroring Christmas Day in most houses.


Unfortunately, the hour length and single episode emphasised the how non-eventful it is without capitalising on the charm. Smithy and Nessa were once the funniest things in the programme, and still to a certain extent were - Smithy's observation that his baby was coming "albeit with his mother and her boyfriend, but such is the modern world" and Nessa's brilliant interaction with the baby monitor: "Oy! He's on his way!" - but their tension went unresolved, despite providing one of the most painful moments in this year's television with Smithy's distress at his son's early indoctrination into supporting Cardiff City. Gavin's move to Cardiff was brought up and then abruptly dropped, presumably to be reintroduced in the third series - but what was the point in bringing it up at all? Jason and Bryn's fishing trip was brought back for an encoure but not elaborated upon and the neighbours' mother-in-law was dragged in for a laugh that oddly never paid off. The whole thing seemed like an elongated season premiere that didn't work because there is no premiere for months. It was a huge misfire, and given the attention Gavin and Stacey has deservedly won, and earned its move to BBC1, it was a great waste. Why would you then cripple it like this? Who would be converted by that? I'm already converted, and I hated it! The Office's sensational Christmas specials were brilliant because, as the Last Hurrah of the series, they wound it all up so the Extra Special Length and Timing was okay. This Christmas special, as a place-holder, frustrated me so greatly it has actually diminshed my love for the series. Even more than those awful in-vision commentaries on the DVDs did. Which are, incidentally, a dire concept.


Elsewhere, Doctor Who giveth and taketh away. But I'm so delighted Doctor Who giveth at all these days after two desperately poor years, that I'm giving them a pass. Great writing for once, and a dazzling performance from David Morrissey who somehow rose above the whole thing and made it into a dramatic piece of epic proportions that reduced my seven-year-old niece to tears in the best possible way. How often are children moved that way simply by a middle-aged man sitting quietly and thinking of his dead wife? It was magnificient, such an amazing performance that I got over my disappointment at the fact David Morrissey was NOT, as a matter of fact, going to be the next Doctor. Even David Tennant's maddening Doctor failed to drive me to blind homicidal rage. All in all, it was a success. In fact, my enjoyment of it was equalled only by the unveiled competitiveness on Dancing on Ice, a programme which not only stirred up the battle of the sexes but handed electric cattle prods to both sides. I personally favour the ice dancing over Strictly, if only because you can generally tell when the dances have gone wrong on the ice, often because of the flowing blood. As my brother remarked when my mother attempted to put forward Strictly as the best viewing: "If they start doing the headbanger on Strictly, I'll watch." Also, the fluctuating and fantastically tense relationship between Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean on Dancing on Ice is hypnotising. And Suzanne Shaw's merciless nettling of Chris Fountain's arrogance was a thing of beauty.


BBC4 weighed into the Christmas spirit with Renaissance-man Mark Gatiss and his Crooked House, paired with Lee Ingleby, an actor I adore from Spaced, Master and Commander and the Wind in the Willows. The less said about that Martin Shaw police thing set in the 60s the better (Martin Shaw - there's a man whose career has had some swerves. The Professionals = awesome. Then - The Lost Years. Judge John Deed/60s police thing = depressingly safe but successful. Apparitions = off-the-fucking wall batshit). Once you readjusted to the Crooked House's pace - i.e. BBC4's pace - you realised it was marvellous television, albeit slooooow. Nothing wrong with that. Lets you breathe. Has an actual story you can muse over without being whacked over the head. And walls seeping blood. What more do you want with your mulled wine?

Not much motivated to catch the most-watched programme this year, Wallace and Gromit, since I am not three and since my niece and nephews find them annoying for reasons I can't establish apart from the fact they are extremely spoilt and are more interested in their Wii. The 39 Steps looks promising, if oddly scheduled.


Meanwhile, I am driving Monkey raving mad by watching all my new DVDs commentaries. "You are the only person in the world who watches them," he claims. I maintain this is not true - there must be others who watch them purely to enjoy Schadenfreude as the producers recall a particularly cold day or a nightmarish location. And who cares anyway. Currently my brother's cat is lulled into a coma by my stroking, Monkey is lulled into a coma by Mad Men and I am lulled into a coma by my mother's roast dinner. Merry Christmas, one and all.

Wallander: And The Swedish Tourist Board Wept

"Every time he opens a door, I keep expecting there to be a cliff or something," said Monkey, suddenly.

He had a point. There are definite shades of Ingmar Bergman about Wallander, a show which flirts with surrealism and boredom in equal, fascinating measure. Is this inactivity sinisterly antmospheric or simply an absence of plot?

Kenneth Branagh wafts through the whole bizarre malarkey with his usual air of talent and egoism, meaning that for all the otherworldly feeling of Wallander, there is also a decided mood of "yeah, well, it's Kenneth. We never understand" about it. "You didn't get The Magic Flute?" Kenneth asks. "Well, suck this up, you lazy, voyeuristic bastards who tune in to watch murder and crash out on a Sunday evening from your living rooms in Shropshire. You're about to be kicked up the arse." Yes, Kenneth is adopting the Trojan Horse method in his campaign to bring cinematic Art to the British people, whether they like it or not. People who have a certain soft spot for Foyle's War are abruptly viewers of Scandinavian surrealism, thinking "well...I expect it's good for me", in slight fascinated dismay.

Anyway, Wallander succeeded in its self-proclaimed aim to prove there is more to Sweden than Abba and Bjorn Borg. (And Ikea, but they didn' t mention that because it's the BBC. Other suppliers of flat-packed furniture are available). No - there are also plentiful fields of rape (plant rape, not...you know), grisly murders in unlikely rural locations, and weepy detectives who seem not to be hardened to the challenges of the job after a lifetime. Oh, and cute bullied underlings.

Let's not go there.

For the Love of Merlin

I love Merlin. There, I've said it. I said it yesterday while standing in Louis of Hampstead and was looked at as though in the grip of a raving insanity. Why? People love Doctor Who, Robin Hood is accepted - Merlin outguns them.

A fusion of Disneyland, Harry Potter and High School Musical, with a dash of Buffy and the faintest seasoning of, you know, Arthurian legend, it is frankly a dizzying and intoxicating mess of hysteria, hilarity and a good, old-fashioned romance. It is, essentially, everything Robin Hood tried and failed to be. The effects are awful (though survivable if one has lived through Primeval), the scripts suspect ("Arthur is, like, so annoying", along with the mention of "Destiny" at least ninety-five times an episode) and the acting uneven (Giles-from-Buffy up against Blondey McArthur is a non-challenge), but it is fun.

Of course, it means checking your basic knowledge of the legends at the door. Merlin, Arthur and Guinivere (sorry, Gwen) are all the same age, and Gwen is more interested in Merlin than Arthur anyway, Lancelot is probably older than Arthur, and Artimedes, I regret to say, is nowhere to be seen. There is also depressingly little in the way of turning Arthur into squirrels or fish, and no singing at all. Even when the Lady of the Lake turned up, it was on dry land and no lakes were mentioned.

Naturally, none of this really matters. Morgana is gorgeous, Gwen is sweet, Arthur looks boy band fabulous and Merlin is an adorable geek. After an initial wringing of hands and shrieking "Child, child, was it for this I ploughed through Morte d'Arthur?" you begin to appreciate the sheer wonder of it. We have it all, everything beloved of The CW: rebellious sons, love between men, love between women and men, closeted secrets (the magic closet rather than the gay closet, but judging by the charged looks between Merlin and Arthur it could go either way), life lessons, jousting.

And lots of hugging and learning.

It's brilliant!