Sexy Beasts – Netflix

Sexy Beasts is the new dating show from Netflix that revels in its weirdness. Taking inspiration from The Masked Singer, this is The Masked Singletons. Four young people looking for love are masked up with professional prosthetics, wigs, hairpieces and stage make-up as thick as your palm. Looking for love, they’re sent off on a series of dates in locations straight out of Richard Curtis’ films. Look closely and you might find Hugh Grant stuttering winsomely at some lucky lady.

In episode one we meet Emma the demon who is covered in red make-up accessorised with horns on both her head and her chin, which feels like overkill to me. In real life she’s a model from New York, tired of being judged on looks alone, and looking for someone to get to know her beyond surface level. I mean it’s a nice problem to have, if a dating show needs to put in work to make you look uglier. The posing and posturing in the edit made me certain that the contestants must all be 100% American frat boys, but no. Two of her suitors are British. That’s Gloucster lad Archie the stone man (the moss growing around his ear is a nice touch) and Adam the Brummie mouse. Bennett the baboon is the only American guy in Emma’s threesome.

Emma has three speed dates with the beastly suitors in a lovely London bar. There’s no real chance of interesting free-flowing conversation like in Channel Four’s excellent First Dates as the editing here is very choppy and the whole show feels rushed. Emma says her men need to step up and open up to her more about what they’re really like, but they’ve not really had chance to say anything. Maybe she’s just as confused as we are.

At this point Emma has to send one man home. Despite the 100% appealing offer of a date “getting smashed” in a “dirty little Birmingham pub” Emma chooses to send Adam the mouse home. He de-masks and Emma and his competitors get to see his real face which is quite combative and all very awkward.

The location fixers had fun, with a stately home used as base camp, and a fancy-looking health spa and a theme park for the ‘proper’ dates. The two remaining beasts get to spend some proper quality time flirting with Emma and trying to impress her. Bennet is her first choice by a long margin, and we get to see them bump rubber as they try to kiss in masks. 

Rod Delaney (whose voice I did not recognise) is the warm and slightly sarcastic narrator ready with gentle snark to puncture all the boastful self-publicists. But God bless the guy in the trailer who, asked about his priorities in a partner, says “Ass first, looks second”. What an icon. May he get exactly the high-quality ass of his dreams.

Erm… a grasshopper and a dolphin or something at a bar, I guess?

So many of these types of shows portray their contestants as superficial and bland, with everyone in the same sort of outfits, with the same haircuts, tans, sculpted bods, and cheesy pick-up lines. The people themselves are forgettable; they’re so generic. I suspect this isn’t just hot young things on TV and people more generally want to fit a certain very prescriptive mold when dating; to be conventionally attractive and always on best behaviour. At least this way the masks make people stand out, for the viewer at least, and perhaps even leveling the playing field slightly between extrovert model types and shyer more introverted people. I hope we see a bit more of that in this series, and it’s not wall-to-wall over-confident people. 

But really, no deep questions are asked or answered. Any moral message about substance over surface is completely lost beneath the layers of prosthetic. It’s just a silly bit of superficial summer fun designed to be served with popcorn on a Saturday night after you’ve turned your brain off. As to whether I’ll watch the rest, I don’t know. But best of luck and Godspeed to Mr Ass Man. May the booty be ever in his favour.

The whole first series of Sexy Beasts is on Netflix now, to see you through the weekend.

Like what you read? Chip in the price of a coffee and support my expensive streaming habits. Come on, that Masked Singleton joke was worth a couple of quid alone! Thanks!

'The City and the City'

“Nowhere else works like the cities”. This is the first line of BBC1’s new drama based on the 2009 ‘weird fiction’ novel by British author China Miéville, an exotically named man actually born in Norwich. His book has been adapted for TV by screen writer Tony Grisoni.
The cities in the title are Besźel, which looks like the Eastern Bloc of 30 plus years ago mixed with cafes and people from 1970s Istanbul and Ul Qoma which is glimpsed only briefly in the first episode. These streets look brighter, cleaner, and more advanced. The colour pallets are quite different in each city; dingy yellows for Besźel and clean blues for Ul Qoma. Like the inhabitants, the viewer always knows where they’re looking.
The two cities actually occupy much of the same geographical space, but the inhabitants wilfully ‘unsee’ the areas they’re not allowed to view. Early on Commissar Gadlem (Ron Cook) gets out his overhead projector, and lays two acetate maps on top of each other. That’s a good way to get your head around it.
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'Roast Battle' – Comedy Central

Comedy roast are not all that common in the UK, despite this being the home of the Archbishop of Banterbury, Bantom of the Opera and the Bantersaurus Rex (lads! lads! lads!). While we’re very much at home with taking the piss out of each other in the pub, the playground and all-office emails, this kind of vicious verbal sparring in front of an audience is a format that we’re just not used to in merry old England. We leave that to the Americans, and a proud history they have of it too. Instantly this new Comedy Central show is a bit out of step for the British audience looking for funnies, with a post-apocalyptic set, macho gunshot sound track, and the studio audience expected to shout and point as well as drink and laugh. It’s all a bit too much to believe we can multitask like this.
I love stand-up comedy, on tv and especially live (shout out to the excellent Fat Penguin club nights in Birmingham – if you’re in the Midlands check them out), but I turned this on and watched it through my fingers. I didn’t was this format to fail, but it was bound to be a disaster, right? As The Guardian said “Roast battles and insult comedy? No thanks, we’re British”. But despite the silly gunshot noises and the heavy reliance on Paper Planes by MIA, the battles themselves were not as aggressive as I’d thought. If anything the style is collaborative; usually solo comics acting as a team, building on each other’s jokes, laughing at themselves and visibly enjoying the experience. I was all set to hate it but the four comedians in the first episode did such a good job they quickly won me over.
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'I'm Dying Up Here' – Sky Atlantic

I’m Dying Up Here was on my to-watch list for a long time before I took the plunge. I’m sorry I hesitated, because it’s exceptional television. It’s American comedy-drama television series created by David Flebotte and set firmly in 1970s Hollywood. It was made for Showtime in the US and picked up in the UK on Sky Atlantic (exactly where you’d expect quality imports to pitch up). It has comedy pedigree in its backbone as it’s based on a book by William Knoedelseder detailing the excesses of soon-to-be household names such as Jay Leno, Robin Williams and Andy Kaufman on Sunset Strip in the 70s. It’s also executive produced by Jim Carrey, and at the time of writing, the less said about him the better.
While based in reality, this is a fictionalised account of the premier Los Angeles comedy club, and the denizens who inhabit it, honing their craft to make it to the big time. That way real-life anecdotes can be revised, tweaked and magnified, much like the way a stand-up takes real life and makes it funny, constantly revising their act.
The comedy club is Goldie’s, owned and run by businesswoman and matriarch Goldie Herschlag (played by Melissa Leo, and loosely based on Mitzi Shore the founder of The Comedy Store). She has very little tenderness in her heart and is all about business. She cares for her comics in a way, but is very strict with them, and this tactic has proved extremely successful. What she says goes (even insisting one comic change his name after daring to play in another LA club). Goldie’s is only place where the talent scouts come from Johnny Carson’s ‘Tonight Show’, the big coast-to-coast American talk show. That slim chance at stardom is what keeps her comics loyal.
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'Joanna Lumley's India'

Another jaunty ITV travelogue for those of us going no futher than the park this summer presented by Joanna Lumley (don’t be fooled by the rocks that I’ve got, I’m still J-Lum from the block), grande dame of the small screen and the lady who the word mellifluous was coined for. This is a three part whistle-stop documentary on ITV and J-Lum (I’m going to use it until it catches on) is keen to play up the family connection. She was born in Srinagar, Kashmir, in the last days of the Raj and her family ties go back several generations. One might think she’s rather brave trading on being directly related to the old colonial empire. Thinking about it, that apostrophe in the title might be a little insensitive.
But don’t worry – this is not a programme designed for much thought or reflection. “Gosh!” and “Fabulous!” she enthuses every few minutes about everything. To her credit it certainly doesn’t seem forced and her sparky interest is very infectious. She talks with her hands in rhapsodies about everything – Morgana Robinson’s impression of her on The Agency is entirely accurate. Amusingly the Radio Times insists she’s toned it down a bit this time!
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'The Handmaid's Tale'

If you’ve not yet heard anything about the The Handmaid’s Tale, let me give you a hand getting out from under that rock where you’ve been hiding. This is an MGM production being show on Hulu in America. They seem to be a good 7 episodes ahead of us. Sadly, even in 2017, sometimes America is ahead of us in tv land. It’s great to have synchronised start dates, but it’s still not the norm. Avoiding spoilers for this much talked-about show is going to be a killer.
A few weeks after starting in the USA this 10 part drama series has been picked up by Channel 4 in the UK, which, as the young, intelligent, and left-leaning political channel is a really good fit for their brand and a bit of a coup. The series is based on a novel by Canadian author Margaret Atwood and despite its startlingly relevant content was actually written in 1985. So this dystopian future Atwood envisaged is 30 years closer than we’d have hoped for, and none of her themes are any less relevant or possibilities presented any less realistic. In interviews Atwood says that none of these war crimes in the fictional Republic of Gilead are entirely made up – all have happened somewhere on the globe. This really is extremely dark stuff. Do we as the audience have the stamina to get through it?

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The handmaids distinctive uniforms at a ceremony

 
The series opening is distressing, as our heroine Offred is violently parted from her husband and daughter, but it’s not a tense escape. We know she’ll get caught. The rippling tension comes from her social position at her new posting with the Commander (Joseph Feinnes) and his wife Serena Joy (Yvonne Strahovski).
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