Archive for November, 2023

Sentimental Education

November 7, 2023

Quoting Orwell on children’s books, Christopher Hitchens said:

what he found (in an essay called ‘Boys’ Weeklies’) was an extraordinary level of addiction to the form of story that was set in English boarding schools. Every week, boys (and girls) from the poorer quarters of industrial towns and from the outer edges of the English-speaking Empire would invest some part of their pocket-money to keep up with the adventures of Billy Bunter, Harry Wharton, Bob Cherry, Jack Blake and the other blazer-wearing denizens of Greyfriars and St. Jim’s. As he wrote:

‘It is quite clear that there are tens and scores of thousands of people to whom every detail of life at a ‘posh’ public school is wildly thrilling and romantic. They happen to be outside that mystic world of quadrangles and house-colors, but they can yearn after it, daydream about it, live mentally in it for hours at a stretch.’

The main body of that essay is about Harry Potter, another franchise selling the dream of a magical school that whisks talented children away from dull and impoverished lives. The film director John Hughes did something similar with his string of movies in the 1980s and Laurie Nunn, creator of Netflix’s Sex Education, drew inspiration from him. 

When I was growing up everyone loved John Hughes, but I could never stay awake through any of his films except Ferris Bueller. Sex Education was a difficult intro. The first two episodes were so annoying I was holding on for dear life. None of it made sense. Everyone sounded too posh. This bright beautiful town. This bright polished fun school where everyone gets to wear their own clothes, when in real life they’d have some horrible uniform (as indeed happens in season 3 when Hope takes over). The plot was silly. There’s a sixteen year old kid called Otis who is the son of sex therapists, but is sexually repressed. Maeve, who he is secretly in love with, suggests he start up his own sexology clinic to help the teenagers with their problems. So everyone starts paying for advice from this lad who has never had a sexual experience – even with himself.

At the end of episode three they end with a scene of Maeve sitting in her trailer, not speaking, and I realised there was something there. From that point Sex Education becomes unmissable. You get hooked into the stories of the various sixth formers as they desire and plot. The characters get fleshed out. Otis’s dad is a psychologist named Remi Milburn, absent for many years. Otis finds him at an event where he is promoting his book, ‘Is Masculinity in Crisis’? to an audience of mainly uncertain-looking young men. Afterwards the two go for a drink and Otis confronts Remi about his failings. For the first time, Remi becomes both self aware and honest. He tells his son:

You know, when you’re young… you think that everybody out there really… really gets you. But, you know, actually, only a handful of them do. All the people who like you, despite your faults. And then if you discard them, they will never come back. So when you meet those people… you should just hold on them. Really, really tightly. And don’t let them go. And whatever else you do [tapping a copy of his book] never read this fucking book.

At that point one of the lost-looking young men from the audience interrupts them to ask Remi for an autograph. Remi cheerfully signs the young guy’s copy of the worthless book. 

The school based stories are still absurd, but you begin to appreciate the setting more. There are incidental characters, bizarre performances, funny teachers, and the best cover of Peaches ‘Fuck The Pain Away’ you’ve ever heard. Moordale is fun, and everybody’s welcome. Headmaster Mr Groff has a breakdown and loses his position, and is replaced by professional young educator Hope Haddon. While Michael Groff was old fashioned, but ruled with a light touch, Hope is a modern authoritarian who imposes an abstinence-only curriculum, which doesn’t go down well. Her control of the school ends in scandal and the school being closed down. 

At that point the series could, maybe should have ended. The final season was its least popular. Moordale was replaced by Cavendish, run from below by a supremely annoying trio of teenage progressives who will charge you for gossiping in front of them. We graduated from the sex school to the Sunday School of Woke, and it was a hard adjustment for many viewers. 

In a classic hatchet job the Guardian’s Lucy Mangan wrote:

If Sex Education were staying true to its early, far more radical roots, it might do more than just hint at the potential downsides of relentless positivity, but here the rule remains absolute affirmation only… Also dragging down the mood is the fact that everyone – and not just the rival sex therapist O (Thaddea Graham) who is already set up at Cavendish – use therapy speak at all times. Sex Education scripts used to be fleet and funny. Now everyone is earnest, delivering life lessons at every turn and making you long for the days when humour was still an honoured part of the human condition.

Yet the school genre has always sought to deliver moral instruction. Entertainment was almost secondary to that. When I was a kid I read everything by Enid Blyton, including the school stories, which always had a didacticism of varying subtlety. At some point one of the characters, in the afterglow of some test of her virtue, says to herself: ‘We learn more than lessons at Whytliffe School!’

Shaad D’Souza writes: ‘While the show has previously dealt with subjects such as abortion, discrimination and sexual assault, weightier than average for a teen drama, it’s darker than it’s ever been, siloing many of its core characters, such as Otis (Asa Butterfield), his mother, Jean (Gillian Anderson), his best friend, Eric (Ncuti Gatwa), and his love interest Maeve (Emma Mackey), in order to send them on their own journeys of strife and self-discovery.’ Nunn silos them off – and in many cases puts her characters through their own tests of virtue and responsibility just as Blyton did. Even Mr Groff the former headmaster is left to try and change and grow, in the wreck of his marriage and career. He cuts a sympathetic figure and is yet another lost soul in need of instruction. 

Conservatives hate stuff like Sex Education because they see it as indoctrination – and the wrong kind of indoctrination, at that. And I could never be told anything by anyone. But there was still some of that old exhilaration in the final season. There are some writers, educators, entertainers and professionals who are driven by the need to instruct and teach others – and if they sometimes get it wrong, well, this kind of education is better than it was in my day. 

As series creator Laurie Nunn said: ‘Things move so fast nowadays and there’s so much amazing TV out there. I’m always joking that my baby’s gonna get older and be like: ‘Oh no, Mum, you made that really problematic, really embarrassing sex show.”

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An Acquired Taste

November 6, 2023

Poor Matthew Perry. What went wrong for him? There are no clues in his formative years. No tyrannical father. No childhood trauma. No diagnosed mental health problems. Yet you know exactly what drove him to excess. Perry’s parents lived thousands of miles apart and he remembered flying alone from Ottawa as a child to see his dad. He would not feel safe until he could see the lights of Los Angeles rising to meet him. ‘But soon I would see the lights of the city and have a parent once more.’

Perry describes a lifelong sense of incompleteness and dislocation. He felt that there was a void inside him – one he had to fill with success, and applause, and with booze and opiates. This sense of incompleteness may stem from all those hours of lonely flights over the continental States. But that feeling of dislocation is basic human condition stuff. We all feel that we are lacking, illegitimate, or in Perry’s words ‘not enough’. (Don’t we?) If only in all those years of rehab and therapy someone had told him – or maybe they did and it didn’t sink in. For me, anyway, it’s something instantly identifiable. A therapist told Perry once that reality is an acquired taste. I knew what Perry meant as soon I read that line, and I also knew that the acquisition of such taste can be the work of a lifetime.

Every autobiography is a success story, Martin Amis said. Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing is not a success story. The poor man is like something out of F Scott Fitzgerald, or Bojack Horseman. Perry often breaks off the narrative to say something like: ‘During that time, I met at least five women that I could have married, had children with. Had I done so just once, I would not now be sitting in a huge house, overlooking the ocean, with no one to share it with, save a sober companion, a nurse, and a gardener twice a week – a gardener I would often run outside and give a hundred dollars to so he’d turn his fucking leaf blower off. (We can put a man on the moon, but we can’t invent a silent one of these things?)’ And, later: ‘Instead, I’m some schmuck who’s alone in his house at fifty-three, looking down at an unquiet ocean…’

Self pity is hard to take, particularly from the wealthy, but there’s no point in Perry’s memoir where you feel he’s asking you to feel sorry for him. The style is too self aware and funny and candid for that. Even the really terrible lines (‘My colon exploded’, ‘I’m a drug addict, I did some drugs, that’s what we do!’) you will hear them in the voice of Chandler Bing, and Perry of course knows this. He fell in love with his character and indeed reading this book I realised for the first time the weight the right actor can bring to a character. The tragedy of Perry’s life, as he says, is that the character had surpassed him: ‘It was not lost on me that Chandler had grown up way faster than I had.’

Anyway, how has Friends aged? There’s a fascinating discussion, one that social media has yet to address. I tried to watch the series through last year and stalled at season five. I never thought it was the same since Chandler and Monica got together – not because the characters lost their spark but because the whole show felt too polished and professional. People say Friends was too white, but that’s true of most TV in the nineties. At its worst Friends was a despotism of social norms – the main group are these shiny happy people and the humour came from their interactions with various wacky people outside their group.

The Atlantic’s Megan Garber said:

I don’t love that they tend to make the people outside the universe the butt of the jokes. You’ve got the core people. And then you have the side characters and dating interests who cycle through their lives. And typically, it’s those outsiders who get the brunt of the jokes. They’re expendable and therefore the most mockable, which is not a great dynamic.

Having said that, at least Friends was good at eccentrics and grotesques: Patrick Kerr’s wonderful turn as the creepy restauranteur, Chandler’s disturbed housemate Eddie, Phoebe’s brother Frank, Mr Heckles and Janice and even Jack Geller. (‘A woman who works in my office is a lesbian. I’m just saying!’) The early seasons are the best because they’re hanging out in their apartments together and having a laugh (Monica’s apartment is unrealistically large – has anyone mentioned that?) and it makes you think of when you were in your early twenties and spent lazy afternoons watching the show with your friends, because all of you had nothing but time on your hands. It was such a chilled, witty vibe and we had the drama of Ross and Rachel’s on-off relationship. As the Twitter account ‘what a weird week’ said, their love story was completely misaligned. ‘Everything is ALWAYS fraught. Fighting, jealousy, possessiveness, drama. Their relationship looks EXHAUSTING.’ Chandler and Monica were the more natural couple, but Ross and Rachel – whether in each other’s arms, or at each other’s throats – captivated us more.

So I feel bad for Matthew Perry, sad that he died alone, probably in that same big empty house by an unquiet ocean. I never shared Perry’s faith in God or the higher power but I do hope that if there is a place that we walk after we die, that that walkway has a star with his name on, and that there are city lights rising to meet him. For men of a certain age, Perry’s premature death could not, uh, be more poignant. 


(Image: Wiki)

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