This Week in Lumps
#62 [09/09 - 15/09]
· So, lightweight announcement of the week goes to Apple, which is unlike them. The new 4th generation Nano is out, thinner and sleeker than before, and with a new price too. Is it enough?
The blogosphere was decidedly underwhelmed by Apple’s latest product launch, not least because most of the announcements about a new-look iPod nano and refreshed iTunes music store had already been leaked online in the weeks previously. But nonetheless it’s just in time for the Christmas market, which is very much like Apple.
The main new feature is an accelerometer (already found in the iPhone) which allows the Nano to switch between portrait and landscape display modes and shuffle songs when shaken vigorously. As good ol’ Claudine pointed out in her Telegraph article:
“Several other MP3 players, such as the Sansa Shake and Sony Walkman mobile phones, have offered this sort of functionality for a while now, but Apple’s decision to include it in their new iPods demonstrates its commitment to the product”.
The user interface has also been refreshed, in keeping with the new hardware design. It includes a new voice recording feature which starts automatically when an Apple compatible microphone is plugged in. It also includes the new “Genius” feature, introduced by Apple the same day. The Genius feature automatically creates playlists based on a selected song using an algorithm built by Apple.
But what seems to have overshadowed this announcement is news on the Blackberry, which is something I don’t tend to mention much on here. There’s a new Blackberry flip handset coming our ways, coupled witha touchscreen model as well. Putting the cat amongst the pigeons with regards to blowing not just the Nano out of the Christmas market, but also set to wow the potential iPhone market as well. Ouch.
“The BlackBerry, once the preserve of macho investment bankers, is becoming one of the most sought after Christmas presents among teenagers this year. Tech-savvy youngsters, who are obsessed with keeping in touch with their friends 24-hours-a-day, are particularly keen to make the most of the device’s instant messaging service”.
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· You may or may not have heard of a small American sitcom from a few years back called Friends; it used to be a semi-successful sitcom that started in the 90′s and struggled on for ten years, and focused on six 20-somethings (later 30-somethings) living in a run-down New York apartment sleeping with others (and each other) before settling down and having babies and living happily ever after. It did reasonably well in the ratings, and the stars all made a bit of money from it, so much so that the formula of “friends is the new family” was re-marketed a few other times with varying success.
Two of the success stories happened across the pond, firstly, Cold Feet started in 1998, 32 episodes later it had made huge names of the actors and actresses starring in it, and won countless awards. Lesser success (but equally as enjoyable) came the way of Coupling, which also starred 6 friends sleeping with each other, but focused more on the farcical, almost slapstick humour to great success.
I’m sure there’s been many more since, but the most recent BBC effort comes in the shape of Mutual Friends, which started a few weeks ago, and appears on the surface to be a mix of all three of the dram-coms listed above:
“Martin has two best friends, Patrick and Carl, who couldn’t be more different. One is an irresponsible, unreliable, feckless womaniser, and the other is dead. Guess which one slept with his wife?
Martin Grantham is happily married to Jen. They have a son Dan, a nice house, the works. One day his best friend Carl throws himself under a train, setting off a disastrous sequence of events that will change Martin’s life forever…
Into this mess steps Patrick, a friend from way back. Patrick is everything Martin is not – glib, self-confident, popular and pathologically immature. He’s the last person Martin needs in his life right now. Or is he? It’s not a matter of life and death; it’s much funnier than that.
Firstly, the good points, the show has managed to gather together some familiar faces enough to get people interested from the get go; Marc Warren is best known from Hustle, Alexander Armstrong seems to only host HIGNFY nowadays, but can also be seen in Armstrong and Miller (if anyone watches that), the gorgeous Keeley Hawes used to be in Spooks, whilst Sarah Alexander actually made her name in the aforementioned Coupling amongst other things, including Smack The Pony. With such a array of names (and the different edge of having them all as 40-somethings instead of the younger age brackets), surely the show can go from strength to strength?
The first episode went down without any serious choking; the main characters were all introduced without any major hiccups; the initial setup storyline was handled decently, and the initial plotlines were started and built upon to guarantee the show had enough weight to last the 6 episodes. However, its after this initial streak of fortune and good luck that the show starts to wear thin. Despite a vague glow of interest from my female flatmate, it was never enough to warrant anything other than a “I’ll record it” reaction from me, basically meaning it’ll sit on the Freeview HDD until a typical Sunday evening ‘slouch on the couch’ session, in which we hack our way through anything we’ve missed (but recorded) during the week. This past Sunday was one of those slouch days.
It was half way through the 3rd episode that my interest really fell to the wayside, and my eagerness to do something else kicked in. It was also around this time of the show that I turned to my flatmate and announced “y’know, there’s absolutely no-one in this show I truly like, or want to like”, and that, sadly, is the shows main problem; In Friends, everyone was annoyingly likable in their own quirky, American way, and in Coupling, despite it being a comedy, you also had more than enough love for characters like Jeff or Steve. The problem with Mutual Friends is that everyone is so horrible, self-centered, egotistical, over the top and, in the case of the men, thick, that they’ve gone from being a tad likable in the first episode to totally unbearable in the 3rd. Warren’s character Martin has this ‘mouth & surroundings’ illness that means he can only slag someone off when they’re standing right behind him, and although this joke is quirky and amusing the first time round, it gets annoyingly repetitive after the 32nd ‘mishap’. His wife Jen, played by Hawes, shagged his best friend (the one who died), later told him at said funeral, yet still had the nerve to turn it round completely onto Martin who was too thick to realise what she was doing. Jen doesn’t stop at manipulation, as shes quite apt at lying to her child, hiding from her widowed friend so she avoids confrontation, and making her husband seem completely useless, even though he probably is, before demanding a divorce, and then shagging him in a loo.
Armstrong’s character ‘Patrick’ is so clichéd it’s hard to like him just for the sake of liking anyone – the opening scene sees him late for the funeral because he’s “banging a bird” as he’d put it, who he then deserts to zoom off to the funeral in his E-type Jag. He bumbles his way through the rest of the episodes trying to act, when you can’t help but feel that anyone else could be doing a better job. Even when he does something so incomprehensibly nice (such as the Fire Engine for his pals son), it isnt built up enough to give the audience time to give two shits. He’s trying to get back with Alexander’s character ‘Liz’, who is apparently so desperate the only man she could bed is Patrick’s fellow work colleague, but apparently because it’s “revenge” we’re meant to think that it’s okay.
For a show that starts off quite dark (in the death of a character), you’d expect it to remain dark for a little while longer, but the writers are too keen to squeeze every little drop of gossip and storyline into the first few episodes that it’s turned into a glorified soap, with sarcastic jokes and looks just moments later. The script, written by Anil Gupta and Richard Pinto (Goodness Gracious Me and The Kumars at No 42), isn’t bad, and has the occasional moment, but much like wearing a thong on backwards, it doesn’t feel right, and certainly doesn’t look right. By the end of the 3rd episode, its clear just how weak it is on paper overall, matching on occasion just how weak it is on screen, being held together by thin threads because some of the cast have an ounce of talent.
So, after 3 hours of bog-standard TV drama, I started to think where it had all gone wrong; why can’t a TV drama series about friends and the trouble they bring be enjoyable? It doesn’t have to be OTT like Friends to get the ratings, and it can even have the odd teary moment like Cold Feet if the writers feel like it, so why has Mutual Friends failed to live up to its predecessors?
Andrew Billen from The Times admitted:
“I wished for more subtlety, more black humour, more depth of emotion!”
Overall, you have to love who you’re watching. You loved Chandler; you laughed at him, you cried with him, you fell in love with him, and that was due to a great script, a great actor, and great support from his fellow actors. No fortune, no luck. Some shows have it, some shows sadly do not.
Mutual Friends does not.
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That was the week in lumps, a week in which: Noel doesn’t want to pay his TV licence, Sky channels stay on Freeview, the Darwin Award claims another nominee (I was going to say Fried O’Nions, but thats out of order), you should eat naked to lose weight, Facebook have Commandments, and Phillip Seymour Hoffman isn’t convinced that he’d be a good Penguin for the Batman franchise.
Wait… Bunny doesn’t have floppy ears? Best call 999!
ttfn
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