I spent the day getting ready for my upcoming trip to Italy and Germany, and when I'd finished packing and other logistics for the evening, I sat down to finish Fast X. I started it last night and wanted to finish it before I leave, so you get my thoughts on that instead of my anticipation of my first trip without family since before the pandemic (the Germany part; for the Italy part I'm going to see my mom).
There are spoilers after the jump, so be warned:
Since about 23 June 2016, observing the UK from my safe perch here in California has been like watching a slow-motion car crash. Everything was in slow motion for the longest time, but as time has gone on the suck has accelerated, so it sometimes feels like everything's going wrong all at once. I'm going to try to put things in order, because although everyone over there is talking about the next election, which a) is scheduled for sometime in 2024 and b) can't come soon enough, there are reasons, to paraphrase Ian Dury, not to be cheerful.
A lot of this is based on my reading of UK news, particularly in the Guardian, but also on reading social media accounts based in the UK. I also chat from time to time with friends and relatives who are there, but it's worth pointing out that a certain point of view is over-represented. Still, the destruction of the economy through Brexit and the fact that schools are literally collapsing in on themselves and the fact that the UK has had four prime ministers just since the Brexit vote (and three just since last year) are pretty clear to see, regardless of whether you read the Grauniad or the Torygraph.
Starting with the Tories, then: they seem to be going through a similar evolution as the Republican Party here in the US, though there are differences. The main one is that the Conservative Party has not, as a whole, abandoned the principles of democracy the way the GOP has here. There have been some moves by select figures here and there to circumvent the parliamentary process, as when Boris Johnson was trying to get his Brexit deal approved without having it go through Parliament. Those moves have largely failed, in part because I suspect that, crusty and hidebound as they may be, even the most inveterate Tory MP is less willing to permit such guff than their US Republican equivalent.
Another similarity is talk among Tories of "the blob", which is similar to the "deep state" that apparently plagues Donald Trump here. But whereas the deep state is the entire apparatus of political insiders, in the UK the blob mainly just refers to career civil servants who sometimes object to Tory ministers' more outlandish behavior. This could be plans to upend the economy by announcing unfunded tax cuts, plans to send asylum seekers to Rwanda, or just bullying senior civil servants until they quit.
The deep state seems to have found more fertile ground here, whereas it sounds to me like the blob is something that only senior Tory frontbenchers complain about. Again, because Brits seem not to be as susceptible to guff as Yanks, though they did keep Boris Johnson in power for an inordinately long period of time.
The main similarity is the Tories' war on woke, which is probably the thing that's gained the most traction outside of Westminster. The war on woke isn't just around racism or LGBTQ issues, but also refers to climate protests and Brexit, which are a bit more prevalent there than here. Leaving aside Brexit, it doesn't sound like the US has any comparable organization to Just Stop Oil or Extinction Rebellion, though that might be more to do with the fact that a lot of states have legalized running over protesters in your car.
What's most striking to me of all the Tory nonsense at the moment is the scandal around substandard concrete in schools, which has blown up all of a sudden just a week before schools are set to reopen for the fall. This is something that was flagged a couple of years ago, when the roof of a school actually collapsed (on a weekend, so no one was there), but that the government has ignored until now.
In fairness, two years ago Boris Johnson was dealing with the pandemic and with the beginnings of the outrage over his violations of lockdown rules. His successor, Liz Truss, wasn't in office long enough to look at the issue (which is probably best, because she'd have probably contrived some way to just knock down every school in Britain at once). So it's fallen to Rishi Sunak to deal with it, which he's done in the inimitable Tory way of ignoring it until he couldn't any longer, and then blaming everyone else for the problem.
So why don't I feel good about Labour and the upcoming election? Well, Labour seems to have lost the plot in general since 2015, when everyone kind of shat the bed and freed the Tories from having to govern in coalition with the Liberal Democrats (who also shat the bed, because they'd been in a coalition with the Tories). I don't consider Jeremy Corbyn's time as Labour leader to be a loss of plot, but he was undone by a lot of infighting within the highest echelons of Labour, and by the antisemitism scandal.
It's also true that he was maybe a little too right-on, Red Wedge, 80s Marxist Labour, which undoubtedly scared off a lot of people, though I appreciated that he was at least trying to position Labour as a different party to the Conservatives, something that has eluded most Labour leaders since 2005. And it should be remembered that he led Labour to a much stronger showing than expected in the 2017 snap election, so he clearly wasn't turning off that many voters back then.
No, I have severe misgivings about Keir Starmer. He seems to have taken his cues from the Tony Blair following wing of the party, and has staked out the most centrist positions he could on just about everything. The most recent was Labour's U-turn on introducing a wealth tax and raising the top rate of income tax, which they'd promised to do in their platform in 2020.
Now, I've heard the argument that Starmer can't be too radical, because he can't implement any progressive policies if he doesn't win. But at what point does he jettison so many policies that he doesn't win anyway? And, to be blunt, is he just waiting to get into power so he can then introduce a wealth tax after all? Is he lying now, or was he lying then, in 2020, when he said he'd introduce this new tax?
It seems unlikely that Sunak would be able to outmaneuver Starmer the way David Cameron did to Ed Milliband in 2015, by promising a whole raft of seemingly progressive policies that undermined Labour's centrist positioning. Cameron did a good job of pretending to be modern and progressive in certain things, and responsible in the ways that people want Tory PMs to be, but I think that level of charisma is beyond Sunak. And even if Sunak himself were a magnetic personality (let's not forget that this is a man who lost an internal Tory leadership election to Liz Truss), it's clear to all but the most RT-addled Tory voters that the Nasty Party isn't pretending to care about the environment or worker safety or any of that crap.
The danger is that Starmer spunks away so much goodwill that he does manage to win the next election, but that he only earns a slim majority, which doesn't let him do anything. Four or five years later, the Tories could therefore come back, probably under Boris Johnson again, and point to the government's lack of achievement to win themselves another term.
What's frustrating is that this current government is on its last legs, devoid of ideas beyond fighting culture wars. Starmer has the opportunity to be a transformative figure, more than just a safe pair of hands to right the economy after Brexit and the pandemic and the European energy crisis, but he seems unwilling to take this opportunity. To put it another way, he's on the Blairite wing of the party, but he seems to have none of Blair's good points.
Britain doesn't just deserve better: it needs better, unless it wants to end up experiencing Blackadder's vision of England with his manservant Baldrick in charge: cavorting druids, death by stoning and dung for dinner.
Since I started keeping track of how many movies and TV shows I've watched in 2023, I've fallen into the same trap as I have with books, namely that of chasing numbers rather than enjoying what I'm watching. In the context of books, it manifests in trying to read a certain number of books per year, per quarter, per month, etc, and trying to read a certain number of pages per day to hit those goals.
I haven't reached that level of obsessiveness with movies or TV shows, but it manifests in other ways. For example, earlier in the year, I was assigning certain TV shows to certain days of the week, which was useful for managing the concurrent seasons of Ted Lasso, Succession, the Mandalorian and Picard, among others. The adverse result, however, is that I become less willing to add a new TV show to my rotation, because I'll have a limited number of days to watch it.
Part of the problem there is that everything is serialized now. If you skip an episode of a show, you'll have missed developments that inform subsequent episodes, so you need to obsessively watch everything in order. It also means you can't just enjoy a few episodes or a single season in isolation, because you're missing the developments that came before, and not seeing the resolution of what comes after.
Serialization has been good for TV overall, at least to some degree. Star Trek is (as always, around here) a good case in point. The original series is criticized now for essentially resetting the characters between episodes - any character growth or lessons learned don't appear the following week. This makes sense in the context of TV at the time (and for a few decades after), where the real money was made in syndication, where episodes were broadcast out of order. The expectation was that an episode would run, say, at 6pm in syndication, and if someone wanted to watch some Star Trek, they watched that episode or nothing. Subsequent shows have been more serialized, though TNG was still easy to run out of order in syndication, while DS9 and most of the New Trek shows are harder to appreciate out of sequence.
The trouble is that sometimes you don't want to get sucked into a whole multi-season story arc, or even remember what happened prior to the episode you're about to watch. This is particularly true when a show falls out of your rotation for whatever reason, and revisiting it therefore feels like a chore.
Enter Blackadder, one of my favorite shows growing up and still one of the absolute classic British sitcoms. When I got on Hulu, I discovered that it was available there, which made me happy because it's been a long time since I watched it. I've started watching episodes here and there, when I don't have time or inclination for a one-hour drama, and I've been doing it out of order, which has been particularly refreshing.
Like all British sitcoms of the era, there's no overarching plotline or character arc to contend with. Each series has its own premise (Medieval England, the Elizabethan Age, the Regency, WWI), and most episodes make just as much sense in any order other than strict broadcast order. The only exceptions are the very first episode, which introduces the main characters and how Edmund becomes the Black Adder, as well as the final episode of each series, where the whole cast usually dies horribly.
So far I've just gone through and identified a few key episodes in each series, and watched one or two of those. For example, in the first series, my favorite episode is The Archbishop, so I watched that in isolation from the others around it, especially Born to Rule and The Queen of Spain's Beard, which are the other episodes from that series that stand with the best of the show overall.
Incidentally, the final episode of Blackadder Goes Forth, Goodbyeeee, ends on a poignant note that critics still talk about more than 30 years later as a moment that transcended its usual silly comedy. And the best part is, you don't have to watch a minute of anything that came before it, neither in its own series or the three preceding ones, for it to land.
As I say, serialization has led to more sophisticated and enjoyable TV overall, like my absolute favorite, the Wire. But sometimes it's nice when you can just watch a show, kind of mindlessly, without worrying about how it fits into the overall story. Blackadder's a good example, as is Law and Order, Star Trek TOS and TNG, and the Simpsons. The point, after all, is entertainment, rather than some obsessive chronicling of internal continuity.
That said, I'm looking forward, at some point, to starting another British show, Line of Duty, which I believe is completely serialized and has to be watched in order. Luckily, that's on Hulu as well.
