Comedy that brands itself as dark and edgy requires a certain amount of resistance from its consumers to justify its existence, so I’m sure Phoebe Waller-Bridge, creator and star of Fleabag (the second series of which is happening on BBC1) was delighted when several people popped up to declare that miscarriage was not something that should be joked about.


In fact, the miscarriage in the first episode was – apart from its initial shock value, because, no, it’s not something you do expect to happen in a sitcom – more of a McGuffin, setting the stage for a climactic, post-prandial punch-up and developing the awkward relationship between the chaotic Fleabag and her superficially in-control sister. It’s a brave, dangerous show, not least because the central character is a gloriously bloody difficult woman; but it still fits into a classic genre, the British comedy of embarrassment. And now (we’re currently half-way through the series) we’re getting properly self-referential and post-modern, as Fleabag’s droll arch glances and one-liners to camera have been noticed by the sweet, sweary, probably alcoholic Catholic priest (Andrew Scott) she’s determined to shag. If the asides were already Brechtian, the explicit reference to them adds so may layers to the artifice it’s hard to see how she can escape. Verfremdungseffekteffekt, maybe?

Of course, the whole idea of acknowledging the camera’s existence was a key element in the success of The Office, the show that brought Ricky Gervais to most people’s attention. This, however, was in the context of realism, as the cameras were there within the fiction (for the fly-on-the-wall documentary that many of us thought we were watching for the first few minutes of episode one) as well as in reality.


In his new Netflix show, After Life, there are no furtive glances at the camera. The closest we come are the video messages that the terminally-ill Lisa has recorded for her journalist husband Tony (Gervais) and the clips he’s shot of the daft pranks he played on her in happier times. After his death, he declares that the only thing holding his back from suicide is responsibility to look after his dog; the dénouement is [SPOILER ALERT] that, despite his best efforts to become a walking, talking delivery mechanism for toxic abuse, there are plenty more people who love and need him: a new young writer on the local paper he is assigned to mentor; his sad, adoring godson; the amiable sex worker who cleans his house. If the narrative leans towards gloomy neorealism, the setting is defiantly artificial, a pleasant English rural location somewhere between large village and small town, constantly bathed in improbable sunlight, where everything seems to be within walking distance, including the beach. This of course only serves to set Tony’s seething agony in stark relief.

After Life has also prompted complaints, from those who think the nihilistic despair of the recently bereaved shouldn’t be a matter for comedy and, to an extent, I think they’re on steadier ground here, because that is actually what the show is about; where they’re wrong, though is that After Life isn’t in fact a comedy. Sure, calling a 10-year-old schoolyard bully “a tubby little ginger cunt” offers the same sort of transgressive giggle as Fleabag’s gynaecological mishap, but ultimately Gervais’s offering is a tragedy in which funny things are allowed to happen; Waller-Bridge is orchestrating a farce that occasionally throws up tragic moments. (Incidentally, with regard to the language, Netflix seems to be more forgiving than the Beeb; Scott’s priest character was originally meant to refer to his brother as “a cunt” but this had to be changed to something less offensive. So the absent sibling became “a paedophile”. Which is better, apparently.)

I still don’t buy into this notion that we’re in some golden age of TV; it’s simply that more TV is being made, so inevitably there’s more good stuff to be found. Sturgeon’s Law still applies. But Fleabag and After Life are both clearly in the top 10% of that top 10%. As to which is better, I’d just say that while Fleabag dazzles with its wit and sheer devilish attitude, After Life is more like getting a punch in the gut when you least expect it. Fleabag I watch behind barely parted fingers, gasping at its sheer bloody-mindedness; After Life I can barely watch at all, for all the right reasons. Fleabag is a superb piece of Art, while After Life is Life itself.

PS: This just in, via Henry Hitchings on Twitter: Nabokov reference (unreliable narrator?) at the bus stop

(And now for the inevitable anticlimax, goaded out of me by Realdoc and others. Just be grateful that I've trimmed most of the Baudrillard and all the Barthes from it - at one point, it was about twice the length, not including footnotes. I did think a SPOILER ALERT might be appropriate here, but since The Wire is officially the greatest show you've never seen, and probably never will, there's not much point. Unless this provokes one or two of you to join the club, of course.)

The Wire is lauded for its realism; but of course, it is not real. We know the names of the actors who pretend to be cops and gangsters, teachers and students, politicians and journalists and dockers and priests and junkies and hookers; we know the names of the writers who put words in their mouths, and the directors and the producers too. The true obsessives know the cameramen and the editors and the stunt performers and all the musicians who recorded the various versions of the Tom Waits song and the person who crafted Brother Mouzone's bowtie.

But that's not what realism means, of course. Realism at its best means the art of lulling the viewer into two parallel states of consciousness: deep down, they know it's not real; but at the same time, they care as if it is real. The fun is in the tension between the two states. By the last episode of the last season, the makers had grown confident enough to play metafictional games with the audience, dancing in the spaces between The Wire's universe and ours, without severing that emotional, unironic bond.

It's in similar territory to Brecht's Verfremdungseffekt: deliberately alerting the audience to the artificiality of the drama to remind them that the big themes are more important than the imaginary characters. But David Simon (the most appropriate candidate for the role of 'author' here, if such a job title still exists) goes one better; he downplays the reality of Wireworld by allowing real Baltimore to intrude. Entangle yourself with the hyperreality of Omar and Kima and Carcetti; just remember that there's something approaching reality (that's real reality) going on at the same time.

Think of the relationship between the actors and the roles they play. Many characters take their names from real individuals in Baltimore; Sgt Jay Landsman for example, who appears both as a character (played by Delaney Williams) and as an actor (playing Dennis Mello). Journalist Bill Zorzi and convicted killer Felicia 'Snoop' Phelps, meanwhile, play themselves, or at least characters who share their names. Elsewhere, the producers cast from the headlines: reformed drug dealer Melvin Williams (who was arrested by David Simon's colleage Ed Burns) plays the Deacon; disgraced police commissioner Ed Norris plays a cop called, uh, Ed Norris, And sometimes it's just a matter of settling scores: Simon named a loathesome police lieutenant 'Marimow' to get back at one of his bêtes noires from his days on the Baltimore Sun. That's the real Baltimore Sun, by the way, not the fictional one on screen...

Ah, the paper. Which brings us to the last season, and the last episode, and the title screams its intentions. "-30-" is journalese to signify the end of a piece of copy. Not only is our attention drawn to the fact that this is the last episode; it also labels The Wire as a piece of journalism, something purporting to be true. Except that, as Scott Templeton's concoctions spiral out of control, and his paymasters turn a blind eye, we know that any claim that journalism may once have had on the truth is long gone.

Not that anyone else has clean hands, of course. As Norman Wilson says at the beginning of the episode: "Everyone's getting what they need behind some make-believe." Mayor Carcetti has just realised that his ascent to the Governorship may be derailed because the serial killer that he used as a way to lambast the State for lack of funding doesn't actually exist. He's a politician, so he's used to lying; what throws him is the fact that this time he thought he was telling the truth. Similarly, Templeton is a journalist, and well used to embroidering the truth; but on this story, he's unaware that his embroidery is decorating an invention. It's empty and, as his colleague Alma discovers, so is the notebook he wields as a badge of his journalistic integrity.

This emptiness, this absence, becomes a central theme when McNulty finds himself confronted by a classic simulacrum - a copycat of a killer that doesn't exist. "The lie's so big," he declares, channeling Goebbels, "people can't live with it." But they can, and they do, as the (conveniently insane) copycat is blamed for the other killings and Carcetti gets his photo-op.

But there's one more absence, one more lie to deal with. In the past, policemen who died have had wakes staged for them; this has also been a handy way for the makers to acknowledge the passing of cast members (both Foerster and Cole were honoured thus when the actors who played them died). These were fictional funerals to mark real deaths; McNulty now receives a wake when he (the character) isn't even dead. Except that this is the last episode, and as far as the viewer's concerned, he may as well have taken a bullet; Landsman's eulogy is for The Wire itself. -30-. It's all make-believe after all; the only difference is, the make-believe in The Wire won no prizes, unlike Templeton's Pulitzer-worthy creations.



In the end, only two characters break free from the cycle of mendacity, although they both express their moral purity in unlikely ways. Daniels, unwilling to help the new mayor by producing statistical bullshit, leaves the force entirely and becomes a defence lawyer, in which role, presumably, he lies for a living; but at least he and everyone else knows it's an act. And Marlo, encouraged by Levy to reinvent himself as a legitimate businessman, slips away from the posh party, knowing that his true self can only exist on the street. By acknowledging himself as irredeemably evil, he achieves a sort of nobility through self-knowledge; a sort of truth.

(Patroclus asked me to rub my chin in the direction of Echo Beach/Moving Wallpaper. And you don't argue with Patroclus.)

I should have read the instructions first.

Confronted with the first episodes of Echo Beach (ITV's new post-watershed soap) and Moving Wallpaper (ITV's archly postmodern comedy about the making of ITV's new post-watershed soap) I assumed that the latter was the equivalent to the extras on a DVD, or maybe one of those spin-off shows for the benefit of people who can take more Big Brother or Dr Who than government nutritionists would normally recommend. So I watched the soap first, managed to stagger through half an episode and it was shit. I mean, not just Hollyoaks shit, not just cynical, falsely glossy, one-eye-on-the-gossip-columns shit, but Eldorado shit. Albion Market shit.

Then the lovely woman without whom I'd probably be unable to put on my trousers the right way up pointed out that Moving Wallpaper was broadcast first, so maybe I should watch that first. And Moving Wallpaper turned out to be a fairly amusing sitcom about media folk, a bit like Extras, maybe. Although, really, that's not the point, is it? The fact that one show is OK, and one is dire, is swatted into irrelevance by the high-concept 'aboutness' of the whole project. After I'd watched MW, I tried EB again and, although it was still very bad, at least we knew why the hunky harbour master and the Indian barmaid and her off of Footballers Wives were there.

The thing is, despite all the hoo-ha about ITV taking postmodernism to the masses, MW/EB is doing very little that other show-within-show shows (Extras, Larry Sanders, Annually Retentive) haven't done, apart from splitting the two components. All of them were predicated on the fact that the 'real' show (eg When The Whistle Blows) probably wasn't something you'd bother to watch. If the earlier shows were fruit yogurts, this is Müller Fruit Corner. Not so much groundbreaking, more like painting the floor a slightly different colour.

Of course, there's loads of fun here for media theorists to ponder over which shows and characters are simulacra of the other, and which of them are more real. Is the actress called Suzie Amy, played by the actress called Susie Amy, more real than the producer Jonathan Pope, played by Ben Miller, although the real producer of Echo Beach is called Jonathan Pope? Did someone really nut a picture of Michael Grade, and would they have mentioned if he did?

Unfortunately for the makers, the whole 'real'/'fake' interface has been overtaken by... I was going to say real life, but you know what I mean. Stuff on the news. The WGA strike in the States is an intriguing beast, not least because it's drawing people's attention to what writers actually do. There's a paradox here: when we're watching drama, we know that Bruce Willis or Judi Dench aren't making up their own words, but we suspend disbelief. We know we're doing it but, hey, it's all make believe, innit? But when we watch something that's meant to be 'real' (a talk show or an awards ceremony, for example) we also kid ourselves that Jay Leno or Jon Stewart is coming up with his own quips, and our enjoyment really suffers when we know the whole thing's scripted.

Of course, Brecht argued that the suspension of disbelief was a nonsense in drama as well, and deployed the Verfremdungseffekt (alienation technique) to remind people that what they were watching was just a bunch of people pretending. Which is what the people in Echo Beach are doing, and we know that, because the people in Moving Wallpaper told us - but then so are the people in Moving Wallpaper.

Maybe, if we ever get to see another Oscars or Golden Globes ceremony, we'll be forced to watch it in a Brechtian manner. In a strange way, it's not a strike - it's art.