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Winter 2021 TV Preview

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Every New Year’s celebration comes along with some excitement, pomp, and circumstance, but rarely has the countdown from 10 felt more urgent in the waning seconds of 2020. Yes, 2020 is just a number and yes, time is just an abstract concept created to explain celestial bodies moving around one another. But darn it all, it still feels great to see “2021” at the top of this article.

2021 will hopefully come along with some good news (though admittedly early signs aren’t looking great on that front). At the very least, however, it should come along with some interesting TV options. Due to COVID-19 production delays, there perhaps aren’t as many confirmed release dates for early 2021 as we’ve seen in years’ past. Still, there are plenty of exciting new and returning TV shows to keep you occupied throughout the chilly season.

Winter 2021 is when Marvel makes its triumphant return to television. The official MCU canon gets started with WandaVision in January before continuing on with The Falcon and the Winter Soldier in March. The newly-branded CWverse will make its debut this season with Javica Leslie’s Ryan Wilder taking up the mantle of Batwoman. And that’s not even to mention other genre options like Netflix’s Fate: The Winx Saga or season 2 of TNT’s surprisingly good Snowpiercer.

What follows are all the new and returning shows in winter 2021 that we’re excited about. You can also check out a list of our most anticipated returning British series here and new British series here.

Prodigal Son Season 2

Jan. 12 on Fox

Audiences were captivated by a shocking season 1 finale for Fox’s crime thriller Prodigal Son, and season 2 will continue the story of police profiler Malcolm Bright (Tom Payne), and his notorious serial killer father Martin Whitly (Michael Sheen). Malcolm’s sister Ainsley (Halston Sage) has gone from intrepid reporter to protector of family secrets by following her father’s deadly instructions.

With Malcolm’s life in disarray as a result, Prodigal Son season 2 will find him protecting his mother Jessica (Bellamy Young) from a secret that could tear the family apart even worse than before. Martin, meanwhile, is determined to strengthen the growing bond between him and his “prodigal son,” and the relationship is bound to produce more twists and revelations when the show returns on Jan. 12, 2021. – Michael Ahr

Superstore Season 6

Jan. 14 on NBC

Superstore will be taking a bow with its current sixth and final season, but there’s a big status quo change that will add plenty of drama to its final episodes. Jonah (Ben Feldman) will have to find out how to move on from Amy (America Ferrera) after her exit from the series less than three months ago.

So far we know that Jonah’s ex Kelly (Kelly Stables) has returned to the Ozark Highlands store. Also, there are rumors that though Superstore is coming to an end, characters Bo and Cheyenne could be getting their own spinoff. Perhaps we see some sort of backdoor pilot? Superstore will air 11 more episodes before concluding in the spring. – Nick Harley

Search Party Season 4

Jan. 14 on HBO Max

In addition to being a great TV show in general, Search Party belongs on a short list of the best “well…how did we end up here?” entertainment properties. This dark comedy from Sarah-Violet Bliss, Charles Rogers, and Michael Showalter began with one young millennial’s decision to go looking for a missing acquaintance. Somehow that led to no fewer than two murders and the trial of the social media century. For its fourth season, Search Party will up the ante yet again.

Search Party Season 4 Review (Spoiler-Free)

By Daniel Kurland

Cassidy Diamond is Search Party Season 3’s Vocal Fry Queen

By Alec Bojalad

As evidenced by the end of season 3, Dory Sief (Alia Shawkat) finds herself kidnapped and held by her stalker (Cole Escola). While Dory is missing, her friends Elliot Goss (John Early), Portia Davenport (Meredith Hagner), and Drew Gardner (John Reynolds) try to move on with their lives before deciding to make the name of the show make sense again. Search Party proved to be a modest cult hit when it originally aired its first two seasons on TBS. That was enough to get seasons 3 and 4 to HBO Max, where hopefully it will confuse and delight audiences for years to come. – Alec Bojalad

WandaVision

Jan. 15 on Disney+

Give it up for Marvel Cinematic Universe’s wackiest installment yet. Partially filmed in front of a live audience, this nine-episode TV series centered around Wanda Maximoff, aka Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen) and The Vision (Paul Bettany), is poised to herald in the new, Disney+ era of MCU.

While showrunner Jac Schaeffer has kept mum on the exact details of the plot, trailers tease a trip down TV sitcom memory lane that appears to be some kind of collective (forgive us) vision shared by Wanda, her late boyfriend android Vision, and others. We’ll have to wait to find out if it is a reality created by the uber powerful Wanda herself, driven by her grief over Vision’s Infinity War death, or if there is another force at play here. Whatever the answer, WandaVision looks to be a wild ride. – Kayti Burt

Disenchantment Season 3

Jan. 15 on Netflix

While Matt Groening is best known for a certain animated on Fox series that’s run for…a few seasons, to some he will always be known as the mastermind behind beloved cult animated hit Futurama. And it’s that series that fans hoped for more of with the announcement of the fantasy kingdom set Disenchantment for Netflix. Through two seasons, Disenchantment hasn’t reached Futurama’s heights yet (because really: what could?) but it has delivered on the promise of exciting, serialized storytelling in a wacky animated world.

Disenchantment season 3 is set to open up the show’s storytelling even more. The end of season 2 (or Part Two, per Netflix) finds Bean (Abbi Jacobson), Luci (Eric Andre), and Elfo (Nat Faxon) trapped in a catacomb surrounded by “Trogs” and Bean’s villainous mother Queen Dagmar. Season 3 trailers reveal that Bean and the gang won’t spend much time here, however, and will instead eventually make it to the previously hinted-at steampunk world known as Steamland. With the show transitioning from magic to science only three seasons in, perhaps it’s not much longer before we get a proper Futurama crossover. – AB

Servant Season 2

Jan. 15 on Apple TV+

The premise of Servant’s first season was a simple yet unnerving one. The M. Night Shyamalan-produced Apple TV+ series found two parents, Dorothy (Lauren Ambrose) and Sean Turner (Toby Kebbell), dealing with the death of their son by caring for a “reborn” doll named Jericho. The doll was creepy enough to begin with but made creepier by the Turners bringing a young nanny named Leanne (Nell Tiger Free) aboard who immediately accepts the doll as a real child without questions. And that was all just the setup for a show that absolutely wasn’t satisfied to let weird enough alone.

Season 2 finds Leanne on the run with Jericho and also perhaps with a cult? I don’t know, Servant really is a lot. The real question, however, is what kind of meals Sean will be preparing this year. As a professional chef, the character was always known for cooking up something truly delicious (and usually gruesome) in his expansive Philadelphia home kitchen. Hopefully he still has enough time to cook with all the missing baby and cult stuff. – AB

Batwoman Season 2

Jan. 17 on The CW

Batwoman is gone; long live Batwoman. Ruby Rose’s Kate Kane is out of the picture, but Javicia Leslie’s Ryan Wilder is here to put her own spin on the black and red suit. We’ve seen the first two episodes of season 2, and we can’t wait for more! The series makes room for Kate’s loved ones, Gotham, and the audience, to mourn her, while Ryan quickly establishes her own origin story and relationship to all our favorite returning characters, who have very different reactions to her presence.

Like Kate before her, Ryan opens up the world of superheroics to new communities. Oh and that villain Safiyah they teased all last season, who even makes Alice scared? Buckle up because she’s coming to Gotham and she’s not messing around. – Delia Harrington

All American Season 3

Jan. 18 on The CW

This CW sports drama breakout returns for a third season with a whole new set of problems for Spencer James, who returned to his former school, South Crenshaw, at the end of Season 2 in order to keep it from becoming a magnet school. From the looks of the Season 3 trailer, Spencer continues to be caught between two worlds; his former teammates at Beverly Hills High can’t get past the color of his jersey.

Meanwhile, Coach Baker’s own transition to South Crenshaw is anything but smooth, as he has to deal with a hostile school principal who has raised the required GPA for student athletes. Additionally, All American plans to explicitly integrate th Black Lives Matter protest in Season 3, promising another season that is as relevant as it is dramatically addicting. – KB

Riverdale Season 5

Jan. 20 on The CW

Riverdale’s fifth season will open with the prom, finishing up the season four stories that were cut off early due to COVID-19, with the trailer teasing eerie violence, plenty of twists, and a possible Barchie hookup. Then the show will fast-forward seven years to show the gang in their mid-twenties AKA at their actual ages. The main cast is returning, with Riverdale parents Skeet Ulrich (FP Jones) and Marisol Nichols (Hermione Lodge) leaving the show.

Riverdale has cast Veronica’s husband and he’s not played by KJ Apa or his secret twin, so we’re going to need some serious explanation about what happened to Varchie – and why, if they broke up, it wasn’t so Beronica could finally get together. Vanessa Morgan’s IRL pregnancy will be incorporated into Toni Topaz’s storyline – hopefully that means a gayby for Choni! Whatever comes next, it will definitely be bonkers-drama, stylized as hell, and at least 75% murder-y. – DH

Nancy Drew Season 2

Jan. 20 on The CW

If you skipped Nancy Drew last year because you think there are too many reboots and remakes, take this as an opportunity to correct your error! Part Veronica Mars, part ghost story, and actually as cool as Riverdale hopes to be, this refresh of the beloved books is a take on high-stakes small town crime, the haves vs the have-nots, and every conceivable legend involving a sea witch that fictional Horseshoe Bay, Maine has to offer.

How Nancy Drew Succeeds as an Adaptation Where The Hardy Boys Fails

By Lacy Baugher

How Nancy Drew Has Reinvigorated the Dark Young Adult Drama

By Lacy Baugher

This season Nancy and friends are left to deal with many cliffhangers – including visions of their own deaths! Season 2 promises more of Nancy dealing with learning who her real parents are and the mysterious and deadly Aglaeca and its connection to the Marvin family. – DH

Walker

Jan. 21 on The CW

The CW is rebooting the 90s television hit Walker, Texas Ranger for a new action series titled simply Walker, premiering January 21, 2021. Jared Padalecki takes on the titular role in his first outing after wrapping up 15 years on the network’s juggernaut series Supernatural. Texas Ranger Cordell Walker is haunted by the death of his wife Emily (guest star Genevieve Padalecki) as he returns to Austin after two years undercover.

Much of the drama centers on Emily’s suspicious killing, but Walker also must reconnect with his creative and thoughtful son August (Kale Culley) and his headstrong daughter Stella (Violet Brinson) while navigating clashes with his parents and brother. He also finds unexpected common ground with his new partner Micki Ramirez (Lindsey Morgan), one of the first women in Texas Rangers’ history. – MA

Jurassic World Camp Cretaceous Season 2

Jan. 22 on Netflix

Netflix and Dreamworks Animation’s Jurassic World Camp Cretaceous really could have been a phoned-in effort. The formula to success on such a series would appear to be: get the coveted Jurassic World license, animate some dinosaurs, throw the product out there, and profit. It’s to the show’s credit, however, that it sought to be a much more entertaining and enriching experience in its first season than mere IP mining.

Jurassic World: Camp Cretaceous – The Origins of Bumpy Revealed

By David Crow

Jurassic World: Camp Cretaceous Reveals That Friendship is When Trust Defeats Loneliness

By Alana Joli Abbott

Season 2 of the show will find the lead children outside the friendly confines of Camp Cretaceous but still trapped on Isla Nublar and looking for a way out. Camp Cretaceous excelled in creating an intense, yet still family-friendly narrative in season 1 and season 2 seems poised to do the very same. – AB

The Blacklist Season 8

Jan. 22 on NBC

When The Blacklist returns for the remainder of its eighth season on NBC, expect the already rapid pace to be increased. “The next season, season eight, starts in a much more heightened and dramatic place than normal seasons do,” writer and producer John Eisendrath told Cinemablend. “We are gonna tell the story that we were unable to tell at the end of last season.”

The latest season continues the ongoing saga of enigmatic antihero “Concierge of Crime,” Raymond Reddington (James Spader), the world’s most-wanted criminal who – unbeknownst to the general public – enjoys an immunity deal with the F.B.I. in exchange for leads about his vast array of criminal contacts (the titular blacklist), frequently shadowed by special agent Elizabeth Keen (Megan Boone), who, as revealed later in the series, happens to be the daughter he conceived with a deadly Russian spy. – NH

Fate: The Winx Saga

Jan. 22 on Netflix

Netflix has taken on the daunting task of adapting Winx Club, a beloved Nickelodeon animated series, into a live action teen fantasy series called Fate: The Winx Saga, which drops its six hour-long episodes on Jan. 22, 2021. The story follows Bloom (Abigail Cowen) as she adjusts to life as a fairy at Alfea College, a magical boarding school in the Otherworld, where she must learn to control her dangerous powers.

The live action series promises to be darker and edgier than its predecessor as the fairies fight the Burned Ones, but Fate: The Winx Saga hopes to capitalize on the original’s iconic set of strong female characters to build an equally addictive genre series. The male specialists from the animated series will also be on hand, including Bloom’s love interest, Sky (Danny Griffin). – MA

Charmed Season 3

Jan. 24 on The CW

Like many a network TV show, Charmed was forced to cut its second season short due to the COVID-19 pandemic, which left a lot of plot threads hanging—the biggest, a brewing battle against the Faction. Season 3 promises to see that power struggle through, with Macy, Mel, and Maggie jonseing for a fight in the trailer.

“I’m afraid not even the Charmed Ones can survive the death of all magic,” we hear someone voiceover in the sneak peek. If you’ve given this reboot a pass because you’re loyal to the original, now’s the time to reconsider. This show is forging its own path, and it’s filled with supernatural delights. – KB

Snowpiercer Season 2

Jan. 25 on TNT

The original 2013 film Snowpiercer has gone down in history for two main reasons. First of all, it’s another superb entry into the film canon of director Bong Joon-ho, who would go on to strike Oscar gold with Parasite. Secondly, it’s the movie where Chris Evans earnestly delivers a line about eating delicious babies. Beyond even those two heavily memeable factors, however, Snowpiercer is a great, exciting, and class-conscious movie.

The real surprise about the film Snowpiercer, however, is that the TV series it inspired is also pretty good! After some behind the scenes difficulties and a slow start, Snowpiercer chugged right along in its first season to become one of the more interesting cable TV dramas on television. Season 2 is set to become only more intriguing with the addition of Sean Bean as the elusive Mr. Wilford and with the train quite literally coming off the tracks. – AB

Resident Alien

Jan. 27 on Syfy

Sometimes a title is so good and so of its moment that the powers-that-be have no choice but to make a TV show out of it. Such is the case with Syfy’s Resident Alien. “Resident alien” is, of course, a (rather outdated) term for an individual residing in a country without having yet achieved citizenship. It also brings to mind the concept of actual outer space aliens. Resident Alien, based on the comic of the same name by Peter Hogan and Steve Parkhouse, takes that latter concept and just runs with it.

Syfy’s adaptation will star Alan Tudyk as the titular resident alien, Captain Hah Re/Dr. Harry Vanderspiegle. After “Harry” crash lands in a small Colorado town, he must go undercover as a doctor, while also…solving a murder mystery? This all sounds like a fascinating mashup of genres with a satisfying arc at its center. Also Linda Hamilton is involved, so that’s pretty rad. – AB

Firefly Lane

Feb. 3 on Netflix

Veteran actresses and former TV doctors Katherine Heigl (Grey’s Anatomy) and Sarah Chalke (Scrubs) are coming together for a new take on a decades-spanning dramedy a la This is Us for Netflix. An adaption of the bestselling novel by author Kristin Hannah, Firefly Lane finds the pair set on teaching audiences that “the greatest love story of all can be between friends.”

With a story spanning 30-years, the pair of friends experience tragedy, triumphs, love triangles, and all of the tear-jerker, life-affirming moments one can hope for. Ali Skovbye (When Calls the Heart) and Roan Curtis (The Magicians) will portray younger versions of Heigel and Chalke, respectively, and the rest of the cast is rounded out by Ben Lawson (Designated Survivor), Yael Yurman (The Man in the High Castle) and Beau Garrett (Girlfriends’ Guide to Divorce). The 10-episode series hits Netflix on February 3. – NH

The Equalizer

Feb. 7 on CBS

After successful big-screen adaptations with Denzel Washington, The Equalizer is back on television this winter, this time with Queen Latifah stepping into the role as the titular protector. Latifah stars as Robyn McCall, an underground vigilante who is the crime fighter you call when you can’t dial 911.

Balancing being a mother with helping the defenseless by any means necessary, McCall must evade those that seek to harm her as well as Chris Noth’s CIA Agent William Bishop. The series also stars Lorraine Toussaint (Orange is the New Black), Tory Kittles (Colony). and Adama Goldberg (Taken, Fargo). The reimagining premieres on CBS on Feb. 7 after the Super Bowl. – NH

Black Lightning Season 4

Feb. 8 on The CW

Black Lightning’s fourth and final season will pick up where its many season three storylines left off. Jefferson Pierce and his family are still fighting to keep what’s left of Freeland safe. Following congressional approval for a boarding school for metahumans last season, expect to see Dr. Stewart working on that, and it’s hard to imagine Jefferson not being involved as well.

Nafessa Williams and China Anne McClain return as Thunder and Lightning, although we’ll be seeing a bit less of Jennifer as McClain had already decided to leave the show after this season before it was announced as the final one for the show. There’s a Painkiller spinoff in development, so expect a backdoor pilot. Crime boss Tobias Whale is still at large and Gravedigger is still out there, and Jefferson no longer has Billy Henderson to have his back, so things might get a little rough. – DH

Clarice

Feb. 11 on CBS

How do you make a show centered on Clarice Starling, author Thomas Harris’ FBI agent trainee popularized on-screen by Jodie Foster in Jonathan Demme’s Silence of the Lambs, without her most famous adversary Hannibal Lecter? Well, CBS is going to try. Rebecca Breeds stars as the titular agent in this sequel series, which finds Starling heading back to her native West Virginia to work a case while her mind is still preoccupied by her experiences hunting Buffalo Bill.

The series will also feature Starling’s FBI colleague Ardelia Mapp, played by Devyn Tyler, and kidnapping survivor Catherine Martin, played by Marnee Carpenter. Speaking with Entertainment Weekly, executive producer Jenny Lumet said, “She came face to face with the worst of what we have and the worst of what we are, and lived through it. If you imagine a puzzle box of puzzle pieces all thrown up into the air – that was the experience that she had with [serial killer] Buffalo Bill.” Unfortunately due to legal reasons, the series cannot mention Lecter, which should be an interesting hurdle, but will explore the shared trauma between Martin and Starling. – NH

Tribes of Europa

Feb. 19 on Netflix

German science fiction captured Netflix viewers’ hearts with the time travel series, Dark, and now the post-apocalyptic Tribes of Europa hopes to do the same when it drops its six-episode season on February 19, 2021. The series follows warring factions in the harsh future of 2074 who discover a crashed ship containing a powerful, cube-shaped artifact.

Three siblings Kiano (Emilio Sakraya), Liv (Henriette Confurius), and Elja (David Ali Rashed) get caught in the middle of the bloody war over the cube and are forced to forge their own paths. There’s also the question of what caused the apocalypse and what might be threatening humanity’s existence while the tribes fight amongst themselves. – MA

For All Mankind Season 2

Feb. 19 on Apple TV+

As with many an ongoing Apple TV+ show, many missed the first season of this science fiction drama from Battlestar Galactica’s Ronald D. Moore. And, as with many Apple TV+ shows (obligatory Dickinson shout out), it’s time to reconsider. For All Mankind is an alternate history exploring a world in which the Soviet Union made it to the Moon first, and the global space race never ended.

Joel Kinnaman stars as astronaut Edward Baldwin, but this drama isn’t all white dudes in space. The Soviet Union’s emphasis on diversity in its space program has forced America to do the same, training women and other minorities for space exploration in a way that didn’t happen in our reality. A fascinating blend of real-life history and an imagined path, For All Mankind is a worthwhile watch for any sci-fi nerds out there and, with a Season 3 already greenlit by Apple, holds the promise of more narrative to come. – KB

The Flash Season 7

Feb. 23 on The CW

In a post-Arrow world, it’s up to The Flash to bear the standard of the Arrowverse. Err Berlantiverse. Scratch that, CWverse, apparently. And it will do that with the speedforce destroyed, Barry Allen losing his speed, and Iris trapped in the Mirrorverse. Season 7 will pick up with Team Flash at an all-time low, with Cait MIA and Mirror Mistress Eva McCulloch victorious.

The Flash TV Episode We Almost Saw

By Mike Cecchini

The Flash Season 7: Jay Garrick Will Return

By Mike Cecchini

Of course one person won’t be returning. Hartley Sawyer, who plays Ralph Dibny AKA Elongated Man, was fired for his racist and sexist tweets back in August, what feels like a solid five years ago. Joe West’s story arc will be inspired by, “the societal changes happening in today’s world,” which sounds like a euphemism for systemic racism, white supremacy, and police brutality, a weightier topic that veteran actor Jesse L. Martin would do an excellent job handling. – DH

Superman & Lois

Feb. 23 on The CW

The CWverse is at a real crossroads. With Arrow done, The Flash past its prime, and Supergirl and Black Lightning nearing their ends, DC TV’s hold over small screen storytelling is loosening. Superman & Lois, as well as a new-hero-driven second season of Batwoman, are looking to change the direction of that momentum. The former is betting on a different screen adaptation of Superman than we’ve seen in recent years: Superman as a parent.

Superman & Lois is looking to tell a small town story, one led by title characters who are firmly into adulthood and have some very relatable problems—namely, the complicated pressures of raising their two teenage sons while also working. In a time when many parents are feeling the immense weight of childrearing more than ever, Superman & Lois may just end up being one of the most cathartic shows of 2021. – KB

The Walking Dead Season 10B

Feb. 28 on AMC

Wait a minute, didn’t The Walking Dead season 10 finale already premiere a few months ago? Indeed it did. The Walking Dead concluded its 10th and now penultimate season with “A Certain Doom” on Oct. 4, 2020. Due to a major delay in airing said episode because of the coronavirus pandemic, however, AMC decided to go ahead and reward loyal viewers with some extra season 10 episodes.

The Walking Dead season “10B” will consist of six loosely-connected installments that each follow different characters and will help bridge the gap to the show’s 11th and final season. In order, the episodes will be “Home Sweet Home” (Maggie-centric), “Find Me” (Daryl and Carol), “One More” (Gabriel and Aaron), “Splinter” (Eugene, Ezekiel, Yumiko, and Princess), “Diverged” (Daryl and Carol again), and “Here’s Negan” (Guess who). While this extra half-season clearly exists in part to milk AMC’s zombie cash cow as it nears the end of its life, the storytelling possibilities under capable showrunner Angela Kang are undeniably intriguing. – AB

The Falcon and the Winter Soldier

March 19 on Disney+

One of several Marvel TV offerings coming to Disney+ this winter is The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, which got pushed from its original August 2020 release date to March 19, 2021. The miniseries picks up after the events of Avengers: Endgame as Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie) and Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan) team up for a global adventure that will apparently test their abilities and their patience.

Daniel Bruhl will reprise his role as Helmut Zemo, the Sokovian citizen turned terrorist mastermind who, in Captain America: Civil War, engineered the rift between Tony Stark and Steve Rogers. Emily Van Camp also jumps from that film to The Falcon and the Winter Soldier as SHIELD Agent Sharon Carter, grandniece of SHIELD founder Peggy Carter. Wyatt Russell will play John Walker, better known to Marvel fans as USAgent. – MA

Solar Opposites Season 2

March 26 on Hulu

Through four seasons Justin Roiland and Dan Harmon’s Rick and Morty has proven itself to be one of the most exciting and narratively complex animated series around. So folks could be forgiven for assuming that Roiland’s next animated effort, alongside Rick and Morty writer Mike McMahan, would be all but an equally brainy carbon copy. But while Solar Opposites has the same animation style and intergalactic environs as Rick and Morty, season 1 proved that this was a hilarious beast all its own.

Solar Opposites Season 3 Confirmed

By Alec Bojalad

Solar Opposites Character Guide

By Joe Matar

Solar Opposites is essentially Roiland’s version of a wacky neighborhood sitcom. The neighbors at the show’s center just happen to be outer space aliens technically charged with overtaking the citizens of Earth (they swear they’ll get around to it eventually but don’t seem too motivated). Season 2, which was ordered at the same time as season 1, will continue the Earthbound adventures of Terry (Roiland), Korvo (Thomas Middleditch), and their two “replicants” Yumyulack (Sean Giambrone) and Jesse (Mary Mack). Solar Opposites was not afraid of some serialized storytelling in its first season, and who’s to say we won’t get another background story as epic as The Wall saga. – AB

Shadow and Bone

April on Netflix

Netflix has experienced quite a bit of success when it comes to bringing fantasy adaptations to its servers. Shows like The Witcher, Cursed, and Chilling Adventures of Sabrina have all found success (to differing extents) on the service. It’s no mystery then why the streamer would go out and snag the rights to Leigh Bardugo’s Grisha trilogy.

The first novel in the trilogy, Shadow and Bone, lends its name to this live-action adaptation. Shadow and Bone is set in a world that’s divided in two by a massive barrier of perpetual darkness. When orphan Alina Starkov (Jessie Mei Li) discovers she harnesses a particular power, she gets to work trying to unite her country. The Grisha trilogy is well-known for its effective Russian-influenced imagery and is sure to be a production designer’s delight when it premieres in April. – AB

Loki

May on Disney+

The month of May is a bit late to be considered part of “winter” TV season, but depending on where you live in the world, it will probably still be snowing anyway. And plus, it’s not like we can turn down an opportunity to include the third, and in many ways, most intriguing, Marvel Disney+ series.

Doctor Doom Could be Mystery Villain in Loki Series

By Kirsten Howard

Owen Wilson’s Loki Character is Based on a Beloved Marvel Writer

By Gavin Jasper

By the time Loki rolls out in May, viewers will already have gotten a good idea of what Marvel’s Disney+ offerings are all about thanks to WandaVision and The Falcon and the Winter Soldier. Still, it seems as though Loki (like its titular character) will have plenty of tricks up its sleeve. Based on the bonkers first trailer, Loki (Tom Hiddleston) is primed to jump from the events of Avengers: Endgame right to the offices of the Time Variance Authority where he travels through events in human history…and also somehow becomes D.B. Cooper? Yeah, this is going to be wild. – AB

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wreathedwith · 7 years

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How Not To Be a Boy reaction post

I finished this book – Robert Webb’s memoir – last week and it’s a book very dear to me that I had been eagerly anticipating. My thoughts are in chronological order below. Full spoilers for the whole text, hence the read more link (also for reasons of length). If you’ve also read this book and/or this post, please let me know your thoughts!

Here’s the wardrobe that never yielded to Narnia no matter how faithfully I reached for the cold air.

Lovely.

Tall, Welsh and handsome, the presenter Steve Jones…

Apparently this is a key aspect to note of RW’s Flashdance experience.

And after everyone has left and Abbie has gone to bed, I’ll sit in our little garden and drink another two bottles of red wine and smoke about thirty Marlboro Lights. Tomorrow I’ll do something similar – but in the pub in the middle of the day. This behaviour won’t change when our daughter is born, and the moment will come when Abbie will tell me about these months and say as she looks at me steadily: ‘You let me down.’

These parts, mostly come back to later, are very tough reads – it’s sad to think about RW letting his wife down, and there’s more catharsis in the overcoming than the (partial) repeating of his childhood. It’s not so unusual to find searingly honest memoirs, but unlike most of the rest of the book RW doesn’t have time’s distance, substituted names or the death of those involved to fall back on here – he’s being very honest about something quite recent and similar to his current life, even ongoing. On the other hand, a narrative ending where everything was perfect would have seemed trite and not rung true.

15: You sound quite posh. 43: Ah yes. Well, that was your idea. You want to sound like Stephen Fry, don’t you? 15: What’s wrong with that? 43: Nothing. I mean it’s a bit – 15: Look, I just don’t want to sound like fucking Dad, all right? I want to be the opposite of Dad.

Self-evidently this ‘exchange’ says quite a bit about class, emulating heroes and RW’s relationship with his father in under 50 words.

‘Quiet boy’, ‘painfully shy’, ‘you never know he’s there’: these are some of the phrases I catch grown-ups using when they talk about me. But not here, not in the car with Mum.

I found this extremely affecting. It made me think about moments carved out when you feel safe when you generally don’t, being told you’re quiet, time craved alone with parent(s) without siblings, and my own mum of course.

(Shyness: see also: ‘He’s just very shy,’ explains my embarrassed mum. I hear that word a lot. ‘Shy’ is my defining characteristic. Everyone tells me I’m shy so I must be.)

I take a more cautious approach to the outdoor life and I don’t do it with other children. Unless, of course, you count the Guy-Buys. The Guy-Buys are my imaginary gang of friends. I am the Captain of the Guy-Buys, obviously, and they are my twelve – yes, twelve, like the apostles – men.

See also Would I Lie to You?, Series 5 Episode 2.

But mothers underestimated girls and overestimated boys – both in crawling ability and crawling attempts… Expectant mothers who know the foetus is male are more likely to report foetal movement as ‘violent’. So the odds are that Huckleberry, compared to India, is expected to be more independent, more aggressive, more outward-facing and less interested in personal relationships since before he was born. With the best will in the world, bunging him a Barbie when he’s five years old isn’t really going to cut it

This is a fair point, but how do we stop doing this? (It’s fine – I didn’t expect this book to provide me with those sort of answers.) Any unconscious biases are difficult to overcome, but I suppose being more aware of them is a start.

Susan and Lucy in grief for their dead king, the great lion; Charlie, eking out his year-long ration of Wonka Bar; Emil, alone on a train (before he meets his detectives), pricking his finger on the safety pin; the Doctor, losing his mind on Castrovalva; his companion Tegan, longing for home; Luke Skywalker, looking for adventure in a twin sunset – together with Mum or alone in my bedroom, stories were a way to reach distant places. But also, and without my noticing, a way to reach distant people. That’s where I really caught a break. I don’t mean I suddenly had miraculous powers of empathy; I just mean that empathy had a chance.

No note, just appreciation.

Roger has a Commodore VIC-20 which, technically speaking, has a much smaller memory than my 48K Spectrum, but does have the advantage of actually looking like a computer. Still, I’ve grown to love my ‘Speccy’ and treat it with almost religious respect. After each session with Horace Goes Skiing, Jetpack or The Way of the Exploding Fist, I carefully put the Spectrum back in the box that first revealed itself to me under the wrapping paper last Christmas Day.

Gamer chat! (Sadly I think this is it all for the whole book.) RW has also talked about playing arcade games on family holidays to Skegness on S2E6 of Go 8 Bit.

I like it when he calls me ‘Rob’ as he used to at Coningsby Juniors. It’s strictly ‘Webb’ and ‘Baxter’ on the school bus.

Why did (does) this happen even at a mixed sex grammar school. And the girls don’t get it at all? Society is weird. (That’s one way to put the theme of this book, broadly.)

‘What do you want to be when you grow up then, boy?’ he asks. I do the usual. ‘Computers.’ It’s the fastest way to close down this sensitive line of enquiry. Nobody over twenty has the faintest idea what a job involving computers could possibly mean, so it works well.

This is funny and, I would assume, no longer work.

I say, ‘I was always Cowley. Roger Baxter and Matthew Tellis took it in turns to be Bodie or Doyle.’ David Mitchell puts his pint down in surprise.

FUCKING FINALLY, like 33% in, Jesus Christ RW. (I know he doesn’t really fit in for the most part, but what RW does say about DM is completely lovely, so I’m happy enough.)

(DM first mentioned RW 19% of the way into Back Story.)

I say, ‘I was always Cowley. Roger Baxter and Matthew Tellis took it in turns to be Bodie or Doyle.’ David Mitchell puts his pint down in surprise. ‘How come you always got to be Cowley?’ ‘Well, they – hang on, what do you mean, got to be Cowley. No one wanted to be Cowley.’ ‘What are you talking about? Cowley was in charge. Cowley gave the orders.’ ‘What, so at your school everyone wanted to be Cowley?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Seriously? You were all queuing up to be Cowley?’ ‘I don’t remember a queue, but yes, essentially.’ He takes the drag on a cigarette I just gave him. ‘To be fair,’ he says, ‘we were quite weird, our little gang. It’s probably more normal to want to be the macho men.’

I mean they had fairly different upbringings, despite (I would assume) the general assumption of them being broadly similar, and that is made amusingly clear.

David will spend his twenties being the only example I’ve ever known of a successful social smoker. He bums a couple of fags in the pub (good luck with that, American readers) and then doesn’t dream of having another the following morning. I don’t mind this because every now and again he’ll turn up with a pack of ten and hand them over as a contribution to an ongoing tobacco kitty where I keep the change.

Whatever this is just adorable.

It’s more that we just chat while keeping half an eye out for a funny idea creeping up on us. They always do – they wander in from the edges of sight. If you look straight at them, they disappear, like faint stars. You wait until they’re in plain view before stealthily picking up a pen. Then you’ve got them. Talking about TV is typical of us on these occasions, but talking about school is not – we’re in our mid-twenties and too young to find children interesting.

Mid-twenties *sucks in a deep breath*. An insight into the Process here. A focus on TV, often daytime TV specifically, is clear to any watcher of That Mitchell and Webb Look.

Many years later I’ll be talking to a friend (not David, but another comedy writer) who puzzlingly seems to have moved from one terraced house to an almost identical one in a slightly different part of Brixton. He tells me that, in the last place, the neighbours started using his bins for their overflowing rubbish. I ask him, ‘What did you say?’ ‘Oh God, I didn’t say anything,’ he replies. ‘No, we decided it would be easier to move house.’ This makes me laugh for about three minutes. I know he’s joking, but mainly I’m enjoying the idea that I’m not the only grown man who will go to incredible lengths to avoid an awkward conversation.

*Me, scrolling through my BritCom rolodex* who is this

One of QEGS’ battier traditions is the Eisteddfod

I have NEVER heard of a non-Welsh school (I went to a Welsh school) putting on an Eisteddfod; please get in touch if you can give me further evidence to the contrary.

It becomes obvious that once you’ve got their attention, you can wait. And you can make them wait with you. In fact, the longer you make them wait for ‘Indeed, sir’, the bigger the laugh will be when you say it. Confusingly, if you wait too long, they won’t laugh at all. So I start to listen to the audience. I start to time it.

I’ve read (*cough*) quite a lot of books about comedians’ early lives, and something like this generally happens in them, but I think RW does write about it particularly well.

Suddenly I have a name for that feeling I had in Dad’s car on the way back from the Flashdance fireworks. That feeling, the one that made me blush, was an overwhelming desire to be famous.

I mean, I can’t believe there is a linear through-time Flashdance narrative in this book. Amazing.

So I’ll be famous. And funny writing and acting is what I’ll be famous for. That will help because famous people are safe. Famous people don’t have problems. And they can probably have the radiator on as often as they like. And maybe girls like them.

We move into self-psychologising here quite thoroughly, but I will choose to take this as pretty insightful.

The only person I want to kiss, and to kiss her would make my decade, is Tiffany Rampling, friend of Zelda and the younger sister of my future dream-girl Tess Rampling. Yes, that’s right. One day I will adore Tess and get nowhere. But only after two years of getting nowhere with her sister Tiffany.

‘I only went with her 'cos she looks like you. My god!’

(This is an extremely esoteric observation, but I was slightly disappointed there were no Pulp references within the various music mentioned in this book. I just have to accept RW is a Suede (actually mostly Prince) man.)

I’m in my bedroom, reading in bed. It’s a pity that the Doctor’s companion, Nyssa, has chosen to part company with the Doctor, staying behind to help with the space leper colony. But then, I think, as I remove the last of my clothing, that’s Nyssa for you: beautiful and kind-hearted. I put the book to one side, and think about beautiful Nyssa and how, on the space leper colony, she wouldn’t have anyone to help her if, for example, she somehow got a splinter in her vagina…

…HANG ON, SOMETHING VERY ALARMING BUT FANTASTIC IS HAPPENING! I SHOULD STOP THIS – IT’S MAKING ME GOING TO DO A WEE! NO! IT’S NOT A WEE, IT’S SOMETHING ELSE! IT’S . . . OH MY FUCKING LORD! And thus it was that the would-be Doogie Howser MD of space cunnilingus had his first orgasm.

Ahhhhh hahahaahaha.

Also: points (?) for first getting off to getting a woman off, albeit mostly through the ego-boosting prism of being very good at it.

Also: this is a fandom-related wank, right? This is a first fandom wank. I’m sticking a flag in this for fandom.

‘You’re born naked and the rest is drag.’ RuPaul

You think this book wasn’t going to have a RuPaul quote? Pfft.

‘I’m a man, he says!’ I almost yell at Mum. ‘Only a boy would need to say so.’ It’s a line I’ve been waiting to try out for days.

Ah the performative cleverness of teenagehood *stares back through the mists of time*.

‘I mean, they’re not exactly The Beatles, are they?’ she says, cheerfully. I scowl at the TV and say in a slow pantomime of controlled rage, ‘Not everyone . . . can be . . . the sodding . . . Beatles.’ She chuckles to herself. ‘Soz, Rob,’ she teases. I blink at her queenily and then do a reluctant grin.

Nice use of the adverb ‘queenily’.

And I’ve just noticed that wanting to be famous just for the sake of becoming famous makes you look like a massive twat. I’ll have to come up with a better reason. I’ll have to start saying that fame is an unfortunate side effect of my, I dunno . . . art.

The boy matures. (A bit.)

So what is it about this ‘Will’?

I’ll level with you: it’s when Will turns up the ‘Some highlights have been hidden or truncated due to export limits.’ message starts coming up on my Kindle highlights.

I adore how RW has written Will, and how he has written Will as a first love. We know exactly how RW sees Will (rather than who Will actually is), we feel his awed lust and love. Again, RW doesn’t hold back and it does pay off. I fell in love with Will (well, at least got a bit of a crush on) because I’m reading RW’s point of view of him, and RW is in love with Will, and that is the result of a successful clearly-rendered memoir’s voice.

He’s about the same height and build as me. His hair is darker and he can grow it longer… Will can get his to just wavily flop either side of his thin-framed glasses.

This reminds me of someone else a bit

More Will just because I can:

He’s skinny like me but his collarbones travel just that little bit further before they reach his shoulders, his muscles are slightly more defined, his knees just a bit less knobbly, his legs . . . But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. I was talking about his attitude, right? Not his body. It will be instructive that, when introducing you to my new Best Friend, the first thing I want to do is undress him. Probably because I would spend the next five years trying to do exactly that. He’s cool… His clothes just fit. It’s mesmerising. They cling and swing around him like adoring fans. Still, as I say, I just like his attitude. Also, his legs.

I’m not seriously suggesting anything here, but I am reminded – when RW is talking about how completely cool Will is – of the part of Back Story where DM meets RW for the first time.

The second thing I noticed about Robert Webb was his earring… the first thing was his long hair – by which I mean the fact that it was long. I don’t want to accidentally sound romantic: ‘As soon as he walked in I was dazzled by the sheen of his golden locks.’ No, I noticed he had long hair which, I’m sure he’ll mind me saying, at that point in his life was a touch mullety. He looked like a bit of a rebel, a bit cool, left-wing, metrosexual.

The SDP/Liberal Alliance poster in the window of Mr and Mrs Slater’s Horncastle home in 1987 has not gone unnoticed. Neither has the fact that Mum is a Labour supporter or that almost everyone who makes me laugh on TV is some kind of leftie. Politics is suddenly an area where secret hopes (university, being a funny actor) neatly overlap with a general wish to side with Mum against the Men. The facts may be that the Parliamentary Labour Party is composed almost entirely of men and that Mrs Thatcher is a woman, but these facts are to be overlooked for the time being. Where Mum agrees with Mrs Slater and both agree with Stephen Fry and Victoria Wood . . . and where all four disagree with Derek, Dad, Norman Tebbit and Bernard Manning . . . well, let’s just say it will be a long time before I feel the need to read a manifesto. I’m Labour. That’s it.

Politics! This makes RW’s recent-ish leaving of the Labour party seem an even Bigger Deal.

For example, Will does a pleasingly smarmy impression of Education Secretary Kenneth Baker (whom I devastatingly rename Kenneth Faker – oomph! Eat that, Tories!) and I play a contemptuous interviewer which owes a great deal to other people’s impressions of Jeremy Paxman.

This made me laugh in a very ‘self-aware of your teenage self’ sort of way.

Sometimes when I make Will laugh, he throws his head back and I stare at the symmetry of his jaw. I like to think he doesn’t notice.

*internal screaming*

I have three CDs: Revolutions by Jean-Michel Jarre, Kick by INXS and Lovesexy by Prince. All read by a laser. Cool.

I mean, really.

I muster what I imagine to be a knowing smirk, as if Han Solo is big enough to take another of Princess Leia’s witty put-downs.

Oh yeah, and there’s a Star Wars linear thread throughout AND it has a really fucking amazing pay-off at the end! RW may only keep to one massive fuck-off celeb story, but it’s a good one.

The Han Solo thing is really not working for me any more. Lucy doesn’t go out with Han Solo: she goes out with a spotty twenty-year-old called Dean who is often in fights and can play the bass line to ‘A Forest’ by The Cure. Surely everyone but me can play the bass line to ‘A Forest’ by The Cure. Obviously, Will has a guitar and can play the bass line to ‘A Forest’ by The Cure.

The… History Boys… crossover?

I’m counting the hours with dread. Will is nothing if not frank, and I know that when he Does It With Daisy, I will be literally the third to know... How does he get to touch her at all? How does she get to touch him at all? One morning before registration, he wanders round to Form 5S and announces that he’s going to see Prince at Wembley. That is, he’s going with Daisy, Daisy’s dad and some of Daisy’s friends. To London. To see Prince. Because he’s going out with Daisy. I am not invited. Why would I be? No wonder I yearn for a time long ago in a galaxy far away. This galaxy obviously hates me. I start writing poetry.

arghhh this is so painful (and, of course, essentially universal)

Reader, I suspect you think you want a piece of that, but trust me you don’t. I’ve been as candid as my ego allows but I have to draw the line somewhere. No teenage poetry. Not even a Best Of.

hahahahaaaa

‘OK, so . . . you know that thing when you’re trying to get Cresta Run to load on a Spectrum and it doesn’t work because you’ve set the volume on the tape too . . . No.’

OK, I was wrong about the last mention of gaming thing.

I think I was drawn to [Michael Jackson] partly because of his stolen childhood, which manifested as childishness. It turns out that some dads do hit famous children… And what he reminded me of in 1987, when he released Bad, was a painfully shy child playing at being tough. If you want to see a real-life Guy-Buy, have a look at that album cover. There he is with his silly costume and unlikely bravado. And that terrible fear very nearly hidden in make-believe… I’ve never seen a performance like it... It’s so beautiful. The way he moves around that stage, you’d have to be mad to take your eyes off him for an instant. It’s also a hell of a song, despite, or perhaps because of, the same weird boy/man disconnect – he’s written a song about contested paternity when the last thing you can imagine Michael Jackson doing is having sex. I like it that he might be a virgin. I also have to admit that I like the way he’s accidentally outperformed his older brothers and utterly eclipsed his violent father.

This whole section (being a fan, again) is wonderfully written.

And I find out something else too. Even though I think I’ve worked out how he does it, when I watch the whole thing again, it still looks like magic. Taking something to pieces doesn’t spoil the whole when you put it back together. You can still love the effortlessness even when you’ve noticed the effort. Not before time, I finally start reading books in the same way. Not just to enjoy what a writer did, but for the pleasure of figuring out how they did it.

I like this part too, although I do have some slightly more complicated thoughts on this. (This is the root of moving from reading to creative writing – the root in any skill from moving from a fan and consumer to creator as well – but if you love a piece of writing for non-literary reasons and you have a sinking feeling it would not stand up to the scrutiny of close analysis, it is tempting to leave it well alone. On the other hand, much of my personal joy in the consumption of something creative that I adore comes from relentlessly close analysis, as is self-evident from my long relationship with fandom and this ludicrously long blog post.)

I wait till no one else is in the Form room and ask Mrs Slater if it’s ridiculous for me to think of Cambridge.

This takes bravery as, of course, does the reapplication of himself and the getting-in-eventually, the going back to school for another year, rather than just going to another university, all from a 17, 18, 19 year old who had lost his mum. It says something about RW’s focussed desire to go to Cambridge in order to be a famous comedian (and he also cites some snobbery), but it’s also hugely impressive.

Will puts 50p in the jukebox. ‘Bobs, at some point you’re going to have to face the fact that you’re about as likely to have sex with Tess Rampling as I am with bloody . . . Trevor McDonald.’

A note: it’s interesting to see RW’s name change throughout this book according to the situation: Robert to his mother, Robbie to Mark, the little brother, Rob when he’s at university, ‘Bobs when Will’s being all casual and cool here, Bobbington when that outgoing Footlights president is being a bit of a dick… there are a lot of different names.

[Will] runs a careless hand through his hair in a way that makes me want to jump him right here and right now

*swoons*

‘Have you fingered her yet, then?’ enquires Pete through another gobful of crisps. ‘Honestly, Peter, don’t be so crude,’ Will replies, putting his brandy down and producing a soft-pack of Lucky Strike out of his black 501s. ‘Of course I’ve fingered her. She’s lovely.’

This is like, I don’t know, if the Inbetweeners interacted with their idea of a successful human being.

At home I listen to ‘Slow Love’ by Prince and think of Tess. I listen to ‘I’m Not in Love’ by 10cc and think of Will. It’s difficult to know which one to have a hopeless wank about first.

*Me, screaming through the void* It’s going to be OK Robert Webb! It’s all going to be OK!

I try to look on the bright side – at least the way I feel about Tess proves that I’m not gay. Rationally, I can see that being gay is fine, but it looks like gay men have to put up with a whole world of stupid nonsense that straighties with a one-off fixation get to ignore. And, if I’m honest, the way I lust after Will feels not only dangerous and exciting but also shameful and wrong. The Sovereign Importance of Early Homophobia has done its work. It’s like I’m left with a closet homophobia – a Farage in the garage. Or, as I would have pronounced it at the time, a Farridge in the garridge.

There’s not loads of this chat in the book (and why necessarily should there be) but the reader gains some important internal feelings of teenage-RW context here.

[Diary extract] He [Will] hit me with it. He started talking about how he’s shagged Daisy on Friday night while watching a video of Krull.

The Krull detail is a beautiful one to be recorded for posterity.

I found out that Mum had cancer in early March, and three weeks later, I found out that she wasn’t going to survive it.

As RW has rightly said when doing interviews and other press for this book, the grief in this book is universal: everyone has lost someone. I’m not claiming I’m special. But not only as someone who left a comprehensive school in an isolated area to study English at a newer Oxbridge college you don’t hear so much from, but also as someone who lost their mum at a fairly young age (I was 22 – this is, to be noted, very much not the same as 17) to cancer on almost exactly as swift a timeline as RW’s mum, I had yearned for this book and I was emotionally steeling myself for this part of the text – after all, through RW’s structural choices (and from what I knew about RW already), we know it’s coming. We are exactly 50% of the way through the book and this profound loss is the heart of the book. Yes, I cried.

I’m remembering its implacable seriousness. The way the danger, the terror was unswervable, non-negotiable – this was going to hurt and there was nothing to be done and nowhere to hide.

Compared to the mad-cat-on-a-wall-of-death infatuations with Tiffany, Jill, Tess, Will, Marina and about three other girls and a boy that I haven’t troubled you with…

This intrigues me because of RW describing Will as a ‘one-off fixation’ earlier on (although that was written from the viewpoint of RW at a slightly younger age, and in the context of being worried about being gay). There’s also Sam, but he doesn’t come until university. It’s not just once, although he notes that the “Michael Portillo line” he uses later is true.

I’ve got an English exam in the morning, History on Thursday and Economics on Friday.

Perpetually surprised throughout this book over RW’s third A-level being Economics.

Two seventeen-year-old boys are holding hands in bed. One of them is Will; the other one has just stopped crying. Will is wondering how long this is going to take. It was likely that being best mates with someone whose mum has just died was going to involve some kind of emotional doobly-woobly, but he wasn’t expecting it here and now, at 5 a.m. in a double bed in a rented holiday house in Torquay. There again, there’s never a good time for this sort of thing. I feel an urge to get up and put some clothes on. But then – not so fast – because Will is holding my hand. He never holds my hand… I’m not thinking about this in bed. Instead, I’m thinking the thing that I usually think in the company of Will – ‘I wonder what Will is thinking?’ He shifts his weight slightly. ‘I didn’t hear Ralph come in. D’you think he’s sleeping on the beach again?’ Oh, OK – that’s that then. Gently, I let go of Will’s hand.

Still, the emotional temperature is only just returning to normal and he leaves what he imagines to be a tactful pause before checking his watch with his now free hand. This is the kind of thing that makes me want to found a minor religion in his honour…

...It’s a hot summer and neither of us can be bothered any more with that extra bit of admin to do with special night clothes. Practical enough – and I guess there must be plenty of other male friends who would be happy to share a double bed naked. I just don’t know any. Something is clearly going on, although neither of us could quite say what. It’s unthinkable that Will is secretly gay or even secretly bisexual, but his curiosity – maybe his sympathy – allow him to be secretly something-or-other with me. And as for me, I don’t know what I am, but I know what I like, and what I like is Will. What happens exactly? I touch him; he doesn’t mind; I’m grateful. And repeat. It’s not exactly Torvill and Dean. A few years later, he touches me. I’m even more grateful. Frankly, the sex is pathetic. But the love . . . my goodness me. You don’t choose your first love. I was lucky with Will.

Whatever’s going on, it’s only the eye-catching headline of the real-life story of everyday teenagers titting around. We drive to Boston and walk into River Island, hearing En Vogue’s ‘Hold On’ playing through the speakers and suddenly notice we’re striding down parallel aisles to the beat. We get to the end of the shop, turn round and stride straight out again, like idiotic dudes. And all the rest – the hysterical argument about whether Oliver Reed was in Castaway or The Blue Lagoon, the underage piss-ups in fields before barn-dances, the joint love for all things Prince, Robin Williams, and Fry and Laurie, the competitive impressions of friends and teachers, the pound-a-pint games of pool, my attempts to teach him the moonwalk, his attempts to teach me the chords of A and D, the many splendid parties and the fun, the honest-to-God fun of it. And there he is, holding my hand in the dark because he’s friend enough and man enough.

The friendship will last. But soon, he’ll have a girlfriend, one he’ll be crazy about. The sense that he’s crossed the boundaries of his masculinity will catch up with him and he’ll become colder towards me for a while. And he’ll remember that he should care, as he currently does not care – now, in August 1990 – as he gets out of bed and saunters from the room towards the loo, that I am watching the lean, easy movement of his body in the breaking dawn light. As things are, he looks straight back at me with a tarty smirk as he goes through the door. In the window the closed drapes have begun to glow with the last day of the holiday. Gentle beams of light pierce the cracks and tears in the fabric as if a benign alien power were probing the room for signs of intelligent life. I notice the moment, and because I am seventeen, I notice myself noticing. I marvel that something so present will soon become real only in memory. This moment, a happy one, will vanish. But it will be there to be recreated another time, any time – just as I daily reconstruct the sound of my mother’s voice.

This is a ludicrous amount to quote in one chunk, but I won’t make much attempt at an apology because I think this is a beautiful passage that I found gentle and peaceful and cathartic and heart-skipping and it ends with RW, writing now, thinking back to something that happened but has not gone.

This gives me a windfall of £615 and I blow £500 of it on Chesney. It’s a sporty-looking two-tone blue coupé with a curvy back windscreen and a five-speed gearbox which belies its tiny engine. It beeps when you put it in reverse. I love it.

First car! Independence! (DM left home to go to Cambridge but he wasn’t escaping anything much and never learned to drive; RW learned to drive and bought a car with his mum’s life insurance policy and was desperate to leave home by the time he’d had to do a third year of sixth form – discuss.)

Carole, my mum’s top friend and increasingly one of my own, steps in with the offer of a lift, which becomes the offer of three lifts. We visit King’s College, then Robinson College and then finally she drives me to my interview – at Robinson College.

I can’t work out for sure from this book (I know no-one cares) whether RW applied to King’s and was pooled pre-interview or whether he just visited King’s and then ended up applying to Robinson.

(See later: I picked my Cambridge college – Robinson. They want AAB so I better bloody well pull my socks up.)

Robinson sends me an offer of a place if I get AAB. My second choice, Leeds, offers ABC.

Grade inflation – RW’s may have been a compassionate offer as he had to get AAA next year. Since the introduction of A*s at A-level the standard offer is A*A*A – A*AA. Leeds asks for AAA for their English Literature course these days.

Two men in grief, two men who can’t cook and don’t know how to work the washing machine, two men who don’t know how to talk to each other and who haven’t got the first clue about bringing up a child. One man who is still a boy, who thinks his exams are the most important thing in the universe, but who can’t or won’t do any work. One man who left school at fifteen, but goes along with the idea of education while finding it faintly ridiculous.

Baked the day she suddenly dropped dead we chew it slowly that last apple pie. Shocked into sleeplessness you're scared of bed. We never could talk much, and now don't try. You're like book ends, the pair of you, she'd say, Hog that grate, say nothing, sit, sleep, stare… The 'scholar' me, you, worn out on poor pay, only our silence made us seem a pair. Not as good for staring in, blue gas, too regular each bud, each yellow spike. At night you need my company to pass and she not here to tell us we're alike! You're life's all shattered into smithereens. Back in our silences and sullen looks, for all the Scotch we drink, what's still between's not the thirty or so years, but books, books, books.

- Book Ends I, Tony Harrison

In my memory, she’s alive and well, not poor and old. Any year now, I might have to say something. Actually no, easier just to move house.

This is a nice callback.

At the same time I rack my brain for a memory of Woodhall Spa ever having a launderette. Like the one in the Levi’s advert with the soundtrack of ‘I Heard It Through the Grapevine’ and that beautiful model taking his clothes off. No, don’t think about the model…

It’ll be fine. As long as he doesn’t know I’m still thinking about Nick Kamen in his boxer shorts, it’ll be fine.

(Good god.) Happily, we do get some resolution as to the concern over fears of the reaction towards the end of the book as well.

As Will was wearing black 501s earlier, I’ve now cast Nick Kamen as Will in my head in some sort of terrible conflation.

Accountancy, for crying out loud. To me, Will is destined to be an accountant the way Jay Gatsby was always going to end up selling pet insurance. But I suppose the way I see Will isn’t the way he sees himself…

This is what I mean by the fact that Will in the book is how RW, in love, sees him, not who he actually is.

I notice that there are rumours about me and Will which I do nothing to discourage. In fact, I start to cultivate a deliberate sexual ambiguity. In a common-room chat about Thelma & Louise, I casually mention that Brad Pitt is ‘obviously some beautiful model they’ve given a few lines to’ and my co-winkies seem to appreciate my bullshit insights into Hollywood while going a bit quiet at that use of the word ‘beautiful’. It doesn’t take much.

I enjoyed these descriptions of RW, frustrated at being left behind to do another year of sixth form, rebelling further by cultivating an ambiguous sexuality.

Prince Hal is either going to leap onto his horse in a single bound or carry on getting pissed with Falstaff. Luke is either going to leave Tatooine forever, or go to work as a rent boy in the Mos Eisley cantina.

Striking This Is It turn of phrase.

I’m currently under the impression that it’s all to do with irony and detachment. I think that whatever they say, clever people don’t mean it. I expect in the next hour to be in the exclusive company of people who would never dream of calling a spade a spade. The very idea! Surely, it’s all going to be rather camp.

I actually wouldn’t say this was an incorrect perception.

And by the time we pass Huntingdon, my accent is finally in line with the geography of England. It was a good four years ago that I started to say ‘carstle’ instead of ‘caastle’ and ‘ahp’ instead of ‘oop’. All the affectations are coming home, I think. To the place where they won’t be affectations any more. No more pretending.

More accent affectation. People still do this, because I know people at university who did.

So far I’ve learnt that every one of their parents is a teacher, academic or writer. All ten parents are seemingly all still married.

We get a big change in a short space of time in the book, which works well narratively, between RW being desperate to be different, and RW feeling very aware that he does not seamlessly fitting in. He both does and does not now desire to be different from the people he does not seamlessly fit in with.

See also:

I’ve just turned twenty. With my September birthday and my unmissable third-year sixth form, it feels like I’m two years late to the party and also two years under-prepared.

Again, this would have been to quite a reasonable extent not the experience of DM. (To be considered, DM also went, by contrast, to Cambridge’s oldest college.)

And:

I like the general chuckle. But something is wrong. I’ve taken off my jumper to reveal what was once a grey T-shirt but which last summer I cut into the shape of a grey vest. My longish hair has grown much faster at the back, so I look less like a foppish public schoolboy and more like a mullet-wielding footballer. The gold stud in my left ear that was daringly effeminate in Woodhall Spa now feels weirdly aggressive, as do my Doc Martens boots and the box of condoms visible from within the bedside cupboard, left artfully ajar. The summer spent painting all ninety-four of the Dower House window frames has, for the first time, given me some muscle definition in my arms and shoulders but . . . did I have to wear a vest? And why, next to the Laurel and Hardy poster, is there a page of A4 on which I’ve written ‘Je suis une Communiste’ in chunky hip hop writing? Why, within hours of arriving at Cambridge, did I make a sign that said ‘Je suis une Communiste’ in chunky hip hop writing and put it up on the wall?

Oh my god, Je suis une Communiste did make me laugh.

So I re-cross my legs while unobtrusively lighting a cigarette with the Zippo that Will gave me as a going-away present.

(pause for minor swoon over Will’s going away present here.)

It’s about this time that I give up reading. That’s to say, at the beginning of my English degree. So, naturally, this is also where the lying has to start in earnest. As an English student, reading books and writing essays about books should really be quite high up there in a time and motion study of how I spend my day. The trouble is, much as novels, plays and poems have previously been a solace and an inspiration, reading them is now my job. I used to be practically the only boy who loved reading: now I’m surrounded by them. Therefore: screw reading.

He’s putting this down to his pushing back, his rebellion, but it’s not exactly surprising – we know from following the book through, from RW’s teenage diaries, that he wanted to go to Cambridge to be in the Footlights and become a famous comedy writer/performer. Lots of similar autobiographical writings, including RW’s hero Stephen Fry, mention how the academic work they put in to get to Cambridge drops off at this point now they are able put in the hours with like-minded people on comedy writing and performing.

It takes a particular type of focus and effort to do this, however – because of its reputation, the student comedy scene at Cambridge in and of itself is competitive and it’s also one without guarantee of paid work at the end of it (generally, of course, through comedians’ memoirs we here about the successful ones – although Tristam Hunt’s done alright for himself) and the stress from not doing academic work (as RW mentions later) and the pressure to expend your greatest amount of effort on that is substantial.

At this point, Dr Weiss gave me a one-to-one ticking off so gentle it had the effect of encouraging me to do even less. ‘Robert, it’s possible that you could secure a 2:1 with native intelligence alone, but unlikely. And certainly not a First.’ Oh Judy mate, that’s FINE! That’s BRILLIANT NEWS! Who needs a First? I’m going to be a wealthy TV star!

I think it also helps if you are reasonably sure of yourself.

God, this thing is starting to read like Confessions of a Sex Maniac! It’s awful I know, but I’m just recounting the facts. Let’s be clear, poppet, you don’t think it’s awful in the slightest. You’re having a ball and good for you. Pity about all the lying, though, dearest. Pity about the ‘facts’.

So it was always debatable how canon or how fanon it was that RW had a lot of sex and a lot of girlfriends, or whether this was just e.g. a contrast with DM, but yeah, he had quite a lot of sex.

It’ll come down to love and sex again. Unrewarding sex and unrequited love. Nothing very unusual, but then the privilege of being young is a total lack of perspective. So there could never be a sexier, more gorgeous woman than Lily-the-Goth. And there could never be a more beautiful, more enigmatic man than Mags’ friend Sam (the-former-Goth). And there could never be a turn of events more calamitous than my sort-of girlfriend Lily, and my sort-of minor deity Sam, falling in love with each other.

The nightmare: your crushes dating each other.

(I like how he calls men ‘beautiful’ quite often.)

Another man, and another tragic matter of the heart. At least it gets the poor boy to counselling.

At the end of my first year, the funny (and outgoing) outgoing president Miles Williams has left me a kind note asking me to give him a ring. I was immediately star-struck not just because the president had noticed my existence but also because he had his own telephone number. I nervously dial from one of the Robinson phone booths. ‘Aah, young Webbington! Thanks for calling, just catching up on a bit of cricket on the telly.’ Miles has been brilliantly compèring Smokers all year and I’m unnerved by the sound of his voice, as well as by the news that he’s in possession of not just a phone number but a television. Jesus, what else do you get if you’re president? A speedboat? An annuity?

This is amusing, but also quite a difference between 90s studenting and now-ish.

You and that Tristram Hunt boy. Do you get on with Tristram?’ ‘Er, I haven’t actually met him.’ ‘Nice chap, bit wet behind the ears, bit of a leftie by all accounts but you can’t have everything’

Ahhhh Britain is ridiculous part 927.

Fine, I thought. I’ll just learn Anglo-Saxon. I mean, how hard can it be? How many words can they have possibly invented before 1066? Boat? Sword? Rain? This is going to be a doss!

O.O

It’s with that attitude that I turn up at my first Old English seminar. In front of about seventy students, the Canadian tutor holds up a copy of his book: A Guide to Old English. ‘Read this book,’ he chortles in an accent that’s weird even for a Canadian, ‘and you’ll never need to come to one of my seminars again!’ The undergraduates around me chuckle indulgently. Not come back to the seminars! The very thought! My goodness!

The thing is, when people say things like this at Oxbridge is that they don’t expect at least some of the people there to take you seriously.

‘It’s all stupid, really. There’s a boy here that I fell in love with. I thought he was the best thing in the world. I’d just read The Picture of Dorian Gray and then he walked into the bar and I couldn’t believe my eyes. But I was wrong to give him my trust.’…

Bad enough he just had to endure an emotional outpouring from a semi-hysterical child, but he has also been made to consider that if there’s one thing that would look worse for Robinson than a 2:1 student getting a Third, it’s probably a 2:1 student lobbing himself off a high balcony.

The Education Committee scene is a set piece tour de force.

I kept hearing this first-year’s name and it was annoying me. I knew he had something, but people wouldn’t shut up. I was going to have to see for myself.

We’ve hopped back to my second year. I’m in a little performance venue called The Playroom to watch a one-hour non-Footlights revue called Go to Work on an Egg. A bunch of mates from Peterhouse and Jesus College have cobbled it together, apparently. Eddie had put me in charge of Smokers and I’ve auditioned most of them. They’re fine but let’s not get carried away. Except for one.

As a first-year, he was never going to be in the Tour Show, but he’d been asked to contribute material and I’d written a sketch with him. The sketch was nothing special, but that wasn’t unusual. It’s just that we’d nearly made each other sick with laughter while writing it. That was both special and unusual.

He’s on stage as the lights come up. Come on then, young David Mitchell. Let’s see what you’ve got. Oh, I see. You’ve got everything. I spend the hour enjoying the sketches without once taking my eyes off David.

He’s very funny, which helps. But I’ve seen other funny student performers. This is different. He’s completely committed, but entirely natural. He can afford to seem generous to the other performers because he’s going to get your attention just by standing still. It’s a precious combination of ease and focus that I conceitedly think reminds me of me. He looks like he lives there. It’s an exciting but also worrying turn of events. What am I going to do about this?

Fucking finally part 2. We already got DM’s perspective in Back Story.

This is lovely.

I pop the question. I don’t quite say, ‘Join me, and together we can rule Footlights galaxy as . . . two blokes’, but I do suggest we do a show. He’s a polite young man from a minor public school, as well as a first-year being asked out on a big comedy date by next year’s vice-president. So I can’t help hoping he’ll look pleased. What he actually looks like is Charlie Bucket just after Willy Wonka offers him a Chocolate Factory.

HEARTS FOR EYES

There again, once a sensitive young man belatedly understands that he’s been dumped, it’s only natural for him to start sensitively sleeping around. A whole eight days later, the panto cast party sees me trying to charm all the people I’ve variously ignored, patronised or insulted over the previous few weeks. One of them is a very nice girl called Jenna. She beckons me over . . .

I know it was fanon-canon to give RW a lot of girlfriends, but… eight days between one long term relationship and another! He’s probably had a good think as to whether this means anything, so I won’t go into it further here.

But I suppose I’m at least consistent. I didn’t come here to get an excellent degree. I came here to meet someone like David Mitchell. As it turned out, I met the actual David Mitchell, which was even better.

(hearts for eyes again)

David and I are two years into the business of creating a career in comedy and we do so with the quiet hysteria of the chronically obscure and stonily broke. We write together, we travel together to meetings, we travel back from them, we perform fringe stuff together, we watch TV, we stop watching TV and go to the pub, we walk home from the pub, we say goodnight. He is the first vertical person I see in the morning and the last at night. We’re annoying each other and I’m not helping the situation by living in his flat without paying any rent. But the flat for which I am paying rent seems a long walk away and contains a cat that isn’t house-trained. So I can either live with David, or I can live with a load of piss and shit. He doesn’t seem as flattered by my preference as I might have hoped.

It’s interesting to see this here, although of course they’ve talked before about getting fed up with each other.

Before then, for the two years after leaving college, I’d lived on Super Noodles and toast. I tried to avoid opening letters or answering the phone in case it was the landlord, the bank or the DSS. I was claiming housing benefit and taking whatever part-time work turned up. I worked as an usher in a theatre; I drove a lorry; I worked in a photo-library for a magazine about buildings (that’s Buildings Magazine). Jenna had a credit card and would occasionally bail me out. I tried to get my own credit card, but was refused. It was the Co-op offering a card to Labour members that turned me down. I must say, I thought that took the biscuit.

It’s been said before elsewhere by others, but I don’t know how you would do this in London today.

Jenna bailing him out with her credit card: shout out to partners enabling creative dreams.

And it seems to Jenna and me, as once again she goes glumly to bed and I stay up with a bottle of wine to play Civilization II for another two hours,

(OK, gaming again, fine.)

The pilot called P.O.V. has been commissioned for a whole Channel 4 series and the new title is Peep Show. I do the first week’s filming and Jenna even leaves me some warm food for when I get in at night.

I can’t believe Peep Show started so long ago RW wasn’t even with Abbie back then.

When she hears me say that none of Shakespeare’s comedies are actually funny, she starts singing a made-up song called ‘Pretty boy is a fucking moron’.

We all love Abbie, obviously.

We pack St Paul’s Church, Covent Garden – ‘the Actors’ Church’ – with lots of other family and friends. ‘This room,’ says my best man, David Mitchell, ‘is full of very nice people.’

Again, aw.

‘But before her . . .’ I take the Michael Portillo line because, it happens to be true, ‘as a teenager and a younger man . . .’ ‘Go on, boy. None of my business. Go on.’ ‘. . . not all the people I had, erm, relations with were girls. In fact, one or two of them were boys.’…

…Ultimately, we’re not talking about much sex with many people… Dad made exceptions for me just as I made exceptions for him. His views on snooty, Champagne socialist, metropolitan, formally pan-affectionate, middle-class Oxbridge luvvies had to take a step back when he noticed he had one for a son.

Well there you go then, I guess.

I look at my CV over those years and there’s persuasive evidence of breadwinning panic. Great Movie Mistakes, Argumental, Robert’s Web, Pop’s Greatest Dance Crazes, Young, Dumb and Living Off Mum, and almost any ad or voice-over going. I did all this stuff as well as I technically could, but my heart wasn’t in it and the audience noticed.

Hard to know what to say about this. I noted at the time that this stuff did coincide with starting a family and the higher costs that entails, but I wouldn’t have necessarily guessed they were to be regretted (except maybe the higher rate of panel shows).

But for now, there’s Daddy in the picture, standing outside, waving at his two daughters through the kitchen window. It’s as if he prefers it. It’s as if young families make Daddy sad.

tough read tough read (see my comments earlier)

How did you get on? If you scored 5,634, then congratulations because . . . That’s Numberwang! If you didn’t get 5,634, commiserations. Also, if you answered anything other than d) for any question, then you have been Wangernumbed and must now be taken out to be gassed. On with the show!

I love a good Numberwang reference.

I’m sure we’ve all seen it, the Care Home Kaleidoscope Synecdoche (I expect this phrase will catch on): a house concentrated into a single, glittering room. Trinkets, ornaments, pictures in frames – the mementos that survived the downsize. They stand for all the treasures – including the people – left behind.

I found this well-observed.

‘Well, yeah . . . she was a great reader, our Pat. By guy!’ ‘By guy’ is the way John softens ‘By God’ when in the presence of women or children. It reminds me of something, but I don’t follow the thought: before me is the great pleasure of reading to my daughter and grandfather at the same time.

‘By guy . . .’ John had said. By guy . . . Guy-Buy? Is that where I got the name, all those years ago? The name for the Guy-Buys, my gang of twelve disciples, by God? I doubt it, but it’s tempting to think so. Life is a mess and the desire is always to try and straighten it out instead of embracing it as it is; to unpick the cobweb into its silvery thread.

I like this: writing a memoir is about straightening a life (messy) out into a coherent narrative, with callbacks and foreshadowing just like any good fictional story, but even the most realism-centred novel isn’t as real as real life. In a story you’d never get two main characters with the same name because it would be too confusing. In this book, which is about real events, RW changed the name of his friend Jonathan Dryden Taylor because he had a John (his grandad) in the book already.

‘Are dragons real?’ I wrestle with this for a moment, but decide not to lie. ‘No, sweetheart. There are no real dragons.’ Ezzie takes this in and looks again at the pictures in the book. ‘But they’re real in the story.’ Gosh. That’s a good way of putting it. Must remember that one. ‘Yes, my love. They’re real in the story.’

Another good meditation on fiction.

Mr Rochester has a lot to answer for. Charlotte Brontë’s original Fifty Shades of Moody Twat is the direct precursor of Dirty Den and the accompanying notion that only a tall, dark emotional car-crash can make anyone come.

Well, excuse you.

I don’t drink alone and I’ve quit smoking. It remains a sexist world and I can’t change it for my daughters the way I would like to. But I can try to improve the situation one man at a time. Starting with me.

He had three grandsons. When I told him, in 2008, that Abbie was expecting a baby, he said, ‘It’ll be a boy, boy. The Webbs only do boys.’ And then when we turned up with a girl, followed by another girl, he was delighted and said, ‘Robert has to be different, doesn’t he?’ Yes. Robert has to be different.

I’ll leave with these final two quotes, except one final delightful DM thanks from the acknowledgements:

[Thank you] to David Mitchell for helping me to remember what happened and when. His excellent Back Story was a useful resource for the university section of the book, but I pestered him about chronology all the same. Without wishing to turn this into a mawkish BAFTA acceptance speech… I wouldn’t be in a position to write this book without the partnership that I formed with the gentle and brilliant David Mitchell.

#robert webb #how not to be a boy #britcom #mitchell and webb #text post #long post

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