Tv I miss 'Friends'. Or rather the first season of 'Friends'. I miss the 'ugly naked guy'. I miss the deliberately strange Pheobe. I miss the unrelated Chandlerisms. I miss the Monica who was a mature woman living in the city. I miss Joey when he wasn't too stupid. I miss Ross when he was in love with Rachel. I miss the Rachel who was a waitress. I miss the times the characters would just sit around chatting about stuff without an impetuous. I miss the time when even filler episodes were classics. Sitting down to watch an original episode is like greeting an episode of 'Fawlty Towers' - you've seen them so many times, yet you can't help but laugh (even 'The One with the Stoned Guy' makes me titter now, despite Jon Lovitz). Heck, I even miss Marcel - and the fact that this show was kooky enough to have a monkey as a semi-regular character. Over the years as new writers have come, we've moved from character to plot.
Watching the seventh series (still continuing a year behind on Channel 4) is an entirely missable prospect. It's difficult to put your finger on why it isn't as good. Perhaps it's that the details of the characters have been obliterated. Or that any semblance of a guest cast hardly get a look in - or if they do it's because they're stars from other shows. Is it Matthew Perry's now wayward performance? Or the fact we know that Lisa Kudrow is capable of some much more, especially having seen her work in 'The Opposite of Sex'. Or that Joey has become needlessly dumb in the face of looking for easy jokes. Or that Courtney Cox looks unremittingly bored. Or that The Schwimmer seems to be spending more time directing - and is of the opinion that shouting is a good substitute for comic timing. The only suspect to come out of any of this is Jennifer Aniston. I can quote whole lines of the first series:
"Gum would be perfection. Gum - would be perfection. Could've said gum would nice - could've said I'll have a stick. But ... no ... no... no ... for me - gum is perfection. I loath myself...."
Even the second soundtrack is messier and just not as cohesive as the first, 'Hootie' and 'REM' replaced by 'Robbie Williams' and an appalling mix of 'Smelly Cat' (which I also miss - when was the last time we saw Pheobes perform at Central Perk?). Thank God the eighth year will be the last. I'm mad as hell and I can't take it anymore....
(and it seems BBC Manchester feels the same way - next weeks 'I Love 1994' features a segment - anyone taking bets on them talking recent series down?)
Music Currently listening to Poe, whose standard female vocalism is interspersed with Portishead wierdness and tape recordings of her dead father. Worryingly mainstream in places - perhaps trying to tread just the wrong line. Bet she watched Teletubbies and wondered if the world was laughing at her...
Club One of my top five favourite places on Earth (and I don't make that claim lightly) has a web site. The Krazy House was for a long time the only Rock Club in the centre of Liverpool. The first time I visited was on my birthday getting on for five years ago - and there was a Halloween ball (yes - my birthday is the 31st October - and I've heard any jokes you may have). This was pre-Buffy - so the room was filled with girl with red horns and forks and old-style vampires. Oh and a curious looking Darth Vader. I fell for the place - stepping into there from Liverpool City Centre was literally like entering a new world.
Time and behaviour in this club is strangely at right-angles with the rest of reality. One night, one of the last times I went with a friend, my drink addled mind had been in conversation with one of the regulars. From nowhere I asked her if she'd ever had her palm read. She says no - and that she has always wanted to see her future. So I take her hand...
[I should step out of this story for a moment and say I don't know anything about palm reading - nothing could be spookier could it]
...and realising my predicament, and realising I'll have to say something, the improvisational actor in me began to talk about the lines of the hand signifying this and that. I didn't actually say anything she might not have thought and now and then she'd ask me whether 'things would improve' and I just told, generally upbeat, positive things. Her usually sullen goth face for five minutes after was so cheerful I thought I'd ruined her.
Time passes. It's the following week. I'm there again, fighting at the bar for a drink and suddenly a hand is thrust in front of me. This time I'm not drunk and I'm in an episode of the old game 'Scruples' - do I tell the truth? Well no. So I told this second girl (friend of the first) the exact same things - she too goes away happy. Ten minutes later another hand (friend of the second). Then give it twenty and another. And this goes on all night. Each time I tell the same upbeat tale of a possible future - and at no point do they call me on it.
This tells me two things - there are some things girls don't talk to each other about, and that if you're going to do something like this at least have a reason. Believe me when I say that my inability to monopolise the situation I've makes me unremittingly nice, or unbelievably stupid. Or both. *
* What a creep.
No comments:
Post a Comment