Joel Fry-days: Bedlam: Series 2, Episode 5 – “Dare” (2012)

I’m not quite sold on this BBC supernatural drama, although admittedly, it doesn’t help that Joel Fry’s guest appearance comes in the literal penultimate episode of the series. I love me a good penultimate episode, but not when I don’t know any of the characters or the main story! Despite that, it’s quite a good episode for Fry, and his plot is standalone enough that I don’t need any extra details to make sense of it.

Partway through the opening scene, I realized I maybe shouldn’t be going in completely unaware, so I paused to Google the show. Basically, the premise is this: in modern-day London, the infamous Bedlam hospital has been turned into high-end flats, but the building is still haunted by the ghosts of former patients. In each season, the protagonist sees visions from the past as these ghosts emerge, giving them clues to help the spirit move on and/or protect anyone from being hurt by them. In series 2, that protagonist is Ellie. She shares a flat in the building with Max, Kiera, and Dan.

In this episode, Ellie’s visions show her a mutilated priest. She and Max search for answers at a nearby church, not realizing Bedlam houses an old chapel. This is the staging ground for a troubled young man named Liam to “[conduct] the rite of blasphemy” with his two reluctant friends in tow. Elsewhere, Dan juggles personal drama with both Kiera and the landlord Warren (who has some involvement in the supernatural goings-on in the building.)

We’ll briefly touch on the main cast drama, then move onto the one-off plot that’s our focus today. It’s clear that these flatmates (plus Warren) have super tangled interpersonal lives. There are multiple will-they-won’t-theys, a recently terminated pregnancy, and paternity secrets. Because it’s so close to the end of the series, some of the relationships get shaken up here, and some of the secrets come out. But since I don’t have any of the background on these characters/stories, it doesn’t really matter to me. While Ellie and Max both know about the supernatural stuff and work together to find the priest’s ghost, it seems Kiera and Dan don’t. Kiera is played by Gemma Chan, which is neat to see.

Okay, onto the Ghost of the Week plot, which is where we find Joel Fry. As Liam, he kickstarts all of this. His actual aims are kind of muddled—he thinks conducting his ritual in a purportedly haunted chapel will call forth “evil,” which he hopes to capture on film and put online. He also thinks this will prove God doesn’t exist, though I’m not sure how.

But in a way, it makes sense for his intentions to be confusing. Liam repeatedly expresses sentiments like “I don’t care what people think,” and “I’m not scared!”, presenting himself as equal parts edgy outsider and puckish shit-stirrer. When he and his friends—ex-girlfriend Chanel and her new boyfriend Taylor—see evidence of spookiness afoot, Liam reacts with glee, at one point actually rubbing his hands together as he grins. In truth, though, his speechifying and eagerness to unmask “evil” are rooted in trauma, grief, and misplaced guilt.

It’s an interesting oneshot plot, because while I think the writing feels kind of inconsistent, the episode does draw me into the lives of these three characters. The dynamic between all of them is interesting, and the hints we get about Liam’s personal issues early on is enough to make me want to know more. Liam is still hung up on Chanel and makes the occasional “oh, I think your boyfriend’s scared” dig, but Taylor is genuinely his friend, even if Chanel gets along better with both guys than they do with each other. (Side note: Taylor is played by Sam Anderson, former History Boy and Danny Pink on series 8 of Doctor Who!)

For a guest starring role, Liam gets a lot of focus, so it’s a pretty nice role for Joel Fry. Despite some of the shakiness in the writing, he’s quite compelling to watch here. As Liam shifts from mischievously excited to brashly defiant to quietly needy, Fry deftly navigates everything and keeps it feeling consistent to the character. You can feel the undercurrent of pain beneath his provocation, and as much as he brushes off Chanel and Taylor’s misgivings, it’s clear that he doesn’t want them to leave him here alone.

I want to highlight the opening scene, where Liam breaks into the basement at Bedlam, exploring until he finds the chapel. Although it briefly had me worried that Fry’s character was going to die in his introductory scene—investigating an old haunted hospital on his own, and before the credits, no less!—the performance here is so good. Because Fry has such strong nonverbal acting skills, he keeps your attention without any dialogue. As Liam pokes around, alternately curious and irreverent, we’re given a good sense of this character before he ever speaks his first line.

Also, I believe he does a brief Q impression in the middle of the episode? Add it to Fry’s miniature David Bowie and Mr. Spock impressions from White Van Man!

Accent Watch

London, I think. I’m realizing that a lot of Fry’s accent work has a pretty light touch, rarely more than a few shades away from his own accent. That can sometimes make it harder for me to identify if he’s putting one on or just using his regular voice.

Recommend?

In General – A soft maybe. I was definitely more interested in the Ghost of the Week plot than any ongoing arc stuff, but it might work better in context.

Joel Fry – I think so. Fry does a really nice job as Liam, and there’s a surprising amount of meat on this bone.

Warnings

Violence (including references to child abuse,) disturbing images, strong thematic elements, sexual references, and drinking/drug use.

Y tu Luna también: Pan y circo: Season 1, Episode 7 – “Looking Ourselves in the Mirror: Identity and Racism” (2020)

The last episode of season 1. Like episode 6, it was particularly interesting to look at this topic from a Mexican perspective. However, I do think they could’ve covered certain aspects of it in greater depth. Onto the dinner conversation!

• I love this analogy from the coordinator of a non-profit group – “Identity is like a garment that carries Mexicanness. Then you take it off and you realize that everybody can have a different one.”
• A linguist explores the concept of identity by pointing out that everyone at the table—everyone in the world—is an Earthling, “however, that isn’t part of our identity. Because there’s no contrast” – She goes on to say that Earthling identity, Earth culture/books/food/etc. would take on a much greater meaning if we were invaded and oppressed by an alien race.
• I really like this remark from a journalist – “It makes a lot of sense to me to have an identity associated with the land. Because culture has a lot to do with geography, with climate, with the things you eat, with the produce that comes out of your garden. On the other hand, national identities, to me, as an indigenous person, generate conflict. I have a Chilean passport because of a historical accident.”
• A researcher discusses some of the reasons behind the denial of racism in Mexico – “They say, ‘How can we as Mexicans be racist if we are the product of two races? We can’t be racist.’ That’s one. The other argument is, ‘In Mexico there are no people of African descent.’ There is a very strong Afro presence which was erased to build a national identity based on the indigenous and the Spanish, but also in a hierarchical position.”
• This is where I think the episode drops the ball – While immediately following these comments, there’s a montage of footage, news clips, and snippets of interviews involving Afro-Latinos, no one at the table is speaking to that experience on a personal level. We see people talking about Afro-Latinos, but no one really talking as an Afro-Latino, which is especially stark when they’re brought up in the context of erasure.
• An architect for the controversial Mayan Train project, which is planned to go through indigenous communities, winds up being the unofficial “heel” of the table – Multiple other guests take him to task over the project, and at one point, he accuses the indigenous journalist of being “racist” against him because the journalist doesn’t include him, a mixed-race man, in his observations about indigenous folks around the table.
• This is a good quote from the linguist – “The call for integration to us has always been an alarm. Because it means precisely to disenfranchise the population under a brutal racist system with public resources from the state to reach this point.”
• I like this detail that the chef shares with Diego Luna, talking about his process when he cooks in different places – “I never take anything prepared, I never take anything from my place. I go to the place where I’m going to cook with what’s there.”
• A renowned soprano from an indigenous community talks about how much it means to her to sing songs in various indigenous languages (six languages, as Luna points out!) – “Those of us who have and speak a language say to you, ‘Speak your language, learn a language.’ Because we are losing them, because we have to rescue what our ancestors spoke, right?”
• This is an excellent quote from the linguist about projects like the Mayan Train – “It seems to me there’s a ‘we think this is good for you’ kind of idea here. I find the directionality quite disturbing. Let’s assume good faith. But even if there were good faith, we have been an impoverished population, but there are also other forms of validation that go beyond paper money.”

This is another episode where Diego Luna takes a lighter role during the discussion, making room for other voices. He introduces some topics, like the Mayan Train, but he mostly just reacts to what the guests say. As usual, he has some nice interactions with the chef before the meal.

I also like his introductory voiceover here. I’m going to quote it in full:

“Sometimes we are all those who were born in the territory we call Mexico. Although sometimes, we are the inhabitants of a region or simply a city or an indigenous town. Other times we are the ones who share certain physical traits, because ‘we’ always implies an outsider, an ‘other. And that can lead to racism, a disease with terrible consequences, consequences that we can see all over the world.”

Joel Fry-days: Play for Today: Series 2, Episode 1 – Wild (2026)

Okay, not a drill, we have another new Joel Fry project! And honestly, while this one-off TV dramedy is fairly good, his character/performance is just excellent! I know I sound embarrassingly easy to please throughout most of my reviews, but it’s not my fault that Fry keeps playing characters I adore so much.

Play for Today is a revival of a BBC anthology series from the ‘70s-’80s, with each episode telling a self-contained story (and the new series makes a point of showcasing new writing/directing talent.) In Wild, three old friends from university head to the Scottish Highlands for their 27th annual wilderness camping trip. It’s Lou’s turn to plan it this year, and he’s got big ideas, ranging from doing things old-school (with a map and no phones) to filming the trip for posterity via GoPros. Naturally, it’s not long before everything starts going wrong. As the guys get bug-bitten, lost, and hungry, tempers flare and longstanding insecurities/resentments start coming out. Will they—and their friendship—survive this camping trip?

The premise is pretty basic, from both a comedy and a drama perspective, but for the most part, I enjoy how the story digs into it. All sorts of wilderness mishaps in store, and the guys’ bickering verges on childish at times. Lou presents as a cross between a bumbler who thinks he knows everything about the great outdoors (this is the year he’s finally gonna catch a rabbit, he swears!) and a trip tyrant who’s weirdly insistent about his rules, even as things go off the rails. But while there may not be method in his madness, there is a deeper reason behind it. Alistair, who’s married with a young child, frequently becomes the butt of the joke for the other two, who paint him as the guy who got lame after he settled down. And Lou also uses Alistair as an object lesson for Dev, who’s irritated that Lou refused to let his girlfriend accompany them on the trip. It’s painfully obvious that Lou, as he clings onto their university glory days, is afraid of losing Dev to “lame” married life, so the dynamic between the three men partially becomes a power struggle over which way Dev wants his life to go. As for Dev, he’s not quite sure himself, and Lou and Alistair sort of become the devil and angel on his shoulder as he considers his future.

More than anything, this is a story about men being afraid to be open and vulnerable with each other. They sublimate their feelings into camping and squabbling because they can’t let themselves be honest about their fears and insecurities. It’s literally the meme, “Men will [do anything] before going to therapy,” and for the guys to get through this trip in one piece, it’s going to take more than just their wilderness skills.

Despite the beautifully expansive setting of the Scottish Highlands, this is quite an intimate story. While Dev’s girlfriend and Alistair’s family get name-checked, the only characters onscreen are the three guys. I’ve seen Daniel Mays in a number of things, most memorably his guest-starring episode of Doctor Who (“Night Terrors,” from the Eleventh Doctor era,) and he gives his all as Lou. The guy is kind of a mess but desperately trying not to be, clinging tight to this camping trip with both hands even as things fall apart. I’ve seen Amit Shah, who plays Dev, in various sundries—he’s a Doctor Who alum as well (he was in the Thirteenth Doctor’s debut episode,) and he had a small role in an episode of White Van Man with Joel Fry! Even though we only see the three guys on this particular trip, both the story and Shah’s performance do a nice job of showing how Dev regresses to his university self when he’s around his mates, especially Lou, who eggs him on. 

That leaves Joel Fry as Alistair. While IMDb credits him as such, the other guys spend a good 95% of the story calling him “Al.” But since sans-serif fonts can’t distinguish between a lower-case “L” and an upper-case “i,” we’ll stick with “Alistair” so it doesn’t look like this guy is called “Artificial Intelligence.”

Oh, man. Alistair—my sweet, asthmatic, uncool dad-friend. What a guy! He tries to join in with Lou and Dev’s laddish mockery, but he’s not very good at it, either stumbling over his words as he tries to come up with a zinger or being too earnest to keep it up when one of his mates looks bothered by it. So instead, he becomes the prime target of mockery. Lou is particularly invested in making him look bad, and he sucks Dev into it too. They gripe about Alistair’s asthma making him the “weak link” who slows the group down (Chekhov’s inhaler makes its appearance in the first five minutes of the episode,) but then they laugh at his insistence that he can keep up with them. Condescendingly, they urge Alistair to stay in his lane and play to his strengths, which include “[smashing] the school run out the park” (“I’m never late,” he agrees stoically) and “[thinking] of the perfect Secret Santa gift.” Insert The Good Place meme: “That’s an unmarried-bros insult. It’s devastating. You’re devastated right now.”

I’m reminded a lot of Daniel from Alice and Steve, another of Fry’s characters who’s emasculated a lot for being a gentle wife guy who doesn’t perform masculinity the “right” way. While Alistair is quicker than Daniel to stand up for himself, he’s also quicker to be negatively influenced by his friends’ insults. The cracks about his asthma are a particular sticking point for him, and he gets himself too invested in trying to prove he can keep up with the others, to his own detriment.

Look, I love Alistair, okay? I love him. Like all three guys, he’s a bit too allergic to admitting vulnerability, although he’s at least made a little more progress on that front than Lou and Dev have. He touts the waterproof rating of his GPS. He covers his face with both hands when a swarm of midges descends, creating temporary strategic openings for his mouth when he needs to talk. He sometimes plays peacemaker and sometimes gets swept up in the bickering. He mumbles apologies when he fumbles a big armful of firewood moments after describing himself as “steady [and] composed.” He hums and sings to himself. He has hard limits where he absolutely will not let his friends talk shit.

Joel Fry’s performance hits all the right notes. Alistair is caring and observant and pedantic, sweet and dorky, by turns confident and insecure. Just a terrific character! The little details in Fry’s acting keep Alistair feeling specific and grounded—although the character is a fairly recognizable “type,” he feels well-rounded on the screen.

Accent Watch

Southern British English, maybe a bit London.

Recommend?

In General – I probably would. It paints in fairly broad strokes sometimes, but it’s ultimately a nice story, and the three guys are very believable as old university mates whose friendship is being held together (yet simultaneously tested by) camping trips.

Joel Fry – 100%, yes! Alistair is fantastic, and Fry is really great here!

Warnings

Plenty of “don’t try this at home,” language, and thematic elements.