Other Doctor Lives: W1A: Series 3, Episode 4 (2017)

*Spoilers from episode 3*

After a bit of a shakier outing last time, this one is pretty good. While there’s still plenty of the show’s circular dialogue, it’s brought up against an important deadline, which ups the drama to the proceedings.

The rumors over the BBC Big Swing Band and the problems with the Syncopatico auto-captioning software combine to create a perfect shitstorm. When a news story covers Jools Holland’s call to boycott the BBC over the issue, the captions render his name “Jews Holland.” That’s the disaster Ian and Anna walk into as they return from a meeting with Fiona. They’d been waylaid when Anna passed out in the taxi, but she insists she’s fine now and doesn’t want Ian to say anything about it. By the time they get back, they have an hour before one of them is due to go live on-air with the BBC’s official response to the whole thing.

Our character of the week is Neil Reid, played by David Westhead. Another one of the execs, Neil is Controller of News and Current Affairs. He’s the one who’s been dealing with the captioning debacle, and unfortunately for him, the latest Syncopatico upgrade is too shoddy to be accurate but too robust to switch it off. He has little time for wishy-washy business speak, and in any given executive meeting, he’s usually one of the few people speaking in complete sentences that have subjects and direct objects.

The whole thing is a mess. During the emergency meeting to address the crisis, a pair of junior execs keep reading out the names of celebrities who’ve voiced their support for the boycott, Siobhan keeps announcing how many minutes they have left, and Faiza has turned up just in time to imply that it’s all Lucy’s fault. Meanwhile, the paramedic told Anna to try and “have an easy day,” but now she’s the one who’s being tapped to make a statement on the news, without anyone knowing what that statement should actually be. And even though Anna doesn’t seem to react to this, Ian is clearly concerned on her behalf.

Okay, so we’ve gone from On Your Bike as a TV chat show, to Cycle Shorts as a series of video selfies of people saying, “This is me on my bike,” to now a series of video selfies of people just saying, “Me.” The idea is to start an online trend to build buzz ahead of the BBC Me launch, and Siobhan wants to get some “Super Me’s,” celebrities filming themselves saying, “Me,” to get people excited to join the bandwagon. Since celebrities come to the BBC regularly, Will is stationed in the lobby with a phone to recruit some to record themselves for the campaign. Let’s just say Will isn’t the ideal person to explain a request clearly and succinctly to a busy celebrity.

David Tennant’s narration didn’t stand out as much to me today, but here are a couple good lines:

• “In the meantime, the live interview about the BBC Big Swing Band on the 1:00 news isn’t getting any less live or any further away.”
• “In the end, after all the talk about exactly how much time they’ve got left, it turns out the answer is they haven’t even got enough left to address the question of what they’re going to do if they run out of it.”

Other Doctor Lives / Joel Fry-days: W1A: Series 3, Episode 3 (2017)

Despite the presence of Joel Fry, not my favorite. This one leans pretty heavily into the “everybody at the table talks a lot without actually saying anything,” although it does still have some entertaining parts.

The BBC is going full steam ahead with their Less is More initiative, looking for places to reduce/combine programming. When it’s pointed out that the BBC has six different orchestras/bands, the executives float the idea of downsizing them, with the BBC Big Swing Band under particular consideration. Siobhan and her team have been asked to look at Jack’s reworking of On Your Bike, now called Cycle Shorts, to potentially use as a trailer for BBC Me. After an upgrade, Syncopatico’s autocaptioning software is spitting out some unfortunate errors.

There are times when the drivel in the executive meetings gets into a good groove and it’s a fun skewering of corporate nonsense. Other times, it starts to feel like that scene from Extras where all the characters on Andy’s sitcom are just sitting around saying their catchphrases at each other in turn—only here, the catchphrases are things like, “Yes, no, brilliant,” “The fact is…”, and “So that’s all good then.” That’s kind of what this episode is like for me. The characters are batting words across the table, each trying to avoid having to say a fully formed, coherent thought.

As such, when they start getting press about the rumors that the BBC Big Swing Band is getting axed, at that point, nobody knows whether or not it’s actually happening. One thing that does come through loud and clear? Anna is anti- all things Lucy. There’s a nasty moment during a meeting where Lucy is trying to get Simon to clarify something, and she softens it by saying, “I mean, I might be being stupid…” Instantly, Anna snaps off one of her go-to catch phrases: “Yes, exactly.” And the whole mess with the Big Swing Band kicks off when Lucy points out that her grandparents are avid listeners, which causes Anna to not not think they’re ripe for the chopping block.

As someone who used to interpret in a public school where teachers would turn on the god-awful auto-transcriptions on YouTube videos, the captioning subplot is a lot more successful for me. An engineer touts the upgrade’s 93% success rate, but it trips up the most on proper names, a la “President Tramp” building his wall along the border of “Max Sicko.” As one exec notes, proper names are arguably “the most important 7%” of the news, so this is a major problem. By the way, back in the pilot, there was a sight gag about Syncopatico’s atrocious captioning software, so I appreciate seeing it brought up here as an actual story.

Here are my picks for David Tennant’s best narration today:

• I like this description of what Jack has turned On Your Bike into with Cycle Shorts – “In many ways, it’s a perfect example of exactly the sort of selfie-centered content that will lie at the heart of the new channel and that may well be the model for how television will work in a world where no one watches it anymore.”
• The narrator explains that a famous musician has weighed in on the Big Swing Band rumors on Twitter, “...and worse still, a lot of people with opinions have already liked that.”

Our character of the week is Michael Chung, played by Will Sharpe. He’s a young Fun Media employee who’s been brought to London from the New York office. Michael has been painted as a whiz kid when it comes to marketing—in the season premiere, BBC Me was his brainchild. Whenever we see him, he stands silently while Siobhan’s team riffs on their ideas. But when someone asks him for his input, he lets loose with a robotic-sounding monologue, leaving the other characters aghast at his brilliance.

Adding another character into the scenes at Fun has meant less Karl. Although he never has that many lines, a good amount of humor with Siobhan’s team often comes from Karl’s offbeat responses. Here, as in episode 1, the usual pitch session is truncated to build up to Michael’s clincher. Karl/Joel Fry only gets a couple good moments here. My favorite comes when Coco is contemplating how to create a theme event for the BBC Me launch centered around Cycle Shorts:

COCO: “Yeah, so like, maybe you have it somewhere you can only get to by bike.” 

KARL: “Yeah.” 

BARNEY: “Okay, like where?” 

COCO: “I dunno. Maybe more like…” 

KARL: “Yeah, France.”

And both Barney and Coco turn to him with the most dumbfounded look. I’m the number-one Karl defender out here, but I’ve never claimed that he doesn’t say some truly wild things, and that’s part of why I love him!

Y tu Luna también: Pan y circo: Season 1, Episode 5 – “My Body is Mine: Termination of Pregnancy” (2020)

Much like the episode on gender violence, this is another where Diego Luna wisely takes more of a back seat, setting the stage for the dinner conversation but mainly listening to other voices at the table.

The chef for today’s episode lives and works in Puebla, an ultra-conservative area of Mexico. In conducting short interviews with passersby ahead of the dinner, Luna encounters opinions like, “I’m all for it, as long as it’s because of rape,” and claims that women treat abortion as trivially as, “I’m just taking an Alka-Seltzer.” And naturally, the conversation throughout the country is entangled with questions of religion and morality—at one point, we see a clip from a speech where Pope Francis says abortion is “like hiring a hitman to solve a problem.”

Highlights from the conversation:

• One of the guests is the Secretary of State – It’s rare for a government official to come on the show and not immediately earn the suspicion of the other guests. But while the secretary gets some pushback here for her stance on decriminalization over legalization, she’s not really positioned in opposition to the others.
• In response to the decriminalization vs. legalization question, the president of the National Institute for Women says, “I think what is dramatic is that we are still talking about this in terms of crime instead of rights.”
• A theological advisor for a pro-choice Catholic group emphasizes throughout the night that the Church shouldn’t dictate legislation – “In Mexico, the legislative discussion now is not whether abortion is a sin or not. That is a matter for the churches, and they will have to convince their parishioners, the pastors, and the bishops what is a sin or not.”
• But a senator points out the trouble with that statement, which is that the Church doesn’t stick to that – “This has really been the great debate and the great contradiction that they wanted to address from the point of view of religion instead of law and justice.”
• A feminist advocate and social psychologist pushes back on Luna framing the abortion debate as “unpopular” – “In the cities where it’s decriminalized, people lose their fear, people change their opinions when they respond.”
• Meanwhile, an actress and activist argues that the tide on abortion hasn’t changed across the board, pointing to childhood friends from her rural hometown – “They tell me that I get to be naughty and they can’t, because in the provinces, they’d kill them if they got a divorce or had an abortion.”

As I said, Luna spends much of the discussion sitting back and listening. That means that his largest contributions come from his voiceover near the start of the episode. He observes the double standard in Mexico, saying, “While we are sitting here, there are women in prison for having terminated their pregnancies. But if we open that door, we can find hundreds of thousands of men who have abandoned their children and who are walking around freely.” He also stresses that the episode isn’t about debating abortion, that everyone on the show begins from a standpoint that people should have the right to abortion: he says, “This table is about listening to women, understanding their arguments, and, ideally, raising the awareness of those out there who think differently.”