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.

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!