Joel Fry-days: Drunk History: UK: Series 3, Episode 4 – “Kerry Howard and Joe Lycett” (2017)

This is Joel Fry’s last episode of Drunk History: UK, and I think it’s my favorite. He has a good-sized role in his story, and this is the best narrator he’s had. Really fun!

Again, just two stories. We learn about “The Great Train Robbery” and “Beatrix Potter & Peter Rabbit.”

Joel Fry is in the first story this time around, so I’ll quickly cover the Beatrix Potter story and then come back around to his stuff. It’s narrated by Kerry Howard, who did the Queen Victoria story from his first episode. There’s no gross humor this time around, but I’m still not really a fan of her narration style. The way she does character voices and stuff, it feels like she’s trying too hard to be funny, and part of the beauty of Drunk History is the narrator not trying to be funny. There are a couple good bits in here. I like the note that Peter is Beatrix’s favorite rabbit in her garden to draw because “the guy…the guy’s like Kate Moss. He knows how to pose.” And when Beatrix is trying to publish a paper she wrote on mycology, I’m amused by the sexist gatekeeper shooing her out of his office, saying, “Get, woman! Get! Get out of the science box.”

When I heard “The Great Train Robbery,” I assumed it was going to be about the famous silent film from the early 1900s. So color me surprised when our setting was “the swinging ‘60s”—I didn’t realize there was a real English train robbery with the same name (which I assume it got because of the film.) This story is narrated by Joe Lycett, who I think is the best narrator within these three episodes. His delivery is really fun, veering from ultra laidback to sudden bursts of energy where he just shouts out of nowhere. I especially love this line, from the police officer called to the scene: “They’re within thirty minutes of this location. Scour! I have foiled their plan, those fucking pricks. ‘Cause I’m a clever cat. Meow!” Ha!

Joel Fry plays Gordon Goody, a thief/hairdresser and one of the masterminds behind the robbery. He approaches Bruce Reynolds with the initial idea, and they assemble a crew to pull it off. He’s terrific throughout the reenactment—he follows the varying pitch of Lycett’s delivery throughout, cranking the intensity up or down on a dime as needed. Note: Lycett doesn’t always say who’s speaking with his dialogue, so as I talk about my favorite parts, I’ll put Gordon/Fry’s bits in bold:

One thing I always love on Drunk History is when the cast lipsync the drunken narrator’s verbal slips, and we get some fun instances of that here, like as Gordon cuts Bruce’s hair while they conceive the robbery. “Bruce says, ‘Literally all I can afford is this haircut, so I’m really hoping this is a good haircut, Gordon.’ And Gordon’s like, ‘Don’t worry about it, I’m very good at women’s hair—men’s hair.’ ‘What’d you say?’ ‘...Men’s hair.’” I get a kick out of Fry’s facial expressions as Gordon realizes the slip and emphatically corrects it.

And this exchange in the middle of the robbery is just hilarious. I love everything about it—the dry delivery of the absurd dialogue, Fry perfectly lipsyncing along as Lycett stumbles over his words, and the impeccable “you have got to be shitting” me facial expressions/body language:

“‘I can’t drive this train. The trains I’ve driven have been slightly different in the—kind of, in the buttons and stuff.’ And they go, ‘Well, it says go or stop.’ And he’s like, ‘I don’t know how to do that. I don’t know which one to press on that one.’ ‘Peter, surely, if you—if you’re—if you really think about it, probably go is the one.’ ‘Yeah, I mean that’s what they want you to think!’”

Oh my god, it’s so funny! The whole exchange plays out fantastically, with the perfect cap of Lycett finally announcing, “They press go, they’re going. Thank fuck for that.”

Side note: it’s interesting that Joel Fry plays white historical figures in all three of his episodes on the show. Drunk History has never shied away from racebent casting where appropriate—the first episode I watched of the main show featured John Cho as William Shakespeare!—but given that Fry made multiple appearances, it feels a little surprising that he didn’t play a Black person at least once. I wonder if the UK version of the show didn’t have as many stories about BIPOC historical figures.

All right, that’s it on Drunk History: UK! Final thoughts:

Accent Watch

Not applicable—he’s lipsyncing other people’s words.

Recommend?

In General – Slightly complicated question. The pilot is pretty yikes, but the two season 3 episodes I watched are great! I don’t know if it’s just the first episode that’s bad, or it took them a while to settle into things. Maybe start from the end and work your way backwards so you can stop if it gets awful?

Joel Fry – I would! Fry does a great job with the format, and his performances here are always funny.

Warnings

Smoking/heavy drinking, language, sexual content/references, strong thematic elements (including jokes about nonconsensual sex in the pilot,) violence, and strong gross-out humor in the pilot.

Joel Fry-days: Drunk History: UK: Series 3, Episode 2 – “Murr and Jessica Knappett & Lydia Rose Bewley” (2017)

Okay, so this isn’t a full White Van Man situation where the pilot is “meh” and the second episode is fantastic, but this is a big improvement over episode 1. Although this one has a much smaller role for Joel Fry, it doesn’t have the same gross humor as the pilot, which is a relief.

Although, before I get started, a short airing of grievances: while there were other things I wanted to watch, like Fellow Travelers and the new Dexter shows, Joel Fry’s three episodes of Drunk History: UK were my primary reason for subscribing to Paramount+. After watching the pilot, I discovered that Paramount+ was missing two episodes of this series, one of which was this one. “Streaming rights issues,” apparently. Why would two episodes have different streaming rights than the rest of the show? No idea. Either way, I had to find this episode through alternate means, at which point I was so aggravated that I promptly decided to cancel my subscription, limiting myself to watching whatever I could fit in before my billing cycle ended. I don’t why, but tech issues make me so irrationally angry—I had to express my frustration in whatever limited way I could. Arghhhhhh!!!

Anyway…just two stories this time around. We learn about “John Tunstall & Billy the Kid” and “Elizabeth I & Mary Queen of Scots.”

James “Murr” Murray narrates the Billy the Kid story, telling us how he was hired to be the personal protection for shopkeeper John Tunstall and fought the local “cartel” throwing their weight around. There are amusing references to The Bodyguard, with Billy the Kid promising Tunstall, “I’m gonna be the best Kevin Costner you’ve ever had.” A lot of the humor in this drunken retelling comes from the American Murr’s difficulty with accents. Tunstall was British, and the story involves him feuding with a few Irish characters. Murr regularly starts their dialogue with an easy stock line to get him started—“Me Lucky Charms” for the Irishmen and “Pip, pip, cheerio!” for Tunstall—and he keeps up a running commentary on his accent struggles:

• “‘Hey!’ I can’t do an Irish accent. ‘Hey, mon!’ No, that’s Jamaican. Hold on, hold on….”
• “‘This is fucking nuts, man!’ It sounds Mexican, but it’s not.”

Jessica Knappett and Lydia Rose Bewley narrate the story of the two queens, which is where we see Joel Fry. I don’t think their tag team is as much fun as Murr’s—their narration is kind of mumbly, and they talk over each other a fair amount. But there’s still some fun stuff here. I like the observation that it was “a pretty frickin’ fit thing” for Elizabeth to be a virgin back in those days, and I chuckled at one of the narrators declaring Elizabeth was “a bloody prozzy, by which I mean Protestant!”

Joel Fry plays Gilbert Gifford, a honeypot who’s sent in by Elizabeth’s right-hand man to get incriminating evidence of Mary’s plans to overthrow her. He doesn’t appear until the tail end of the story, but this is very fun. Right from the start, he slides into Mary’s cell, proudly declaring, “Gilbert Gifforrrrrd!” with a double thumbs-up, hee! I get a kick out of how transparently Fry’s body language telegraphs that he’s a double agent. Gilbert segues straight from Mary complimenting his calves to stroking his beard as he asks, “But anyway, don’t you think you should be queen, though, Mary?”, and he turns to flash a grin at the camera while he’s getting the evidence he needs. I also really like how gingerly he sets Elizabeth’s inkwell on her desk so she can sign a decree.

As with the first episode, Fry’s talents lend themselves well to this kind of work. Even with only a few minutes of screentime, he delivers comedy, character, and plot movement with his lipsynced performance.

Joel Fry-days: Drunk History: UK: Series 1, Episode 1 – “Rob Beckett and James Acaster” (2015)

It was a deep dive on another actor, Andrew Rannells, that led me to watch Drunk History in the first place. That episode was a blast, and I went back to watch the whole series later on—so much fun! So it’s only fitting that Joel Fry is the reason I’m trying out the UK version of the show. This is his first of three episodes, and while he’s quite good in it, I’m not sold on the series yet.

As with its US counterpart, the conceit of the show is that a comedian gets blinding drunk, then tells a historical tale as well as they can. Their narration becomes the soundtrack to a reenactment, with the actors lipsyncing their drunken retelling verbatim. In this episode, we’re treated to “When Henry VIII Met Anne of Cleves,” “Queen Victoria’s Secret Sex Drive,” and “How Scotland Caught the Black Death.”

First, a couple differences from the US show. There doesn’t appear to be an actual host in this series. Each drunk comedian is talking to someone offscreen, but we never see them. Instead, a series narrator briefly introduces each story before the comedian starts telling it. I like the quick tally of how many drinks they’ve had at the start of their segments.

I already knew the bullet points on Anne of Cleves from the musical SIX, and this version of her story hits the same major beats. Told by Rob Beckett, there are some funny bits here. I like the scene where Henry VIII is talking to Oliver Cromwell about his previous failed marriages (divorced—beheaded—died): “And Cromwell’s like, ‘Henry, it’s not your fault!’ And Henry’s like, ‘Well, one of ‘em definitely was.’” I also enjoy Henry’s friend Anthony Brown not having the guts to tell Henry that Anne doesn’t look like her portrait, instead saying, “‘Henry, she’s absolutely quality, mate. You’re gonna love her.’ And then Brown fucks right off!” However, it’s gross that, while Beckett specifically references Anne’s smallpox scars as the issue with her looks, she’s played by a fat guy in a wig and 16th century gown. And I really don’t like the extended sequence of Beckett imagining Brown gagging as he tries to tell Henry about Anne.

Fortunately for me, the Black Death story is the shortest of the bunch, a quick little tag at the end of the episode. It’s narrated by James Acaster, and instead of being dramatized by a cast, his narration is accompanied by simple animation. It’s still horrifically disgusting, though, and it creeps me out. The one bit I enjoy is his description of how the plague is ravaging the English: “Chins falling off. Butts falling off. Nipples—off.”

Kerry Howard tells the Queen Victoria story, where Joel Fry plays Prince Albert to Rebecca Front’s Victoria (Front was Nicola Murray on The Thick of It, so that’s fun.) While I knew a little about Victoria and Albert, I’d never heard speculation that Albert was gay and their nine children were due in part to Victoria being “a raging nympho.” Again, this is a segment with a few fun lines and a fair amount of uncomfortable stuff. I like Howard’s description of the sexual repression of the era, saying, “Ankles were not to be seen. They were like tits.”

Mostly, though, the comedic depiction of Albert’s horror and exhaustion about Victoria’s insatiable sex drive just reminds me of the Pop Culture Detective videos on “Sexual Assault of Men Played for Laughs.” Through a modern lens, we’re able to recognize plenty of sexual violence in arranged marriages between historical monarchs and recognize that it’s effed up, so it doesn’t sit that well for me to hear Howard laughing uproariously at her own jokes when Albert is the one being forced to have sex.

Despite all that baggage and grossness, I do still like Fry’s performance as Albert. He’s a bit hampered by Howard’s narration—he’s lipsyncing her words, of course, but she does different voices for all the characters, which boxes him in more than usual to a specific portrayal of the character—but given the strength of his nonverbal acting, it doesn’t surprise me that he’d do well with this format. His facial expressions and body language are top-notch throughout, making Albert a sweet bundle of nerves who’s caught between a rock and a hard place when the queen of England announces, “I’m gonna have you.”

Here are my favorite parts:

• When one of Albert’s friends asks if he’ll know what he’s doing in the bedroom, Albert replies,  “To be honest, erm, why would I want to go near a woman? [...] It’s like a dragon down there, and I don’t want to touch that dragon.” Fry’s facial expressions are just great here!
• “‘You’re gonna be my wife—I mean, husband.’ And Albert’s like, ‘Er…!’”—Nice physicality here, with Albert nervously taking a drink while looking wide-eyed at Victoria.
• On their wedding night, I like the choice Fry makes to have Albert covering his face with both hands while Victoria is on top of him.

Not the most auspicious start to the series. The US version went on to share lots of cool lesser-known stories from history—more obscure tidbits about famous figures, badass stuff from impressive marginalized folks, etc.—so seeing an opening episode that relies on cheap cross-dressing jokes, “funny” sexual assault, and intense gross-out humor is a disappointment. Fry’s other two episodes are both from series 3, so fingers crossed that the show will be more thematically aligned with its predecessor by then.

Accent Watch

Not applicable—he’s lipsyncing someone else's narration.

Recommend?

In General – No. At this point, the humor is too mean-spirited and gross. I hope it gets better, but either way, this episode definitely bothers me.

Joel Fry – Possibly. Despite the disturbing angle the story takes, Fry’s performance is still good.

Warnings

Strong thematic elements (including jokes about nonconsensual sex,) sexual content, language, smoking/heavy drinking, references to violence, and strong gross-out humor.