Other Doctor Lives / Joel Fry-days: W1A: Series 3, Episode 6 (2017)

*Spoilers from episode 5*

This is the last episode of W1A, although there’s also a short special from 2020 that David Tennant narrated. So I’ve got a bit more for the show with Other Doctor Lives, but this is the end for Joel Fry-days.

The Less is More Initiative strikes again: it’s just come out that Head of Values, Head of Output, and Director of Better and being rolled into one new position. Matt has already cut his losses, so now Ian and Anna are left to decide whether they want to apply for it. To Izzy’s surprise, she learns that Will managed to pull out a last-minute save for the Hugh Grant fiasco. Everything comes to a head, where else? At the BBC Me launch.

Our last character of the week is Fiona Craig, played by Pooky Quesnel. She’s the civil servant who’s been working with the BBC on the contract negotiations. Fiona doesn’t have a very big role in the finale, but she’s at the BBC Me launch with everybody else.

I won’t get into spoilers, but there’s a little of everything quintessentially W1A here. Ian trying to pin things down in a meeting where no one wants to commit to anything. David not realizing he’s just thrown a huge wrench into things and Siobhan offering a very bad idea as a “fix.” Mostly unspoken love triangle stuff between Ian, Anna, and Lucy. A major crisis at a key movement that Ian has to step in and smooth over.

I like how things shake out with Will, Izzy, and Jack. Often, Will’s wins have been completely by accident, but this time, he sets out with a specific plan and it actually pays off. We also get a good full-circle moment for On Your Bike that’s nice to see.

Here’s what we’ve got for David Tennant’s narration today:

• This is how Tennant introduces David making everything worse at the eleventh hour  – “Even though it’s already been a big week at the BBC, for those that haven’t managed to get out of the building yet, it’s just got even bigger.”
• As the characters deal with an unfolding/urgent crisis, this made me smile – “They need to think of something fast, and worse still, something good.”

Karl and the rest of Siobhan’s team are at the BBC Me launch. Ostensibly, they’re there to help run things (I think? they all have their tablets with them,) but more than anything, they wind up serving more of a hype man role. Most of their lines are simply “yay!”, shouted after Siobhan or anyone else says something significant.

As such, Joel Fry doesn’t get to do much for his final episode. It’s an improvement over the Twenty Twelve finale, but not by much. Karl continues his habit of often being a little behind the others, at one point chiming in with a “yay!” when Barney and Coco don’t do it. And when Siobhan’s explaining some plans involving a smoke machine to the execs, Karl adds, “With, like, real smoke.” Oh, Karl!

Okay, last thoughts on the Joel Fry portion of W1A (I’ll do my David Tennant wrap-up next week): 

Accent Watch

Southern British English.

Recommend?

In General – A soft maybe. It’s amusing, but it gets too repetitive for me.

Joel Fry – I would. It can be hard to watch at times when the others are mean to Karl, but he’s always hilarious and endearing to me! 

Other Doctor Lives: W1A: Series 3, Episode 5 (2017)

*Mild spoilers for episode 4*

I watched Twenty Twelve and W1A a number of months ago and have had my reviews written up for a while, but when I went to post about this episode for last week’s Other Doctor Lives, I found just the notes I’d taken during my initial watch—somewhere along the line, I’d missed writing the review and had never gotten back around to it. Whoops! Anyway, I just rewatched this, the penultimate episode of W1A, to jog my memory and to write a new review of it.

There are a couple fresh crises brewing at the BBC. Claudia Winkleman, longtime host of Strictly Come Dancing, has been offered a deal with a rival network and is considering walking. While the executives scramble to find a way to woo her into staying, Izzy and Jack are met with a crisis of their own. Last week, Will had an unexpected win when he got Hugh Grant to film a “Super Me” ahead of the BBC Me launch. The only problem is, Grant didn’t realize it was for a viral marketing campaign—because, of course, Will didn’t explain things clearly—and now he’s upset about the BBC using his image without permission.

We’re getting two characters of the week this time around, because they’ve been a package deal from the start of the series. Max Olesker and Ivan Gonzalez play a pair of interchangeable junior executives, the terrifically-named Ben Rosenstern and Jerry Guildencrantz. As their surnames would suggest, much of their humor throughout the series has come from Ian and other executives generally being unable to tell which is which. They’re both quintessential yes-man and have a particular habit of echoing whatever Simon says in meetings. This past season, they’ve gotten their own mini-subplot. Like Lucy, their positions have been targeted by the BBC Less is More initiative, with two jobs being reduced to one. This has caused friction between them as each tried to distinguish himself from the other and prove he was the one worth keeping around. The subplot comes to its conclusion in this episode.

Claudia Winkleman is wanting to take on more serious projects, and the new offer she’s received would allow her to branch out from her role as the host of a popular but insubstantial show like Strictly Come Dancing. Losing her would be a huge blow to the BBC, so the execs are desperate to satisfy her. There’s an amusing pitch session where they search for anything more serious that they could offer her, and naturally, any time you have a delicate meeting with onscreen talent where it’s critical for everything to go right, it’s not great to have both Siobhan and David involved.

The Hugh Grant debacle has quickly spiraled out of hand. In addition to removing his image from the BBC Me marketing, he’s demanding that the BBC apologize by making a charitable donation of over a million pounds. As Izzy panics over the situation, Jack tries to convince her that her best option is blaming the whole thing on Will.

Some nice David Tennant narration today. Here were my favorite bits from him:

• This one cracked me up – “Meanwhile, upstairs, what was supposed to be a renewal meeting mainly about something called ‘distinctivity’ has spontaneously turned into an emergency damage limitation meeting mostly about disaster.”
• Nicely worded – “Elsewhere in the building, Jack Patterson and Izzy Gould have taken some time out to have an argument.”
• This is such a textbook W1A line – “It seems that the BBC is shortly to announce a major senior management simplification, which follows the pattern of encouraging more staff to apply for fewer jobs by abolishing the ones they’ve already got.”

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.”