Looking for something better

HBO's Looking has been renewed for a second season, news that comes as a huge relief to this fan. But not everyone gets the show, with critics and the audience divided over this tale of sex, love and friendship in San Francisco. It's been branded slow and boring, but if, say, Noah's Arc is your yardstick for gay TV drama, then Looking's slow-burning, nuanced, and unforgiving take on gay men's lives will inevitably disappoint.

Some will cry "but Noah's Arc represents us! Those white shows don't" but I wonder how many black gay men live the kind of life the characters in Noah's Arc live. Noah's Arc is many things (fabulously entertaining, for one) but no one could ever accuse it of being realistic or deep. It's pure T.V. bubblegum fantasy, as true to life as Lost In Space is representative of space travel, and some of its tropes (gay boy falling for straight boy) were tired and played out even in 2005.

On the other hand, Looking is a genuine attempt to shine a light on the lives of a group of gay men in San Francisco. It is slower than, say, Scandal, and if that's a problem for you, maybe Glee might fit you better? Looking is to gay T.V. drama what The Wire is to cop shows: profound, literary and cinematic (yes, it also looks visually stunning).

The characters hale from a variety of racial backgrounds, and manage to cover age and class, too. Patrick (Jonathan Groff) is the classic whitebread American WASP. His awful friend August (Frankie J. Alvarez) is a spoilt rich (Latino) kid. Their other friend, Dom (Murray Bartlett), is the daddy of the group, a man who's just hit the dreaded forty. Their friends and lovers are Britain's own (black) O.T. Fagbenle; Lauren Weedman, as the best fag hag ever ("he can sit on my face anytime"); and Raúl Castillo's painfully sensitive blue collar Richie.

Patrik-Ian Polk - demonstrating a disappointing grasp of professional courtesy - said of Looking, "It's dull as ditchwater." That's ironic, coming from a guy whose entire oeuvre consists of rehashing the same storyline: a group of conservative gay college dudes, one of whom falls for a "straight" guy. In Polk's world, "racial diversity" amounts to a token (hot slut) Latino dude. There's nothing wrong with being a hot slut, but if I was a gay Latino, I'd question why Polk thinks "hot slut" encapsulates the entirety of my identity.

Some people can't accept the fact the central character is a WASP, and yeah, I'd love to see a gay drama of this calibre about a black dude who is neither a stereotypical thug, or one of Patrik-Ian Polk's pearl-clutching elites. But you know what, in the gay community, there's many, many more dudes like Jonathan Groff's Patrick than there are that smart, blue collar black dude we've yet to see represented on screen. Looking's writers have written about a WASP, but they've written about a WASP who's in love with a blue collar Latino, and who is, at the very least, on the road to recognising that his background doesn't make him a better person. That's infinitely more relevant in 2014 - that juxtaposition of economic background and class - than Polk's tired obsession with the HBCU down low brotha.

Noah's Arc may be about black gay men, yes, but it also happens to be about a particular kind of gay man; that privileged, college-educated, gay man who looks down on blue collar men as, at best, sexual playthings, and at worst, inferior beings. Looking, at least, has the grace to call into question the assumption that class, background and education make a better man. In Noah's Arc, the lead characters consistently use and dispose of "blue collar" men - T-Money, Wade's boyfriend Dre - as if their lives are of less value than those of Noah, Wade, Ricky, Alex and Chance. Noah's Arc flirts with the issue of economic disparity and class privilege, but is terrified to face it head on, and so we end up with scenes where Chance is stranded - terrified - in the ghetto. If Chance had been a white character, the audience would rightly be appalled at his prejudice, but because he's black, it's somehow okay to denigrate the denizens of the 'hood. Looking faces up to it in blistering detail; an entire episode is devoted to Patrick and Richie's first date (none of the other characters appear) and we're allowed to fall in love with the characters as they fall in love with each other. That makes the subsequent car crash even more brutal: Patrick's cringe-inducing snobbery about Richie's job, and rich kid August's stomach-churning snideness towards his fellow papi. Patrick hates that side of him, and fights it. As a working class boy, I love that; the characters in Noah's Arc seem to not only embrace their class privilege, but positively revel in it.

Back to Looking, which ended, beautifully, on a nod to The Golden Girls. Me and my boy were watching together, laughing out loud at Blanche and Dorothy, laughing along with Patrick in the final moments of the surprising and heartreaking season finale. The credits rolled over The Golden Girls theme tune, a genuinely clever and touching move: these guys know what they're doing.

Looking, like HBO sibling The Wire, feels more like a novel, or arthouse cinema, than the conventional network T.V. we're used to. It forgoes intrusive background music and the tedious plot conventions viewers are usually force-fed. It goes deeper, and some people just don't get that. Looking isn't just the best gay T.V. series I've seen in a long time, it's one of the best T.V. shows in recent years. Look no further.

Dying on T.V.

Which T.V. death - fictional or behind-the-scenes - left you in pieces?

LATELY I'VE been catching up on NYPD Blue, now it's finally been released on DVD, and found myself gripped - and unexpectedly moved - by the death of Jimmy Smits' Bobby Simone. He takes five long, gruelling episodes to die. Not from a bullet in a shoot-out with some skells, or some other dramatic device, but from a nick on his gum after a trip to the dentist.

What follows is the painfully slow demise of an alpha-male detective, his physical collapse depicted in unrelenting, devastating detail. The hospital scenes are a perfect master-class in exactly how to get it right, stripped of the cliché we usually get on network T.V. What we're left with is a frightening, uncomfortably intimate, voyeuristic insight into a man's dying days. Initially, a junior (Latino) doctor deals openly and honestly with our traumatised couple, but an added frisson creeps in when a calculating WASP surgeon - who "talks down" to Bobby and Diane, vividly portrayed as working class Irish and Latino - tries to use the situation to his advantage.

The storyline is the most perfectly handled depiction of a character's death I've witnessed onscreen.

Over on Coronation Street, long-running transsexual character Hayley Cropper is dying from cancer. Hayley's portrayed with immense warmth and humanity by Julie Hesmondhalgh, and has been in the show since 1998, long enough for regular viewers to consider her an old friend. The trajectory is devastating: the routine check-up, further tests, the news that It's Not Good, the surgery that doesn't fix it... And then the death sentence. Yeah, I cried a little when consultant told the uncomprehending couple that palliative care was Hayley's only option. By dint of its characters sheer longevity, soap can still have that power.

Coronation Street is famous for making viewers blub. It was long before my time, but everyone knows of the famous scene where cleaner Hilda Ogden returns home from hospital with that pathetic bag of husband Stanley's possessions, and pulls out his famous glasses. In 1964, the credits rolled in silence when Martha Longhurst died suddenly in The Rovers Return, and conceit that would be repeated on that show and copied by others.

Years later, Doctor Who's controversial 1980s show-runner, John Nathan-Turner, would use the same "silent credits" conceit for the death of (gay) boy companion Adric. Actually killing an assistant was unheard of, and was never repeated (they backtracked on the brave butchering of Peri in 1986's The Trial of a Timelord). In Doctor Who today, if a leading character dies (and they do, often. Amy Pond seemed to die every week) they simply come back to life again, or become immortal. Death is meaningless.

Too many characters die in our our soaps these days - it's a bloobath out there! - although there at least they tend to stay dead, Dallas missteps notwithstanding. New Year's Day 2012 saw the death of Pat Butcher, a character who'd been in EastEnders since 1986. But it was an episode that aired a few days earlier that really tugged the heartstrings. For one last drink, Pat ventured out to the Queen Victoria pub, her local for decades. The camera slowly zooms in for a long, lingering close-up of actress Pat St Clement's face. In the background, various friends and relatives are told the news of her impending death, as Tony Bennett croons The Good Life, "please remember / I still want you, and in case you wonder why / Well just wake up / Kiss the good life goodbye..." She knows it's time to say goodbye, and we, the viewer, are left with no illusions that there's no hope of reprieve. The cumulative impact is devastating.

Click to 28:50.

Barbara Windsor has recently claimed that Pat St Clement phoned her up in tears upon learning that Pat was being killed off. It's an area EastEnders has form in, with the premature killing of Dirty Den in 2005, after actor Lesley Grantham was caught doing something he shouldn't on a webcam. Killing characters off can be a big mistake, as 1980s behemoth Dallas discovered when Patrick Duffy decided to jump ship - then come back. The entire ninth season was written off as a dream sequence, in one of TV's most epic fails. The worst part of this decision was the loss of Barbara Carrera as the terrifying Angelica Nero.

Redskin beauty JD Williams has twice died in cult dramas - as Kenny "Bricks" Wangler in Oz, and as Preston "Bodie" Broadus in The Wire. In both series, he played a long-running character who died abruptly, brutally and without warning. But most abrupt of all was the shocking gang killing of Kevin Alejandro's Detective Nate Moretta. Southland's writers sprang that one on us out of nowhere. Both Oz and The Shield open with characters who appear set up as series regulars, but see out the first episode in a body bag.

Dystopic late 1970s/early 1980s BBC sci-fi drama Blake's 7 loved a death, killing off all of its cast over its four season run - with the exception of evil super-villian Servalan. Famously, the remaining permanent cast were annihilated in the series finale, Blake. But I'm always drawn to the dreamy 1980 episode Sarcophagus, by sci-fi writer Tanith Lee, in which an alien entity takes over Cally. After centuries trapped in a tomb, she's freed, only to be thwarted by anti-hero Avon. For the alien, death is not an option, and her malignancy gives way to a desperate plea as she's sent back to limbo for another eternity: "I want to live, to live. I want to live, to live, to live. I want to live, to live, to live..."

Blake's 7 even killed off characters who'd already departed. Original character Jenna was said to have died - off-screen - in that terminal episode. EastEnders is also fond of telling us that long-departed characters have since died: we're told that Angie Watts finally succumbed to her alcoholism, years after she was last seen in Albert Square, and fellow '80s favourite Kathy Beale was said to have been killed in a South African car crash. The prematurely cancelled Noah's Arc had its second season finale resolved in a film, with the heartbreaking news that Dre did die in that Black Pride car crash, after all. I can't be the only one who wished that it had been Wade, instead.

Sometimes, the actors who play the characters we love pass away, whilst the characters they played live on - at least, for a while. Most recently, Glee's Cory Monteith died, leaving producers of that show to figure out an exit strategy for his character. Comedian Phil Hartman was murdered by his wife whilst he was still appearing in the NBC sitcom NewsRadio, and David Strickland committed suicide in a Las Vegas hotel room whilst appearing in the Brooke Shields' vehicle Suddenly Susan. Yootha Joyce succumbed to alcoholism whilst her sitcom George & Mildred was at the peak of its success.

To coin a phrase: a friend who dies, it's something of you who dies.

Every man is guilty of all the good he didn't do

review

Thirteen Cents
Johnny Mad Dog

We're selfish, decadent, and despicable. All of us. No good, piss poor examples of humanity, you and I.

How else to explain our nice lives, compared to those of the boys in Sello Duiker's Thirteen Cents, and Johnny Mad Dog? We live comfortable, pampered lives, buffered and insulated from reality. How can we look ourselves in the mirror when these unspeakable horrors are permitted in the 21st century? How can this happen? We allow it to happen, all of us, or it wouldn't happen at all. As Voltaire said, "Every man is guilty of all the good he didn't do."

The abuse - physical, sexual, and mental - meted out to the children in both titles, isn't front page news. We know it goes on. The real revelation, for me at least, is the extent to which we've become desensitised to it, taking it in our stride as something that happens elsewhere to someone else. "Paedophile" has become merely a tabloid headline, stripped of the stomach-churning reality so that we roll our eyes and think, "Oh well." Nobody cares, it seems.

Thirteen Cents contains graphic depictions of our 12-year-old "protagonist", Azure (pronounced Ah-zoo-ray), who - to survive - satisfies the lust and perversions of adults in Cape Town. It's not titillating. It's not shocking. It's gruelling. It's soul-destroying. And it's happening right now, for real, all over our lovely globe. I read much of Thirteen Cents on the Tube going to work, and several times had to bite my lip to stop myself from 

crying. Trapped in a world of unbelievable violence, of gangsters, corrupt police, paedophiles and drugs, Azure's tale is relentlessly grim, eye-opening and essential reading.

(And here's the real "icing on the cake". I didn't read the author bio until I was nearly finished the book. To add to the depiction of Azure's despair, came the knowledge that Duiker, right, hanged himself in 2005. He was 30-years-old.)

Having finished Thirteen Cents, I finally forced myself to watch Johnny Mad Dog, a film that's been on my shelf for a while, which I'd been afraid to tackle on my own. My boo, who's Zimbabwean, had previously refused to watch it with me on the grounds he'd find it too upsetting - and he's as hard as nails. Ah, but I left it a while, and he forgot, and Johnny Mad Dog ain't the kind of film you can stop watching once it's started. Like Thirteen Cents, it's traumatising, but you can't look away - and nor should we.

This tale of child soldiers - played by real former child soldiers - follows a squad of boy killers as they make a final assault on government forces, raiding villages for fresh troops (the opening scene has us witness a boy, no older than 10, forced to choose between shooting dead his own father or being killed himself) and executing adults for target practice. Their adult general brainwashes them with bizarre rituals (he unleashes a machine gun volley on them to prove they're impervious to bullets. The rounds are blank) and hypes them up by rubbing cocaine into fresh cuts.

The Wire's fourth season looked at Baltimore's school system, and focused on four "disadvantaged" boys. That was tough, weep-like-a-baby material. Johnny Mad Dog makes it look like an episode of Saved By The Bell.

Christophe Minie is incredibly charismatic as the titular Johnny, the "small boy commander". But his lieutenant No Good Advice (Dagbeh Tweh), all of 10 or 11-years-old, is terrifying: feral and unhinged. Johnny is draped in rosary beads, whilst one of his youngest soldiers, Butterfly, wears butterfly wings. Another wears speedos and a red crash helmet, whilst one muscular older youth takes to a wedding dress. None of it is a flight of fancy, as the montage of documentary photos over the film's closing credits shows. This film is visually stunning: like their neighbours in Sierra Leone and Ivory Coast, the people of Liberia are exceptionally beautiful, and director Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire makes the most of this fact, and of their equally beautiful, scarred country, jumping from staccato bursts of violence to eerily calm scenes of rural and urban devastation.

There's one important difference in the message I took away from each work. There seems little hope in Thirteen Cents, no sense that things could get better. With so much evil in the world, how can anything be good? The knowledge of Duiker's suicide compounds this.

Johnny Mad Dog is an entirely different story. A 50-minute film, The Making of Johnny Mad Dog, takes us behind the scenes on the film, to screentests and acting lessons with the former child soldiers. The making of the film is shown to be a positive transformative experience for the boys, now despised by Liberians for their part in the war. It's joyful, a real ray of hope, where we see the boys for what they truly are: children.

Some men have mediocrity thrust upon them

if there's

ONE

THING

i hate...

Desperate Housewives, Cougar Town, Gossip Girl... Call me an anti-American misogynist, but why would anyone want to watch the painted banshees that litter these shows? Watching Desperate Housewives is like having one of those old-fashioned police sirens go off right next to my ear hole. Is it just me that feels physically sick at the sound of their ear-piercing bleating?

The US military should forget water boarding, they should strap their suspect into a chair in a windowless room and play him the season one box set of Cougar Town. After an hour or so of Courtney Cox doing her best impression of Teri Hatcher on Desperate Housewives, he'll be begging to confess.

Stick insect slatterns being zany and kooky at 110 decibels! What fun!

Your correspondent has the misfortune to live with someone who can gorge - at the drop of a hat - on hours of mainstream American television. Hour after hour of the above mentioned, plus the utterly joyless snooze fest that's FlashForward (you'll find me opening my wrists up in the bathroom just to escape), Legend of the Seeker (perfectly fine if you're a 12-year-old geek), NCIS: Los Angeles (where do I start? It appears to be some sort of cop show, with humour written by a 9-year-old shoehorned in).

They're all gloss and no substance, sickly confections, fluffy and insubstantial. No balls, no teeth, nothing. The kind of thing that British television has degenerated into over the last ten years. (Mind you, at least the Americans have The Wire, True Blood, Nurse Jackie, Rescue Me... What's the one thing UK telly does better than the US? Soap. We've got EastEnders, they've got The Young and the Restless.)

That's why, in the grip of my better half's all-American crapfest, I felt an extra kick in the guts when I heard the news that David Mills had died. He'd written for The Corner, Homicide: Life on the Street, NYPD Blue, and, of course, The Wire, and he was just 48.

I'd rather watch one single episode of his work, on a continuous loop, than have to endure a single second of Cougar Town and its ilk ever again.


Title quote: "Some men are born mediocre, some men achieve mediocrity, and some men have mediocrity thrust upon them." Joseph Heller, American writer, 1923-99.

America: We'll Take The Good Stuff - You Can Keep The Bad

THE WIRE IS coming to terrestrial televsion. BBC2 will screen the entire series on weeknights over spring. This tactic, combined with the fact the BBC is free of commercials, makes missing The-Best-TV-Show-Ever inexcusable. The Wire is often mistaken for a cops'n'robbers (or dealers, rather) drama but the sheer scope of the series is much wider than that. The Wire is a portrait of the decline of modern America (and, perhaps, the Western world). Baltimore is an entire city falling apart, from the dizzying heights of political office right down to the homeless junkies on the street. Baltimore is The Wire's microcosm of where we're at... SPEAKING OF QUALITY television... We can all breath a sigh of relief that the American model for raising advertising revenue in television and film - the dreaded product placement - won't be coming to Blighty. The government's three-month consultation raised concerns that lifting the ban on product placement would blur the lines between advertising and content We need look no further than the truly revolting Sex & the City movie, which was simply one long advert, to see how damaging product placement can be to the arts. Now no one would ever claim that something like Sex & the City had much integrity to begin with, but what possible good does this sickening glorification of capitalism, this soulless fuel for greed, do anyone - apart from advertising executives? Culture Secretary Andy Burham said: "My priority has always been to make sure we maintain levels of trust between audiences and broadcasters, and protect the standards of broadcasting for which Britain is known worldwide. I have listened carefully to the arguments on both sides around product placement, and concluded that it should not be permitted in programmes made for this country. There is a lack of evidence of economic benefits, along with very serious concerns about blurring the boundaries between advertising and editorial. Britain is known around the world for the high quality of its broadcasting output. We need to continue to preserve editorial integrity as technology advances. I am well aware that a number of commercial broadcasters are facing difficult economic times and I will continue to work with the industry to explore ways we can support them, but my preference is to consider all other avenues before allowing product placement." Just imagine the effect product placement would have on something like EastEnders. Bianca would we seen doing her grocery shopping in discount supermarkets Netto, or Lidl. The MinuteMart would become a Tesco Metro. Christian would be parading around in AussieBum boxers... Elsewhere - BBC Two to show US TV's The Wire Elsewhere - The Wire re-up Elsewhere - Product placement ban on UK television to continue

The Wire

THIS SATURDAY, THE Independent presents the 50 Best Boxsets. Boy oh boy, do I love box sets. No adverts, no waiting. Some shows, like The Shield and Oz, I've only ever known on DVD. It's the way to watch proper television. And it doesn't come much more proper than The Independent's No.1, The Wire. The Wire isn't television, it isn't art, it's beyond that. It's religion. If you want meaning, if you want truth, if you want television and cinema to make you feel something, this is it. A black, gay gangster everyone is afraid of - talk about exploding stereotypes. The moment Bodie shoots Wallace - still makes me wanna weep just to think about it. Oh and Stringer Bell. The slow, dying death of the docks. Hamsterdam. Kima Greggs, the best lesbian ever. Boys of Summer. Every scene with Bubbles. JD Williams murdered again. The old lady Bunny Colvin needs to get out of Hamsterdam. Spider. Dukie. The lady and her coupons. The ties. Boys, boys, boys. And men. And the most beautiful cinematography ever. Space and time, and thought. The Wire feeds the ear, the mind, and the eye. As it happens, I've just taken delivery of my complete series boxset (I sold my individual season sets on eBay to get this beauty). I didn't buy the sucky UK version (five regular DVD cases in a card case). I imported the sexy US set, and I've just embarked on Season Five. I know Omar gets killed (but I haven't got there yet) but I don't know anything else. It'll all be over soon, but great novels can be reread again and again. So - what's your favourite Wire moment? Elsewhere - The 50 Best Boxsets Elsewhere - HBO.com/thewire

In Pictures: 2008 By Garçon Stupide

January: Barack Obama announces that his favourite TV show is The Wire (the seminal cinema experience of this decade), and that his favourite character is Omar Little. Well, that should have made Mister Obama my favourite politician, like, ever. Except he added, "That's not an endorsement. He's not my favorite person, but he's a fascinating character," which yours truly decided to interpret as a wholesale attack on the gay community. I'm a bit silly.


February: Keyontyli and Taleon Goffney, known to boys (and maybe even a few girls) the length and breadth of the world wide web as gay porn twins Keyon and Teyon, are arrested for a series of alleged robberies. The juicy details of the story are widely reported, but no one seems interested in delving into the real heart of the matter. Who are these young men, and what happened to them, for it to come to this?



March: Serapis Kephra, a.k.a model and stripper K-Rock, is taken by cancer.








May: Left-wing, pro-gay, pro-green, pro-diversity Ken Livingstone is ousted as London's Mayor. Conservative toff Boris Johnson, infamous for his quips at the expense of gays and ethnic minorities, is voted in. Within weeks, one of his deputies is demanding Afro-Caribbean Londoners go back where they came from, whilst another resigned following financial irregularities.




June: BAD WOLF BAD WOLF BAD WOLF BAD WOLF BAD WOLF BAD WOLF BAD WOLF BAD WOLF BAD WOLF BAD WOLF BAD WOLF BAD WOLF BAD WOLF BAD WOLF BAD WOLF BAD WOLF BAD WOLF BAD WOLF BAD WOLF BAD WOLF BAD WOLF BAD WOLF BAD WOLF BAD WOLF (or to put it another way, the most exciting forty-seven seconds of television this year).

July: The story of Kamal, a young gay men in Iraq, makes for gruelling reading. Rape and torture are rife for our brothers (and sisters) in that country. I wonder where Kamal is now, and what 2009 holds for him?






August: I love animals. They're much less disappointing than people. I especially like dogs, so the BBC's expose of the pedigree dog industry sickened me. Man's inhumanity to man? Man's inhumanity, I say.






September: D'Angelo, D'Angelo, D'Angelo... You been gone so long, and after reading David Peisner's incredibly informative article in Spin, I finally understand why. They say the Voodoo man will be back in 2009. I really hope he is.






October: The justice system claims my bff, my ex, my rock, or as R. Kelly (hmm...) once said, my homie, lover, friend. Losing him was like losing a limb, and I was angry. I lost it, and I haven't really recovered yet.






November: Nabeer Bakurally is the 28th - and last - teenage boy murdered in London in 2008. Shaquille Smith, left, was killed in August, at the height of the murders. The loss of so many bright, beautiful young men is horrific. I mourn them all. We were once them.





December: Religion sucks. God is a lie. December sees the Mumbai terrorist attacks, and the marriage of an eight year old child in Saudi Arabia to a middle-aged man - fully sanctioned by an Islamic dictatorship (meanwhile, the Pope compares Us to the holocaust).