Pop culture review round-up

A celebrity biography, a TV show, two documentaries, and a movie

montage of respective Wikipedia article image illustrations

Table Of Contents

[Originally, I followed Substack’s official instructions for inserting a table-of-contents here, but they don’t work. However, if you’re viewing this on desktop, hover your pointer over the left edge of your browser window, click on the little ruler that appears, and you can use the table-of-contents that appears there to jump to any of the individual sections by name.]

Peter Kay: An Unauthorised Biography

book by Johnny Dee

My dad used to teach secondary-school English. It was only after I found myself teaching post-secondary science that I understood properly why he tended not to want to read serious literature in his downtime. Going through his bookshelves, I’ve found plenty of thrillers, plenty of crossword-solving references, and plenty of biographies. Among the last was this one, which happens to be about someone who happens to have had his roots in the same part of the country as my dad (and the same social class); but, unlike both of us, had no interest whatsoever in education.

Nearly twenty years old now, so pretty much only available second-hand, this book is all the more interesting for having been written before Peter Kay became A National Treasure.

Dee writes engagingly and, even though his admiration is obvious, with a healthy cynicism and with an (I suspect hard-won) insight into the way real human beings behave in real-life situations—both everyday and showbiz. For example, Dee’s a good judge of when Kay’s former colleagues/competitors speak out of envy and when they offer a counterpoint to the legend—he’s especially good on Kay’s early tendency to sabotage rivals when he had to share a stage with them.

The story-telling gets a bit shakier when Kay’s career takes off properly and Dee, inexplicably, begins trying harder to be funny himself; but he otherwise remains clear-eyed and entertaining. What redeems Dee even at this stage is that he writes with a sincere respect for northern English working-class and popular culture, some of which is deserved.

Kay neglected his schooling to wallow in junk TV—especially British junk TV—and went on to mine this, like all the other aspects of his everyday life, for material. Dee understands how dangerous Kay’s compulsive consumption of lowbrow media could have been to the prospects of someone from the Kay’s circumstances; but he also can’t disguise his sneaking admiration for anyone willing to do the “work” needed to attain PhD-level mastery of any subject, no matter how low-rent, even if that includes acquiring encyclopaedic knowledge of Coronation Street.

Kay is to pulp TV what Tarantino is to pulp cinema: an obsessive young fan who turned into an auteur and raised its game. He’s always going to be successful and widely loved; but, over time, he will, like Les Dawson before him, get more of the serious recognition he deserves. I doubt a better book will be written about his formative years.

The Night Agent

Netflix Original TV series

[Not to be confused with The Night Manager.]

Based on a novel that I haven’t read, The Night Agent isn’t a radical rewrite of the paranoid thriller template, but it tortures the subgenre’s tropes until they say something more interesting. Plenty of clichés are present—but they’re not correct.

The male co-protagonist has a Dark Backstory—but this Dark Backstory pertains to his father, not to him. He’s young and low down in the FBI hierarchy, doing a boring job—but this combination of unpromising premises is responsible for everything kicking off around him.

The female protagonist is suspicious of the male protagonist—but not merely to generate obligatory sexual tension; her suspicions are justified by the plot. At the start of the story, she also has a “boring” job—but there are at least two good reasons why she becomes entangled in the exciting shenanigans.

Indeed, one of the satisfactions of The Night Agent—too rare in our times—is that people have reasons to do things. Actions that lead to action aren’t free-floating excuses for another stunt set-piece; they’re expressions of demonstrated interests and characters.

This is in contrast to, for example, The Bricklayer, which I’m not going to give its own review, because I don’t have enough nice things to say about it not to stay mostly silent about it. (Once again, it’s sad to see Aaron Eckhart’s talents wasted.)

The Night Agent’s two protagonists make mistakes that drive the story, but they are both competent, and their errors aren’t teen-cheerleaders-taking-a-shortcut-through-the-graveyard foolish. When there’s violence, it’s both believable in itself and has physical consequences even for those protected by Plot Armour. They get hurt and the pain and damage hobble them. The biggest plot twist makes sense. I like a conspiracy thriller that doesn’t make me roll my eyes like I do when someone tells me their favourite conspiracy theory.

Classic Albums: Phil Collins—“Face Value”

Pop album/Amazon Prime documentary

There’s no need for this review to be deep or involved. This documentary does what it says on the tin and is as unpretentious as its subject, but it reminds you just how much better and enduring the work of Phil Collins was and is than that of most of the people who sneered at him at the time he was creating it. Indeed, it’s the unpretentiousness of Phil Collins’s non-prog, non-jazz, non-big-band musical output that’s central to its ageing better than much of his far-more-feted-at-the-time, artsier pop music contemporaries.

Accordingly, Collins spends much of his interview time in this telling us that this, his debut solo album, was simpler than everyone thinks—even to the extent that he told his guest musicians, including Eric Clapton, an actual blues man, to make their contributions simpler too.

Collins also tells us that people have over-interpreted the lyrics on the album: Yes, he was angry because he was getting divorced at the time, but his words were a stream of free-associated rhyming rage, never intended to address specifics; and no, none of the urban myths about “the incident behind In The Air Tonight” are true, because there was no such incident.

People have imagined that his composing and recording the music was a lot more complicated and clever than it really was: Yes, he did use drum machine presets and mixing-desk talkback channels and other random elements that had a ready-made sound that pleased him.

People not alive during his chart-bothering heyday might find it hard to grasp how detested Phil Collins was back then, a sort of Margaret Thatcher of corporate pop. Even though, as this documentary reveals, PC’s real-world relationship with his record company was far from smooth.

Even if you hate Collins and his music, it’s hard to deny there’s a charm about Face Value and its creator when set against the agonising of the work of other 1980s artistes. This documentary does its subject justice for most non-musically-trained, non-tribal listeners. Recoommended.

Becoming Bond

Amazon Prime documentary

George Lazenby is famous for playing James Bond once; and he’s almost as famous for then refusing to play James Bond ever again—despite being offered all the gold in Australia. This documentary pulls off the same trick of the best of the EON Productions’ 007 franchise by being both dry and camp (two qualities that outsiders often associate with his birthplace of Australia).

Much of the dryness comes from one third of the documentary’s format: Current¹ Lazenby’s close-up, face-on answers-to-camera to questions about his life, which alternate between self-deprecating and self-aggrandizing. Much of the campness comes from another third: Dramatizations of important incidents in that colourful story. On the frequent occasions when you doubt the veracity of Lazenby’s account of himself—he doesn’t deny that he has lied widely both in his personal and professional lives—the other third of the content—contemporaneous film footage or accounts of the same events from other participants/media reports—often gives him validation.

Do not be put off, as I almost was, by the first few minutes of Lazenby’s storytelling, in which he is wincingly crude and brags about being an unpleasant child in a way that immediately turned me against the adult senior citizen he aged to become. Because, by the end, his story has said something profound about the choices we all have to make in life, even if you’re not exactly sure what that profound thing is, and you will (probably) have been charmed by some of what he tells you about his experiences between those two ages.

There is an early brush with death. There is a great love affair. There is a pivotal choice. There are improbable scrapes. You will learn things about the man that you didn’t know—I had no idea that he was catapulted to an A-list role without any previous feature film experience—and you will learn things about English-language culture in that odd transition from the 1960s to the 1970s that you either never did know, are so old you’ve forgotten, or were too stoned to notice at the time.

Rebel Ridge

Netflix original movie thriller

Immediately after I finished watching Rebel Ridge, I did a Twitter search for “Black Jack Reacher”, because I knew that this would be a common response to the film, and I would be very surprised indeed if its makers hadn’t at least thought about using this high concept as its pitch, if not its actual shooting template.

If the Reacher phenomenon has somehow passed you by, then we’re talking “tall, quietly spoken, ex-military stranger arrives in small town, stumbles upon dark shenanigans in high places, teams up with a local hottie, and then it all kicks off”.

The Jack Reacher novels make a very big deal of what a very (physically) big man the character is, but the first official Jack Reacher movie cast notoriously short A-lister Tom Cruise as the protagonist—to howls from the fandom. (Though much of the later critical consensus was that he somehow managed to fill out the part.) Rebel Ridge almost made the same “mistake” in casting 5’9’ (1.75m) Star Wars franchise star John Boyega. But Boyega dropped out and the lead role of “Terry Richmond” was taken by relative-unknown Aaron Pierre. Pierre is 6’3” (1.9m) and ripped. His being big, but quiet and somewhat anonymous, was a perfect combination for this role.

So much of the tension of this movie—and it relies on tension for so much of its effect—comes from our experiencing the extremes of provocation Richmond is put through from his point-of-view and so simultaneously willing him both not to lose and to lose his temper so we can see what righteous retribution he’s capable of wreaking. It is a nice touch that both the protagonist and the viewer will slip up if they see too much of a racial motivation in Richmond’s treatment

Pierre is so good in this film, and the film itself is so good, that it could well be both the man’s breakthrough role and the beginning of a(nother) lucrative action franchise. I’m not just saying this because Pierre is, like me, another member of the (highly exclusive) half-Sierra-Leonean Brit club², but the man has movie-star presence and hypnotic looks. These wouldn’t be enough if it weren’t for a superb script, one that’s both lean and dense. (It’s certainly dense enough to leave some critics confused—as people who so often fail to pay attention at work can be.) And they wouldn’t be enough if Pierre couldn’t act. He can even deliver the occasional overwritten badassery in this in a way that is convincing rather than cringe.

Don Johnson has been doing this sort of thing for decades longer than Aaron Pierre, but he could have phoned in his role in this; he chooses not to, and his performance is another gem.

Throughout Rebel Ridge I was gripped, so much so that I don’t want to say anything about the plot, especially as it relates to the title, because I want you to be as pleasantly surprised as I was. If you watch in on my recommendation and you don’t like it, I’ll give you back the corresponding fraction of your Netflix subscription³.

1. 2017, rather than 2024.

2. Other members include Idris Elba.

3. No, I won’t.