Some Kind Of Monster:Somewhere Boy.

In a very remote house deep in the forest, young Danny (Lewis Gribben) lives with his father Steve (Rory Keenan). They stay in watching old films (Casablanca, His Girl Friday, Millions Like Us) on dusty VHS tapes and listening to pre-war crooners and novelty country and western tunes on gramophone. Danny's happy - at least when Steve's there - but Danny's not allowed to leave the house.

Ever. Because of the monsters. The monsters that Steve has told him killed his mother. When Steve goes out he wears full leathers and carries a large gun. Ostensibly it's to defend himself against the monsters but in reality it's used for shooting rabbits whose blood, for reasons unexplained, he then smears over his face.

Lots of things are unexplained about Steve in Channel 4's Somewhere Boy (written by Pete Jackson with directing duties shared between Alex Winckler and Alexandra Brodski. When Steve dies, putting that gun of his to its final use, Danny is taken to live with Steve's sister Sue (Lisa McGrillis) and her family. Perhaps we'll find out what inspired Steve to take such strange decisions.

Sue lives with her partner Paul (Johann Myers), their two young children, and Aaron (Samuel Bottomley), Sue's son from a previous relationship. Aaron is not sure about Danny and Danny is not sure about anything except that his dad was a good man. Danny doesn't understand the outside world. He doesn't understand Weetabix, he doesn't understand pylons, he doesn't understand karaoke, he doesn't understand soapboax racing, and he's never even heard Mr Brightside.

They're a strange list of examples for the show to choose (and Danny should consider himself lucky on the Mr Brightside front) but, more importantly, he doesn't understand basic social norms which causes him to do things that make people feel uneasy - like wandering into their houses uninvited and getting in their beds for a nap. More humorously, he doesn't know what 'fucking' is though when pushed about his masturbatory fantasies by Aaron he admits that he knocks one out over images of Edna Purviance  from Charlie Chaplin's 1923 silent film A Woman Of Paris.

Aaron has his own, more typical, young man issues to deal with. He gets sulky with both his mum and Paul, he spends way too much time scrolling on social media - like so many of us, he calls his friends cunts (though, in fairness, some of them are), he watches porn on his phone, he's rubbish at football, and he speaks about girls in a very misogynistic way. While, at the same time, clearly being desperate to get a girlfriend or at least pop his cherry.

Aaron, sometimes willingly, sometimes unwillingly, will be by Danny's side as he goes out into the world. What happens to him when he sees no monsters? Why do only five people turn up to Steve's funeral? And why is the funniest story any of them tell about the time he once ate two meals in a Hungry Horse pub? Why does even the vicar conducting the service say, of Steve, some of his actions have been 'inexcusable'? And, perhaps most importantly of all, who did kill Danny's mum and what will Danny do when he finds out?

We see Danny haunted by flashbacks of being chased by a monster/man through a forest. Maybe a magic mushroom trip will help! Maybe it will make things worse. Aaron and Danny find some work with a local farmer, Mike (Jamie Michie), and Aaron even starts to fall for his daughter, Daisy (Eleanor Nawal), but will they manage to somehow screw that up? They're awkward enough to. More importantly, what are their real reasons for being on Mike's farm?

All the performances are good but both Gribben and Bottomley are brilliant throughout. Gribben's Danny is at times dead eyed, at times wide eyed with innocent wonder. In his understandable confusion he is driven by an absolute certainty that may prove to be his undoing. Bottomley's Aaron is a masterclass in gauche defensiveness and awkward bravado. A boy who's found himself in a man's body and is not sure what to do about it.

But, despite this, Somewhere Boy can be a frustrating watch. It's eerie in places, quite moving in others (an example being when Danny watches his parents' wedding video), I probably heard the word 'cunt' more often than anywhere outside of my close friendship group, all the old music (the likes of George Formby, Marty Robbins, and Shine On Harvest Moon sounds so great that when newer stuff - Idles, Roxy Music - appear it's almost shocking), and you remain curious to the end but somehow it left me feeling a little bit shortchanged. As if I'd come out of two decades hiding from ghosts only to find they don't exist.

Leon Wuidmar:The Vocabulary of Architecture?

I'd never heard of Leon Wuidar but the retrospective of the octogenarian Belgian artist at White Cube, Mason's Yard was free so I thought I'd go and have a look. It didn't detain me for particularly long.

Charpentes (1965)

 

That's not because I didn't like his art so much as his art is something that doesn't really take very long to look at. The exhibition traces Wuidar's career from the early sixties up to the middle of the eighties and is intended to show how Wuidar's art is influenced by the "vocabulary of architecture" and the ruined buildings of post-war Belgium.

 

Wuidar was friends with one of Belgium's leading architects of the era, Charles Vandenhove - who made buildings in Brussels, Liege, as well as The Hague and Paris, and both men considered a house to be, quite simply, an "assembly of geometric shapes". You can see that in early Wuidar paintings like Charpentes which is, of course, an assembly of geometric shapes itself. A reasonably aesthetically pleasing one. But then so is most of Wuidar's art.

 

Ecrans, 1 septembre 1973 (1973)

18 novembre 82 (1982)

Composition au trait interrompu, 21 juillet 79 (1979)

Very little of it truly excites though. From the work that seems to riff on that of hard-edge painters like Ellsworth Kelly and Abstract Expressionists like Barnett Newman to more playful pieces, like Victoire and Composition avec de chevrons, that almost look like boardgames. Victoire, specifically, reminds me of backgammon.

A game I can't even play. Wuidar himself has spoken of finding inspiration from Paul 'taking a line for a walk' Klee and the small, almost modest, paintings of Giorgio Morandi as well as the cartouches on the tombs of pharoahs and the pamphlet you pick up at the desk of the gallery contains such alphabet soup as "the dynamic interplay of form between curved and rectilinear lines and shapes". Who writes this stuff? Can I do it? I need a job.

Un morceau de musique (1962)

Victoire (1965)

Composition avec des chevrons (1968)

Grand Air, 21 avril 65; fevrier 1968 (1965-68)

Figure derisoire (1966)

To be fair, some of them have a charm. I particularly liked the spidery Figure derisoire and the jellyish Paysage Rocheux. Elsewhere I was reminded of Fernand Leger which is no short praise but, ultimately - and despite being pleased to finally learn a little about Leon Wuidar and his art, I came away understanding why I'd probably never heard of him before.

Paysage Rocheux, 17 juillet 72 (1972)

A perte de vue, mai 1970 (1970)

Places, 22 octobre 73 (1973)

If You're Looking For A Way Out:Inside Man.

"Everyone is a murderer. You just have to meet the right person" - Jefferson Grieff

BBC1 pulled the big guns out for their recent drama Inside Man (created by Steven Moffat, directed by Paul McGuigan, and up on iPlayer). Stanley Tucci, David Tennant, Dolly Wells, and Lydia West make for an excellent cast and even Dylan Baker and Kate Dickie come along for the ride.

You have to take a leap of faith with some of the more elaborate scenarios dreamed up by Moffat but if you can manage that Inside Man makes for a tense, thoughtful, pacy, highly watchable show. At times it's very moving, sometimes it's chilling, and, perhaps a bit oddly, it's quite funny in places. Because the subject matter is not particularly amusing.

Jefferson Grieff (Tucci), a former Professor of Criminology, is on death row in America for killing his wife (though we learn, just to flesh out his character a bit, that he also ate his mum's feet). He may be a killer but he's highly intelligent and very articulate and he uses those skills to help solve other crimes - if they're deemed to have a sufficient amount of moral worth!

He's not far short of Hannibal Lecter. His death row sidekick is Dillon (Atkins Estimond), a man who killed fourteen, or is it fifteen, women. Dillon has an excellent memory and 'works' as Grieff's recorder during his interviews although, in a typical Moffat line, he complains that Grieff makes death row sound a bit depressing.

It all feels a long way from leafy English suburbia where Harry Watling (Tennant) serves as a friendly local vicar, or "fucking vicar". When he picks up his son Ben's (Ben played by Louis Oliver) maths tutor Janice (Wells) from the local station (they've called it Norbridge but it's actually Godalming, later the Welcome Break service station at Fleet turns up) she's just helped journalist Beth (Lydia West) out of a harassment situation on the train and Beth, always eager for a story, wants to interview her.

Seemingly quite desperately. Janice doesn't want to be interviewed. She lives a quiet life, living alone and enjoying solo hiking holidays. She seems to enjoy a good relationship with Ben, Harry, and Harry's wife Mary (Lyndsey Marshall) but when ever eager to please Harry agrees to hide his verger Edgar's (Mark Quartley) porn - in the form of memory stick - from his mum he makes a big mistake.

At The Vicarage, Janice finds the memory stick and uses it to try and set up a computer. The memory stick contains child porn. Bizarrely, Harry decides to protect Edgar - believing him to be a suicide risk. In fact, Harry goes to extreme lengths to do so. Which makes things much worse for everyone around.

Soon, it's not just Harry making very strange decisions. But why are these people acting so irrationally while, at times, remaining calm enough to make quips at each other and, ultimately, how will the makers of Inside Man tie the stories of Harry, of Grieff, and of Beth together?

There's some great dialogue, of course, and Tucci gets most of the best lines though I did quite enjoy it when Mary described Harry's Christianity as a "half-wit fairy tale", there's a bizarre side story about a man who found an unsolicited sum of money deposited into his bank account every time he has sex with his wife, and there's a great use of Bonnie "Prince" Billy's heartbreakingly lovely At The Break Of Day.

Some of Grieff and Dillon's death row chats are delivered up as almost comic sketches which brings a very literal meaning to the phrase 'gallows humour' but, somehow, it all works just right. Inside Man tackles themes of altruism, atonement, sainthood, and sacrifice and makes us ask ourselves what we may be capable of in extreme circumstances. Most of all though, it was just a bloody good story, written brilliantly, and acted out superbly.

Kakistocracy XXXVIII:Moving On Up.

"You've done me wrong, your time is up. You took a sip from the devil's cup. You broke my heart, there's no way back. Move right out of here, baby, go on pack your bags" - Movin' On Up, M People

 

 

Lyrically, you can hardly fault Liz Truss's choice to come on stage to at the recent Tory conference:- M People's Moving On Up. There is no way back from here and soon she will, surely, be packing her bags (if they've even been unpacked yet) and moving out of number 10 Downing Street.

Otherwise though it was, very Trussian this, a complete own goal. Mike Pickering, one of the song's authors, was livid about it and condemned her use of it, calling the Tory government a "shower" and Heather Small's, the song's vocalist, son just happens to be a Labour councillor so was able to have fun on Twitter taking the piss out of Truss.

 

A simple piece of research before using the song may have prevented such embarrassment but research and listening, along with truth and decency, are no longer things we can associate with this rotten bunch of scoundrels whose conference involved incidents of homophobic abuse. 

 

Not exactly a surprise when you consider that the Met Police WhatsApp group recently discovered to have been sharing racist, homophobic, and misogynist memes turned out to be headed by a man called Rob Lewis. who works for the government and is involved in their immigration policy.

At conference, Truss spouted a load of bullshit about a made-up Anti-Growth Coalition. Like Project Fear (which now even the Telegraph admits was Project Truth), and like the Citizens of Nowhere and the Enemies of the People this is unimaginatively lumping everyone who disagrees with you into one huge amorphous blob and then, quite simply, othering them.

It's amazing how they can make up imaginary enemies (see also:the wokerati) and then convince people they exist and that only the Tories can save us from them. That shit has finally stopped working. Smug tossers like Chris Philp and Tory chair Jake Berry (who told poor people they should just get better jobs so they can afford to switch their heating on this winter) seem to be coming up in the ranks of complete and utter bastards.

 

Or at least they would be if the game didn't appear to be up. Someone accurately described what is happening within the Tory party now, and to the detriment of the entire country, what happens when the ringmaster (Johnson) leaves the circus. The lions start eating the clowns.

On Question Time the audience laughed heartily, though in some despair, as Nadhim Zahawi used the all too popular Tory trick du jour of trying to blame Putin for their own bad policies. But of course all this was overshadowed by Kwasi Kwarteng being sacked by Truss (who then pretended he resigned instead) and him being replaced as Chancellor by Jeremy Hunt. Or Jeremy Cunt as he is widely known.

Truss sacking Kwarteng for showing loyalty to her is akin to a ventriloquist sacking their dummy for saying the wrong words and it's left her with virtually no support in her runaway train of a party. Yesterday, Penny Mordaunt found herself in the unusual position of having to explain to the House that Truss was not hiding under a chair when she didn't turn up for work.

She eventually showed but surely even someone as stupid as Truss must know that Tory PMs don't hide under their desks. They hide in fridges. Hunt began to rip up, pretty much in its entirety, Truss and Kwarteng's disastrous mini-budget (or 'fiscal event') and is now, in all but name, in charge of the country despite finishing eighth, and last, when Tory MPs last voted on who they wanted as their new leader. Ushering in a new era of austerity, yippee, as Truss sits there gormlessly grinning and acting like a robot sex toy that has fallen so far down the uncanny valley it can never come back. 

Crispin Blunt has been the first Tory MP to call for her to go but many more are saying it in private. Imagine making enemies of the RSPB (who are outraged about Tory plans to build on important conservation sights), M People, the Daily Star (who have been comparing Truss, unfavourably, to a wet lettuce), the Ramblers, Joe Biden, pretty much the entire British public, and almost the entirety of your own party. Imagine making Michael Gove look like the voice of reason or being able to be accused by Nadine Dorries, someone who campaigned on behalf of Truss, of lurching to the right.

They can't govern themselves so how could they possibly ever hope to govern the country? It's not just time for Truss to go and it's not just time for the entire cabinet to go. It's time to the entire party to go. Unlike the book about Truss, below, the country just can't take any more of the Tories. Until they start moving on out, the country can't even begin to think about moving on up. 

Hope Not Hate:The Walk-In.

"We have to believe that people filled with hate can change" - Michael Collins, Hope not Hate

A neo-Nazi walks into a shop in Mold and knocks as Asian dentist, 24 year old Dr Sarandev Bhambra, out with a hammer before attempting to murder him with a machete while shouting "white power". The next year another killer shot and stabbed to death the 41 year old Labour MP, for Batley and Spen, Jo Cox in broad daylight. Shouting, as he does it, "Britain First, this is Britain".

Against a backdrop of Brexit, Breaking Point posters, Nigel Farage, Sieg Heils, and the burning of Israeli flags, The Walk-In (ITV Hub, directed by Paul AndrewWilliams, and written by Jeff Pope) is a dramatisation, based on real events, of how Hope not Hate, an anti-racism advocacy group, prevented the murder of another MP by extreme right ideologues.

It is brilliantly acted, wonderfully scripted, and it is powerful - from the very start. We see Michael Collins (Stephen Graham) in a university lecture theatre explaining to students how the extreme right attract followers. He knows because he was once a neo-Nazi skinhead himself.

Now he's working at Hope not Hate with Nick (Jason Flemyng) and Brenda (Shvorne Marks) campaigning against racism, fascism, Islamic extremism, and antisemitism. When he's approached by the police investigating the Mold killing, DS Donkor (Ryan McKen) and DC Buckley (Jodie Prenger) he becomes exasperated by their belief that the killer was a "lone wolf".

To Collins' mind, there are no such things as lone wolves. He believes the killer was a member of National Action, a proscribed neo-Nazi terrorist organisation and a very disciplined one too. National Action evolved from the BNP and use Islamist terrorist techniques for inspiration. They also receive funding from US neo-Nazi groups.

Collins' work has a huge effect on his own personal life. The regular death threats he receives, he has to check under the car every time he drives it in case of a bomb, means him and his family have to keep moving house. Which causes stresses with his wife, Alison (Leanne Best), and kids.

He is particularly loathed by National Action as he used to be like them. This leaves him haunted with flashbacks where we see a young Collins running with a violent gang of racist skinheads in the era of No Irish, No Black, No Dogs. There's a particularly brutal scene when the gang enter a library and begin headbutting a group of Asian women there.

In Bradford, Stanley (Kent Riley) and Robbie (Andrew Ellis) are fixing a cable outside the house of a Muslim family. They need to go inside the house to do the job properly but are refused access because they're unmarried and there are unmarried Muslim girls inside the house. Later, working in a warehouse, he sees Muslim workers being given extra breaks for prayers.

Inspired by his common-or-garden racist workmate, Robbie - who is single, directionless, unworldly, and unhappy with work, decides to do his own 'research'. On the Internet, of course. Soon he's attending a White Man March and soon enough he's approached by National Action.

Ben (Josef Davies), Garron (Ezra Watson), Matt (Bobby Schofield), and deputy leader Chris (Chris Coghill) run National Action, or NA, like a cult. When you join them you must renounce your other friends and, in Robbie's case, he definitely has to end his friendly chats about Man Utd with co-worker Asif (Irfan Shamji). For reasons I'm sure you can work out.

Worst of all the NA members is the youthful looking Jack Renshaw (Dean-Charles Chapman). A cold hearted fascist who believes Hitler was too merciful and that the Jews are keeping the cure for cancer to themselves and should be hunted down. Renshaw lives with his mum and appears to have some kind of dark secret that must never be exposed.

NA's idea to bring forward a 'coming war' start with the plan to execute the West Lancashire MP Rosie Cooper but Robbie's sister, Natalie (Molly McGlynn), becomes concerned when her brother starts to pepper his conversations with talk of 'vermin' and espousing conspiracy theories.

Collins eventually receives a phone call and is told of the plan to assassinate Cooper but can Hope not Hate help prevent it? To do so they will need a walk-in. Someone who is pretending to be part of NA but is in fact passing information to Hope not Hate. Who could that walk-in be and can they even be trusted?

Where The Walk-In works really well is that even though we know Cooper was never murdered we're never really sure who can be trusted and who can't be and we feel the fear of the perilous situations both that walk-in and Collins himself find themselves in. With scenes relating to the suicide bombing at the Ariana Grande concert in Manchester in May 2017 (23 dead) and the terrorist attack on Westminster Bridge in London two months before that (6 dead) it's not a show that's shy in showing how Islamist terrorism and neo-Nazi terrorism inspire and feed off each other but one of its most powerful moments is perhaps how they handle the murder of Jo Cox, played here by Bryony Corrigan.

We hear the shout of Britain First and then the camera fades to black in respect. It's chilling but it's not exploitative and it should leave us with absolute certainty that hatred will, and has to, lose in the end. That hope is more powerful than hate.

A Fragrant Sparkle:The Wonderful World Of Wasps.

In Dylan Thomas' 1952 prose work A Child's Christmas in Wales the poet mused on some of his Christmas presents. They included a book that told him "everything about the wasp, except why". Just fifty miles north of Swansea, where Thomas was born, in Lampeter he would, now, find someone who could answer the 'why' question and that person is Professor Seirian Sumner, an entomologist and behavioural ecologist at UCL who I was fortunate to spend a small part of yesterday evening listening to as she talked about wasps.

She knows A LOT about wasps and she was more than happy to share it with Skeptics in the Pub - Online in a talk she'd called Endless Forms:The Secret World Of Wasps. The same name as her book  on the same subject. Starting with our old enemies, the yellowjackets. They're the ones that bother us in beer gardens and ruin our picnics, the gangsters of the insect world, and one of very few wasps that have a painful sting.

They have, according to the Prof, given other wasps a bad name and there are A LOT of other wasps. Over one and a half thousand species of social wasps and more than one hundred thousand species of solitary wasps.

Love them as she undoubtedly does now, Seirian Sumner didn't start out with a particular interest in wasps. Or even insects. But she was fascinated by animal behaviour so when she was given a chance to do a PhD on wasp behaviour she jumped at it. When she found herself in a tunnel full of hover wasps in South East Asia she wondered if she'd made the right decision.

That didn't last long and soon Sumner had become entranced. She observed that, in many ways, wasps behaved like the much loved meerkats. There's a division of labour in their society and some wasps even give up the ability to reproduce in order to help others bring up the infant wasps.

The South East Asian hover wasp, luckily for Sumner - who ended up getting stung several times, doesn't have a particularly painful sting. Justin O. Schmidt, the American entomologist who is either a genius or a lunatic and likely a bit of both, had himself stung by as many bees, wasps, and ants as possible and devised a sliding scale of pain, the Schmidt sting pain index, in which the sting of the hover wasp was described as merely "a fragrant tickle".

Which sounds almost pleasant. But wasps still get a bad rap. When people were asked for words they associated with bees the most popular was honey (with flowers, pollination, and buzz not far behind) but when asked about wasps the word that cropped up most was sting. Other words that came up included angry, annoying, and aggressive. Though 'stripes' featured with both bees and wasps.

Even God hated wasps. Specifically hornets who, in both the Exodus and Deuteronomy chapters of his boring book The Bible, were created by God specifically to punish non-believers. God really is a bit of a cunt.

Real people understood wasps a little better than fictitious deities. Aristotle, in his Historia de Animalibus, wrote about bees mainly but included wasps, yellowjackets specifically, whose colonies he'd observed. A Chinese eunuch watched wasps taking bark from trees and smoothing it down and hit upon the idea of inventing paper so, in some ways, wasps invented paper.

Generally though, wasps are underrated and understudied. At least that's the case now. A century or so back there was a small wave of what Professor Sumner calls 'wasp whisperers'. They included George and Elizabeth Peckham from Wisconsin who played an important role in getting evolution taught in (some) American schools and the French wasp whisperer Jean-Henri Fabre who found that bee wasps emitted toxic farts on their newborn which contained a form of immunisation against diseases so that the young bee wasps, who would never see their parents after birth, would be safer out in that big scary world.

The Peckham's studied the solitary digger wasp and found that when it hunts its prey in the form of caterpillars it doesn't, at first, kill it. It simply paralyses the caterpillar and then keeps it as a form of 'living larder'. Returning to its paralysed body every time it fancies a snack.

Other wasps zombify cockroaches and others hunt tarantulas. Without the wasps we'd have no bees or ants as both bees and ants evolved from wasps. That was just one of the reasons that Seirian Sumner felt we should celebrate the wasps. The Japanese do in the form of wasp festivals and, in Devon, a brewer has made a beer using wasp yeast. It gives you a nice buzz, apparently!

The image of the wasp, it seems, is slowly changing even if claims that wasps are essential pollinators of figs turned out not to be entirely true (I think I could live without figs, tbh) and another theory that wasp venom may include a cure for cancer seems highly speculative.

Wasps do, however, act as pest controllers. One hundred and fifty years ago, it was observed on a farm owned by a Sir T.Brisbane, that after all the wasps had been destroyed it only took two years before said farm became host to a plague of flies. Wasps regulate the number of flies (and aphids, spiders, caterpillars etc;) by killing lots of them.

But one thing a wasp finds even more irresistible than a lovely aphid and spider pie is a sexy orchid. Orchids have actually evolved to look and smell like female wasps and male wasps are sufficiently tricked and seduced by this that they end up depositing a dollop of pollen inside the orchid and thus pollinating it.

It was just one of many fascinating facts at yesterday's talk, a talk in which the Q&A went from Linnaeus to lettuces and from The Karate Kid to cabbages, and included two pieces of invaluable advice. If you don't want to be stung by a wasp then don't act like a badger and if you ever find yourself being chased by a wasp then stand on your head.

These lines were delivered with a smile and Professor Sumner even got her bunny rabbit out for us to admire at the end of a talk that sometimes a little bit silly but also very educational. The best type. For that I thank the compere Gerard Sorko, Skeptics in the Pub - Online, and Professor Seirian Sumner. But most of all a big thankyou to all the wasps out here. I know some of you, at least, will be reading this.

It's A Dirty Job But Someone's Gotta Do It:Industry S2

"If you stop producing, you're simply a cost" - Bill Adler 

Investment banking. It IS dirty job but, unlike in Faith No More's deathless We Care A Lot, nobody has to do it. Nobody in their right mind should want to do it either. Series two of Konrad Kay and Mickey Down's Industry (BBC1/iPlayer) could hardly have screened at a more apposite time. Following the disaster of Kwasi Kwarteng's mini-budget, or 'fiscal event' and in the dying days of the collapsing Liz Truss regime what could be better than a look into the world of rich, privileged bankers. At people who would sell their own grandmothers if they got a good enough price.

A world of cryptocurrencies, headset phones, drinks after work in Slug & Lettuce pubs, handjobs in the back of taxis, shooting weekends, Bloomberg, Tough Mudder, posh people making podcasts, profiteering off the pandemic, snorting coke, Brexit, a race to the bottom between London and New York to see which city can accrue the most wealth, and people in suits who endlessly blather on about "due diligence" and "granularity", and who, like Truss and Kwarteng, genuinely seem to believe in the discredited theory of "trickle down economics".

Whereas, in the first series, most of the key players were merely objectionable. The second season begins with each and every one of them acting like a complete and utter cunt. Industry series two seems to be a much harsher critique of both the lifestyle and those that live it. I felt nothing but contempt for every single, brilliantly portrayed, character and I wondered how that would sustain me though eight hour long episodes.

I had to believe that these ghastly caricatures would be fleshed out - and eventually they were. But it took some time. Yasmin (Marisa Abela) has become one of the bullies she once railed against it. She was the character I was most sympathetic too in the first series but seeing her now I wonder if that's just because she's very pretty. I was two years younger, and hornier, then so it's not impossible I gave her the benefit of the doubt.

This time round, she's dealing with some daddy issues and courting the business of Jesse 'Mr Covid' Bloom (Jay Duplass). Both Jesse Bloom and Yasmin's father, Charles (Adam Levy) are clearly pricks but they're different kinds of pricks. Charles seems to have slept with, or tried to have slept with, every woman he's ever met and is forever judgemental of every person he meets and every room he visits. Jesse Bloom first appears spouting that old "Hell is other people" cliche.

A quote from Jean-Paul Sartre's 1944 play No Exit and one that tends to be used by people who haven't considered the fact that to everyone else in the world they are "other people". Like a lot of wankers, Jesse Bloom is minted. Obnoxious though he is, Ken Leung's Eric is worse. As the staff at Pierpoint & Co return to the office after a spell working from home, Eric's not forgotten to bring his best friend with him. A baseball bat.

He's an unimaginably self-inflated bully but he's losing his touch at work to younger men like foul-mouthed, but at least funny Rishi (Sagar Radia), the squeaky clean American import Danny Van Deventer - or DVD (Alex Alomar Akpobome), and the supposedly reformed pint size pisspot of resentment and rage that calls itself Kenny (Conor MacNeill). Eric's desk is being moved closer to the door and he doesn't like that one little bit.

Like the second lockdown, everyone's being nastier to each other and, like our current government, nobody even pretends to care anymore. Eric wants Harper (Myha'la Herrold) to get help with her mental health. Harper doesn't think that's necessary. Harper regularly falls out with Rishi and her relationship with Yasmin is at an all time low.

Nobody seems to like anyone else. Everybody seems to hate each other as much as I found myself hating them. Robert (Harry Lawtey) is being upstaged by Venetia (Indy Lewis) who he's supposed to be mentoring while at the same time not having much luck on dating apps. Yasmin's screwing around but seems to have a special interest in Celeste (Katrine De Candole) who, of course, is a pretty vile, self-satisfied, individual.

As Yasmin says of her and her colleagues, "we're all cunts, aren't we? So let's just lean into it". Gus (David Jonsson) has moved away from Pierrepont and is tasked with tutoring Jesse's wayward son Leo (Leo Bloom, yes - they went there, is played by the excellently named Sonny Poon Tip) whom he only goes and starts sleeping with.

Gus is perhaps the most sympathetic character in the whole series. Which is not something I thought I'd ever say about somebody who goes to work for the Tory party. Specifically for the upwardly mobile MP Aurore Adekunle (Faith Alabi) who has a picture of herself with Boris Johnson up in her office. Marking her out, instantly, as yet another tosser.

Aurore is campaigning under the slogan of Britain Deserves Better which, after twelve years of Tory misrule, is a bit fucking rich. When Robert tries to win over the business of an older lady, Nicole (Sarah Parish), he embarks on a sexual relationship with her and when Felim (Andrew Buchan), Pierpoint's biggest client, joins a shooting trip he ends up being shot in the face by Jesse. Just for shits and giggles.

There are some really odd insults. "Fuck off you Canada goose nonce" was particularly bizarre although when someone is referred to as a "Maggie loving cunt" it makes more sense and could reasonably be applied to everyone in Industry. The entitlement is so stark that at one point Jesse Bloom remarks that, to him, "the concept of a buffet is absolutely abhorrent".

Even when the characters have sex, and they have it often, it's rarely tender or loving. It's always very athletic and it's usually quite rough. There's lots of grunts, sighs, and the sound of fleshy appendages banging away on other flesh. The music, a near constant in Industry, even stops completely so we can hear these sounds much clearer and so we can fully appreciate a shot of freshly jizzed on midriff.

At least the music is good. Quite an eclectic mix too. From Talking Heads, PiL, The Velvet Underground, and GZA to Christine & The Queens, Jamie XX, Kanye West's Sunday Service Choir, and 070 Shake. With a special shout out for both Inner City's Good Life and State Of Independence by Jon & Vangelis.

It almost seems to be too good for this lot who swan around their huge office drinking coffee, shouting at each other, making jokes about Gary Glitter and Raoul Moat, and, at one point, paying tribute to The Office with both a stapler ensconsed in jelly and a rendition of the infamous David Brent 'dance'.

Despite the general unpleasantness of all the characters, it remains watchable throughout. But it took some time, a good four or five episodes, before I began to care about the characters and it wasn't until the final couple of hours that I was properly gripped. When Yasmin finds out the truth about her dad, when Harper goes in search of a brother she's not seen for years, and when Harry visits his own dad in Oxford. We even get, briefly, a glimpse into Eric's home life.

Nothing about their backgrounds can excuse their characters but it does, perhaps, explain a little of why they've turned out this way and it does, definitely, lift a slightly disappointing second series to something closer to the majesty of the first. It seems unlike we're going to become more sympathetic to investment bankers any time soon under this government so if a third series does go ahead, and they wish to continue on this trajectory,. they'll probably need to turn one of them into Jeffrey Dahmer or something.