How I Met How I Met Your Mother

MAY contain - wait for it - SPOILERS.

My name is Sue and I am a perfectly normal person an HIMYM-aholic.

On Monday I watched two episodes twice. The same episodes.

I  watched another three times on Tuesday, before and after dinner. Different seasons, too. 

It's not the first time I've been addicted. There was a ten year plus period where I couldn't get enough Friends. I was getting a fix anywhere I could, mostly on T4 at the weekends, even though I had the box set, I'd crave it live, it's better that way.
Lately it's been Frasier but that's not as easily accessible, or fresh, you know? I needed something brand new. The new series of The Big Bang Theory proved too soft, more chicken soup than anything; I wasn't getting the buzz from it any more.

No, seriously, folks. I have a new telly love and it's How I Met Your Mother (new episodes 8:30pm E4, Thursdays). 

At first I was filled with disdain for it. It is ,I declared publicly, just a poor man's Friends, and not a very good copy at that. Then one of my own friends, Jess, said, "Have you watched it from the start ?"
I hadn't and there was the rub.

It's a jigsaw (as the E4 announcer loves to point out). There's a craft to the narrative even in season eight, that Friends never had  (too busy latterly wondering how many millions to pay the cast to think about real attention to the increasingly caricatured scripts of the last couple of seasons).

It has its parallels with Friends, which I think given that show's bestridal of the Earth like a Colossus since 1994 is inevitable. There are 5 characters, not 6, though; there's no 'Phoebe' but she was always the outsider anyway (Rachel:"You're not related, you live far away..."). Which leaves us with the established couple , Marshall & Lily, and the on-off couple -either Barney & Robin or Ted & Robin depending on which season you're watching. Barney is the Joey figure (see also David Spade in Rules of Engagement, or errr, David Spade in the underwatched Just Shoot Me).

Barney, played by the disgustingly brilliant and - wait for it- talented Neil Patrick Harris is of course, awesome. 

It was at first, Barney that pulled me in.  Ted's twee chats to his future kids and the cloying niceness of Lily & Marshall left me a bit, well, cold. Barney however - largely due to the charm and talent of Mr Harris - kept me watching. Barney - well,this is the most self confident man in the world. A sharp dresser, always in a suit - heck even his PJs are suit shaped with a neck tie.

And then slowly I started piecing it all together. The Interventions, the goat, the GNB building. The fact that we have as far as I recall, already met their mother...

These characters ring truer to me than Ross, Rachel et al. Don't get me wrong,  they will always be very close to my telly heart. And there isn't, I think,  a situation in life that you can't find a positive answer to in Friends, which is why it's so comforting to revisit. 

But Ted and Robin and Barney and Marshall and even Kindergarten teacher Lily  have flaws, real ones, not like Monica's OCD or Chandler's sarcasm. They even swear like sons of Grinches. And when they've 'eaten a large sandwich' you can guarantee they'll have the munchies afterwards.... Lily has massive credit card debts and is prone to mild kleptomania. Marshall can't 'read a magazine' anywhere but his own bathroom. 

There's a whole subtext going on, in my head at least, and I hope everyone else who watches - otherwise I'm just a weird obsessive. Unless you watch regularly I suspect you can't buy into the bigger picture, and I think that's what I missed at first. Now I can fit all the pieces together ,understand  the flashbacks,and wonderfully,  the flash forwards.

I appreciate that Ted is a device used in literature since novels started being written - I'm particularly thinking Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby or Pip in Great Expectations - an unreliable narrator (the Greats were co-incidental there). 

For example the incident of the goat at his 30th birthday party; it was in fact his 31st . He's remembering in 2030 so we can forgive him his memory lapses.

We know who the mother is - we know she is at a train station at the same time as Ted, that she carried a yellow umbrella, that she was in a class he (sort of ) taught, we know she played bass at Robin & Barney's wedding; we have already really, met the mother. 

It's eccentric and quirky, not in a twee hippy chick New Girl quirky way but in a 'we're not quite normal' way, which I can relate to; in a rubbish happens in life sort of way (the episode where Robin discovers she can't have children is poignant). I love Barney's touching naivete when it comes to his formerly promiscuous mother and his desperation to know who his dad is , latching on to the lies she told - he truly believes his Dad is the long-serving host of The Price Is Right. Barney and Robin's burgeoning relationship is one of the highights of the show for me. 

I think there's one episode that always sticks in your memory if you've seen it, and it more or less stands alone: if were a Friends episode, it would be called The One With The Burger. The search for the ultimate burger that Ted once had when newly arrived in NYC, but could never find the burger bar again, I think would make a hardened vegetarian crave a quarter pounder with cheese.

It's an analogy for me at least, that once I got the taste for this show I craved it again, more big fat meaty bites.

It's the only new show now that I am excited to see, (sorry Big Bang Theory ) 

And to my delight there's still one last season to go.  

Along Came Lucy : A brief Catch Up

It's been a while... It's not you, it's me.

I intended to post my no doubt hugely witty and insightful thoughts about yet more new comedy shows that have graced our screens in the last few weeks but there just haven't been enough hours in the day for me to watch, let alone write about what I've watched. Heck, I'm an entire week behind on Doctors ; I wonder what season they'll be in when I go back ?

Watson & Oliver (BBC2, 10pm Thursdays) afforded me a few wry smiles; they don't have the surreal brilliance of Anna Crilly and Katy Wix but they'll do. Although their 'SUSAN' does make me laugh, especially when Fiona Bruce is in the courtyard.

Vicious (ITV 9pm Mondays) is absolutely camper than a row of tents on Brighton beach* (*not a beach - bank of pebbles) - with Sirs McKellen & Jacobi enjoying themselves enormously, and me as voyeur watching them enjoying themselves enormously while not really finding any of it particularly funny. In fact all I could think of was the anecdote a colleague once told me about seeing Sir Ian play King Lear at the RSC. In the madness on the heath scene he was starkers and she was sitting quite near the front of the stalls so she got a glaring view of the McKellan undercarriage which by her account, he waved around quite happily. 

Since writing that, I have enjoyed the subsequent episodes a whole lot more; I think I am getting into the groove of it; McKellan & Jacobi are clearly having a lot of fun and I am starting to, too.

Vicious is followed by The Job Lot which was initially appealing because I knew it featured one of my favourite actors, Russell Tovey, whom I trust to make intelligent choices in his acting career.
I watched with my hubby whose first job was dealing with claimants at a DHSS office in an impoverished area in the early 80s aged 16 and straight from school - an area with  a high Indian population , and he was in charge of those whose surnames started  with P. So he's been at the front line of such things.

Neither of us found it exceptionally funny on two viewings. Bit of a shame really.


The Apprentice has re-started with a bulk of stock characters who seem to be caricatures of previous contestants. Numpties the lot of them. Enjoyable numptiness though. 

Above all my favourite series recently (ended Saturday 11 May, BBC2, 10:30pm)  was Alan Yentob's The United States of Television:America in Primetime .

It was an absolute treat for a TV nerd like me.

It's not just about clips from sit-coms; it's a whole social history laid before us in all its delicious American beauty.

From "Lucy, you got some 'splainin' to do!" via Mary Richards to Carrie Bradshaw ; from Father Knows Best  to Ray and Debra Barone via Archie Bunker; from Danny deVito as Louie in Taxi  to the God that is Hugh Laurie in House, I lapped up every second of these four hours. America reflected in its own prime time programming.

Yentob examined the independent women , the husband, the maverick, the crusader. Of course the sexual revolution of the Sixties changed things for women but even if you look at Lucy she was a determined woman pursuing a dream. And Lucille Ball was a real life business woman to be reckoned with (without her production company with then real life husband Desi Arnaz  DesiLu, we might never have had Star Trek. When he was little , my hubby thought DesiLu was the name of the green alien woman on the end credits, but that's an aside ...)
Father doesn't know best any more - you only have to watch one episode of Raymond to know that Debra & Marie are running the show. It was the sexual politics that fascinated me most looking at this. Probably nothing new but four luscious hours of wonderful telly essays.

And damn isn't Jon Hamm good looking...

So there's a brief catch up post ... like buses another will follow soon about my new telly obsession.

I know, you can't wait ;-)