110: I watched Thursday Murder Club and don't like* Richard Osman anymore
Hello, welcome to Border Crossing issue one hundred and ten, I hope you’re well and not too shook about autumn landing hard: I think this was my favourite summer since pandemic times, hopefully yours was lush.
This issue, I write about a very bad current film and what it means for admiring its originator.
A quick note on the temporary Chris T-T ‘comeback’ and vinyl reissues project: if you’re a music writer, DJ, podcaster, whatever, and if you fancy doing an interview or session with me between now and mid-November, please get in touch, I’m well up for chatting ahead of the vinyl release and the 100 Club show. Thank you.
And go ahead and pre-order my two new/old LPs.
Maybe The Rest Is Entertainment will have me on as a guest…
I’ll also mention how saddened I am to hear of the death of Jonathan Main of Bookseller Crow in Crystal Palace. I’ve spent many happy hours in there and got to know Jon a bit, mainly through Jim Bob launching books there. All love and condolences to Justine and Karen and the Crow family. Right now they urgently need people to buy books to keep them afloat, in an impossible moment.
On we roll.
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appearances
Saturday 20th September, I’ll play a solo Chris T-T set at the gorgeous SeptemberSong festival, in Oxfordshire. This is a new family-run psych-folk gem from the team behind Truck and Wood festivals, with a thoughtful lineup. I’ll also join an early afternoon panel chat on politics and music.
gems
1
Margaret Bennett’s fabulous essay on Paula Yates and classic British TV show The Tube. from her Ninki newsletter.
2
Big Banana Feet, a fascinating 1975 doc film about stand-up comedy legend Billy Connolly touring to Ireland, on the cusp of superstardom, is on the BBC iPlayer.
3
Having won the Green Party leadership by a landslide, Zack Polanski has launched a podcast, Bold Politics, first guest Ash Sarkar.
In the past I’ve used Ash (a bit critically) as a case study of a potentially valuable leftist politician, who instead chose to build a media career shouting on the sidelines. Zack’s presenting chops are good enough he could’ve easily taken the media path, but he hasn’t, and that’s great. Right at the start of this interview he gently challenges her on that exact choice.
“I invite people, like, add up the value of everything you own, and minus your debts. Could you live on that for the rest of your life? If not, you’re part of the big ‘we’, you’re part of the movement, you’re part of the ninety-nine percent. If you can live of it for the rest of your life, we’re coming for you.”
— Ash Sarkar
4
Jane Fonda interviewed on NPR’s Fresh Air specifically on her career in activism. Her unflinching vitality in her late eighties is wonderful.
5
Last week I interviewed the great poet Hollie McNish for a forthcoming podcast series and she was both inspiring and very fun to chat with. Her latest book Virgin is out in October and she’s on a national tour this autumn, which is selling fast.
potato gems
In both the last two episodes of University Challenge there’s been a potato. First a potato question, then a potato answer.
What country has a cultural and linguistic divide popularly named after a kind of potato pancake? The divide passes close to the town of Biel, or Bienne, which is officially bilingual, and through Fribourg, a bilingual canton.
Answer at the bottom.
The second one was about French spud legend Parmentier:
Which common vegetable is the subject of a 1773 chemical examination by Antoine-Augustin Parmentier, one of a number of works in which he advocated for its value as a… (question interrupted successfully).
Which reminds me, at some point I ought to write a full piece about Parmentier, who fought to decriminalise (yes) the potato in France and prove its nutritional worth. It’s a fascinating tale.
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I watched Thursday Murder Club and don’t like* Richard Osman anymore
I’ve long held a soft spot for Richard Osman that I mistakenly presumed was low-key counterintuitive — countercultural even — when, in fact, it turns out that’s just the expected British position on him. The man’s a national institution. It’s like when you fancy someone you think is potentially within your reach but then realise everyone else fancies them too, they’re straight-up glam, but you’d just thought they were quirkily up your alley. Actually, I do suspect I’ve been a bit besotted with Osman. In an interview about their podcast partnership, Marina Hyde pointed out that he is more of an alpha than people realise, when they only know his onscreen personality.
We’ve watched series after series of cosy early evening BBC2 quiz show House Of Games with near religious fervour and focus. I love it, it’s become a television touchstone. Bought the board game, play it at Christmas. Fully buy into Osman as a lesson in studied conviviality. I’ve fully developed theories on how to win specific prizes. If I got famous I’d be on there like a shot. I’ve also listened to every episode of The Rest Is Entertainment podcast, even as other shows in the Rest Is… canon have fallen away (surely in this genocide appeasement era of western pseudo-democracy, nobody sane can stick with the duvet-day analysis of Campbell and Stewart? Which, by the way, sounds like a presbyterian soup and biscuit manufacturer). But The Rest Is Entertainment weaves a compelling (false) binary: its constant and unusual subtext is art versus entertainment.
Marina Hyde’s mid-to-highbrow taste is repeatedly pummelled to the floor by Richard Osman’s determined, deeply institutionalist, populist love affair with ultra-mainstream entertainment. This culminated a few months ago in the show’s most self-actualised hellscape moment: a furious fight over which was best, Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane, or BBC reality contest Interior Design Masters with Allen Carr. I snorted my coffee. Of course, Osman’s populism easily won the day. No brow knowingly lower: where Hyde is Orwellian, Osman is Cowellian.
That’s a podcast aware of its own influence, inside a system it enjoys too much to attempt to improve, even as it feeds us a thousand (essentially safe) behind-the-scenes glimpses of industry ‘secrets’. The presenters often mention how tabloid newspapers construct bullshit stories out of casual comments they’ve made on the podcast. But really, they’re as proud of that as they are disdainful of it. Meanwhile, the Richard Osman of The Rest Is Entertainment is all about the bennies and he tends to regard the price of things as their value, with everything framed by how much it cost, or made, or was sold for. Including people.
So, my wiser friends got bored and jumped ship, til I’m here alone, still splashing around in this thickening puddle where Osman ‘splains everything as confirmed fact and you don’t notice the trick until he stumbles into your own area of moderate expertise (for me, the pop music industry) and you realise he’s spouting a roughly 60/40 blend of genuine insight and authoritative sounding drivel. His brother’s in Suede, you know.
To be fair, for example, this week (as I finished editing this scree) Osman talked passionately about how hard it is for even well-known musicians to make a living, mentioning Self Esteem and name-checking unexpectedly outsider / underground acts, for example The Anchoress, as well as Field Music’s Doors tribute band, which I wrote about myself on Double Chorus a few weeks back, as he ploughed through a very sincere, heartfelt plea for music fans to show up to gigs and pre-order albums. It was a very decent effort. I really need to cut the man some slack. But you’re always hardest on those you love, yes?
Rightly, I’d predicted I wouldn’t enjoy Osman’s cosy crime series of novels, which are such a behemoth of that genre. Assiduously, I’ve avoided them. Hence I came to the newly released Netflix movie Thursday Murder Club totally fresh, without knowing plot and such, only watching it at all for our Refigure podcast. I believed I’d be insulated from finding it too annoying, since we do have an appetite for icky comfy crime TV (especially on the weekend) such as: we’ve done every episode of Death In Paradise for example, and that’s roughly where I imagined Thursday Murder Club might sit. Perhaps, if it was proper good, a simplified Knives Out type vibe. Gentle satire.
Unfortunately Thursday Murder Club makes Death In Paradise look like John Le Carré. It’s a film that the combined power of James Bond, The Queen, Gandhi, Doctor Who and Celie Imrie cannot dig out of an effluent filled ditch. It’s a film that makes Helen Mirren and David Tennant look like incompetent hams.
Set in a residential care home for the elderly, our main characters are so full of vim, they cannot possibly need to be there. Ageing frailty is only for side characters, and only to suit the plot. Also, lots of people are pointing this out, but bloody hell, this old people’s home is a gigantic, opulent, ridiculous mansion and its estate. Rooms are royal suites. In the real world, this place would cost thousands a night, it’s a fucking palace. No way on earth it’s a care home, more the sort of residential spa retreat that Saudi Royalty and tech billionaires might visit. I think this isn’t Richard Osman’s fault at all: surely such Hogwarts-ish nonsense wasn’t in the novel, and must be a trope to romanticise the English setting for Americans. Still, it badly undermines the urgency of the plot, rendering any ‘peril’ of the home’s closure plain stupid. These super-wealthy nobs could easily just purchase a townhouse in Knightsbridge, for them and all their friends, and hire live-in help. As soon as you clock where they live, it’s impossible to give a shit.
I did laugh aloud three times. Imrie is charming all the way. Sir Ben “call me Sir Ben” Kingsley is almost cute and the one character I vaguely wanted to know more about. This gang is no ‘murder club’, though, more like sidekicks in a superhero movie: the other three make modest, secondary contributions at best, under strict instructions. Imrie’s super power is her cake baking. Really, the film wants to be an espionage detective thriller with Mirren relying on her long-held potent knowledge of crime and spycraft skillset, via a career in the secret services. Any semblance of ‘regular elderly folk cleverly solving crimes’ Miss Marple-style has vanished by twenty minutes. We’re meant to be in awe that Mirren speaks fluent Polish, knows the criminal underworld, thrashes her posh car (a retirement gift) like a maniac through London, and talks threateningly to someone we’ve been told over and over is a terrifying mob boss, when he’s actually Richard E Grant. Such kerfuffle radically over-centres her character as an unreal engine, makes the ‘murder club’ premise far less fun, til by the end she’s revealed (to me at least) as an outright malevolence. Of which, more later.
It’s hard to comprehend how director Chris Columbus, who wrote Gremlins and The Goonies, who directed the Home Alone films and Mrs Doubtfire, ended up here. A clue is: since 2010 he’s made one film every five years and they’ve all been shite. Actually I think I’ve solved it: in 1995 Columbus became a producer on his own projects. Prior to that he’d been a hired gun and often made classics. After that, always a producer, including here. From that moment, his quality plummeted. But I digress.
Richard Osman’s real-life wife, the terrific actor Ingrid Oliver, who rather sweetly he asked out when she was a contestant on House Of Games, does a good turn as Imrie’s daughter, a high level hedge fund type who, it turns out, could’ve saved the home anyway all along, just by purchasing it. Or something.
There’s a funny moment where Mirren disguises herself for a mission, and dresses up exactly as she did playing The Queen, years ago. The visual joke lands, it could’ve been left at that — but they can’t resist over-enunciating, and trampling the gag. “Oh, you look like the Queen”. Raised eyebrow. It exemplifies how producers seem to have gone back through every line and shot, to make it all as thunkingly obvious as possible for the thickies.
Here’s the thing though: none of the above is a problem. It’s just my opinion, Lots of people have enjoyed it, knowing perfectly well it’s neither Citizen Kane nor Interior Design Masters. Films are allowed to be a bit crap. Shuffle off quietly, Christopher, pretend you never interacted.
But but but.
I found Thursday Murder Club’s values to be casually disgusting, and carefully disguised by the upbeat tone. Earlier I used a word about Osman which I’ve come to associate with him, and it applies to the film in spades: it is ‘institutionalist’. This film unfolds into aggressive propaganda for a ruling class under pressure. It deliberately obscures the immorality and violence of its own plot points.
Heroes are posh, of the establishment. Villains are broadly a working class pastiche. One Black policewoman is a signalled exception, though effectively the Murder Club reduces her to a serf within moments (breaking police force rules to keep them informed) just as carelessly as the ‘orrible superior officers who reduced her to a teasmaid in the setup.
The outcome for the only overseas character is awful, yet treated in cavalier fashion by the script and director: Polish builder Bogdan, played by Henry Lloyd-Hughes (literally the only character in the whole movie whose name I can remember, because it sounds like ‘bogged down’, which sums up both his situation and the state of everything else) is presented sympathetically from the off, and we learn he’s in desperate trouble, though this is casually under-represented. He ends up — likely accidentally — killing one of the key gangster villains, while trying to free himself from appalling oppressive control. Except then he’s caught by the Thursday Murder Club. It doesn’t matter how decent and conflicted he’s been throughout: seconds after he’s been marched offscreen by the cops, his character is entirely forgotten. As the ‘excitement’ of the final reel unfolds, after that sequence, it just stuns me that we were only meant to care about Bogdan for perhaps five seconds, and then pile on with our story, unmoved by his fate.
Then, the denouement is truly despicable.
Helen Mirren’s character locates the biggest villain of all — the hidden evil boss behind everything else — a man who has overseen and committed horrific crimes against many, many people offscreen (none of whom are the actual murders of the film’s title, but still) — and immediately she fiercely cuts a deal with him, to leave him free and where he is, in return for protecting the care home. Moments later, in shocking contrast, she confronts an essentially good, essentially powerless person — a minor character — who it turns out abetted a murder many years before and now, panicking about losing the home where he cares for his partner in a coma, has offed David Tennant’s appalling pantomime villain, by poking him with a syringe of fentanyl during a protest at a cemetery.
This time, Mirren makes no deal offer — there’s absolutely no question or compromise, she’s going straight to the cops, snitch that she is, unless he (I shit you not) takes his own life and also that of his partner (Mirren’s character’s beloved old friend) using the rest of the fentanyl. Cue a close-up shot of the syringes in a top drawer, cue moody music, in case the viewer hasn’t been punched hard enough in the face by the point.
He does so, offscreen. The film closes with their joint funeral, as if Mirren’s character didn’t essentially just blackmail the poor bastard into a murder-suicide involving her supposed dear pal, simply to clear her amateur sleuth case load.
All she needed to say quietly was: “don’t worry, we won’t tell anyone” and let it lie. But no. She literally steals a ‘Murder Club’ pendant off the dead woman’s neck, to give to Celie Imrie, promoting her to full membership.
The film doesn’t dwell for even a second upon — let alone stand in judgement of — her actions: she’s portrayed throughout the cloying closing moments as our successful hero, mourning her fallen friend. Mirren’s won the day, saved their old people’s home from Doctor Who. Never mind in fact she casually bullied to death the person who actually saved the old people’s home from Doctor Who.
Some folks watching this be like, oh, chill out man, it’s harmless fun.
Nah, it’s really not. Mirren’s character is an ethically nightmarish rogue former spy. She’s a virulently dirty cop, comfortable with high rank and wielding power, manipulating those around her to prop up her system. Through that lens, her actions (including criminal) to protect the status quo at the expense of anyone around her, are abominable.
I have no clue what of this is in the original book.
And of course * no I haven’t really stopped liking / slightly loving / Richard Osman, I’ll be glued to House Of Games when it returns. Damn, I can’t quit him: his personage is the very comfort food I yearn for, that this film of his novel laughably failed to be.
Can’t wait for sequels.
get in touch
email: chris@christt.com
Instagram: @cjthorpetracey.
always there
Potato answer: Switzerland. The divide is popularly called the ‘rosti ditch’ because it marks the end (or beginning) of love for German potato rosti.
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Thanks again. Look after yourself and your people.
All my love,
Chris
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