BOOKS & ARTS
Television
Boys behaving badly
James Delingpole
Brassic (Sky One) feels like the sort of TV
comedy drama they last made about 15 years
ago but would never get commissioned now,
certainly not by the BBC. Almost all of the
main characters — apart from love interest
Michelle Keegan — are white, male and het-
erosexual. And it’s set in the kind of Lan-
cashire market town surrounded by rolling
sheep country where the opportunities for
plausible diversity casting are really quite
limited. So how come it has been getting
such glowing notices from all the preview-
ers and reviewers?
You’ll be depressed when I tell you. Well,
it has depressed me anyway. The main char-
acter Vinnie — played by Joe Gilgun — is
bipolar. Not only that but Gilgun himself is
bipolar and, as one of any number of tedious
articles by online scribblers cannot wait to
tell you, he is very open and candid about it,
unlike most men, who struggle to talk about
their feelings.
Come, kindly asteroid: strike us now.
Being obliterated alongside my friends and
family will be a small price to pay for the
satisfaction of knowing that in the same pur-
gative explosion will be eradicated all those
woke little pillocks and their idiot notions
that the primary purpose of a TV comedy
drama is to enable viewers to empathise
with ‘disabilities’ such as mental illness.
Gosh, do you think that was what Shake-
speare was thinking when he wrote his ‘To
be or not to be’ speech? ‘So I’ve put in lots of
sexual intrigue and killing: that should keep
the groundlings happy. But there will come
a time about 420 years hence — I know this
because I am a visionary seer — when audi-
ences won’t care about my wordplay or my
intricate plotting, still less about the for-
tunes of a white cisgendered royal. Unless,
THE LISTENER
The Tchaikovsky ProjectGrade: B+
I’m not sure about ‘Projects’. Aren’t
those what ageing rockers produce,
in a haze of sedatives, when their
ego finally outgrows their talent? In
classical music, there’s something
unseemly about the idea of Maestro
X condescending to bestow their
attention upon music that is — or
should be — bigger than they’ll ever
be. Still, the conductor here is the
Russian-born Semyon Bychkov,
unambiguously one of the good
guys, who, after decades spent
paying his dues, has recently hit
the sweet spot where every note
speaks, every gesture ignites, and —
crucially — critics actually notice.
This Tchaikovsky box celebrates
his relationship with the Czech
Philharmonic, an orchestra which,
so the thinking goes, combines Slav
instincts with western polish, just like
Tchaikovsky himself.
Well, maybe. The Czech Phil is
famous for the mellowness of its
sound, and there’s some gorgeous
playing here. Is that enough, though,
in music as raw and as uninhibited as
this? Come on — the Czechs were
never going to scream open the skies,
like Yevgeny Mravinsky’s Soviet-era
Leningrad Philharmonic, or commit
to the hallucinatory, borderline-
hysterical extremes of current cult
favourite Teodor Currentzis. Except
in the three piano concertos, where
the soloist Kirill Gerstein ups the
ante, Bychkov delivers epic grandeur
rather than jangling nerves; the
folk-inspired early symphonies, in
particular, could have done with a
shot of Stolichnaya. But then you
reach the Byron-inspired fever
dream of Manfred and suddenly it’s
game on: a vast, glowering emotional
apocalypse, painted in lurid oils and
seething with drama. I recommend
diving straight in.
— Richard Bratbyyes, that’s it! Yes! I’ll give him a long solilo-
quy where he speculates about topping him-
self. And everyone will say how fresh and
modern and relevant it is, and I might still
compete with mighty future talents on the
English A-level syllabus...’
But how exactly do you make a drama
out of a condition where all the action takes
place inside someone’s head? Well, as series
creator Danny Brocklehurst and co-writer
Gilgun demonstrate, you don’t really. You
can give a few pointers: have him live in
a shack in the woods; provide him with a ter-
rible haircut (an aggressively straight fringe,
like you’d expect to see sported by one of
the Camorra kids in Gomorrah); show him
visiting the doctor (an amusing cameo by
Dominic West) to talk about his ups and
downs and his loss of libido. But in truth
the bipolar bit is just an incidental character
detail, rather than the main event — and bli-
mey, what a relief that is.
What Brassic really is is a more north-
erly and rural version of Shameless; or, as
one critic aptly put it, an X-rated Last of the
Summer Wine. Except, instead of being old-ies, the protagonists are lads in their mid-
twenties who really ought to be moving
on from their adolescence of bored, small-
town criminality, but who, hey, can’t help it
because they’re mates and dealing weed and
playing poker and stealing Shetland ponies
on the orders of the racist farmer who hides
their stolen wheels in his shed is a lot more
fun than having to grow up.
I like what I’ve seen so far. The charac-
ters are — in the manner of the team from
Trainspotting — intriguing and well delin-
eated and appealing: Ash, the Irish travel-
ler pugilist; Tommo, the perv who runs a
very successful local sex dungeon; Cardi
(short for cardiac), the kebab addict; Dylan,
the Marwood-style bright one clearly des-
tined for better things, etc. The plotting
veers between Snatch-style gangster farce
(e.g. knocking yourself out with chloro-
form while stealing a pony, which turns out
to belong the local Mister Big) to poignant
domesticity. (Keegan’s Erin is a single mum
who dreams of giving her five-year-old son
a better life. But will her current boyfriend
Dylan rise to his newfound responsibility
— or will it always be a case of ‘bros before
hoes’?) And the dialogue — such as Tom-
mo’s meditations on the primal needs of
a man’s willy — is often quite funny. I did
wonder, though, about the bit where Vinnie
refers to his friend as coming from a ‘trav-
eller’ family. Surely he would have used a
more offensive, colloquial term than that?
And should a grimy, down-to-earth series
about jack-the-lad criminals and pervy sex
really be pulling its punches?The bipolar bit is just an incidental
character detail – and blimey,
what a relief that isrience and the experience you are trying to
film,’ he tells her. She drops Sunderland.
The film is episodic. There’s a sad trip
to Venice. There are the men who try to
tell her what her own film is about at film
school. There’s her mother, who tries to
protect her, but cannot. The talk is natural-
istic and there is an awkward disconnected-
ness. Even when two characters are in the
same space they are somehow kept apart.
I have made it seem action-packed, but it
isn’t. Julie unfolds slowly, as does the film,
and sometimes conversations start, stutter,
stall, go nowhere. But the leads are both
sensational and it’s not paint drying, what-
ever anyone may say. As it happens, I had
my living room painted last autumn, and
watched it dry. And it was nothing like this.
At all.