the times | Saturday June 11 2022 saturday review 7‘I
don’t know about you,”
Taylor Swift sang, “but I’m
feeling 22.” I don’t know
about you, but the 22-year-
old me didn’t feel much like
Taylor Swift. Not that I’d
ever heard of her then, but
you catch my drift. At 20, sure, maybe,
when I was still safely a student, and my
cherished memories are all of that long,
Britpop summer of tight T-shirts and com-
bat trousers and nights out that would
never end. And now, in my mid-forties, I’m
obviously as Taylor as anything. But in
that later period? That first flush of adult-
hood? No, not so much.
It’s not that I didn’t love it. Sometimes I
really did. But there was an edge there, too,
right? A lost, uncertain one. You’re all
wrong; spiritually gangly, like a fawn stag-
gering around an unfamiliar forest. Your
home is horrendous. Why do you live
here? Somebody pissed on your doorstep
yesterday. Could your mum come here?
Could your gran?
You wouldn’t belong in restaurants,
even if you could afford them, which you
can’t. Your clothes are weird, you might
not get in. You don’t belong in offices,
either, because can it possibly be right that
you’ve turned up for this interview, or this
temp shift, or whatever, in your only suit,
with an actual vomit stain on the lining?
Your diet is preposterous; you can’t stop
bloody smoking. You don’t know, really, on
the most fundamental level, who you are.
Some of your friends seem to have it sort-
ed, sure, streaking away into improbable
careers with improbable salaries, but it all
looks like roleplay, because it is. Some of
them are getting married, for God’s sake,
already. Can that be a good idea? Nothing
feels your own, save for short periods of
perfect sensation — drink, drugs, sex,
screaming conversation at a party — when
the world shrinks to more familiar, man-
ageable proportions. You are the night-bus
people. Forever travelling, but to where?
This is the world, more or less, of Every-
thing I Know About Love. Maggie (Emma
Appleton) and her friends from university
have just moved into their first flatshare in
Camden Town. They drink and dance and
take drugs and chase boys, and they all feel
something is missing. And, of course,
something is, because it is the people they
are going to be.
Although based on a brilliant memoir by
Dolly Alderton (it won a National Book
award in 2018), the telly version is fiction-
alised. This was probably essential, narra-
tively speaking, but fiction raises questions
that autobiography can dodge. Such as,specifically, why these people? Why make
them like this, when you could make them
different? What’s the message? Maggie,
particularly, is problematic in this regard,
because she’s funny, smart and wild and
looks like a supermodel (indeed, she looks
like Emma Appleton), and yet the men she
likes all seem to think they can do better.
What, are they mental?
“You’re fun!” says her friend Birdy (Bel
Powley). “You’re someone who actually
likes skinny dipping, and wearing bandan-
as, and playing snooker at the pub!” With-
out sounding creepy as hell (too late?) I
couldn’t help but be reminded at that point
of Gillian Flynn’s devastating description
of the Cool Girl in Gone Girl; the “hot, bril-
liant, funny woman who adores football,
poker, dirty jokes, and burping”, and so on,
and who her (admittedly psychopathic)
narrator concludes exists only as a result
of female efforts to fulfil male fantasies. Al-
though to be fair this is arguably the whole
point of Maggie, and a point she is destined
to grasp. Either way, on behalf of my own
people, what a joy to learn that stunning
girls in flatshares really do spend their
spare time staging giggling dance routines,
often in hotpants but sometimes in noth-
ing at all. Just as we always suspected.
It’s all a lot smarter, though, than that
might suggest. It’s funny, for one thing, and
sometimes savagely so. Maggie’s first love
interest, a musician called Street (Connor
Finch), uses an old Nokia because he be-
lieves smartphones are bad for our brains.
“It’s like he’s some kind of.. .” begins Mag-
gie, smitten. “C***?” suggests her friend.
There is also something quite powerful
and subtle going on with Maggie’s lack of
self-worth. Inevitably, it turns out to have
roots, but it is also enhanced rather thanHugo Rifkind on TV
Yes, stunning girls in flatshares
really do dance about in hotpants
from above. Or, as one cop puts it early on:
“We clear the corners, they stop shooting
each other. They stop shooting each other,
the murder rate goes down. Murder rate
goes down, the mayor gets to be governor.”
Simon is unafraid of giving a stark, hon-
est overview of the genuine difficulties in-
herent in politicised policing, when every
arrest takes place in the shadow of a smart-
phone. Sometimes, you can even see why
many police officers regarded Jenkins as a
hero. There’s also, though, a devastating
scene in which prosecutors try to find a
quota of jurors who would even consider
trusting the Baltimore police, and cannot.
To be honest, the only real bum note is
the way that despite this all being real, and
set in a scenario made world famous by
The Wire, nobody ever mentions The Wire.
Even while setting up an actual wire.
Given the occasional overlap of cast, this
sometimes verges on the surreal. “Hey
man, you look just like Marlo in The Wire!”
nobody ever says to the cop played by
Jamie Hector, who played Marlo in The
Wire. Although maybe that’s me just being
daft and picky. For all its limitations, it’s as
good as any police drama you’ll have seen
on telly since, well, The Wire.Ms Marvel has been heavily trailed as
Marvel’s Muslim superhero, which is an
odd concept. Are we normally informed of
the religions of superheroes? I’d never
really thought about it, but Google tells me
that Spider-Man is a lapsed Protestant and
that Captain America and the Hulk are
probably both Catholic. Which must be
hard going when you’ve literally met Thor.
Over on the DC side, some say Superman
is supposed to be Jewish, but I don’t re-
member his bar mitzvah. Or his bris. How
would that work? You’d definitely need
kryptonite. And maybe a lathe.
Anyway. I’m not wildly into the super-
hero genre, but this is fairly lovely. Of
course, superhero stories aren’t really
about superheroes. They’re about differ-
ence, and belonging, and squaring familial
responsibilities with saving the world. Of-
ten, they’re basically about puberty. This
all works very well with the teenage Ms
Marvel, aka Kamala Khan, as played by
Iman Vellani. She’s the youngest child of a
moderately conservative Muslim family,
dominated by the mother. Kamala wants
to go to AvengerCon, a sort of cosplay fan
festival, but her mother isn’t having it.
In other words, of course Kamala isn’t
allowed to save the world; she’s not even
allowed to go to a comic convention. In a
manner only mildly incongruous, Kama-
la’s family are unbothered by her close
friendship with Bruno, an impoverished
teenage boy next door, whose role seems
to be inventor sidekick. Both are gamers
and geeks. “It’s not really the brown girls
from Jersey City who save the world,”
Kamala sighs, although not much of the
script here is so heavy-handed. In fact, it’s
pretty deft, and pleasingly cartoony. Yes,
Kamala’s dilemmas are heightened by her
family’s faith, but they’re also pretty clear-
ly the dilemmas of any young girl who has
to juggle her parents, her school and her
friends with owning an inherited magical
bangle that blasts out lasers, or something.diminished by the good things in her life
looking like they outweigh the bad. She
feels she has no big excuse for her prob-
lems, and that’s her big problem. What it
does best of all, though, is capture that aim-
less, map-free drift of your twenties. In-
cluding all the things you’ll miss for ever,
sure, but crikey, also all those you won’t.We Own This City is a new mini-series
written by David Simon, best known as the
writer of The Wire. Being set back in Balti-
more, and concerning itself with police,
drugs, guns and legal shenanigans, it obvi-
ously exists in the shadow of that seminal
TV work, and that’s a bit of a shame. The
Wire, as I have often said, at length, was
simply as fine a piece of storytelling as
humanity has yet achieved in any format,
televisual or otherwise.
Being a mere six episodes, and based on
a true story, WOTC cannot hope to match
it. Nor, though, does that seem to be its
ambition. At first we seem to be in very
familiar territory, with hard-bitten cops
prowling the streets and criminals being
quizzed in interrogation suites. Gradually,
though, we come to realise that the crimi-
nals are police too. For this is the story of
the Gun Trace Task Force, a police unit set
up to take weapons off the streets, yet
which became a corrupt racket, extorting
the public and enriching the officers who
were a part of it. Eight were jailed.
We have no hero here to speak of, but
our villain is Wayne Jenkins, leader of the
group, played formidably by Jon Bernthal.
We meet him as a charismatic uber-cop,
strong but fair. Of course, he’s far from the
latter. Not all of what we see, though, is just
his story. Police brutality abounds in Balti-
more, much of it with a veiled sanctionMaggie
looks like a
supermodel,
yet the men
she likes all
think they
can do better.
What, are
they mental?
dolly mixture Bel
Powley, Emma Appleton,
Aliyah Odoffin and
Marli Siu in Everything
I Know About LoveLAURA BAILEY/BBCEverything I Know
About Love
BBC1
We Own This City
Sky Atlantic/Now
Ms Marvel
Disney+