Pop Between Realities, Home in Time For Tea: Broadchurch
I want to start with an update to yesterday’s appeal. When I made the appeal for boosting the Patreon by $200, I kind of doubted it could be done. Actually, not even kind of. It felt like the longest of long shots—a desperate appeal to avoid having to give up writing despite the fact that it obviously made the most sense for my financial security. Instead, we’ve blown past 2/3 of the goal in a single day. As I queue this up before dinner, we only have $61 to go, and what felt like an impossible dream is looking like it very well might happen. I am humbled and stunned and above all grateful to be so widely and deeply supported, and so, so thrilled that I really might get to continue on this mad ride. But we’re not there yet, and if you clicked away yesterday because it felt like a pipe dream, well… it’s not. But I still need your help. The Patreon link is right here. And with that said, let’s get on to dragging Chris Chibnall.
Act I: The Woman Who Fell to Earth
The most impressive thing about Broadchurch is the unbridled, even cynical efficiency of its conception. Chibnall has suggested he had the idea for it going back to 2003, but from his account of the process this idea did not include characters, the plot, or a location so much as a vague idea to do a child murder story that would focus on the killing’s impact on the broader community. It wasn’t until 2011 that he started developing the program as a spec script after his time working on Camelot for Starz came to an end that was about as unpleasant as the series itself.
In 2011, however, the show’s influence is unmistakable: by that time Danish import The Killing, a brooding and meticulous crime drama, had made its bow on BBC Four, where it was a surprising hit, at least on the scale that BBC Four has those. The Killing, along with the late Stieg Larsson’s hit series of novels starting with The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, jumpstarted the genre known as Scandi-noir. As a television genre at least, these involve making grimly serious crime dramas with a focus on place, both in their fascination with the lush desolation of their landscape and in their interest in in looking at community and social structure, and the way in which a traumatic incident like a major crime leaves a wound that traverses social strata. Think From Hell if it was actually a mystery, or, if you’re hell bent on staying in television, The Wire if it were.
So Chibnall gets to the deeply obvious idea that Britain has remote and desolate landscapes too and that there’s no reason they have to import difficult subtitled Scandinavian series when they can make this stuff on their own. And when I call that obvious, I mean it as a compliment. It’s a ruthlessly well-judged move, born of recognizing a growing trend and getting on board quickly and decisively.…
It’s January 15th, 2017. Clean Bandit have been knocked off of number one by the dawn of the Sheeraning, as Ed Sheeran’s “Shape of You” and “Castle on the Hill” debut at number one and two respectively, heralds of his forthcoming album that will, on its release in mid-March, lead to Sheeran occupying 14 of the top 15 slots in an absolutely unprecedented (and before the streaming era impossible ) turn of events. JP Cooper, Starley, and Jax Jones featuring Raye also chart.
Bush has a mental breakdown on a motorway expressed through a series of car puns: “breaking down,” “stuck in low gear,” “fears of the skidding wheels.” It’s a vague emotional spiral, construed as a barrage of automotive verbiage. A character called Emma has been left high and dry by someone called Georgie, and responds to this loss by losing her shit on the road. Fittingly enough for this premise, “Heartbrake” is a melodically bizarre machine, moving from a tingling piano-led intro to kookiness, eventually landing on a bawdy, brass-accompanied shoutfest of a chorus (“don’t put your BLUES where your SHOES should be!”). Yet “Heartbrake” is so noisy it obscures whatever point it attempts to make. Additionally, it’s too undisciplined for its volume to even work, becoming white noise rather than grabbing attention with spectacle. The thematic dubiousness of Lionheart extends to the album’s quality, and the it suffers as a result.
CW: Discussions of Jimmy Savile and sexual assault.
charts and appearing on what seemed like every TV program in the UK, Bush did an extensive amount of traveling, visiting West Germany, the Republic of Ireland, the Netherlands, France, the United States, Canada, and Japan. One could unpack any one of these tips individually, but they mostly consist of Bush performing songs from The Kick Inside. As Dreams of Orgonon is a song-by-song blog, we analyze episodes in Kate Bush’s career through the lenses of new songs as they come. Bush’s promotional visit to Japan in June of 1978 not only offers a couple songs we haven’t heard her sing before, even if they are covers, but it gives a chance to see what Kate Bush does when she’s not doing Kate Bush things.