Tox Report 54. I think about it all the time

Charli XCX (again), Inside No. 9 and Brideshead Revisited

I’m in Inverness at the moment, because apparently summer in the south of England wasn’t cold and drizzly enough for me. This week, it’s all about the wistful transitions: Charlie XCX faces her thirties, Inside No. 9 says goodbye and Evelyn Waugh gets misty-eyed for youth. By the time you hear from me next, I’ll have been to the Eras tour, so next week it’s going to be a FULL TAYLOR EXPERIENCE.¹

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Listened

Charli XCX, “I Think About It All the Time”

This is mostly shorthand for the fact that I’ve been listening to Brat, like, a lot. I didn’t expect this to end up being one of my favourites on the album — I go to Charli for the purest pop, and with its introspective talky verses, this is not that. But even when Brat feels most full-throttle party, it’s a record that’s thinking about who Charli is and who she wants to be. There’s a sweet moment in “So I”, her tribute to the artist Sophie who died in 2021, when Charli remembers Sophie pushing her to “make it faster”: it’s a reminder that when this album does go flat out, there’s still sadness in there. This track (and “So I”) put the melancholy to the front.

Tox Report 48. Done with niceness

At 31 and with a fiancé who gets namechecked plentifully on the album,² Charli is weighing up whether it’s time to have a baby. “I think about it all the time/ That I might run out of time/ But I finally met my baby/ And a baby might be mine.” She comes away from meeting friends with a new child with an acutely observed jealousy that “now they both know thesе things that I don’t”; she considers stopping her birth control “’Cause my career feels so small/ In the existential scheme of it all.” But the brilliance of the song is an argument against itself: her career is not “small”, and whatever unique insights parenthood might bring, it’s hard to imagine the person who wrote this has any lack of sensitivity.

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Watched

Inside No. 9 series 9 (iPlayer)

I’ve been watching Inside No. 9 since the start, and if you’d asked me to guess what Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith had planned for their finale, I would have put money on it being an all-in horror extravaganza combined with some linear TV trickery. Something like the brilliant Halloween special (Dead Line) which posed as a live broadcast (complete with in-character livetweeting from Shearsmith), or the deliciously executed phony quiz show 9x9 hosted by Lee Mack and presented as a last-minute replacement for the trailed episode of Inside No. 9.

Well it wasn’t that, because Inside No. 9 had already done those things, and a reluctance to repeat itself is one of the anthology series’ distinguishing characteristics. Instead, this was a kind of Inside Inside No. 9 — a super-self-referential episode with Shearsmith and Pemberton playing themselves at the end-of-series wrap party, bristling with in-jokes and painfully well-observed entertainment industry meta-ness.³

That meant it didn’t all play well with newcomers to the show — my daughter has just got into it, and the lore behind the “lost” On the Buses-inspired episode missed her. (That’s the phony trailer that was put up as a decoy for 9x9.) But that wasn’t the point: this was an act of service to the fans, and my daughter, as a newly minted fan, got much pleasure from subsequently watching the very first episode (“Sardines”) and picking up the parallels.

I’m going to really miss Inside No. 9. Of course broadcasters have a preference for the big, narrative-driven shows with multi-season-arcs that keep viewers on the hook — but I wish there was more space for sharp, smart stuff like this, which knows how to play with the medium because it’s really in love with the medium. TV’s great gift is its intimacy with the audience. Inside No. 9 has exploited that ruthlessly, and brilliantly. It was right to celebrate it at the end.

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Read

Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited (Penguin)

Why haven’t I read this before? Waugh’s pure dark satires, yes (although for all Brideshead’s reputation for wist, plenty of it — the idiot Bridey and his matchboxes, Rex Mottram and the hauntingly cruel description of him as barely even a man, just certain essential parts well articulated — belongs to the same genre as Black Mischief and Vile Bodies), but not this, which is in some ways the perfect melodramatic novel to read as a teenager (but daddy, I love him!) yet is also shot through with a kind of loss that takes a very middle aged kind of self-knowledge. Writes Charles: “we possess nothing certainly except the past” — and then he itemises those possessions of his, in the form of his relations with the Flyte family. Loss, and the awareness that by the time you’re an adult, you have made made of the irrevocable choices you will ever get to make, pervades here. All you own has already slipped away.

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Gimme, gimme more…

• For The Times: using technology to soak up our sins.

• For The Critic: in praise of Courtney Love’s relentless war on everything.

• Nick Cave goes wild swimming and writes beautifully about finding happiness at your most animal. (Thanks to Nathan/the American Beefcake for the link!)

• The Ian Hislop vs Helen Lewis podcast series on Orwell vs Kafka is like a supersize In Our Time, but funny. Strong recommend — though if it inspires you to read Kafka, I suggest you go for Metamorphosis and the (incredible) short stories, rather than The Trial, which makes a thematic virtue of punishing the reader as well as the protagonist.

• And speaking of Orwellian/Kafkaesque punishments: congratulations to Tristan Kirk for winning the Paul Foot Award for his reporting on the “single justice procedure” which (let me shock you) is not in fact anything much like justice.

• Cancellation is officially boring part 94: didn’t The Morning Show already do this?

1. Putting this as a footnote because it’s a bit embarrassing, but I have started to quite like TTPD after all my bitching. Caveat: I only like about six songs.

2. This fiancé is the drummer from the 1975, a band that represents everything I enjoy in the abstract and who have never produced one record I’ve actually enjoyed, making them the music equivalent of J. G. Ballard for me. Suggestions for 1975 tracks/J. G. Ballard novels that will break this duck welcome.

3. This excavated a lot of the trauma I have from one party I went to, after which I texted a friend: “You know ‘Zero’ by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs…”