Love and bingeing through the lockdown

Lockdown, I’ve discovered, is a good time for a Love binge.

No, no, not that kind. I’m talking about bingeing on TV series about Love. And there are three we’ve been enjoying recently on that theme. One of them goes so far as to take the remarkably original title, Love.

Only one of them is new, so you may know them anyway. But just in case, here are my recommendations.

Johnny Flynn and Antonia Thomas in Lovesick
Having fun (left) and not so much (right)

Let’s start with Lovesick, a British series, jointly produced by Channel 4 and Netflix. It’s based in Glasgow (though you have to work that out for yourselves, and the accents are almost all English). It’s still available on Netflix.

The premise amused me: a young man (Johnny Fynn) diagnosed with chlamydia has to contact all his sexual partners of the last several years, of whom despite his obvious emotional clumsiness and ineptitude in relationship-building, it turns out there are a large number.

He’s surrounded by a diverse crew of friends, including the would-be gigolo (Daniel Ings) who’d rather not be (OK, you have to watch the series to get that), the friend (Joshua McGuire) for whom every relationship is long-term until it blows up in his face, and the young woman (Antonia Thomas) whose attraction for one particular young man (no, no spoilers here) is veiled by a series of attachments that could never prove as satisfactory.

Around them is a string of secondary characters with their idiosyncrasies and their peculiar stories which keep the series moving nicely through its 22 episodes in three seasons (originally released between 2014 and 2018). Cleverly, all the characters occasionally do things that are off-putting, but then win their way back into our affections in other, more attractive ways. 

Overall, there wasn’t a character I didn’t feel I liked, at least most of the time. Which is a great relief, since I’ve seen – and abandoned – plenty of series where I feel that no one appeals to me.

Mae Martin and Lisa Kudrow in Feel Good
Charlotte Ritchie is behind them

The second series is new (released in 2020), with only one six-episode season so far. Feel Good is also British, and made jointly by Channel 4 and Netflix. There’s no confirmation of a second season yet, though it would surprise me if there weren’t one (though perhaps delayed by coronavirus).

It’s a semi-autobiographical look at the life of the acting lead and co-writer (with Joe Hampson) of the show, Mae Martin. She’s a Canadian-born stand-up comic, based in Britain since 2011.

Martin’s a good standup and we got some amusing comedy scenes (not quite as many or as extended as in The Marvellous Mrs Maisel, but nonetheless of the same general kind). She’s also an attractively complex individual, who resists being categorised as either bisexual or lesbian, and identifies as either non-binary or a woman, using the pronouns ‘she’ and ‘they’. No problem there, as I’ll use whatever pronoun about them that she wants.

From the first episode, Mae gets into a new relationship with a straight woman (Charlotte Ritchie), ironically called George, and the rest of the season takes us on a roller coaster ride of their relationship, mixed in with the problems of coping with addiction (or with an addicted friend) and of handling the stereotypically awful British family of George’s friends.

Everything’s treated with a deft and light touch, making the even some difficult scenes beautifully comic. There’s also a wonderful performance by Lisa Kudrow as Mae’s mother (she says her own parents are nothing like the depiction in the series, and I can only say, just as well). An unusual, quirky and beautifully funny series.

Gillian Jacobs and Paul Rust in Love
Their roller coaster has troughs as well as peaks

Finally, there’s that series with the startlingly distinctive title, Love. That name’s so distinctive that, for the first time ever, I couldn’t use the title to track the entry down on IMDB.

You don’t know IMDB? It’s the best, most comprehensive internet movie database there is. Funnily enough, that’s what IMDB stands for, by the way.

The only way to search for it, I found, was to look for the name of Paul Rust, and then pick the series title from the list of his filmography. That’s quite appropriate, as it happens, since Rust is a highly talented individual, who’s both an accomplished scriptwriter and a fine actor. He’s the co-creator, one of the producers and a star of the show.

His co-star is Gillian Jacobs as the wacky non-conformist with the addicted personality (yep, we get some addiction in this series too), who has a bit of a rocky ride with Rust’s character. Like Lovesick, there’s a large collection of secondary characters, each funny in his/her/their way (see? I’m learning about personal pronouns). And, again like Lovesick, the behaviour of the main characters makes them absolutely unbearable at some moments, though at others they redeem themselves, so you can’t help sympathising with them generally.

I have to confess that we’ve only watched season 1 so far, but we’ve enjoyed it enormously. It’s a Netflix series that ran from 2016 to 2018, with 34 episodes over three series. My suspicion is that when we get to the end, I shall feel as many others have, that it was cancelled too soon.

Still, it has all the qualities one needs to get through some more of the Lockdown with sanity undisturbed…

Emily, whose words speak to me still

One of the benefits of retiring is that I have, over the last few weeks, renewed my acquaintance with a fascinating woman.

Actually, I think it’s more than a mere acquaintance. I like to think of it much more as a friendship.

It’s a one-sided friendship, I grant you that. Well, it could hardly be any other way. Because Emily, as I like to think of her though she’d be more properly referred to as Emilie, does not include among her stellar qualities – brilliance, drive, generosity – the rather practical one of being alive. In fact, she died well over 250 years ago.

Emily at work

As it happens, even if we had been contemporaries, I doubt my friendship would have been reciprocated. As a member of the French aristocracy, and an outstanding intellectual, she would have been unaware of my existence.

Emily may be one of my friends, but I would not have been one of hers.

None of that stopped me working on a novel based on her life. It takes the form of a confession, from her death bed, in which she reflects on all she has done or failed to do, the things that might have gone better, the things that could have been or actually were disasters. I was fascinated by the subject and got the whole thing written bar perhaps twenty pages some three or four years ago.

Other things then got in the way. Work was one, but that has finished. A different novel also held me up: this is the one where I make space available for Misty, our cat, along with Luci, our first toy poodle, and Toffee, the second and the most turbulent of the three, to express their views. These I have stolen from their diaries, and I’m proud of all three for their achievement: after all, most peoples’ pets can barely hold a pen let alone keep a diary.

The first book of their diary extracts (wittily entitled Through a cat’s eyes and dogs’ tales) is now complete and is only looking for a publisher (I say ‘only’ but that’s a far bigger undertaking, it seems to me, than writing the dratted thing in the first place). 

All three animals with Danielle
One of the illustrations by my daughter-in-law Senada

So now I’ve been able to get back to Emily. 

One of the pleasurable aspects of the book is that I’ve used her voice wherever possible. We have a lot of her correspondence, so I know what she actually said about certain events and people (not necessarily what she thought about them: as the politics of today’s world show, what people say isn’t always what they think).

She also wrote a lot, though she didn’t always publish it. For instance, she kept her Discourse on Happiness strictly to herself in her life, though we’ve published it since.

The best way of making sure of happiness, she argued, was to make it depend entirely on yourself. Study, she says, is the best way to achieve that aim. And yet:

…the passion which can give us our greatest pleasure and make us happiest, leaves our happiness entirely dependent on others: you understand that I am talking about love. This passion is perhaps the only one that can make us desire life, and make us grateful to the creator of nature, whoever he might be, for giving us our existence.

Emily had such a passion. The one great love of her life, among many other lesser ones, was for the most celebrated wit and polemicist of their time, Voltaire. But:

I don’t know however whether love has ever brought together two people made for each other to such a point that they would never feel the surfeit of pleasure, or the cooling to which ease and security lead, nor the indolence and half-heartedness which arise from familiarity and the long continuance of a relationship

That was the fate of her bond with Voltaire. Towards the end of her life, they were both indulging in affairs with others. Indeed, she fell pregnant at 42, a dangerous age at that time, as a result of an infatuation for a much younger and entirely inappropriate man. She died as result of an infection associated with childbirth.

Hence the death bed with which my novel starts. But it’s striking that gathered around it, as well as the young man who’d fathered the newborn daughter, there were her husband, always a loyal and supportive friend to her, and, whatever cooling there may have been in their relations, Voltaire, grieving his coming loss.

They remained attached to the end, then. Though Emily was clear that it was she who ensured that was so. There are loves so great, she tells us, that there’s never more than one in a century. Hers was one of those. And it persisted, returned or not, and despite any side dalliances they may have had. The soul that loves, she tells us:

… has to love so much that it loves for two, and that the heat of its heart makes up for what is in fact missing from its happiness.

Across the centuries, I’m as moved as ever by those words from an exceptional friend, however remote she may be.