o-uncle-newt

[o-uncle-newt]

This is in many ways really true, and absolutely a contrast with the other pairs you mention, but what I find fascinating are the very specific ways in which some divides are still present and how Sayers chooses to delineate them. She's very clear that Wimsey treats both of them like confidants, but Wimsey has a number of moments where he's still very conscious of Bunter's position (such as one point where he stops Bunter from insulting the Duke's intelligence as that would be inappropriate), for example. The thing with Parker is even more interesting, because while one barrier between them is in many ways broken down (I don't know what book you're up to so I won't spoil it), at the same time chronologically he becomes much more aware of Parker's status as a policeman being at odds to a degree with Wimsey's own role, depending on the scenario, and that introduces a degree of chill.

All this to say, I am in AWE of how good Sayers is at characters and their layers!

Parker, Bunter and Wimsey feel very different to the duos I've been reading up to this point!

Holmes and Watson, Raffles and Bunny, Jeeves and Bertie all exist with an invisible barrier between them. Holmes can't express his emotions openly (or at least greatly struggles), Raffles can't either; opting to be weird and pull Bunny in on things without saying why. Between Bertie and Jeeves at least some professionalism is required to be upheld.

But not Wimsey and Parker lmao. I just finished Clouds of Witness and those guys will literally get wasted on Westminster Bridge at 5am. Bunter follows happily with Wimsey's investigations and will sob for him when he almost got eaten by a bog lmao. Wimsey tells Parker funny stories and brain teasers just to see him puzzled or laughing. They are too cute :3

These stories get heavy and serious at times, and I find this more than a welcome relief to those times. I LOVE THEM, SAYERS!! THANK YOU

[o-uncle-newt]

Question- has anyone ever written about Cabin Pressure from the perspective of its depictions of aviation?

I have seen a few people (I think on here!) mention Cabin Pressure getting them into aviation, which is what makes me wonder if any of them- or anyone else- has gone into more detail!

I know that JF used his dad as aviation consultant, and I've seen a few different places where he himself commented on the aviation terminology on his blog, and a podcast interview I heard where he describes the plot/a bunch of dialogue from Qik basically coming from a conversation with his dad about whether a plane of the kind he made GERTI could do an Arctic sightseeing trip. And of course there's the use of CRM* as a plot driver in Ipswich.

*which means something completely different in my field and thus always throws me

So that I have, but I'm curious if anyone has ever done something more specifically about the show from an aviation lens. I ask this because recently, on my long express-train subway commutes, I've been reading a lot of Admiral Cloudberg articles about plane crashes/disasters, and while I expected to know/understand nothing, I was pleasantly surprised at how much of the terminology I recognized (even if not necessarily what it MEANT) from the background of Cabin Pressure episodes. So I get why nothing funny happens during takeoff/landing (sterile cockpit rule), what the deal is with maximum takeoff/landing weight, and a few other things that I'm not remembering, partly because I probably still don't totally understand them lol. I'd be really curious to know what some of the more subtle aviation-related angles that I might have missed might be, how the show does aviation-wise overall... just seems like a fun angle.

[o-uncle-newt]

A Different Kind of Queen of Crime- five ways that Dorothy L Sayers changed the way we see Sherlock Holmes

For my first Holmesian post- a crossover with one of my more usual subjects on my other blog! For when one is talking about Sherlock Holmes, in particular Sherlock Holmes scholarship, there are nor many more pivotal names than Dorothy L Sayers. Sure, Christopher Morley may have had a greater impact on Sherlockian culture, and Richard Lancelyn Green on Holmesian scholarship, to name only a few- but Sayers's contributions to scholarship and "the game" were early and underratedly pivotal.

If you're a Sherlock Holmes fan who is unfamiliar with Sayers's influence, or a Sayers fan who had no idea she had any interest in Holmes, keep reading! (And if you're a Sherlock Holmes fan who wants to know what I think about Sayers, check out her tag on my main blog, @o-uncle-newt. Or, more to the point, just read her fantastic books.)

There's a great compilation of Sayers's writing and lecturing on the topic of Holmes called Sayers on Holmes (published by the Mythopoeic Press in 2001), though some of her essays are also available in her collection Unpopular Opinions, which is where I first encountered them. It's not THAT extensive, and it's from an era in which Sherlock Holmes scholarship, such as it was, was still very much nascent. While a lot may have happened since Sayers was writing and talking about Holmes, she got there early and she made an immediate impact- and here's how:

She helped create and define Sherlockian scholarship: Don't take this from me, take it from the legendary Richard Lancelyn Green! At a joint conference of the Sherlock Holmes Society and Dorothy L Sayers Society, he said that "Dorothy L. Sayers understood better than anyone before her the way of playing the game and her Sherlockian scholarship gave credibility and humor to this intellectual pursuit. Her standing as an authority on the art of detective fiction and as a major practitioner invigorated the scholarship, and her...Holmesian research is the benchmark by which other works are judged. It would be fair to say, as Watson said of Irene Adler, that for Sherlockians she is the woman and that …she 'eclipses and predominates the whole of her sex.'" We'll go into a bit more detail on some specific examples below, but one important one is that, as Green notes, Sayers was not only a mystery writer but an acknowledged authority on mystery fiction, whose (magisterial) introduction to The Omnibus of Crime, a then-groundbreaking history of the genre of mystery fiction, included a highly regarded section on the influence of Holmes on mystery fiction. She was able to write not just literate detective stories but literate critiques of others' stories and the genre (as collected in the excellent volume Taking Detective Stories Seriously), and as such, the writing she did on Holmes was well received.

She cofounded the (original iteration of) the Sherlock Holmes Society of London: While the current iteration of the Society lists itself as having been founded in 1951, a previous iteration existed through the 1930s, founded as a response to the creation of the Baker Street Irregulars in New York and run by a similar concept- the meeting of Sherlock Holmes fans every so often for dinner at a restaurant. Sayers, who seems to have been much more clubbable than Mycroft Holmes, helped run the Detection Club on corresponding lines as well. (Fun fact, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was invited to be the first president of the Detection Club! However, he refused on grounds of poor health and, either right before or right after he died, the Detection Club met for the first time with GK Chesterton as president.) While the 1930s society didn't last, and Sayers didn't decide to join the newly reconstituted club in 1951, her presence from the beginning was key to the establishment of Holmesian scholarship.

She helped define The Game: Sayers didn't invent The Game, as the use of Higher Criticism in the study of Sherlock Holmes came to be called. (The Game now often refers to something a bit broader than that, but it's a pretty solid working definition to say that it is the study of Holmes stories as though they took place in, and can be reconciled with, our world.) Her friend Father Ronald Knox largely invented it almost by accident- as Sayers described it, he wrote that first essay "with the aim of showing that, by those methods [Higher Criticism], one could disintegrate a modern classic as speciously as a certain school of critics have endeavoured to disintegrate the Bible." This exercise backfired, as instead of finding this analysis of Holmes stories silly, people found it compelling and engaging- and this style of Sherlockian writing lives on to this day in multiple journals. Sayers, with her interest in religious scholarship as well as Holmes, was well equipped to both understand Knox's original motivations as well as to carry on in the spirit in which further Game players would take his work, as we'll see. She also wrote the line that would come to define the tone used in The Game- that it "must be played as solemnly as a county cricket match at Lord's; the slightest touch of extravagance or burlesque ruins the atmosphere." While comedic takes on The Game would never vanish, her establishment of tone has lingered, and pretty much any in-depth explanation of The Game will include her insightful comment.

Some of Sayers's ideas became definitional: Here's a question- what's John Watson's middle name? If you said "Hamish," guess what- you should be thanking Dorothy L Sayers. (When this middle name was used for Watson in the BBC Sherlock episode The Sign of Three, articles explaining its use generally didn't bother to credit her, instead saying that "some believe" or a variation on that.) She was the one who speculated that the reason why a) Watson's middle initial is H and b) Mary Morstan Watson calls Watson "James" instead of "John" in one story is because Watson's middle name is Hamish, a Scottish variant of James, with Mary's use of James being an intimate pet name based on this nickname. It's as credible as any other explanation for that question, but more than that it became by far the most popular middle name for Watson used in fan media. Others of Sayers's ideas include that Watson only ever married twice, with his comments about experience with women over four continents being just a lot of bluster and him really being a faithful romantic who married the first woman he really fell for (the aim of this essay being to demolish HW Bell's theory of a marriage to an unknown woman between Mary Morstan and the unnamed woman Watson married in 1903, mentioned by Holmes in The Blanched Soldier); that Holmes attended Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge (she denied that he could have attended Oxford, having gone there herself- fascinatingly, Holmesians who went to Cambridge usually assert that he attended Oxford! Conan Doyle of course attended neither school); and reconciling dates in canon (making the case that one cannot base a claim for Watson's mixing up on dates on poor handwriting as demonstrated in canonical documents, as it is clear from the similarity of different handwriting samples from different people/stories that they were written, presumably transcribed for publication purposes, by a copyist).

She wrote one of the only good Holmes pastiches: Okay, fine, I'm unusually anti-pastiche, and genuinely do like very few of them, but this is one that I love- and even more than that, it's even a Wimsey crossover! On January 8 1954, to commemorate the occasion of Holmes's 100th birthday (because, of course, he was born on January 6 1854- Sayers was more in favor of an 1853 birthdate but thought 1854 was acceptable), the BBC commissioned a bunch of pieces for the radio, including one by Sayers. You can read it here (with thanks to @copperbadge for posting it, it's shockingly hard to find online), and I think you'll agree it's adorable. The idea of Holmes and Wimsey living in the same world is wonderful, the way she makes it work is impeccable, and it's clearly done with so much love. Also you get baby Peter, which is just incredibly sweet!

I got into Dorothy L Sayers, in the long run, because I loved Sherlock Holmes from childhood and that later launched me into early and golden age mysteries- but it was discovering Sayers that brought me back into the world of Holmes. Just an awesome lady.

[o-uncle-newt]

As mentioned previously, I have done the thing! Let's see what I do with it, but in the meanwhile...

(Sayers stuff will PROBABLY stay here but who knows.)

I said I was going to start a Holmes sideblog- here's the closest thing to it!

Too antsy to truly commit to a blog about just one series/writer, but I definitely anticipate a nice chunk of Holmes stuff. Canon, Sherlockiana, some adaptational stuff. Will probably also talk a bit about my journey into the Golden Age. Let's see what happens.

To kick it off- a tiermaker I did of canon stories. All on instinct, did not spend more than two seconds considering each one. I haven't looked at it since I finished it and yet I stand behind it completely.

[o-uncle-newt]

ONE: it creates traditions

Despite not being a Christmas-celebrator myself, I'm really glad that the final episode of this show aired as a Christmas special, because it's equally timely to talk about Molokai.

I wrote extensively about Molokai last year, and my main takeaway is that it celebrates ritual in a way that's really important. And I was thinking about it, and so many of the themes that I elevated in previous posts I've done this year are related to this as well. It's important to how funny the show is, how heartwarming the show is, how good the show is for mental health... so many different things.

I recommend reading the above post for a full breakdown, but what I raised about Molokai was that it's basically about the importance of creating and/or participating in rituals and traditions, things that mark your life and add pizzazz to it. Martin, living a depressing life on his own in an attic, has no reason to like Christmas when it's just another dull day, but enjoys it when he's exposed to and participates in ritual. Arthur, it turns out, creates ritual all the time, whether invoking existing traditions re Christmas or creating rituals around things like Birling Day.

I argue, pushing that further, that CABIN PRESSURE is about creating a kind of comforting ritual, tradition, what have you. Don't get me wrong- the comedy is often sharp and creative, there's story and character development over time... but it's not so much that the shape of the show is familiar as that the expectations are. This is going to be funny, this is going to have interesting people, this is going to let those interesting people be comically nasty to each other but also let them have real relatable emotions, and at the end of the episode GERTI will fly again.

There's also the repetitive element of features like games, particular character mannerisms, etc. One of my favorite sitcoms, the 60s spy spoof Get Smart, was written with the main character, Maxwell Smart (Agent 86) given many catchphrases, and the actor who played him actively encouraged the writers to create more because having those kinds of repetitive and funny elements is a good hook and a comforting element to viewers. They ended up being some of the most iconic parts of the show, not just because the lines are funny but because of the way they're said by Max/Adams and the way the character who says them is written. Plenty of Get Smart fans can be caught saying "missed it by that much" or "sorry about that Chief" or, my favorite that I say all the time, "he should have used his powers for niceness instead of evil."

The characters of Cabin Pressure don't have catchphrases in the same way- or rather, it's limited to things like "brilliant" and "yellow car"- but it contains so many different elements that listeners can count on in an episode. If the whiskey is stolen, obviously Douglas did it and the question (which will be answered creatively) is how. If this is a situation where Douglas can save the day, he will- and if he doesn't, then there will be a satisfying reason why. People won't recognize Martin as captain- and if they do then that's a sign that something is off kilter. JF creates the boundaries of the world that we step into and then plays within and around them in incredibly innovative ways. It's such a good formula for keeping things interesting and comforting.

And here's where I go to praise JF as the creator- because he ended up taking on an interesting form of commitment to create ritual in our own lives, maybe because he saw how much we'd already done it ourselves. Thanks to the show, already as of S4 people were taking traveling lemons to different locations, playing Yellow Car by Arthurian rules... and then, he started posting a variation on Get Dressed Ye Merry Gentlemen every year, and as a decidedly non-Christmas person it's basically the only thing about the holiday that I look forward to. (Incidentally- one of the things that made me want to post about this is my curiosity what he'll do this year when he's no longer on Twitter...)

But the biggest ritual-creating thing he did, of course, is do 26 episodes of Cabin Fever. He posted the episodes on a regular schedule (and warned us in advance when he started spacing them out), he gave us games to try and puzzles to solve, and he gave us something to look forward to that would add some fun and shape to our lives in a time that could be both shapeless and stressful. I myself was still recovering from my very early bout of COVID, isolated in my room, bored and miserable and not at full breathing capacity and still only getting over the feeling that I could have potentially died, when Cabin Fever arrived and gave me something to look forward to. It created ritual, which created meaning, which was one of the most thoughtful things someone could have done for me around then.

So, a tribute to Cabin Pressure, a tribute to the wonderful John Finnemore, a tribute to the idea that we can take our own action and join with others to create ritual that gives us meaning and comfort... and a tribute to all of you who have been doing/following along with Cabin Pressure advent in various forms. This too is a form of ritual, community, and tradition that I look forward to continuing to participate in- as part of a really cool fandom.

In the meanwhile, happy tenth freaking anniversary, Merry Christmas to all the Christmas people, almost-Happy Chanukah to all the (fellow) Chanukah people, and just generally wishing a beautiful year full of things that give your life shape and meaning.

[o-uncle-newt]

TWO: what an incredible cast

Long and shitty day today, so put on St Petersburg (as I often do) to make myself feel better. It obviously worked great, but it also ended up being a really good reminder of what I already planned to write about today, which is- what a FANTASTIC set of actors this show has!

It goes without saying that the main four are perfect. You get Stephanie Cole and Roger Allam mid-excellent careers, you get a rapidly rising Benedict Cumberbatch pre-typecast/when people remembered he could do comedy, and of course you get the multitalented JF. I add the multitalented part here to kind of call back to what I've said in past posts- so much of what makes the show great is that all of the scripts are written beautifully to the voices, but in fact without as perfect a set of voices as this show has where would we be? Each of the actors falls into their characters, makes them their own, and is just absolutely transformative, giving the show an all-important foundation.

(They're also actors with great resumes- like many people I got to Cabin Pressure FROM a particular part of BC's filmography lol*, but Stephanie Cole is great in Waiting for God and Roger Allam... well, he's been good in everything I've seen him in but I think the most important thing to me is that he originated the role of English-language Javert. There is little that is more epic than that.)

(*I will note- while I got here from Sherlock, it's being able to see past his typecasting courtesy of Cabin Pressure, and as a result seeing his range and abilities, that kept me watching other things he was in- Patrick Melrose, for example, was fantastic and you'd never think he was the type to do it from either Sherlock OR Cabin Pressure.)

A lot has been said of how BC broke out halfway through Cabin Pressure but stayed on the show rather than be recast- but in general, I will say that the fact that all the actors came through and gave their all to the show each week, taking advantage of the flexibility of radio to commit to being there the full run of the show, is honestly a gift. Radio shows do recast voices (as we know from Newcastle), and one has to live with it, but it would just be a different show if any of them had been permanently recast. To us, those voices and vocal mannerisms ARE the characters. (I'll add- while I don't think I've seen anything from Roger Allam saying his opinion on the show, both Stephanie Cole and BC have at various points discussed how much they enjoyed making it and liked the scripts and working with JF, which is always nice! And until a couple of years ago Stephanie was a semi-frequent reply guy to JF's Twitter, which was sweet lol.)

It's just so impressive the way that the main cast imbued their characters with so much individuality and personality. Benedict Cumberbatch picks the exact right voice and mannerisms to convey how, no matter how much Martin will try to bluster, he isn't going to win, and his performance is really nimble given the broad array of emotions Martin experiences and the journey he goes on over the course of the show. Stephanie Cole is sharp and sarcastic and knows exactly how to calibrate it so that she shows just enough vulnerability for the situation (on the rare occasions it's needed) and it never feels false, as can sometimes happen. Roger Allam realizes that Douglas is always both performing and pretending that he isn't performing, and being able to express that no matter what emotion is called for is really remarkable. And honestly, JF wrote the role of Arthur as so calibrated to his own abilities that I'm not sure if any other actor could pull off the character without him seeming false.

But- and this is where my having watched St Petersburg comes in- this show also has such fantastic actors playing the side characters, whether recurring actors like Anthony Head and Matilda Ziegler or one off* actors like Prunella Scales** and Phil Davis, are just perfect. And like, they're given great scripts to work with (and these COULDN'T be customized to their strengths, I'm sure, in the same way as the others!), but they bring so much to it that it's incredible.

*Or, often, two off, as actors were sometimes booked for two-episode recording blocks and played different characters in each

**Incidentally, according to a podcast interview JF did, Prunella Scales was in the early stages of dementia when she recorded Wokingham- and while she wasn't always super together in regular conversation, she would immediately snap into a tone-perfect performance as soon as they were recording

I feel like St Petersburg is a really good example of the importance of great side-character actors, because it only has two and they're perfect in totally different ways. First, of course, you get the brilliant Timothy West as the brilliant "all right" Gordon Shappey, who is just amazing. He takes on an (apparently last-minute-warning) attempt at an Australian accent that I am incapable of judging in order to create one of the most enjoyably if despicably slimy characters there is. He just is perfect, and his delivery of "Hailey sends her love though of course she doesn't mean it" is a particular thing of beauty that just shows how a great actor can elevate an already great line into something special. I'm so glad we got him back in the finale.

And then we have Paul Shearer, who is Tommo, and a poster boy for "there are no small parts." I have no idea whether it was JF or David Tyler or his own decision that led to how he said his lines of dialogue- though on the principle that leads GERTI to be an airdot, I'd almost call them dashes of dialogue- but whoever's call it was it was a genius one and executed so well by him. A role that could have been nothing ends up being the one that got some of the most sustained laughs of a hilarious episode. He deserves so much credit.

I know that there are theater troupes that perform Cabin Pressure scripts, and I'm always so curious how they go because I just can't picture anyone else performing the characters. If those plays are good, it's of course a tribute to those actors as well as to JF's quality scripts- but if the characters LIVE for us and become three-dimensional enough to make people want to re-perform them, then it's a tribute to the original actors who embodied- or perhaps envoiced- them. Kudos to them all.

[o-uncle-newt]

THREE: it's just really good for mental health

I've been saying I'd post this and now that I have a nice long day with not much to do, I will- not that I haven't posted about this before. Honestly, one of the most important things to me about Cabin Pressure is that it has a power, shared with very few other things (among them incidentally are one or two key Double Acts), to make me smile/feel better about pretty much anything, no matter how dire, at least for half an hour- and with at least a bit of "afterglow" so to speak lol.

But I've written about it here, and here, and here and here... probably other places too. And I think the thing that impresses me the most is that, so often when I share this, I get loads of people telling me exactly the same thing. I don't know what it is exactly- is it just the comedy? The characters, who are over the top enough not to be IMMEDIATELY identifiable but still relatably human? The clever plots that you can get lost in? The heart and warmth and care? Probably a combination of all of these things.

You'll see some of the more specific examples of the above for me in the links in the prior paragraph, so I'll move on, possibly to a TMI extent, to a more specific thing, that might not surprise people- the impact of Arthur Shappey's Guide to Happiness on me. JF has said, I think, that it's a principle he genuinely holds by, and I know that lots of people agree that it's something that really hits you. And it really hit me too.

So I'll talk a bit about my own journey with it- shifting from being an Arthur to being a Martin (or trying to be). As in, this has concretely helped me become a happier/better person.

I am not exaggerating when I say that every therapist I've ever seen has heard of Cabin Pressure and John Finnemore, and I'm pretty sure all of them have seen the above video from Fitton. Now, like a lot of other people, I really glommed on to the whole idea about how if you expect happiness to come from the big things then you'll end up disappointed when they don't measure up, so find smaller things that will give you smaller pockets of joy in your every day.

Without going into excessive detail, the last few years have been tough for me in some ways. At the time, I was in a terrible work environment that had serious ramifications for my personal life. And I kept on listening to that clip and being like "well yes I can make this better with self care" or whatever. And it did- I'd say it was more make this bearable but at the time that was still a lot.

At one point I was talking to my therapist and she was asking if I felt happy. And I said that on a day to day level I was enjoying myself (there were fun parts of my job, it was a larger situation that was the problem), but that I still often felt really miserable. She asked why and I thought about it and was like- I keep doing random little things but nothing is getting better. I'm still in the same situation I was last week, last month, and last year, and this is lulling me into complacency when the underlying root of the problem hasn't been fixed at all.

So my therapist asked me- what do you mean by complacency? Does that mean you're feeling better/happier than you have been? And I had to think about it but I could definitely say- yes, I was. I'd tried new foods, taken great trips, read interesting books, and had a lot of little pops of enjoyment. The difference was that now that wasn't enough anymore. Then my therapist asked me- "but don't you realize how huge that is? That you're past the hump where something small is the best you can hope for?" And she was right.

The way I think about it, that placement of the clip in Fitton, no matter what JF meant by putting it there and no matter whether he had anything that came later in mind when he did it, ended up just working beautifully. Like, it makes sense that this is coming from Arthur- he's the character who changes the least. He doesn't have to, much, and while I won't go so far as to say he doesn't have the capacity to, even if he did he has a lot of people who are protective of him because they don't think he has the capacity to. He enjoys his life. He doesn't really have any problems and the dreams that he sees as within his reach (aka, not being a "muppet baby pilot") are, for him, on par with the pleasure he gets from throwing an apple back and forth.

It's why Arthur is a great character- he's a reminder of something simpler in all of us. I don't think he's relatable at all, and that's a good thing- what we really love is the way Arthur makes us feel. He's so non-self-absorbed that in the few moments where his equanimity is shaken up, he's so thrown off kilter that we, who are more used to dealing with the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, want to jump in front to protect him from them. We value the simplistic way in which he sees our goodness, because to us, things are more complicated.

But that complication is a good thing! That's what allows us to be more than and better than what we currently are, eventually. That can be really hard- especially when we're brought low, to take the work to improve things for ourselves can feel impossible. It can take love and support, it can take grit, and it can take an existing base of self-regard, but it can be done. Arthur may not need to, but we do.

At the same time, we learn something important from Arthur, and in particular Martin does in Fitton. (Douglas too, but with a different kind of application.) Martin thinks he's where he wants to be, but he KNOWS he isn't- he's not being paid, he's constantly bullying, and the facade he puts on is doing nothing to earn him the kind of respect that his essentially-purchased title should, in theory, entitle him to. To him, the way to get through it is to grit his teeth and keep on pretending, assume that if he carries on as he is (knowing that he's not good enough yet but still trying anyway) then he'll end up making it. But that just makes him more uptight and difficult, in the end.

What Arthur recognizes is that you DO need those little bits of happiness to make the big ones doable! If Martin is going to keep on trying for the big breaks, he'll inevitably fail at least some of the time (in his case, far more lol) and that will just dump him even farther down than he started. You start to curse the wind, because at a certain point you're trying to control forces that are uncontrollable and that will never guarantee happiness, just give you a potential chance at it. Once you've appreciated the smaller things that you CAN control, and you boost your mood and mentality that way, you start to recognize that maybe you can move past where you are. That you can get both the little things, the apple-tossing and singing, as well as the new big things you are striving for.

Arthur will never need to go past that first thing- the character as constructed has no interest in it. But as much as he doesn't understand the END of Martin's journey except when paraphrased for him in the terms of various movies (not all of which he actually understands), he understands the beginning more than Martin does- that he needs to have the small happinesses to build him up and make him be ready for whatever else comes his way.

Because here's the thing- if we all lived like Arthur, we'd never be with the loves of our lives in the moonlight, would we? We'd be worried it could go wrong or we wouldn't fully appreciate it, and anyway everyone would love us as much as we want to be loved already, and we'd be too busy soaking in the bath to care about the other thing. But the non-Arthurs of us are resilient enough to WANT the loves of our lives (well, on average- plenty of people don't but they wiil have their own equivalent bigger-picture and higher-stakes wants) and, as a result, to be willing to take the risk of it not being everything we immediately want it to be. But, if it's NOT what we want it to be, Arthur wisely knows that we need to make sure we have a cushion of smaller happinesses to fall back on in the meantime, to build us up until we can try again.

With credit to my therapist, I have to say that this reimagining of the Arthur/Martin paradigm and Martin's journey vs Arthur's stasis in Cabin Pressure has stayed with me- reminding me to give myself the smaller boosts I need as I take bigger leaps and really choose the goals that I care about. I'm in a different job that is a better situation, and while I still have plenty of problems, I've learned to find ways to balance them out with the smaller things that make life worth living as I try to overcome them more essentially and hopefully permanently. In the meanwhile, I have Arthur to help.

[o-uncle-newt]

FOUR: it's just so funny, guys

When last year I was doing my listenthrough, at a certain point I stopped including mentions of how funny a particular episode was because... of course they all were. In fact, there are only a couple of episodes that I could name as having plotlines that, IMO, aren't funny and yet even those episodes have some of the most classic joke sequences in the series.* If I sat here and listed every good joke, I'd basically just be reproducing 3/4 of the scripts.

*Qik has a not very funny plot anchored by a not-funny-at-all character, Nancy Whatsherface, but Le Bear Polar is legitimately iconic. Kuala Lumpur even JF doesn't like very much, but Arthur's steward training sequence is basically perfect.

He's just so so good at including the humor in the narrative, is the thing. I did a post last year about Ipswich that was about how good JF is, or rather grew to be, at plot, in particular seamlessly integrating plot and theme and humor. The thing is, even in episodes that aren't as brilliant as Ipswich, the humor is always amazing, and as is obvious given his simultaneous and ensuing comedy career in other formats, he just really gets comedy. But I'd argue that while lots of writers are good at writing jokes, he's really good at writing the RIGHT jokes and putting them in the RIGHT storylines in the mouths of the RIGHT actors.

I think it comes down to a few things-

He's SO good at mining existing situations and limitations for comedy. (Also for plot, which is separate but certainly related.) Obviously this would be a skill that would serve him in good stead in his sketch comedy career, but it's especially good here because instead of circling a sketch around a particular joke, the jokes have to be part of the broader plot, and so he has a more constrained field of search and takes the maximum advantage of it. According to an interview of him on a podcast, the entire conversation with Qik where Douglas convinces Martin that their plane can, in fact, do a polar expedition is essentially JF's replay of a conversation with his dad about whether the kind of plane he chose for GERTI to be back in Ipswich could do a polar expedition- he wanted to do the plot but was worried he'd hamstrung himself by defining the plane he was using, but instead he was able to take that exact limitation and make the actual situation far funnier (though again, I think Qik as an episode has limitations). (Incidentally, while on that subject I want to take the opportunity to appreciate his attention to detail overall. Recently I've been reading Admiral Cloudberg's series on air disasters and I recognized a shocking number of terms from lines that were essentially just him setting the scene for unrelated plots. No idea how overall accurate all of his plane-flying asides are, but the parts that matched up are super cool especially now that I know what a lot of it means.)

At the same time, he has such a great imagination and knew how to cleanly insert the products of it into an episode- obviously he repeats some standard sitcom beats (I think that Rotterdam, one of the funniest episodes, escapes classic status just because "characters get confronted with the cooler versions of themselves" is such a well-worn sitcom-episode plot) but even when he does he can be really original. Not sure where he got the idea of strafing a children's party with a hard-candy bomb and killing a koi from, but it was a stroke of brilliance. He's also surprisingly good at taking previously-written imaginative/comic sequences and putting them very deftly into his scripts- basically the whole "can you imagine 100 otters" scene is from a blog post and you can see exactly how he adapted the exact phrasing but it doesn't matter because he made it fit seamlessly into the new scene and into the overall plot. On a similar note, he's great at using his imagination to come up with different kinds of joke styles- for example, the running joke of them playing games in the flight deck, but then going wild with a) what kinds of games and b) how to mine maximum humor from them. There are just so many classic, brilliant games and he's so good at it that he'll even construct whole episodes around series of games (like Limerick).

He's so good at writing for particular people's voices! He's mentioned that for JFSP he will sometimes call the actors in to do a "silly voices day" and then write sketches based on it, and it's such a cool concept and also so clear how good he is at it. For some TV sketch shows, it can feel like someone wrote a sketch without knowing who in the cast would be available for filming and then they cast whoever would fit the parts- JFSP basically never feels that way, and on the sitcom side, neither does Cabin Pressure. He doesn't nail the voices immediately on day one but it's pretty dang close. And when he goes on to write jokes, not only do they work perfectly for the actors' ways of speaking, but they're nearly always funnier for having been said by that particular actor. The words "you mulled it?!" in context are already funny, but it wouldn't have been as hilarious if not for Roger Allam's impeccable delivery. JF knew he had a five star cast and knew exactly how to take advantage of their gifts- and, of course, he'd had plenty of experience writing for himself and so knew how to give himself jokes and dialogue that would sound perfect coming from his mouth.

The storyline thing... I mean, functionally, it comes down to what I was saying above about how good he is at combining plot arc, themes, and comedy. It's so good that it can be both hard and satisfying to dissect exactly how it was done, but suffice it to say, I think that's the thing that's his real talent. This week I had a few exchanges with a fellow fan on here about some limitations I have noticed in his sketch comedy- nothing major, but I think the thing that elevates him from being a good-to-great sketch comedian to being a sublime comedic-plot writer is his deftness with construction. Lots of people are funny, lots of other people are good at creating well done plots that incorporate theme, he's fantastic at both and at their integration and it's a really special gift.

[o-uncle-newt]

FIVE: it celebrates vulnerability

Sadly ended up in a big rush today so for this one I'll be kind of rehashing some themes that I wrote about at greater length in my 2023 advent. But they're themes that are incredibly meaningful to me so honestly I'd probably have done it anyway.

Sometime in the next couple of days I'll be writing more about the impact that Cabin Pressure has had on my mental health. But I'll start off with a particular facet of this- it contains stories and characters that demonstrate how difficult it can to be vulnerable, what kinds of conditions help make vulnerability easier, and, overall, how important vulnerability is.

When you look at it, vulnerability is an incredibly important part of pretty much every character's arc. (Obviously, some credit here to JF's Zurich farewell bear facts.) I wrote about it extensively in some of my last year's advent, like Douz, Fitton, Gdansk, Limerick, Uskerty, Vaduz... honestly it's all over the place and part of everyone's arc, and maybe that's just because it's such a human thing but it's so well conveyed here that it's beautiful.

I think what I love most about it is that it includes storylines that explain how difficult it can be to get rid of defense mechanisms and open up. All of these characters have defensive shields- Martin's captain's hat, Carolyn's airdot, Douglas's scheming and omniscient facade, and sometimes even Arthur's ignoring of consequences (even if part of that is also just dimness). All of these characters, at some point, have to break them down and let people in, and in all of these cases it is its own journey. For Douglas to open up about his divorce took a whole season from beginning to end, and sketched out beautifully- for Carolyn to realize that Herc was for real (and needed her to be real as well) took two seasons and two specials. We've already talked about how good these characters are, but this particular facet of them is so beautifully played out.

Given stuff going on in my own life, this particular theme is incredibly resonant to me and it means a lot that it's a consistent one.

[o-uncle-newt]

SIX: it spawned an awesome fandom!

It's late so I'll keep it short and sweet- despite in many ways spawning off of a... challenging fandom, Cabin Pressure has really managed to build an incredible fan base.

I'm not saying it's been drama free- though I'll fully admit that I try to keep myself away from it- but when you think about how the fandomy element got to Cabin Pressure, and how that happened through Sherlock and what a shitshow that could be sometimes (and yes, I was there too), it just makes it even more remarkable how people coming from that could coalesce into something like this.

One thing that I think is really cool is that as much as Benny C may have become the major fandom center in some ways (at stage doors, Martin becoming both the fandom woobie and [bafflingly] something of a fandom bicycle, a weird number of Sherlock crossover fics), people didn't let that creep into how the show itself, in its "real world" context, was received and perceived for the most part. JF mentioned in interviews at the time that he'd been nervous that fans would only come for BC and that they'd only laugh at his bits, but the show managed to make people fall in love with it on its terms, and no matter what they were doing with the characters in their own time, people really turned out for the show as it was, as the BBC Radio 4 audience had already been enjoying it for two series.

A lot of credit for this definitely goes to JF for being welcoming to new fans (I'm sure I'll talk about this more in the future) as well as to the show itself for being... well, the kind of thing appreciated by cool people lol (a bit tautological but whatever, it's true!). Regardless, super cool that the group that gathered around this show was able to integrate into the existing fans, adopt this new thing on its own terms, boost it, and in general just love it the way we all do. And I'm not only talking about the people who have stuck with it since then, or who have joined the JF fandom. Every time a Tumblr post or something goes viral about Cabin Pressure you can see people posting nostalgically about having loved it and how sweet and funny and well done it was. People love it whether they're like "Benny C is in it but everyone else is good too!" or "it's so good you even forget Benny C is in it." People just recognize its awesomeness and somehow people around it tend to be equally awesome.

[o-uncle-newt]

SEVEN: it has so much heart

It's just always wonderful to have characters who care about each other- and how each of them earns that care.

I don't recall where I saw this, but I have seen at least one comment about Cabin Pressure, encouraging people to watch it, that's like "if you start it and you're like, where's the found family, they hate each other, remember that the point is that they find it!" And that's probably the best part of the show- it's not just warm and fuzzy (and in fact in many episodes it's not warm and fuzzy at all), it has real and relatable human emotion and connections with each other.

Some claim that this was a later-season innovation when JF became more fanservicey/foregrounded Martin more because of Benedict Cumberbatch, but like... Fitton! It's the first really heartwarming episode that shows them all thinking about life, starting to understand each other, compromising- and it's a sign of where the show is headed. And it's done beautifully, in a way that I don't find at all saccharine.

It's also really well paced, in terms of how relationships develop. None of them ever stay static, which is a complaint I have about Parks and Rec (a show that I'm a big fan of BTW), where, say, April's big shtick is "she's so sarcastic and goth but she HUGS people once in a while!" and that just stays her shtick once every season or so through the end of the show, such that it loses its effect. Here, whenever a character grows in their self-understanding or relationship with another character, that stays their baseline until it develops further, which is much more satisfying narratively. (And that's not to say it's necessarily more REALISTIC than April. The problem there isn't that April hugs or praises or smiles at people every so often but otherwise stays the same- it's that each time, the role in the narrative is to play it as a big deal, when by the fifth time it really has lost the narrative kick that it had the first time. In Cabin Pressure, characters might backslide sometimes but the narrative itself relies on continuous development so it always feels fresh.)

And I do think it makes a difference, as I said two days ago, that the characters don't feel fully human- they feel sitcom. It means that they can bounce right back from crazy sitcom situations, preventing (MOSTLY) real cringe comedy situations, but JF is nimble enough that the human emotions that give it heart feel very real. Here, a comparison I'd make is Community, a show which nails the sitcom-zany characters but then the heartwarming codas at the end of each episode can feel a bit tagged on. JF is so good at integrating everything into one cohesive plot that that really doesn't happen. The warmth, the plot, and the humor all serve the same narrative.

The show is certainly not all warm and fuzzy, and mean-spiritedness is definitely deployed in some episodes, though not always to equally good effect (I still hate Qik...). But there is still a heart and warmth, even in those situations, that is palpable in how the characters relate to each other, and I don't know if it's the writing or the portrayals, but actually, it's probably both. And having something like this on tap, anytime I want, is incredibly impactful and has been since my first listen.

[o-uncle-newt]

I promise I didn't forget about this, just want to do it justice!

I totally agree that it's not as hard as I made it out to be to find episodes that are mostly great sketches (or even entirely great)- and I personally think S6 is a particularly mid season so I usually just ignore it with the exception of the sublime piano musical. But S2-4 are generally excellent and that's usually where I get my airplane/dentist/grocery store drive/etc listening from.

In terms of your excellent point about the more character driven element, I'd say a couple of things, one of which relates to the other thing we were talking about. The first is that I genuinely think that JF's biggest talent is his story construction. I don't only mean plot- I mean in sketch form as well. The thing that I think makes his sketches particularly good is that he's really good at finding the shape of the sketch- and that extends, as you point out, to finding the shapes of ongoing stories as sketch themes repeat over time. Bringing back a popular character (or even just one that he likes) never really feels gratuitous in the way that these things sometimes can- he's really good at figuring out how to convey whatever idea has sparked the sketch he's working on most effectively.

And that leads to another point, which is that his observational comedy sketches (like pretty much everyone's) are only as good as their construction. There are very few things that any comic is observing for the first time, and so it always comes down to delivery- and as you note JF's generally really good at developing micro-characters and micro-stories in order to do that. Take the seashell sketch- the two observational comedy points there are "well people THINK you shouldn't sell seashells on the seashore but of course it's the best place to do it" and "management consultants SUCK, don't they?". The first is a fun point, the second needs a bit of finesse so as not to come across too blatant and therefore obnoxious (especially as their idea is the usual "shower thought" one that JF is trying to debunk), and the excellent framing device of this sketch allows both of them to be built into one of his best sketches- having the first point be explained via tongue-twister-like poem, having it be set clearly in the world of nursery rhymes and with very rhythmic dialogue even besides the poem, the management consultants being cartoonishly obnoxious in their own right even besides their idea... just in general it builds up a whole mini-world that beautifully conveys everything the sketch is trying to do in a way that takes different observational points and integrates them into a whole story.

(I'd also note- this is also SO down to his incredible crew of actors. He writes for their voices and they have a lot of fantastic voices. He really gets the rhythm of how people speak and it's just great. The fact that he also knows EXACTLY how to write for himself helps too.)

And that brings me back to that final point, about the kind of sketch of his I DON'T like. He's actually talked a bit semi-autobiographically (I assume?) in... I think it was Now Show segments about how he grew up largely atheist/agnostic in British schools that had sort of everpresent religious content, and about the UK being a basically Christian country (in the context of "conservatives need to stop moaning about how it's not a Christian country, and tied in with this stop being weird about people of other religions"). The interesting thing is, his Now Show stuff on religious topics I thought were fine. I don't really go out of my way to listen to him on politics/current events, but on the occasions that I have, his approach is "I may find religious stuff silly but the people who do it have the right to," which on a practical level is probably one of the better ways that someone can approach being atheist/agnostic in a multicultural society. It's a useful framing when discussing events that relate to religion in current events (IIRC he did sketches on people complaining about saying/not saying prayers in the Bideford town council, and one about separate swimming hours for women and resultant media hysteria... not sure what else but I found both of those basically well done and measured).

The thing is... that's not really a basis for observational comedy! Hence my complaints in the tags of my other post- if he says "this is silly and they have the right to do it" then fine, he has the right to think that what I do is silly. If he describes the particular silly act to an audience, explains exactly what's silly about it, and then says "well of course they have the RIGHT to do it and there's nothing wrong with it," then at a certain point that's just a form of mockery that he thinks he's actually too open-minded and tolerant for, as the rest of the sketch (IIRC) is all about. It's totally possible that it actually is funny observational comedy, in which case don't apologize for it- but if it makes him too uncomfortable then you can't split the difference by being all "I'm not ACTUALLY making this joke because I'm too openminded and tolerant for it."

Part of it, and that speaks to my point above about construction, is that he was making that particular joke as part of a more standup-style joke. Basically, there's a reason why JF isn't a standup- I'm sure he'd be perfectly good at it, but he's much much more than perfectly good at doing sketch and narrative comedy! The other kind of sketch he does where he tries to sneak in these kinds of "well obviously I'm not ACTUALLY making this joke" jokes is his meta sketches, and while he does have some really good meta sketches these sorts are some of his worst. One particularly weird one that I don't remember super well is where someone asks why he doesn't have diverse characters and he's like "well it would be really weird to give diverse characters to my all-white cast." Like, maybe, but in that case the easy rejoinder would probably be "well um maybe diversify your casts" but that's a different thing.

(Also- and I now think that this may have actually been the sketch with the observant Jew at the traffic crossing- at one point he's like "what, I should deliberately bring in diverse/minority communities just so I can make jokes about them?" to which I'm like "dude, if that's the way you think about it then just don't bring this whole thing up at all." Like, he's clearly uncomfortable with that idea, and in a one-writer show that's not actually unreasonable, but by attempting to get ahead of/subvert insecurities he may well have about the show's lack of diversity, IMO he's just accentuating them and not in a totally convincing way. And he STILL manages to bring in a minority community just so he can make a joke about it.)

(Also also- if he's really worried about diversity, maybe don't have totally-white casts for any potential future series of Double Acts. Nobody's telling him to change his longstanding sketch program cast, but a diverse Double Acts cast is very very doable. Also I just want more Double Acts.)

The thing is, he has other religion-based jokes that I don't particularly love (and some that I do actually like), but they are at least well-constructed! He's able to give them dimension and entertainment value beyond the particular religious thing that he thinks is funny, and they as a result work much much better, because he's taken full advantage of the thing that he's actually incredibly good at rather than done a less constructed, more indulgent soapbox sketch. Actually, the example I'll give here isn't a JFSP sketch- it's his Good Omens S2 minisode, which is definitely biblical satire (which was obviously already on the menu, because it's Good Omens) and is by a mile the best thing in that season despite, honestly, not being a particularly imaginitive biblical satire. Like, Job is honestly pretty low hanging fruit, and his take is kind of what you expect a Good Omens take to be. But it's still an absolutely BRILLIANT minisode, because he used a relatively basic observational premise and beautifully shaped the story, integrated impeccable character work, and of course made it incredibly funny.

Basically, his gift isn't observational comedy per se (not that he's bad at it), it's turning that comedy into more than just the observation.

Hi! I hope you're doing well and having a lovely holiday season :)

Sorry if you've already talked about this before, I haven't been following you for a long time - but what do you think of the other series of JFSP apart from series 9?

Personally I love them to bits, I have listened to every episode more than 30 times and they're probably one of my favourite things in the whole world. I just love the humour, the characters, the situations - it feels very safe, no mean spirited jokes, very comforting. The sketches feels very autistic-coded to me as an autistic person, much like Martin from Cabin Pressure - some of the sketches are things I doubt a neurotypical person would notice or comment on from the angle he chooses. Like the geek sketch and the 'friend I'm in the mood for' sketch from series 5.

What are your thoughts on these series?

Thank you for asking, that’s an awesome question!

The basic answer is that I am, of course, a big fan. That said, I’d say that as much as I overall enjoy sketch comedy, I do tend to find it hit or miss; and while JFSP has a higher hit rate than most, and plenty of sketches are fantastic*, it definitely doesn’t get there ALL the time.

*Notable faves- Spooktacular, seashells, reincarnation/past lives, “Stop Saying G’nus,” tricyclist… there are loads and loads more, just off the top of my head! Not to mention the excellent ones you already cited…

The functional difference for me ends up being that while I don’t think there’s a 100% hit rate on Cabin Pressure or Double Acts either, I know that if I pick one episode that I like I will enjoy myself for a full half hour. Because I’m less familiar with a given episode of JFSP given how many there have been and how many sketches are in an episode, I don’t have that same sense of instant “ahhh” from turning on an episode of JFSP* as I would from the other two shows, where a lot of my emotions about it come from knowing it like the back of my hand.

*Major exception- S7E6. A perfect episode of sketch comedy that I can listen to literally whenever. No notes.

This isn’t to say that I don’t really enjoy JFSP! I just wish I could pick off a menu of sketches, not simply because I like some better than others but because I like the feeling of “oooh this” on demand that I get from turning on a favorite half hour episode. I will say- I find JFSP to be PERFECT for things like dental procedures and car trips, where I might be in the chair for anywhere from five minutes to two hours and can just turn on a bunch of sequential episodes for as long as I need. But it doesn’t necessarily have the same immediate impact for me as the episodes I love of the other shows.

That said- some of the best things JF ever wrote are Since You Asked Me sketches. I want them pumped into my veins.

[o-uncle-newt]

EIGHT: audio is amazing!

In some of these I might, like I did in the last one, go into analysis of the actual episodes- here though I’m just gonna talk about how impactful it was to me to learn about the existence of spoken word audio and how important the audio medium has been for me personally as a way to experience Cabin Pressure as comfort media.

Here’s the thing- except for a couple of story tapes when I was a child and Harry Potter audiobooks that my mom used to play in the kitchen and I usually ignored (could never really follow audiobooks- still can’t), as far as I can recall Cabin Pressure is the first spoken word audio thing I EVER experienced. (And on the radio…! To me the radio was traffic and weather, and sometimes sports.) This was in the relatively early podcast era, and while other people were into them already I wasn’t. Like for so many other basic early-2010s teens, my first audio fiction exposure would be Welcome to Night Vale, my first nonfiction podcast Serial. Both came after Cabin Pressure for me, and I have no clue if I’d have ever tried them if not for knowing that this medium can be brilliant like that. (In fact, I’m 99% sure I got into Night Vale because I recommended Cabin Pressure to a college friend and she was like “oh if you like audio drama, I love this thing Welcome to Night Vale…”)

And, of course, and this has been often discussed in reviews, this allowed me to learn what audio can be that other media can't be- all the ways in which it's not just a runner up but the main event, to mix metaphors. Even when audiobooks work for me, I know that that's not what they're MEANT to be- Cabin Pressure isn't just a sitcom without visuals, it takes full advantage of being audio by doing so many jokes that they could never do on screen- whether in Qik, Rotterdam, Ipswich... he takes what is already an art form and hones it further. It's incredibly impressive and opened up my eyes to what audio can do in ways that I had just been totally unaware of.

Since then… I’m not going to say I’ve dived fully into the medium exactly, as I have learned about myself that I am prone to getting voices mixed up and to getting distracted and losing the narrative. But it got me ready for the mass-podcast era which has led me in some cool directions, it was a gateway into other British radio like Bleak Expectations and The Unbelievable Truth, not to mention JF’s other shows- and I discovered that audio, in the form of Cabin Pressure and some of JF’s other work in particular, was particularly valuable in audio form.

Audio is just kind of perfect because you can fully enjoy something without needing to stop doing whatever else you may be doing that might otherwise be occupying your eyes, or your legs, or your arms, or who knows what. And- and I'll talk about how important this has been to me more in a future post, probably- Cabin Pressure has been basically lifesaving in that kind of a way. It doesn't really matter what I'm doing, whether driving, walking, commuting by bus or subway, working, flying, exercising... and of course so much more, popping in some audio entertainment always slots in, and Cabin Pressure in particular is just beautifully calibrated to always get me in a better mood. It's been practically lifesaving in that regard in some of my worst moments, in fact.

I'm not sure what my life would look like without spoken word audio in it, and I have no doubt that with the podcast boom I'd have gotten into it in some other way. But Cabin Pressure gave me a high bar by which to measure everything that comes later. (And honestly- not just audio! At a certain point I'm like, if JF can do all this with just a script and some people with microphones...)

[o-uncle-newt]

Hi! I hope you're doing well and having a lovely holiday season :)

Sorry if you've already talked about this before, I haven't been following you for a long time - but what do you think of the other series of JFSP apart from series 9?

Personally I love them to bits, I have listened to every episode more than 30 times and they're probably one of my favourite things in the whole world. I just love the humour, the characters, the situations - it feels very safe, no mean spirited jokes, very comforting. The sketches feels very autistic-coded to me as an autistic person, much like Martin from Cabin Pressure - some of the sketches are things I doubt a neurotypical person would notice or comment on from the angle he chooses. Like the geek sketch and the 'friend I'm in the mood for' sketch from series 5.

What are your thoughts on these series?

Thank you for asking, that’s an awesome question!

The basic answer is that I am, of course, a big fan. That said, I’d say that as much as I overall enjoy sketch comedy, I do tend to find it hit or miss; and while JFSP has a higher hit rate than most, and plenty of sketches are fantastic*, it definitely doesn’t get there ALL the time.

*Notable faves- Spooktacular, seashells, reincarnation/past lives, “Stop Saying G’nus,” tricyclist… there are loads and loads more, just off the top of my head! Not to mention the excellent ones you already cited…

The functional difference for me ends up being that while I don’t think there’s a 100% hit rate on Cabin Pressure or Double Acts either, I know that if I pick one episode that I like I will enjoy myself for a full half hour. Because I’m less familiar with a given episode of JFSP given how many there have been and how many sketches are in an episode, I don’t have that same sense of instant “ahhh” from turning on an episode of JFSP* as I would from the other two shows, where a lot of my emotions about it come from knowing it like the back of my hand.

*Major exception- S7E6. A perfect episode of sketch comedy that I can listen to literally whenever. No notes.

This isn’t to say that I don’t really enjoy JFSP! I just wish I could pick off a menu of sketches, not simply because I like some better than others but because I like the feeling of “oooh this” on demand that I get from turning on a favorite half hour episode. I will say- I find JFSP to be PERFECT for things like dental procedures and car trips, where I might be in the chair for anywhere from five minutes to two hours and can just turn on a bunch of sequential episodes for as long as I need. But it doesn’t necessarily have the same immediate impact for me as the episodes I love of the other shows.

That said- some of the best things JF ever wrote are Since You Asked Me sketches. I want them pumped into my veins.

[o-uncle-newt]

NINE: characters you love to hate, then love to love

I was going to write "characters you identify with" but honestly... do I identify with any of them, per se? Not so much- they're all very sitcommy, in a good way. I've never been the kind of person who wants to see "real people" end up in sitcom hijinks; that just ends up being cringe comedy. I want to see the kinds of weirdos who can handle it, who were written for it.

The Cabin Pressure crew are perfect for this. They're all at least a bit (at LEAST) over the top, and all have something that makes you, occasionally, want to punch them (if gently, in Arthur's case) in the face. They all have a kind of a grandiosity that means that no amount of plot-related deflation can truly diminish them- even putting "Dougie" in a life jacket and making him explain how a whistle works isn't going to change the fact that, once that's all done, he's Douglas again. Of course, Arthur will always be Arthur no matter how often he's called a clot- in fact, he becomes more Arthurish the more that happens, because part of what makes him larger than life is his near-impermeability.

I think that that's kind of the point of what makes the characters so moving, though- they’re given a tremendous humanness that is, very often, linked to exactly the thing that makes them larger than life as a sitcom character. And yet, somehow, exploring those human foibles and feelings never diminishes them as sitcom characters to the point of making things actually uncomfortable (except possibly Kuala Lumpur and Qik for Martin, and those are rare bottom-tier episodes for me anyway).

It’s just pretty awesome- the very thing that makes a character larger than life also ends up being the thing that makes them lifelike. It shouldn’t work, but it does.

For example, let’s take Carolyn. What makes her larger than life is the sheer extent to which she takes being a boss- and, in many ways, a control freak. It’s what makes her hilarious but it’s also part of what is holding her back as a person, in the sense that she doesn’t feel like her crew would be there for her if she WEREN’T a control freak. So this natural part of her personality ends up becoming a barrier to her happiness because of the way it interprets how she sees the world, the lack of trust that she has in people who care about her (of course, except for Arthur, but he loves EVERYONE and isn’t trustworthy for other reasons lol). This of course extends itself to meeting and being with Herc, whose feelings for her she can’t fully trust- and as a result she can’t trust him.

The key ends up being- her journey is not about Carolyn needing to be sweeter or softer. It’s about people realizing that she’s not sweet or soft, people like her anyway (or maybe even BECAUSE of it, in the case of Herc), and she needs to trust that they do. She didn’t need to cut back on any part of herself- she needed to open herself up to more, keep the parts of herself that make her her while also not letting them mislead her into being closed off. She remains the same person, but expanded. And that’s pretty beautiful. The thing that makes her a sitcom character isn’t a character flaw that needs to be fixed, it’s a character trait that can be both used well and misused. Misused is funnier but used well is happier- and both are her.

On a similar note- if there’s a character I come close to identifying with, it’s Martin, which I’m sure is the case for many (though if you identify with Douglas, I’d be fascinated to know you lol). I don’t identify with him all as a human being, though, which is a comfort because, like, oh my goodness that would be depressing! I think that the things that people identify with about Martin are his constant striving and, yet, his constant failure- but his core trait is beyond that, that he wants not only to be doing the thing he loves but to be both GOOD at it and RECOGNIZED as good. This is of course intensely relatable, and the thing that is maladaptive is more the extent to which he goes to achieve this than that actual fact itself. By the end of the show, he’s basically brought to normal-human levels of achievement and competence at his dream and is newly satisfied with it, and that’s something we cheer him on for because it just feels achievable- if someone like him can, surely I can too. (This is, of course, mildly undercut by him becoming the boyfriend of the Princess of Liechtenstein lol.) Whatever Martin goes on to achieve will be BECAUSE of his core sitcom trait of wanting to excel at a thing that he loves, but he will have become mildly less annoying about how he achieves that because of how he’s grown. After all, too, part of how he’s going to achieve it is to take on a sitcom trait (a mask of invulnerability) of another excellent sitcom character, Douglas, even if it came via Rory!

Essentially, I think, the key to Cabin Pressure is that it recognizes not only that the very things that make you laugh at a person are the things that can make them deeper and richer, but that there is nothing about the process of them improving themselves that has to make them less funny, because they’re not fixing their sitcom flaws, they’re becoming better about how they use them. They’re still recognizably the same people.

I could go into a whole ramble about sitcoms that I think do and don’t use this well (Frasier, for example, was very good at this for a while but lost it; Parks and Rec, in contrast, got the principle very well but was extremely uneven at applying it on a character by character basis). But I do want to single out Ted Lasso as a show that really fumbled its attempt at this. I loved S1 and really went off it after that, and part of it is that it decided that everything that made Ted distinctive as a character had to be inherently maladaptive. At a certain point, he became Ned Flanders in the Simpsons episode where it turned out that he was essentially psychologically abused into being cheerful all the time- not only was he less funny, he just didn’t feel like the same person. Now, Ted Lasso was more of a dramedy than a sitcom, and maybe that’s why they thought this was necessary/warranted, but if so they were wrong, IMO.

I mention other sitcoms in comparison, and I guess the real clincher that makes Cabin Pressure special is that it lets all its characters grow, to some degree. There’s a kind of an acknowledgement that a sitcom “rule” is that the main character can’t really change, or the show won’t be the same. It explains, for example, why Frasier doesn’t develop to the degree that Niles does in the first two thirds of the show. And the thing is that JF defied this because he got that a great sitcom character needs to have a funny personality trait, but it doesn’t always have to be (equally) a flaw. Cabin Pressure’s crew will always have those same traits, and sometimes they’ll use them well and sometimes they won’t/those traits will clash with others’, and in the latter cases (and sometimes in the former too!) that will make for funny episode premises. A character growing enough that a particular maladaptive element of their sitcom trait is no longer a big issue is great, but doesn’t make them less them, and therefore they’re still going to be funny even if it’s in a different and more self aware way.

Now, you might ask, how does this all play in with JF’s concept of sitcom graduation, where there’s a natural endpoint? I’m glad you asked! To me, the answer is that this is their graduation from THIS scenario. Martin had definitely graduated from MJN, if not from the crew family; Carolyn had graduated from running a dictatorship where she felt like she couldn’t trust, and even reward, people who believed in her; and Douglas had graduated from his feeling of ironic detachment. But we can feel confident that the sitcom traits that they have won’t stop being relevant, that they won’t stop being them, and that they won’t stop being funny. It’ll just be with a different dynamic and different sets of flaws related to that sitcom trait. There will always be situations where their sotcom personalities will be funny!

And I think that the key example of this was Cabin Fever, honestly. While Arthur, who is the only character who couldn’t completely change, obviously didn’t, the other characters brought up retain all of their key traits from the show, just in a different kind of an environment. It becomes clear the extent to which their sitcom traits were just particularly pronounced elements of well drawn personalities with constellations of related traits, and a Douglas/Herc trivia-ranking rivalry shows all the same Douglas sitcom traits that he always had, just applied in a different way. These people’s stories and never really ended- it’s just that particular page that turned. They’ll always be them, outsized personalities and all.

And maybe that’s why the characters live on so much to the fans. We can plop them into new imagined situations and know not just how they will react in a human, but how funny it will be. They’re not merely human, they’re sitcom characters, and that’s the best part. They’ll never lose that.

[o-uncle-newt]

TEN: it's just really good, y'all

This is a short one because it's Day 1 and I already posted something today, but I mean, Cabin Pressure is fantastic, unbelievable hit rate.

I made this tier chart of the episodes and as you can see, it's a bit sad in terms of how poor a job it does in terms of actually ranking them because I love so many of them so much:

It's not even definitive, I spent so much time fiddling with it! Basically, for me S tier is any episode that I have kind of emotionally imprinted on, A+ is basically just Rotterdam because I do think it's hilarious but it never captured me in quite that way, then there are a few that I think have fun but are a bit more outright flawed, and then the five episodes that I actually actively dislike. But, like, seventeen of twenty seven episodes are SO GOOD that I couldn't get any of them out of my S tier, no matter how much I tried! (And I really, really did!)

It's just crazy to me, because there are very, very few shows that I can think of that have this high of a hit rate for me- and for most shows I like, what I consider D tier here would be considered a mid-range episode of them. The overall level of quality is just remarkable.

But it's crazier because the episodes in my S tier... many of them I have listened to literally dozens of times, if not over a hundred for some of them. I wish I could see stats because as unlikely as it sounds, it wouldn't surprise me at all if I've broken 100 listens on Limerick at least. On one level, I'm a rewatcher/relistener in general and rarely get bored, but to me Cabin Pressure takes it to another level in terms of relistenability. I can listen to pretty much any of my faves at pretty much any time, I never get sick of them, and yet they always feel worn and comfortable like a good pair of slippers. It's so soothing, but I also laugh the same as if the joke had been fresh.

This is just so key to the show's being as much of a comfort listen as it is- it manages to be consistently hilarious despite being familiar. Knowing the expected beats of a joke can sometimes take the zing out of it in future listens, but I can't remember that ever happening for me. Maybe it's the brilliant plotting and characters that keep that from ever happening- but the comedy itself just consistently works for this. It's amazing.

[o-uncle-newt]

I missed CP Advent, here's what I'm doing instead

I had had an Advent plan, but in retrospect I'm actually not sure it was the right idea for this (I may save it for next year!)

Instead, my plan is to do a ten day countdown, ending on the 24th- the day that Zurich Part 2 aired. I'll be listing ten ways that Cabin Pressure has impacted me, one each day. Some might be a bit repetitive of my advent listenthrough last year (you can find that if you search my account for the tag "cabin pressure advent 2023"), but some will be based on some general additional thinking.

I was considering doing another relisten- not necessarily daily, but just going through a few random episodes each day- in order to prep for this, but I decided not to because honestly, I rarely do relisten in order. If you read my listenthrough you'll see that I hadn't listened to Kuala Lumpur since the first time (with the exception of skipping through for the Carolyn and Arthur scenes). Honestly, I'm not even sure I remember listening to Cremona in the first place, though I'm sure I did! So this next ten days I'll be relistening to Cabin Pressure, but not in order and not all of them- I'll be returning to episodes that I love and that bring me joy, the ones that I use to boost me up and to, to be frank, resuscitate me when I need it.

Looking forward- hopefully it will be fun, and please feel free to share how Cabin Pressure has effected you!