You may have been totalled by a twitcher
Posted in General on 21. Jul, 2010
You may have been totalled by a twitcher.It is surely one of the oddest ways of wasting time men have so far invented (though cultivating giant vegetables comes a close second). A couple of divorces and at least 11 car accidents have resulted from this man’s hell-bent quest to beat his own record of 359 birds spotted in one year. As he drives, he’s constantly reading his little pager, which tells him where the latest rare bird has been spotted. He swerves to avoid oncoming cars, each of which honks as it passes.
Yet he considers himself almost as good a driver as he is a twitcher, and has covered millions of miles at breakneck speed merely for the glimpse of a bird. Used to have to throw them away and through that I started taxidermy. After a while I started to marvel at the birds’ bright colours … ” No, it’s not Jeffrey Dahmer, the serial killer and cannibal, though his early interests were very similar. Instead, it’s Lee Evans, a champion “twitcher” or bird-chaser (Encounters: Twitchers, C4). We must all be grateful he has such an absorbing hobby.Not that he’s totally harmless.
It all began in what seemed to be a group therapy session but unravelled into a bunch of separate job interviews at a law firm. “Did you have a happy childhood?” was one of the questions considered relevant; the candidate with the happiest childhood of course got the job. He’d actually rather be writing about football, but says: “I think they’ve got enough football writers already.” Too true. All the characters are very conscious of being yuppies in a shrinking job market. None the less, by the end of the first episode, five of these budding lawyers are sharing a pretty fabulous (if dilapidated) residence Methinks they protest too much. Their worries, from unsuccessful job interviews to unrequited love, are nothing new.
Yet their youthfulness is at times poignant – for instance when the half- naked boss gives the new recruits a pep-talk while he gets massaged, his complacent flesh competing with the brand-new pig-skin briefcase in one newcomer’s shaky hand. Meanwhile, the most intriguing character, Anna (Daniela Nardini), is still looking for work, and stuck, sighing, in a nasty bedsit.
She says she’s willing to offer what she calls “sexual favours” to anyone in a position to offer her a job. And when she starts hanging around the railings outside a law firm in her fake leopard-skin jacket, it begins to look like she’s got “soliciting” and “solicitor” mixed up. Vulnerable as the endangered species on her back, she has also been in love for years with the difficult Miles (Jack Davenport), who interviews her for the job she doesn’t get. Everyone else seems staid and set in their ways: “terminally monogamous” and amusingly appalled by the lustiness of their elders.
There is certainly hope of some difficult moments for them all in the coming (11) episodes.And the Beat Goes On (C4) at first appeared to be a wholly ironic reconstruction of Sixties life, an amalgamation of the corniest cliches, with superb vignettes in which people sit down to frugal breakfasts while overgrown sons masturbate upstairs, and where premarital pregnancy leads, not to a prime spot in the housing queue, but to the purchase of gin and knitting needles. Sexual pleasure seems to belong entirely to men in this version of the Sixties – even the racy student with her beatnik boyfriend prefers reading poetry. It’ll take a bit longer to identify exactly what ails Connie Spencer (Jenny Agutter); her troubles – panic attacks, no doubt caused by her obnoxious husband who constantly scolds her – are tended by hubby’s friend, the patronising doctor. Her brother meanwhile is deep in trouble with blackmailers for cottaging.