Ex-Tabula Rasa

The Sixth Himyum

It occured to me recently that all the sitcoms based around a group of friends tend to have six friends. Friends, Coupling, Cougartown, Happy Endings, Spaced (I’m counting Marsha) - those are the ones off the top of my head. I’m sure there’s more. I’m sure there’s millions. Millions and millions. All of them with six close friends cracking wise and having lots of sex.

But How I Met Your Mother has only five friends. And when I realised this I started feeling a bit weird when I watched it. At first I thought it might be because there was a large, yet difficult-to-notice gap in the program like when you’re looking at a painting of the twelve apostles and you can’t quite put your finger on it but there’s something not right about it and you realise that for some reason Simon the Zealot isn’t in there and you get a headache.

And then I started thinking that all of the characters in How I Met Your Mother must have all these terrible emotional and existential problems because their genre decrees that they must be Six but instead they are merely Five. And that when they are egging on Barney to Meet Your Mother they are not doing so out of concern for their friend but because their own inner contentment depends upon it. They will not be adequate sitcom characters until they are a sextet, and each episode that they remain one member short fills them with self-loathing and inadequacy.

But what if that wasn’t so, what if their status as one-fifth of a sitcom friendship group instead of one-sixth means that they have extra kudos in the situation comedy world? What if that increase from 0.16666 of the limelight to 0.2 means they are Top Sitcom Friendship Dogs?

Palpable nonsense.

I finally realised what it all means. There are six characters in HIMYM, and there have been since the first episode. That sixth character is us. We sit at that table in the bar with them, we experience their bedroom antics with them, we do all that stuff that happens in the show with them as we are their friend and we have a bond that can never be broken because we are The Sixth Himyum. We are part of their group, we are an integral yet unspoken partner in the Finding of Your Mother and we…

Oh wait, I just thought of Seinfeld. Sorry, my entire theory just broke.

Pardon me while I blow your mind.

So there’s this TV series, right? Okay. And of the main characters is a young woman whose job involves waiting on other people. And she falls for this broodingly handsome guy who is much older than her. But their love does not always go to plan because he has a dark and murky past that forces him to keep secrets and go off on mysterious errands without telling her why, all presumably for her own good. And a nasty woman from his distant past occasionally comes back and makes things even more complicated.

“Hold up, Fuiru,” you say, “why are you talking about True Blood? The next season doesn’t start for ages!”

But I’m not talking about Sookeh and Bill Compton, oh no. I’m talking about Anna and Mister Bates in Downton Abbey. Boom. I just blew your mind.

And we can take it further. Oh yes.

A handsome young man falls for an attractive and mysterious girl whose ultimate intent is to bring the young man into her family and make him one of their own: Am I describing Jason Stackhouse and Crystal’s Werepanther clan, or Matthew Crawley and Mary’s upper class family? Good question.

A gay guy and his sass-talking co-worker plan the downfall of their other co-worker and her mysterious, brooding new beau. Lafayette and Tara, right? Wrong. O’Brien and William.

While having sex, a girl discovers that her partner in conjugal efforts is dead. Yeah, that could describe just about everyone in True Blood who boffs a vampire, but I’m actually talking about Mary and the Turkish diplomat.

So what exactly am I getting at? This: Downton Abbey is just a British version of True Blood, set in World War 1 and with fewer breasts. They’re basically the same show, but one’s got a bunch of pasty, unhealthily white-skinned sexual deviants, and the other’s got vampires.

Oh, and in case you’re wondering who Eric is? It’s Molesley.

Downton Abbey: Season 3 Episode 1

Scene 1

INTERIOR, LIBRARY: A tour guide in his early 20s leads a group of children through Downton Abbey’s large library. With one or two exceptions, the children all look down at mobile phones and portable gaming devices. A pair of adults (presumably teachers) follow on behind.

TOUR GUIDE: As you can see, the library remains in an excellent state of preservation. Some of these books are more than one hundred years old.

TEACHER (Trying to stir up some kind of interest in his students): Is it possible that this library was ever the scene of some kind of intrigue? A visit from some old face from a forgotten past, perhaps? Scandalous liaisons? That kind of thing?

TOUR GUIDE: Probably not, no. This is where people read books and wrote letters.

TEACHER: Oh.

Scene 2

INTERIOR, STAFF ROOM: Three tour guides sit around a long table. One (female) is reading a paperback copy of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. Another (male) is smoking a cigarette and absent-mindedly flicking through a tabloid newspaper. The third is drinking a cup of tea.

Tour Guide 3: I just know there’s more to life than this, you know? I can’t believe I was destined for a life of drudgery, showing uninterested kids around a big old mansion, telling them about old tapestries and the like.

Tour Guide 1: Oh aye? Got delusions of grandeur have we?

Tour Guide 3: Aye. One day…one day…one day I’ll be working in the front office. Tour guide? Pah! I’ll be an administrative assistant to the chief curator, that’s what I’ll be!

Tour Guide 1: Dream on, William.

Tour Guide 3: Just you wait. Things around here are going to change.

Tour Guide 2 (Referring to tabloid newspaper in front of him): Look at the knockers on her. Oof.

Scene 3

INTERIOR, OFFICE: The Chief Curator and his administrative assistant look at a pile of papers.

Chief Curator: I think someone has been stealing our brochures, Margaret.

Administrative Assistant: But…but who?

Chief Curator (Looking out of the window with a dark glint in his eyes): Oh, I think I have an idea.

Truthful something

Mrs Fuiru got the Downton Abbey DVDs on the weekend for her birthday. We watched the first few episodes together.

Man, that is good shit. Fucked up shit, but good shit. Hilarious shit.

I came into it thinking it would be all po-faced household drama, but there’s more slapstick nonsense in that show than effing Laurel and Hardy repairing ladders in a ball-bearing factory.

There’s this one bit where a woman kicks out this guy’s cane from under him and he falls flat on his face in front of a visiting dignitary and everyone’s like “Ooh, Bates [his name is Bates! Like, could you get more funny than that?], you just ruined Christmas!”

Then there’s this other bit where someone dies in the middle of sex and everyone has to move him around the place and it is JUST LIKE WEEKEND AT BERNIE’S 2.

And then there’s a bit where this dizzy serving girl is given poison in one dish and something “that’s supposed to be put on the chicken” in another dish. Can you guess what happens? If you guessed complete and utter tragedy, think again. If you guess comedic genius, keep reading.

And Dame Maggie Smith (I got a bit annoyed because it just says “Maggie Smith” in the credits because GODDAMMIT she’s A FUCKING DAME) is hilarious because you know she can turn into a cat and she wears massive hats all the time. Each time I see her she’s wearing an even bigger hat and I reckon by episode six her hat will be so big that there’ll be a minor subplot in which the cast of Midsomer Murders are hiding in her headwear, staging detective mysteries.

Holy shit, Downton Abbey is brilliant. I can see why everyone likes it.

The Americans on Tumblr know more about contemporary English television than I do

I wouldn’t know the difference between a Skin and an Inbetweener and a Downtown Abbey if you held a gun to my head.

Upcoming new TV shows

• Miss Carriage of Justice - Cop drama in which Betty Carriage, an unmarried female lawyer, tries to find justice for the underdog, all the while fighting against the system, corruption and the knowledge that the show will be cancelled before episode 3.
• The Biggest Looser - Obese people who can’t spell try to lose weight.
• Help! There’s an Occupy Wall Street Protester Occupying my Hat! - Disturbing sitcom. George, a Wall Street banker, is dismayed when an OWS protestor named Treebeard gets legal permission to occupy his bowler hat. All his nefarious schemes to earn more money at the expense of the American middle classes are thwarted by the hippy on his head.
• Extreme Makeover: Pancreas Edition - People with ugly pancreases get new ones with ribbons and shit.
• Property Virgins - Game show in which contestants attempt to force ambitious and obnoxious real estate agents to admit that their personality defects stem from the fact that they’ve never been laid. Guy Fieri hosts.
• Two Men and the Guy from Saw - Madcap anarchic comedy. Ashton Kutcher and Jon Cryer wake up to find a note telling them that the only condoms in the vicinity have been surgically implanted behind their left eyeball. A rusty spoon sits ominously on a nearby table.

Thoughts on the Bachelorette

I noticed last night that on that show they always have to explain the dates they go on with some underlying deep metaphorical meaning. Like, “When you’re in love you have to just fall and let yourself go. So I brought Gordon to a waterfall so we jump off and literally just let ourselves go.” Or, “when you’re in love it can feel like you’re the only two people in the world. So Norman and I have come to this secluded island where we are the only two people for miles and miles around. [Except for the camera crew. And the producers. And my makeup artist. And the writers.]”

I keep hoping that they’ll be going for a regular date at some point. I want to see them explain that in some deep metaphorical way. “Being in love is like being in a darkened room with people eating popcorn and explosions going off in the background and the person behind you asking where they know that guy playing the soldier from and the person next to them says they think he was in the show Las Vegas and the first person says that they never watched Las Vegas so that’s not it. So I brought Rodger to see Transformers: Dark of the Moon.”

Or, “Being married is like being really illogical and making no sense and fighting, so I brought Huntingdon to a pub in Liverpool town centre on a Friday night for eighteen pints of Stella Artois and a mugging outside a kebab shop.”