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White Gold

Started by BritishHobo, May 24, 2017, 10:44:44 PM

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BritishHobo

New BBC2 series starring Jay from The Inbetweeners and Simon from The Inbetweeners (produced by Damon Beesly) alongside Ed Westwick of Gossip Girl fame, as double glazing salesmen in the 70s.

Episode 1 aired at ten, but all six episodes have been made available on iPlayer. I'm not too sure yet what I think - it's a curious show that I suspect might be trying to lean a bit towards drama as well as comedy, so I'm going to have to give it a couple more episodes to see what I think.

Danger Man

James Buckley is good but otherwise....

AsparagusTrevor

Since I saw the advert for this roughly 400 times I was already sick of it before the first episode even aired.

BritishHobo

It's just like Chickens, this - everyone in the cast throwing themselves into the the accents and mannerisms of the time and place (70s Essex here, wartime England in Chickens), and then the two Inbetweeners just talking exactly like they did in The Inbetweeners.

They're endlessly likable though, to me. I'll always have goodwill towards them. They told a great Russell Brand-esque story on Buckley's YouTube channel a while back painting themselves as basically daft children on set desperately wanting Ed Westwick to think they're cool. It was properly affable.

Mobius

I love Inbetweeners but thought this was shit.

steveh

This wasn't very good, even allowing for the leads being salesmen. The soundtrack was like having someone having hit next track for each scene on a budget eighties CD they'd picked up from Tescos.

momatt

Quote from: BritishHobo on May 25, 2017, 09:36:34 AM
They're endlessly likable though, to me. I'll always have goodwill towards them. They told a great Russell Brand-esque story on Buckley's YouTube channel a while back painting themselves as basically daft children on set desperately wanting Ed Westwick to think they're cool. It was properly affable.

I felt the same.  It's not the best or most original thing ever and I found the talking to the camera a bit too smug and annoying.  But those guys are likeable enough to make the program worth watching.  It's silly and fun and I enjoyed it.

Have you got a link to that video please?  I could only find videos of Buckley playing computer games.

Nice to see one of the Four Lions on screen again too.

Quote from: steveh on May 25, 2017, 10:56:56 AM
The soundtrack was like having someone having hit next track for each scene on a budget eighties CD they'd picked up from Tescos.
The soundtrack was the best part!  It had the Rocksteady Crew and Joe Jackson!

Bobtoo

It doesn't help that the two from Inbetweeners are basically playing exactly the same parts. It's also a bit unlikely that the ruthless "new broom" would keep a softie like Simon/Lavender on his team.

Gurke and Hare

I've just watched this, and it suffered badly from all the characters being pricks. Who was I supposed to be rooting for?

Also, if it's set in the 70s how come they were talking about Star Wars?

Trojan_Jockey

Isn't it supposed to be set in the 80's, 1983 I think. Which means the joke about starving Ethiopians with pot bellies is out of place as starving Ethiopians didn't become "popular" until 1984.

Shoulders?-Stomach!

Quote from: Trojan_Jockey on May 31, 2017, 10:56:57 PM
Isn't it supposed to be set in the 80's, 1983 I think. Which means the joke about starving Ethiopians with pot bellies is out of place as starving Ethiopians didn't become "popular" until 1984.

Yeah, of about the 113 things wrong with White Gold, a slight anachronism that makes no practical difference to the show or the joke is the one to focus on.

Elderly Sumo Prophecy

White dog shit more like.

Wet Blanket

Quote from: Shoulders?-Stomach! on May 31, 2017, 11:23:55 PM
Yeah, of about the 113 things wrong with White Gold, a slight anachronism that makes no practical difference to the show or the joke is the one to focus on.

Also 1980s salesmen would probably still be using the two-fingered fuck-you salute rather than the american one-finger which has usurped it now. And was dogging a thing in 1983? It's set in the 1980s for no good reason really.

Quote from: Wet Blanket on June 01, 2017, 09:15:24 AM
Also 1980s salesmen would probably still be using the two-fingered fuck-you salute rather than the american one-finger which has usurped it now. And was dogging a thing in 1983? It's set in the 1980s for no good reason really.

There's a few series recently that are guilty of this. They want the outfits and music of the era to appear surface-level interesting but don't give a toss about how people actually spoke and lived.

Utter Shit

Just me that's really enjoying it then?

Ed Westwick seems to have channeled his Ben Chaplin appearance into a direct copy of Matthew Malone's personality and intonation, he's brilliantly smarmy yet somehow charming. As everyone has already said, the Inbetweeners are being the Inbetweeners as usual - which in James Buckley's case is good, and in Joe Thomas' case is awful (although he did write it, so fair play) - at times in last night's episode it basically WAS the Inbetweeners, the whole dogging scene in particular could very easily have been in that show.

It's not perfect, but there's plenty of charm about it and enough funny moments to keep me hooked. Matey from Four Lions/Alpha Papa is great as the raging boss.

Wet Blanket

I think it's watchable but I'm put off because the main guy's such an odious cunt. At the end when he was shouting 'fucking fore' on that golf course it just struck me as loutish. I guess they're going for a Francis Urqhart/ Alan B'Stard kind of character, but rather than a Machiavellian genius they've got a smarmy prick, and he doesn't have any apparent vulnerabilities to offset that.

I think it would actually work better if James Buckley was the lead: a successful but deluded character who's not as smart as he thinks he is, with Ed Westwick in the supporting role as someone clearly superior at the job, but a nastier piece of work.

Kane Jones

I've only seen Ed Westwick in an awful thing my wife watches where he is an American endlessly smouldering rich boy. I thought he was an American actor. In our house we call him 'Evil Thomas' on account of the fact that he looks like CaB's Thomas, only evil.

Utter Shit

Quote from: Wet Blanket on June 01, 2017, 11:03:59 AM
I think it would actually work better if James Buckley was the lead: a successful but deluded character who's not as smart as he thinks he is, with Ed Westwick in the supporting role as someone clearly superior at the job, but a nastier piece of work.

They have *sort of* done that with the lead character - him being shit at golf despite acting like he was, not getting the advertising job, going back to his old job to beg for his job back (although obviously this worked out ok for him). If they ramped that up a little bit it would work better, at the moment you don't quite buy that anything is ever going to go seriously wrong for him, which makes him less likeable.

Utter Shit

Quote from: Kane Jones on June 01, 2017, 11:06:35 AM
I've only seen Ed Westwick in an awful thing my wife watches where he is an American endlessly smouldering rich boy. I thought he was an American actor. In our house we call him 'Evil Thomas' on account of the fact that he looks like CaB's Thomas, only evil.

He's a friend of a friend and is by all accounts a very nice bloke. I think he suffers from that British thing of being so good-looking that people instinctively take against you and assume you're a cunt. The poor love.

Depressed Beyond Tables

Quote from: Elderly Sumo Prophecy on June 01, 2017, 02:49:30 AM
White dog shit more like.

Quite.

Yeah this is a load of old googlies. I'd love for someone to take away the soundtrack so you can actually see what a pile of steaming turds this is. Does every scene end with a top 10 song from the time? Jesus.

In short: Hollyoaks does Goodfellas.

Quincey

Only watched half an hour of it, quite liked the 80s setting but couldn't see any humour at all. Would a double glazing salesroom, even in the 80s, have had such nice chairs??

amnesiac

Also only watched half of it by mistake and already hated it because of the trailer. It just seem completely unnecessary, wtf is the point of it, it's not funny enough to be a comedy or dramatic enough to be a drama. Just fucking bullshit. We're absolutely spoiled for quality telly these days and this can fuck right off.

Gurke and Hare

Quote from: Wet Blanket on June 01, 2017, 09:15:24 AM
And was dogging a thing in 1983? It's set in the 1980s for no good reason really.

I wondered this last night when I was watching it, so I checked and according to Wikipedia it turns out that the term was coined in the 70s. I'm not going to link to it now though, as there's no way I'm doing a search for 'dogging' while I'm at work.

Gurke and Hare

Quote from: Utter Shit on June 01, 2017, 11:36:59 AM
not getting the advertising job

That whole bit was ridiculous. "Hello, man I previously called a prick in the pub, can I have a job?" Of course you can't, fuck off.

Mobius

Quote from: amnesiac on June 01, 2017, 12:32:39 PM
Also only watched half of it by mistake and already hated it because of the trailer. It just seem completely unnecessary, wtf is the point of it, it's not funny enough to be a comedy or dramatic enough to be a drama. Just fucking bullshit. We're absolutely spoiled for quality telly these days and this can fuck right off.

The bloke who created The Inbetweener's (Damon Beezley) dad was a window salesman in the 80s, and he'd sit in his office all day listening to his dad and his dad's mates banter about windows and all that in the 80s. So yeah, this is that...

It's probably hilarious to him/his dad and his dad's mates but there aren't many jokes are there? The attempt at making it 80s is more jarring than anything.

DSBoy

Seems this show has done really well in the ratings. Series 2 is now on the way...

https://www.comedy.co.uk/tv/news/2675/white_gold_series_2/

Bobtoo

I thought the Rolls Royce desk was a bit silly.



but I was watching a documentary about Paul Sykes tonight and the "businessman" he did debt collecting for had one in real life.