#67 For I was young and loved, and it was Mae
11/06/21 10:15
Channel 4’s Feel Good has been on my radar for a while but I only just got round to it because I saw that Season 2 dropped on Netflix and thought I’d better catch up. I have no idea why C4 didn’t pick up the second series, but this isn’t the first time they MADE A TERRIBLE COMMISSIONING DECISION AND WILL RUE THE DAY*.
Anyway, the set-up is that Mae Martin plays Mae Martin in a semi-autobiographical comedy drama about a stand-up comic who meets George, a schoolteacher, at a gig. The two hit it off, hook up, and fall in love, which is a story in itself, but Feel Good deals with what happens after, when the postcoital glow has faded and reality starts to bite. George, played with spiffingly straightlaced relish by Charlotte Ritchie, isn’t out, has some awful posh friends she won’t introduce to Mae, and is struggling to come to terms with what she wants from life. Mae, for their part, is a former addict who is possibly looking for a new fix in the form of a girlfriend. They’re from wildly different backgrounds and on one level it seems like the only thing they have in common is their mutual attraction. They can make each other feel good in bed, but are they good for each other out of it?
This series is quite odd, which is probably why I like it. At one point, Mae questions their girlfriend’s love of Guernsey while shut in a wardrobe, in a scene as gentle and funny as it is strange. Mae’s humour is offbeat and delicately disconcerting, like their kind but pointless hand on George’s depressed flatmate’s shoulder. As a character, they’re nervy and intense – ‘I. Am. Not. Intense,’ Mae declares, face smeared in soot, having made an impulsive conflagration of old mementoes. In contrast, George ‘raised in a bag of feathers’, aka Oxford, is a brush-it-under-the-carpet sort of gel who nonetheless likes to be fingered in changing rooms.
The dialogue is light and deft, skirting round the issues rather than confronting them full-on. ‘Don’t look at me! I’m 3000 years old!’ shrieks Mae’s mother Linda during a Zoom chat with the pair. She’s played by Lisa Kudrow, marvellously channelling various toxic undercurrents, and, like the script, George continues the conversation via an uneasy side-eye. Later, Linda tells Mae she was premature, explaining that’s why they’re not close. ‘We’re not close?’ queries her daughter, but the question, like many others, is left unanswered.
The casting is divine. Sophie Thompson is hilarious and pathetic as Maggie, Mae’s self-appointed sponsor, a determinedly dotty figure whose recovery strategy is to keep busy – either by eating grapes or stalking her estranged daughter. Then there’s Pippa Haywood playing George’s mother, equally pathetically in thrall to an ex-husband she purports to dislike. I always remember her playing Gordon Brittas’s wife in The Brittas Empire, and she brings the same brittle quality to this role, passing on her pathology to her daughter, who twists it to suit herself. Everyone is addicted to something, whether it’s a drug, a person or an idea. When you quit one thing you substitute another, until you have to lock it in a clingfilm-wrapped suitcase to wean yourself off.
What makes us feel good? Is it love, sex, friendship, honesty, a fulfilling career? Or is it grapes, or Guernsey? No one is quite sure what they’re looking for, and this ambiguity lends a peculiarly tender tension to Feel Good and the weirdly lovely romance at its heart. Channel 4’s loss is Netflix’s gain.
*bitter personal experience
Anyway, the set-up is that Mae Martin plays Mae Martin in a semi-autobiographical comedy drama about a stand-up comic who meets George, a schoolteacher, at a gig. The two hit it off, hook up, and fall in love, which is a story in itself, but Feel Good deals with what happens after, when the postcoital glow has faded and reality starts to bite. George, played with spiffingly straightlaced relish by Charlotte Ritchie, isn’t out, has some awful posh friends she won’t introduce to Mae, and is struggling to come to terms with what she wants from life. Mae, for their part, is a former addict who is possibly looking for a new fix in the form of a girlfriend. They’re from wildly different backgrounds and on one level it seems like the only thing they have in common is their mutual attraction. They can make each other feel good in bed, but are they good for each other out of it?
This series is quite odd, which is probably why I like it. At one point, Mae questions their girlfriend’s love of Guernsey while shut in a wardrobe, in a scene as gentle and funny as it is strange. Mae’s humour is offbeat and delicately disconcerting, like their kind but pointless hand on George’s depressed flatmate’s shoulder. As a character, they’re nervy and intense – ‘I. Am. Not. Intense,’ Mae declares, face smeared in soot, having made an impulsive conflagration of old mementoes. In contrast, George ‘raised in a bag of feathers’, aka Oxford, is a brush-it-under-the-carpet sort of gel who nonetheless likes to be fingered in changing rooms.
The dialogue is light and deft, skirting round the issues rather than confronting them full-on. ‘Don’t look at me! I’m 3000 years old!’ shrieks Mae’s mother Linda during a Zoom chat with the pair. She’s played by Lisa Kudrow, marvellously channelling various toxic undercurrents, and, like the script, George continues the conversation via an uneasy side-eye. Later, Linda tells Mae she was premature, explaining that’s why they’re not close. ‘We’re not close?’ queries her daughter, but the question, like many others, is left unanswered.
The casting is divine. Sophie Thompson is hilarious and pathetic as Maggie, Mae’s self-appointed sponsor, a determinedly dotty figure whose recovery strategy is to keep busy – either by eating grapes or stalking her estranged daughter. Then there’s Pippa Haywood playing George’s mother, equally pathetically in thrall to an ex-husband she purports to dislike. I always remember her playing Gordon Brittas’s wife in The Brittas Empire, and she brings the same brittle quality to this role, passing on her pathology to her daughter, who twists it to suit herself. Everyone is addicted to something, whether it’s a drug, a person or an idea. When you quit one thing you substitute another, until you have to lock it in a clingfilm-wrapped suitcase to wean yourself off.
What makes us feel good? Is it love, sex, friendship, honesty, a fulfilling career? Or is it grapes, or Guernsey? No one is quite sure what they’re looking for, and this ambiguity lends a peculiarly tender tension to Feel Good and the weirdly lovely romance at its heart. Channel 4’s loss is Netflix’s gain.
- Feel Good, series 1 & 2 on Netflix
*bitter personal experience
