[pressgang] Episode 6 - INTERFACE

Thu Feb 24 13:22:39 GMT 2022

I really enjoyed the old review! LOL to ‘middle-aged gingers’.

Claire

> On 24 Feb 2022, at 05:35, Laura Nunn <laura.nunn at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> Eldest and I watched Interface this evening.
> 
> She found the scene with Spike's underwear hilarious. 
> 
> Other than that, this wasn't a favourite of either of ours; Eldest actually laughed out loud at the patronising round of applause for Billy. "Why are they doing that, Mummy? He's just a person."
> 
> This episode seems to have massive plot holes. The only way it works is if Spike is hugely lying to Lynda and pretending he knows nothing about the clues which he magically helps to solve. Which I think would raise more questions for Lynda, who isn't known to let this sort of thing go.
> 
> I wrote a longer review of this a few years back for the Press Gang at 25 project - pasted below if anyone's interested!
> 
>  
>  
> I’m going to lay it out for you. Interface has never been among my favourite episodes. So if this is in your top five, you may wish to look away now and think about Colin in a bunny suit, whilst humming Disco Info songs to yourself…
>  
> 
> The Junior Gazette hears of the Roxburgh Award – an opportunity to win a computer for the newspaper (a lovely ahead-of-its time line from Colin, who can “almost taste the computer; in megabytes”). We see the paper’s progression through the various stages of the award over a few weeks, via amusing scenes of Tiddler delivering post, including to a somnambulant Frazz. One does wonder why the Junior Gazette gets quite so much post that they need to make mail delivery a ‘thing’, and specifically, why anyone, ever, would want to write to Frazz.
> 
> The computer is duly won and installed with a modem (a modem, folks! In 1989!) and then the proper narrative starts in earnest. And oh boy, is there an awful lot of earnest.
> 
> Let’s test out this modem then. Danny (clearly because every other main character was visiting their aunt in Sherrington that day) and Miss Hessope/Jessope (I assume it’s double-barrelled) are in the school office, sending wind-up messages to Lynda. There is no explanation as to why the school needs a computer with a modem in 1989. I think we can just assume Mr Winters has an ASCII porn fetish. He looks the type.
> 
> We learn Kenny’s dad has a computer and a modem. I have a theory about Kenny; in the first series and flashback episodes, Kenny’s house seems quite nice, quite middle class and he lives near Lynda. In later series, he appears to live in a very grotty council flat and no longer seems to have a dad. I am guessing the 1980s collapsed round Kenny’s stockbroking Dad’s ears, his parents’ marriage failed, despite Kenny’s best intentions at peacemaking and he emigrated to Australia to get away from the unpleasantness. Right, good, that’s canon now.
> 
> Lynda goes a bit… unbalanced next. Yes, I know she’s still getting over her heartbreak with James Armstrong, but I’m not sure we can completely excuse her behaviour. Seeing Colin making a ‘virtue of a necessity’ and selling the Mystery Writer angle, Lynda suggests she’s not selling papers so much as selling her soul. Yes Lynda. Selling the Junior Gazette to children is selling your soul. This is especially the case when the Mystery Writer’s TV column is about Miss Marple, which as every teenager knows, is a gateway drug to Inspector Morse, and nothing good comes of that. I hear that’s how Whatsisname started, on a bit of Marple, nothing serious. Before he knew it, he was mainlining Columbo and the rest is history.
> 
> As the queue of Mystery Writers lines up (including Steven Moffat pulling a Hitchcock* for the very sharp-eyed), Lynda continues to overreact, talking to a blank computer screen, telling the Mystery Writer that he’s “ruining her life”. Bit strong Lynda, bit strong. Save something for There Are Crocodiles. Interestingly she seems a lot less bothered about anonymous articles when it comes to Friends Like These and removing Sarah’s name from the article. Maybe, what with her life already ruined and all, she’s just stopped caring.
> 
> Lynda decides to pop over to Spike’s house to pick his brains about the whole Mystery Writer situation, and a lovely scene unfolds where Spike thrusts his dirty underwear at her (not in that way), mistaking her for his father. Lynda’s “I can’t tell you how much this means to me” is perfectly delivered, as is Spike’s reaction. In order to facilitate conversation, they decide to play Trivial Pursuits. This seems to be entirely like Trivial Pursuit, but with an extra ‘s’ on the end. Perhaps it is the Norbridge edition.
> 
> Lynda and Spike are in detective mode, working out that from the page number from the Roxburgh Award advert, and a film showing at the cinema, they should be going to 26 Laurel Avenue. What a load of shit. Totally impossible, would never happen. The unison, Famous Five, ‘Laurel Avenue’ is enough to make you vom. Don’t. Hold onto it; you’re going to need it in about ten minutes’ time.
> 
> Onto Laurel Avenue, and Lynda enters the house alone, despite Mr Homer’s best serial killer impression. He looks a bit like Mr Winters and Matt Kerr; I wonder if the casting director got a buy-two-get-one-free on middle-aged gingers.
>  
> Anyway, Lynda finally meets Billy, and another nice line, “You’ll understand if I don’t get up”. Moffat certainly shows the ability to bring bathos and humour to the character. Billy doesn’t want to talk to Lynda, so she pops off for a chat with the serial killer instead, and helps him with the drying up. Mr Homer explains he got the computer from work, “What’s one computer to Roxburgh’s?” Hmm, in the 1980s, I’d guess at about £1500, or to put it another way, about 3 months’ average salary in 1989. It seems unlikely that his boss would have OK’d this. I suspect fraud. Perhaps something for the Junior Gazette to investigate at another time. Spike, who evidently doesn’t believe in doorbells, appears in Mr Homer’s kitchen just in time to hear Lynda say that he’s kind of sweet, and in another lovely moment, we get to hear “I can’t tell you how much this means to me” thrown back at Da Boss. It becomes clear that Spike was the man on the inside, as an old friend of Billy’s, rather undermining all his clever ‘detective’ work earlier in the episode.
> 
> Lynda does a great job of treating Billy as she would treat any other member of the news team – “be there or forget about the Junior Gazette altogether”. One wonders why she’s so bothered about this, as the Mystery Writer features is proving a boon for sales, but – as we realised before – Lynda equates selling copies of her newspaper with selling her soul. Perhaps she’s in the wrong job.
> 
> Anyway, fast forward to the team meeting, and it doesn’t look like Billy’s coming, so they crack on. But oh – look, just as they’re about to start, the newsroom doors swing open and who is it, but our favourite serial killer/fraudster, and his disabled son. You know that vomit you were holding onto earlier? Release it now. Spike starts to slow-hand clap. The rest of the news team joins in. Tiddler actually gives him a standing ovation.
> 
> If I were Billy, I’d have wheeled myself right out of the newsroom, and would have been sure to leave massive scrape marks all along their corridor. But he doesn’t. Lynda, at least, continues to treat him like any other member of the team and asks for the minutes to read: “Billy Homer – late”.
> 
> 
> 
> *not a euphemism
> 
>  
> 
>> On Tue, 22 Feb 2022 at 22:38, Vince Deehan <vince.deehan at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Thanks Claire for the kind words.
>> 
>> Thanks Calum for the Internet background info.
>> 
>> Vince
>> 
>>> On Tue, Feb 22, 2022 at 11:43 AM Calum Benson <scottishwildcat at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> 
>>> 
>>> > On 21 Feb 2022, at 17:17, Katarina Hjärpe <katarina.hjarpe at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> > 
>>> > Den mån 21 feb. 2022 kl 14:57 skrev Vince Deehan <vince.deehan at gmail.com>:
>>> > The very early use of the Internet, given that it was filmed in 1988, is pretty mind blowing. I guess it wasn’t called ‘The Internet’ at that time. I’m no expert, but I am guessing the technology they are using had been around for quite some time for use by scientists and computer boffins and high tech industries, but had only recently started to be available to the public?
>>> > 
>>> > I think it was called the Internet, because when I was doing a study among online fans around 2000 and asked them how many of them had been around before the Internet, I got lectured about how old the Internet was. I've forgotten how old it was, though! :-)
>>> 
>>> <boring nerd stuff> 
>>> 
>>> Yep, the term "internet" was coined in 1974 [1]. The first bit of the "internet", called ARPANET, was developed in the late 1960's. As Vince says, though, the internet only really connected educational and government institutions until well into the 1980's. 
>>> 
>>> Surprisingly, it was 1992 before the first dial-up internet services became available for people to use at home. (Things like bulletin boards, AOL and CompuServe existed before that, but they were standalone services that weren't technically part of "the internet".)
>>> 
>>> [1] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc675
>>> 
>>> </boring nerd stuff>
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