The Reader: Nighty-night, Fleabag ... and credit to your dark TV forerunners

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Original: Phoebe Waller-Bridge at an opening night party for Fleabag
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10 April 2019
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Alastair McKay’s search for the cultural antecedents of Fleabag ["The dark night rises", April 8] turns up both predictable (Absolutely Fabulous) and unpredictable (Tracey Emin) names, but omits the most significant precursor.

If anyone “carved out” the imaginative space for the “new genre of comedy” currently inhabited by the in-your-face Fleabag with an itch, surely it was Julia Davis as the off-the-scale awful, oestrogen-driven beautician Jill Tyrrell in her two series of Nighty Night (2004-05). Bleach-blonde but with a very dark side, Jill pushed her unforgivable behaviour to criminal limits.

Fleabag’s arc goes in the other direction: her misdemeanours are gentler, perhaps truer — but work the same space and deliver the same bold thrill of transgression.
Olivier Alexis

I hope Phoebe Waller-Bridge writes a third series or even a film.
David Lodge

EDITOR'S REPLY

Dear Olivier

You’re right to mention Julia Davis, and Nighty Night isn’t given the credit that it deserves. Phoebe Waller-Bridge has admitted to being a huge fan, and auditioned for one of Davis’s shows. Maybe the influence isn’t obvious because Davis is more extreme, and less interested in making her characters likeable.

Of course, once you start on influences it’s hard to stop. It has been pointed out to me that Mrs Brown’s Boys breaks the fourth wall, like Fleabag, but I don’t think that’s a big inspiration. When Fleabag first hit the Edinburgh Fringe, Waller-Bridge was called “a dirty-talking younger cousin of Miranda Hart”. Miranda breaks the fourth wall too, though in a different way to Fleabag.

Maybe Nineties series This Life, following five twentysomething law graduates sharing a London house, was an influence. Daniela Nardini’s Anna would get on fine in Fleabag’s world (though Waller-Bridge was 11 when it was on, so possibly that’s optimistic). And Vogue called Waller-Bridge “a renegade Woody Allen and a dark-haired Carole Lombard in one”. All of which is a long way of saying she’s a true original.

Alastair McKay, Television Critic

Mind the pay gap between Tube staff

I once worked for London Underground and for Transport for London at blue-collar level. The one thing I could never understand was the gap in pay. What was a train operator doing differently to a railman that deserved any difference in salary?

Look at what a customer service agent does for a living, compared with an automatic train operator (ATO).

The latter opens and closes the train doors, similar to what guards once did, while the former make themselves available to address all passenger needs in any form of language thrown at them.

Their body clocks are equally thrown out of kilter in line with the shift patterns. The rules and regulations in their contracts of employment are basically the same, so why the huge wage difference?

During peak periods it is not the ATOs who are controlling the masses getting on and off the trains but the station staff on duty that day.
Pat Hughes

No will for no deal

Brexiteer politicians continue to conflate majority support for Leave in the 2016 referendum with support for a no-deal exit from the European Union today. Yet there is no evidence of any such mandate from the British people. Jacob Rees-Mogg and others are never effectively challenged on this whenever they claim their right to interpret the “will of the people”.
Ian Morley

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