Friday 3 June 2011

Getting Shifty

A very brief pointer to something, other than piles of marking, taking up my evenings.

Co-editor Simon very kindly pointed me to the fact that the whole first series of a bizarre situational comedy from Iceland, Nightshift, is available on BBC iplayer (sorry, UK only international fanz! :-((().

It's still on for about 4 days. All 12 episodes. They're just shy of half an hour each. That's about 6 hours of your time, not a moment wasted.

I can't review it beyond that because everything Simon said about the show to me in advance basically upset me while I was watching it. Every bit of comedy he pointed to, which sounded hilarious in description, turned out to be extremely upsetting material when presented in character context. It was almost as bad as that time he told me about that Faulkner chaper in As I Lay Dying, "My mother is a fish." At the time it sounded hilarious, but when I read it, it made me want to cry.

Worse still, it's taken four years for this to make it over to the UK and since then, they've released two more series (Day Shift and Prison Shift) and a full length film based around the insane shift manager. It apparently outdid Avatar in Iceland. Look, just go watch all of it, quickly, then post up some comments explaining to me why I should have been marking instead, if you can.