When the scandals of the past weeks make their fictionalised debut — courtesy of James Graham, or perhaps Charlie Brooker — it will be Carrie Johnson’s surprise party for Boris Johnson that elevates mere TV drama into art. The surprise party.
Is there a more potent dramatic device? It just reveals so much about the characters involved. The surpriser, well-meaning, exposing for all to see just how well they know their friend. The surprisee: expected to be grateful for this sudden turn of events. The whole thing: precarious, revealing any weak links among the guests.
Who likes surprise parties? Someone with nothing to hide. They’re a staple of TV shows that want to unmask a dissembler. In Mad Men, Don Draper is given a surprise party and hates it — he has after all lied about his identity, and it isn’t really his birthday. In Bojack Horseman, a philanderer makes his confession as he walks in the door, leaving his mortified friends crouching in the dark behind the sofas.
Sometimes surprise parties reveal the gap between the way characters see themselves and the way others do. There are those that make someone confront their unpopularity — Lucille, in Arrested Development, shouting her own “surprise!” to what turns out to be an empty room (no-one has turned up), or Sharon in Catastrophe realising just how “petite” her social circle is.
There are those that out a control-freak. Fleabag’s sister arranges her own (“I don’t want to know anything about this surprise party but if you could just have it at mine, this Friday at 7.30, that’d be great.”) There are those that reveal just how little the organiser knows the birthday boy: in Succession, a character vying for the top job seals her doom by preparing a huge surprise party for the patriarch Logan, who hates them. Don Draper’s is held by his new wife — it only heralds problems between them. What did Carrie’s surprise party reveal?
Perhaps the faintest bat-squeak of a misunderstanding when it comes to Boris’s character: friends have said he has to “gear himself up” for social events, which he finds draining (he stayed just 10 minutes at this one). And of course a belief among the party-givers that lockdown rules might be broken.
But in the hands of a gifted dramatist, it would be something more sinister. In 1997’s The Edge, young lovers played by Alec Baldwin and Elle Macpherson are deceiving her husband, an older Anthony Hopkins. Baldwin’s character will later try to kill him. How is this foreshadowed? A surprise party.
A frail-ish Hopkins is sent downstairs to make a sandwich. It is a mountain lodge in bear country. Suddenly a huge bear rears up out of the darkness, and Hopkins almost has a heart attack. Someone whips the costume off, and as Hopkins sits drained and white, the party starts around him.
This is a surprise party as an act of aggression. Had someone planned to end Boris’s career with a party — in the very room where lockdown rules were made, with the undeniable trappings of cake — they couldn’t have done it with more panache. It’s just such good material. I hope someone makes use of it.
An inspiration to us all
Who says a tweet can’t make a difference? Last week food poverty campaigner Jack Monroe tweeted about how current measures “underestimate the real cost of inflation as it happens to people with the least”. Monroe gave examples of the price rises in some of the staple products such as rice and pasta in local stores.
It turns out that while posher fare, such as ready meals, has not gone up by much, others — towards the cheaper end of the scale — have risen hugely. Despite record profits, it seems that supermarkets have been squeezing their poorest customers.
This week, the Office for National Statistics announced it will change the way it collects and presents inflation data — with a breakdown that shows how it affects different income groups.
In the future, it says, it will increase the number of price points it measures. In the world of activism this must be some sort of record.
An inspiration to us all.
