CONTAINS SPOILERS
The No. 9 this time is the number of a jury, who are deciding who should win the Best Actress award at a television awards.
The jury is chaired by Giles (Steve Pemberton), who is the associate chair of the Television Accademy. The voting panel consists of television writer Clive (Reece Shearsmith), film and TV director Gordon (Noel Clarke), theatre actor Rupert (Kenneth Cranham), journalist June (Fenella Woolgar), American actress Paula (Zoe Wanamaker) and Jackie (Phoebe Sparrow) who is a dental receptionist who won a competition and is there to give the input of an ordinary member of the public.
Having narrowed the longlist down to four actresses, they have to discuss who they think gave the best performance, and each juror will vote for one of them to win the award. The final four actresses to make the shortlist are Shona Andrews, Dame Dorothy Sutton, Kelly Marsden and Anna Adeyemi.
The initial favourite to win is Shona Andrews, who is a big star, and all the panel thought her performance was good. She played Marie Curie in a biographical drama. Jackie says Shona is “always brilliant”. Jackie goes on to say that she didn’t even know Marie Curie was a real person, and confused her with Marie Claire magazine.
Dame Dorothy Sutton is an established old actress who came through the Royal Shakespeare Company at the same time as Rupert. He admits that she gave him a “handjob in the car park of the Dirty Duck in 1976”. In fact, both Rupert and June say Dorothy is notorious for having slept around quite a bit with people in the industry. Jackie
says she likes Dorothy as she reminds her of her grandma. She also suspects that while the performance Dorothy is nominated for is playing a grumpy old woman, she’s probably really nice in real life. June and Gordon both say, as politely and diplomatically as possible, that “Dame Dotty” isn’t very pleasant in real life either.
Kelly Marsden is a former soap actress who is nominated for playing a gambling addict on a council estate. Jackie says Kelly “made me and my mum cry, she was moving and believable”. June says Kelly has picked up a lot of bad habits from her time in soap, and that it’s too soon for her to win an award. Gordon thinks the same, saying Kelly has auditioned for him a few times and hasn’t got the part.
Anna Adeyemi is a young newcomer who played Trish in Channel 4’s Clickbait. (I love that title, it sounds just like the sort of title they give “edgy” youth focused Channel 4 dramas!)
When it comes to discussing Anna, everyone looks at Gordon. Both he and Anna are black. They are in fact not just the only black people in the shortlist/jury, they are the only POC on at all. Gordon is annoyed that everyone is expecting him to have a “unique insight into all things black” and of the implication he is just there because of his race and not because of his talent. It doesn’t help when Rupert describes Anna as “the coloured girl” and goes on to say they “have to have one”, but that “it’s a good thing”. June tries to stop him digging himself a bigger hole.
Gordon says “Look, it’s not my fault Idris Elba didn’t make a TV show this year so you can all tick your little diversity box and have at it”. He threatens to leave, but is persuaded to come back.
Clive had just agreed with whatever Gordon had said up to this point, as he has sent a script to him and wants it to get made. Now he has to give his opinion before Gordon. He says he thought Anna was brilliant. Jackie says she “couldn’t see Anna acting”, but “in a good way”. Rupert didn’t like Anna’s performance much, and it turns out neither did Gordon, so Clive immediately changes his mind to agree with Gordon!
June once gave Gordon’s directing a bad review. When Gordon mentions this to her, she rather smugly laughs at him and says it doesn’t matter, to which Gordon replies that nothing June does matters. He tells her she’s a parasite who contributes nothing, and that Jackie as a member of the public has more to add to the panel than her. A bit later, June seems a bit taken aback by this. She says she’s invited to every premiere and awards ceremony, walks the red carpet with the stars, visits the sets of her favourite shows… but she has nothing to do with any of it.
Paula is doing a play (which she describes as “a piece of shit”) in the West End, and has a costume fitting at 4pm so wants the voting over and done with. She says every performance “stole [her] heart” and at one point quotes one of June’s reviews word for word as if it’s her own opinion. It’s obvious she hasn’t even watched any of the performances. When Giles brings it up that watching all the performances is the minimum she was supposed to do as a juror, Paula says she doesn’t need to.
She says the four nominees are “types”. The Star (Shona), the Dame (Dorothy), the Girl Next Door (Kelly) and the Ingenue (Anna). To be fair, those same descriptions were mentioned in the preview of this episode. There is some truth I suppose that all actors, actresses, directors and even films/TV show themselves are types if you’re looking at the upshot of it. Paula goes on to say “I vote in the Academy Awards, I picked the best film nine times in the past ten years, and I’ve never seen a motherfucking one of those movies, so trust me, I got this”.
When it comes to voting again, Paula suggests they should eliminate the two younger ones as “it’ll screw up their careers”. Rupert calls her out on this; “You were never one for sending the lift back down, were you?”. Paula replies, bitterly “They can use the stairs like I did”.
At first, it seems that Shona is the clear frontrunner as everyone said they liked her performance, but Clive says it’s so annoyingly predictable. Shona is brilliant in everything, she wins awards in everything, she even won the same Best Actress award last year for a drama she wasn’t in that much. She’s talented, but at this point her success is self-sustaining, she gets awards because she’s a star name. After taking a vote, Clive, Paula, Rupert…. and Jackie vote to remove Shona from the list.
It’s between Kelly and Dorothy. Gordon, Clive and Jackie vote for Kelly. Paula, Rupert and June vote for Dorothy, making it a tie vote. Paula has already requested her Uber, so says she’ll switch to “the other one”. Gordon is irritated by this, so switches his vote to spite Paula. Clive switches as well, as he does whatever Gordon does, and June switches her vote, because she’s annoyed that the whole thing has descended into a farce anyway.
They ask Jackie for her opinion. She says “I’m not clever like all of you. I didn’t realise you had to think about their age or how many other awards they’ve won or who’s popular in the industry”. Then she leaves in tearful embarrassment. But with Jackie gone, there are only 5 voters left, and therefore no chance of a tie, so the others all cast their vote, and then go their separate ways. Kelly Marsden is the winner.
Jackie comes back. Giles says they voted with their hearts and not their heads, and credits Jackie for that. Giles leaves, and Jackie removes her glasses, her eyebrows and… her wig! All along she has, in fact, been none other than Kelly Marsden herself!
There were lots of amusing and interesting highlights sprinkled throughout the episode.
Paula saying “Fuck you, you withered asshole!” to Rupert.
June has interviewed Rupert several times, but he has no idea who she is!
Clive initially thought Jackie worked there rather than was a member of the jury, so asked her to get him a black coffee! That could have got awkward.
Gordon is working on Doctor Who post-production. In real life, Noel Clarke appeared in Doctor Who for a time as Mickey Smith.
Giles is extremely nice about everybody, but I suppose he has to be given his role in the academy.
The jury panel are all awful in quite funny ways.
Clive won a Breakthrough Talent award in 2003, but nothing much has happened for him in his career since. He’s desperate now. The quote that sums him up is when he says about his script “I don’t mind completely changing it if it means it will get made”. All his attempts to suck up to Gordon were a waste of time too, as it turns out Gordon has read Clive’s script, and thinks it’s crap. Clive tells Rupert in the end that he has a part for him in the script . The character is a 30-year-old Japanese woman, but again he’s prepared to change all of that if it’ll get Rupert interested in playing it.
June is…. a bit irritating, to put it mildly. She takes offence at innocuous words like “actress” and “ladies”, but she thinks that children with mental disorders (in her case “a toddler with ADHD”) are fair game for a cheap joke. She is the only one who appears to be taking the decision the panel have to make seriously, but then given everything that happens and even if you ignore the ending, it makes you wonder whether that is a point in her favour or not.
Rupert is an AC-TOR type who complains about TV actors “mumbling”, basically that they don’t shout LOUD and CLEAR enough, which is more necessary on stage, but can come off a bit hammy on TV. He has never even been nominated for an award in his life. He describes Kelly as “flat chested”, as if that matters and like it makes a difference as to whether she should win the award or not. He has extremely outdated views generally, though it’s perhaps not coming from a hateful position. He does make an effort at the end to apologise to Gordon if he offended him.
Paula was nominated for an award, once, and lost to Jessica Lange. Rupert and Paula have met numerous times before, and it soon becomes clear they absolutely hate each other. Paula is incredibly bitter and jaded. Not only does she not care about anything, she doesn’t even bother pretending that she cares. Despite that, I have to admit I somewhat liked Paula, she was my favourite if I had to pick one, partly because I thought she was the funniest. As I said above, I liked her speech about nominees and awards.
I agreed with a lot of what Gordon said, he made a lot of good points. However, he is a bit of an arrogant prick.
Then there’s “Jackie”, or rather Kelly. She goes to some quite extreme lengths just to win an award, going to the trouble of creating a false identity. She gives some very backhanded compliments about Shona and Anna, and she was probably aware of what Dorothy is like in real life, so brought that up to remind the rest of the panel of it. It was only Kelly’s (i.e, her own) performance she praised in any meaningful way. She was the deciding vote to remove her main competition, Shona, from the list. She’s clearly very, very manipulative. She should probably be on the judges panel for The X Factor!
Gordon voted for Kelly, but a phone call we hear him make reveals that he had intended to cast Shona in his upcoming programme. He says if Shona says no (as she might find out that Gordon didn’t vote for her to get this award), then they should give the part to Kelly Marsden! Given that she’s auditioned for Gordon and not got the part a few times, as well as manipulating the panel to vote for her to win an award, Kelly has also managed to blag herself another part!
The episode reminded me a bit of Feud: Bette and Joan, especially Paula. I should have blogged about Feud: Bette and Joan come to think of it, it was a very good series. I may or may not do it at some point in the future, but don’t hold your breath.
A lot of people said they guessed the twist ending of ‘And The Winner Is…’ early on. Granted, it isn’t much of a shock, but personally I’m not even sure a twist was necessary. What was good about this episode was the characters and how they interacted and the satire of the television industry and awards.
headphonedaydreams 