#fitton

Now that we've all suffered watched Good Omens S2, and realized how incredible the one and only John Finnemore is - or possibly just wondered who the hell that man is, let me give you a little introduction to his works!

The most important one first:

He'll probably hate that this will be first one, but ya'll need to know about this. Yes, you will be playing it for the rest of your lives. Yes, you will inflict it on everyone you know. No, you will NOT regret it.

Next up we have the most wonderful Cabin Pressure where he plays Arthur Shappey (after writing the whole damn thing - yes, its funny as hell with an oustanding cast, and yes it will break your heart but i can't stress it enough, it will have a happy ending! Yes, that's a spoiler, but I think this one will be overlooked as we've been through enough heartbreak for a while, no?) It stars John himself as Arthur, Benedict Cumberbatch as Martin, Roger Allam as Douglas and Stephanie Cole as Carolyn. (There are guest appearances by the great Anthony Head as Herc!)

Here's some small excerts from each episode - you can purchase them here or keep an eye on BBC Radio (4), sometimes they do repeats!

Then we have his wonderful Souvenir Programme which IS repeating on Radio 4 right now!

And last but not least because that one will forever have the specialest place in my heart - Arthur Shappey's Lockdown Diary!

There's 26 episodes, getting us through the very first Lockdown back in 2020! Just check them out - I've always adored the man (because he's a sweetheart and the nicest man I've ever met, he's smart and funny and comes up with some insane storytelling!)

So yeah, this is all i can think of right now! Check out his stuff - and leave the man some love!

I've been saying I'd post this and now that I have a nice long day with not much to do, I will- not that I haven't posted about this before. Honestly, one of the most important things to me about Cabin Pressure is that it has a power, shared with very few other things (among them incidentally are one or two key Double Acts), to make me smile/feel better about pretty much anything, no matter how dire, at least for half an hour- and with at least a bit of "afterglow" so to speak lol.

But I've written about it here, and here, and here and here... probably other places too. And I think the thing that impresses me the most is that, so often when I share this, I get loads of people telling me exactly the same thing. I don't know what it is exactly- is it just the comedy? The characters, who are over the top enough not to be IMMEDIATELY identifiable but still relatably human? The clever plots that you can get lost in? The heart and warmth and care? Probably a combination of all of these things.

You'll see some of the more specific examples of the above for me in the links in the prior paragraph, so I'll move on, possibly to a TMI extent, to a more specific thing, that might not surprise people- the impact of Arthur Shappey's Guide to Happiness on me. JF has said, I think, that it's a principle he genuinely holds by, and I know that lots of people agree that it's something that really hits you. And it really hit me too.

So I'll talk a bit about my own journey with it- shifting from being an Arthur to being a Martin (or trying to be). As in, this has concretely helped me become a happier/better person.

I am not exaggerating when I say that every therapist I've ever seen has heard of Cabin Pressure and John Finnemore, and I'm pretty sure all of them have seen the above video from Fitton. Now, like a lot of other people, I really glommed on to the whole idea about how if you expect happiness to come from the big things then you'll end up disappointed when they don't measure up, so find smaller things that will give you smaller pockets of joy in your every day.

Without going into excessive detail, the last few years have been tough for me in some ways. At the time, I was in a terrible work environment that had serious ramifications for my personal life. And I kept on listening to that clip and being like "well yes I can make this better with self care" or whatever. And it did- I'd say it was more make this bearable but at the time that was still a lot.

At one point I was talking to my therapist and she was asking if I felt happy. And I said that on a day to day level I was enjoying myself (there were fun parts of my job, it was a larger situation that was the problem), but that I still often felt really miserable. She asked why and I thought about it and was like- I keep doing random little things but nothing is getting better. I'm still in the same situation I was last week, last month, and last year, and this is lulling me into complacency when the underlying root of the problem hasn't been fixed at all.

So my therapist asked me- what do you mean by complacency? Does that mean you're feeling better/happier than you have been? And I had to think about it but I could definitely say- yes, I was. I'd tried new foods, taken great trips, read interesting books, and had a lot of little pops of enjoyment. The difference was that now that wasn't enough anymore. Then my therapist asked me- "but don't you realize how huge that is? That you're past the hump where something small is the best you can hope for?" And she was right.

The way I think about it, that placement of the clip in Fitton, no matter what JF meant by putting it there and no matter whether he had anything that came later in mind when he did it, ended up just working beautifully. Like, it makes sense that this is coming from Arthur- he's the character who changes the least. He doesn't have to, much, and while I won't go so far as to say he doesn't have the capacity to, even if he did he has a lot of people who are protective of him because they don't think he has the capacity to. He enjoys his life. He doesn't really have any problems and the dreams that he sees as within his reach (aka, not being a "muppet baby pilot") are, for him, on par with the pleasure he gets from throwing an apple back and forth.

It's why Arthur is a great character- he's a reminder of something simpler in all of us. I don't think he's relatable at all, and that's a good thing- what we really love is the way Arthur makes us feel. He's so non-self-absorbed that in the few moments where his equanimity is shaken up, he's so thrown off kilter that we, who are more used to dealing with the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, want to jump in front to protect him from them. We value the simplistic way in which he sees our goodness, because to us, things are more complicated.

But that complication is a good thing! That's what allows us to be more than and better than what we currently are, eventually. That can be really hard- especially when we're brought low, to take the work to improve things for ourselves can feel impossible. It can take love and support, it can take grit, and it can take an existing base of self-regard, but it can be done. Arthur may not need to, but we do.

At the same time, we learn something important from Arthur, and in particular Martin does in Fitton. (Douglas too, but with a different kind of application.) Martin thinks he's where he wants to be, but he KNOWS he isn't- he's not being paid, he's constantly bullying, and the facade he puts on is doing nothing to earn him the kind of respect that his essentially-purchased title should, in theory, entitle him to. To him, the way to get through it is to grit his teeth and keep on pretending, assume that if he carries on as he is (knowing that he's not good enough yet but still trying anyway) then he'll end up making it. But that just makes him more uptight and difficult, in the end.

What Arthur recognizes is that you DO need those little bits of happiness to make the big ones doable! If Martin is going to keep on trying for the big breaks, he'll inevitably fail at least some of the time (in his case, far more lol) and that will just dump him even farther down than he started. You start to curse the wind, because at a certain point you're trying to control forces that are uncontrollable and that will never guarantee happiness, just give you a potential chance at it. Once you've appreciated the smaller things that you CAN control, and you boost your mood and mentality that way, you start to recognize that maybe you can move past where you are. That you can get both the little things, the apple-tossing and singing, as well as the new big things you are striving for.

Arthur will never need to go past that first thing- the character as constructed has no interest in it. But as much as he doesn't understand the END of Martin's journey except when paraphrased for him in the terms of various movies (not all of which he actually understands), he understands the beginning more than Martin does- that he needs to have the small happinesses to build him up and make him be ready for whatever else comes his way.

Because here's the thing- if we all lived like Arthur, we'd never be with the loves of our lives in the moonlight, would we? We'd be worried it could go wrong or we wouldn't fully appreciate it, and anyway everyone would love us as much as we want to be loved already, and we'd be too busy soaking in the bath to care about the other thing. But the non-Arthurs of us are resilient enough to WANT the loves of our lives (well, on average- plenty of people don't but they wiil have their own equivalent bigger-picture and higher-stakes wants) and, as a result, to be willing to take the risk of it not being everything we immediately want it to be. But, if it's NOT what we want it to be, Arthur wisely knows that we need to make sure we have a cushion of smaller happinesses to fall back on in the meantime, to build us up until we can try again.

Impeachable, posted by Tom Fitton & The Blaze

TYRANNY: "Biden has now unilaterally wiped away nearly $138 billion in federal student loans for almost 3.9 million borrowers without a single act of Congress. The student loan bailouts come after the U.S. Supreme Court blocked Biden's initial debt cancellation plan last year, which would have cost more than $400 billion."

MARTIN: Why do they always think you’re the captain, Douglas?

DOUGLAS: Oh, that’s easy. ’Cause I don’t care. Captains don’t care. I’ve been a first officer, been a captain, been a first officer again. All the same to me. So long as you’re happy, who gives a toss how many rings there are on your sleeve? Whereas you always look like you want to be the captain, so people assume you can’t be one. You’ve gotta lose that look.

MARTIN: But I have always wanted to be an airline captain.

DOUGLAS: Really?

MARTIN: Yes, ever since I was six.

DOUGLAS: Ah. And before that?

MARTIN: I wanted to be an aeroplane.

DOUGLAS: I see.

MARTIN: Why – what did you want to be?

DOUGLAS: Oh, various things at different times. I studied medicine at university.

MARTIN: You wanted to be a doctor?

Arthur: “I’m fairly often just completely happy. Like, for instance, when you get into a bath quickly and it’s just the right temperature, and you go ‘ooooh.’ I mean really no one gets any happier than that.”

Martin: “What a depressing thought.”