TV review: Call My Agent
I loved this show. After our holiday in Paris at the end of January I wanted to keep the holiday magic alive. So I finally checked out French comedy Call My Agent/Dix Pour Cent (France Télévision/Netflix 2015–2020) several years after I heard the recommendation from TV critic Rhianna Dhillon. It’s so good I devoured all four seasons within a couple of months.
The show is set at a Paris talent agency, where established agents Andréa (Camille Cottin), Mathias (Thibault de Montalembert), Gabriel (Grégory Montel) and Arlette (Liliane Rovère) manage stars’ – mainly actors – careers, egos and dilemmas. We’re introduced to their world through Camille (Fanny Sidney), a young woman who has come to Paris to confront her estranged father and stumbles into a job as Andréa’s assistant.
This is a light, workplace comedy very much in the vein of W1A, the BBC comedy that satirises the BBC. Genuinely great actors with excellent comedy chops are placed in largely frothy and/or satirical storylines. The guest stars are actual, mostly French, celebrities playing themselves. (Which I admit I did not realise for the first few episodes as I did not recognise the names of the early guest stars. I guess huge celebrity in France does not necessarily mean huge international star.)
Continue reading “TV review: Call My Agent”
For about six months now I’ve been subscribing to the 
In my late teens and early 20s I read almost solely literary fiction, and in particular anything reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement or the broadsheets. This being before social media or Wikipedia, pretty much all I knew about each book would be one article I’d read in the paper. Back then I thought of 
I’ve never read The Odyssey, but for my degree I had to study James Joyce’s Ulysses, which involved a couple of lectures detailing how it follows the structure of Homer’s classic. I’ve intended ever since to give The Odyssey a go but 20 years have passed now. I suspect the closest I will come is modern reworks, including those that tell just part of the story. And the best I’ve read so far is Ithaca by 
Over Christmas and New Year I had almost two weeks off work, so I thought I’d power through four or five books. I’d wrap up cosily from the world in chunky knits and soft blankets; move from bed to sofa to rocking chair; interrupted only by dog walks and meal times. Ha! I think I forgot that Christmas is also a time for trying to see all the family and friends for quality time. And that’s lovely, but does mean despite the truly terrible weather keeping the dog walks short, reading time was also short.
The novel Our Wives Under the Sea by 
I am not a big fan of the novel-within-a-novel device. Invariably I find the secondary narrative either too dull or too abstract to keep my attention, and my interest is only held by the primary story. I found it a little odd, then, that the opposite happened with The Forty Rules of Love by Elif Shafak.
