Tommy Saxondale: Rock and Roller
Burried somewhere beneath the long, grey mop of hair, the beard, and the protruding gut of Tommy Saxondale is Steve Coogan, the brilliant actor who created Alan Partridge for the BBC a decade ago. Over the past few years he’s been popping up sporadically throughout various American movies (and better British movies), but has found himself back on the BBC as the writer/star of a new series, Saxondale, which premieres tonight on BBC-America at 11:00pm.
This afternoon I checked out the first two episodes of the series. Loved it. Here, Coogan has created one of the more “American” British series in recent memory. Clearly the original Office seemed to have a lot of American influence (though maybe that’s just the universal nature of how offices work in the first place). Saxondale, on the other hand, seems to be more direct. Tommy is always seen wearing USA t-shirts, he drives a suped-up Mustang, watches Pimp My Ride and dates a woman who runs a head-shop at the mall. Perhaps what the show suggests is the notion of British people who have never been to America, completely embracing American culture, though this is coming from someone who has never been to Britain commenting on their views of America, so who the hell knows.
More directly, the series follows Tommy Saxondale, an aging ex-roadie currently making a living as an exterminator. He also is in possibly court-ordered group therapy to deal with his explosive rage. In the first episode, Tommy hires a teenager to help him with his extermination business, and ends up letting the kid live with he and his girlfriend Meg. What I love about Tommy is his simultaneous embrace of a counter-culture lifestyle, and yet complete rejection of that culture when some of his seedier side shows itself in public. He’s a man living by his own rules who, maybe deep down, wishes he were a little more mainstream.
Either way, its definitely worth checking out.
