Patrick Freyne: Twink connects with the birds, not just the incontinent cockatiel on her shoulder

It makes sense that an entertainment professional such as Lucy Kennedy or indeed the entire Virgin network would need to take in lodgers at this difficult time. It was also necessary to change the old title, Living with Lucy, because that was thought to be too optimistic a title, and Hopefully Not Dying with Lucy was considered a little on the nose. Lodging with Lucy, on the other hand, conjures up the spectre of a lost Patrick Hamilton novel all about a boarding house run by a nefarious busybody during the second World War. It's perfect.

This is the best Lodging with Lucy (Monday, Virgin Media One) episode, because in it she is joined by Adele King aka Twink, formerly of the 1970s terror organisation/pop group Maxi, Dick and Twink and omnipresent on the cathode ray tube when I was a boy.

Lucy Kennedy has employed a young person to cook for her so she can lounge around giving Adele King aka Twink the inquisitive side-eye. She explains who Twink is to this young man because he is in his 20s and so all he can remember is this damned dirty pandemic, and the most ancient show he's ever heard of is Tiger King (no relation to Adele).

Lucy explains that Twink was a big star in the before-times but not to call her Twink because Adele King is her true name. Twink, she explains, is just someone Adele King occasionally transforms into, much like Bruce Banner transforms into the Hulk or grapes transform into wine.

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Twink's house is reputedly like the Garden of Eden, with ocelots and ducks and ospreys wandering around it

Adele King aka Twink arrives in a chauffeur-driven car with an actual cockatiel on her shoulder. Why does she have a cockatiel on her shoulder? Whisht you! She is Adele King aka Twink and her ways are not our ways. The cockatiel is named Timberlake and he lives on Twink’s shoulder happily chirping and pooing away there. Twink doesn’t care. “What of it?” her demeanour seems to say. “What of Adele King aka Twink’s shoulder-cockatiel?”

She is also accompanied by her consigliere and business partner, Teddy Bear, a small, taciturn terrier. Teddy Bear is always announced with both his Christian and surname at once, presumably for legal reasons. Soon Lucy is swaddling Teddy Bear in blankets and carrying him around as though he is a young Christ.

Menagerie

This is just a small, mobile part of Adele King’s menagerie. Her house is reputedly like the Garden of Eden, with ocelots and ducks and ospreys wandering around it. Inspired by this, Lucy invites a bird expert around to give Twink falconry lessons. Soon she’s in the grounds with an actual huge bird of prey on her arm. “Finally, it has happened,” we all think, “they have weaponised Twink.”

But just as we’re quoting Yeats’s The Second Coming, the falconer explains that the bird responds only to food, and Twink disagrees. She argues that it’s possible to connect with birds in a way that transcends food. She really sells the argument and I find myself siding with her. I would happily cower in terror from Twink’s army of falcons, cockatiels and terriers knowing that they were hunting me not out of self-interest, but love.

Here’s the thing: she’s an interesting woman. As well as being an all-round singing, dancing, comedic multi-threat, she paints (pretty well, really). She makes decorative cakes. And there’s an incontinent cockatiel sitting on her shoulder.

Moreover, she’s aware that some have reduced her authentic life choices to a two-dimensional cartoon and she doesn’t like it. She’s soon telling Lucy (a good listener) about her pride in her children (her daughter turns up); the bad treatment she receives from the press (I feel guilty); the fact she may lose her home if the pandemic doesn’t let up (showbiz is an unforgiving biz); the fact she once considered a career in neurology (people are complex); and the time Teddy Bear was kidnapped by nefarious kidnappers (this really happened and is genuinely upsetting so don’t make jokes). I like Twink. She’s living her own life unhindered by other people’s narrow expectations and things are hard for performers right now. Give her more telly gigs.

Reductive

On Brave New World (Friday, Sky Atlantic), an adaptation of the Aldous Huxley novel, everyone is also reduced to a type. Every character is an alpha, a beta, an epsilon or, indeed, a savage, just like in The Irish Times (I've argued for years that this is very reductive; yet it's still on our payslips). In recent years, people have regularly referenced Neil Postman's observation that our current dystopia is rooted more in Huxley's predictions of a future filled with pill-popping hedonists distracted by novelty than in Orwell's sad, oppressive police state in 1984. The fact that Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death is now largely consumed as a memefied soundbite is a measure of how right he was. I mean, I was going to pretend for a moment I'd actually read the book, but no, the sad truth is that I saw something on Twitter.

Brave New World is actually pretty compelling and, apart from the badly lit orgies, very well conceived

In the utopia/dystopia of New London, there is no privacy, no family (babies are conceived in "hatcheries") and no monogamy. As a consequence, everyone dresses in clothes from Gap, is heavily medicated with a drug called "soma" and goes to big public orgies where the music is terrible and everyone wriggles nudely like a limby snake. Seriously, what is it with all of the sensuous writhing at future orgies? Is writhing "sexy" now? Did the last Irishman say, "Any chance of a writhe?" and they've just been following through on this centuries-old misunderstanding? (I know you're thinking, "Don't invite Freyne to the orgy; he's just going to be hyper-critical," so I'll move on.)

Prissy

We enter into the lives of two slightly dissatisfied residents of high-tech New London. There’s a prissy alpha named Bernard (Harry Lloyd) who has status anxiety, and a frustrated beta named Lenina (Jessica Brown Findlay) who is a little less well defined in her disaffection. But both are similarly unenthused by the orgies. They go on a rocket to the savage lands, an America of pick-up-trucks and guns that doesn’t look too different from contemporary America. There, at a special theme park where locals curate the worst of their drunk and violent culture (we know the gist – we have Temple Bar), they get caught up in an uprising involving a young savage who can still feel love, has a human mother rather than a lab and listens to Radiohead on a ye olde mp3 player (nobody’s perfect).

It's actually pretty compelling and, apart from the badly lit orgies ("Jesus, enough with the orgy critiques, Freyne"), very well conceived. It's a bit more high-stakes than the book. That's one of the problems with adapting classic dystopias. In Brave New World or 1984 or A Handmaid's Tale or the Soviet Union or theocratic Ireland, the mood of dread comes from the essential inescapability of the system. Serialise those stories and there needs to be a stronger sense that the goodies might persevere and that evil things can crumble. Which, all in all, might be something we need to feel right now.

It’s that or wear cockatiels on our shoulders.