A MATTER OF DEATH AND LIFE

A Review of "Wooden Overcoats" by Christopher Dole

“This is the universe. Big, isn’t it?”These are the first words of Powell and Pressburger’s masterpiece A Matter of Life and Death. One of the most swooning romances ever committed to film, A Matter of Life and Death tells the tale of how love can conquer anything from inter-continental differences to mortality itself. Its electrifying opening shows us the vast celestial sphere before slowly moving in on our little planet, and then to our two star-crossed lovers. The cosmic and human are given equal weight – because, after all, they’re all we’ve got.These are also, thrillingly, the first words of the series finale of Wooden Overcoats, the story of two sibling undertakers on a tiny island that has literally never affected the wider world (the village archives prove it!), their “great-at-everything” assistant, and their rivalry with the cheery new-to-town undertaker whose arrival kicks off this tale. At first blush, perhaps this is less cosmic a tale than its predecessor, and yet even though Wooden Overcoats ends up gleefully deflating the iconic plane crash sequence that follows this interstellar narration, it ends up achieving a similarly universal emotion on an equally boundless scale: the joys of life amid death, and how and why we endure.For, indeed, Wooden Overcoats is a series bursting with life. It practically overflows with it. Nowhere is this more clear than the character of Antigone Funn, a woman who begins the series so isolated in her mortuary that most of the village believes she died years ago. It takes the arrival of Eric Chapman (the definition of an ideal sitcom archnemesis – apparently effortlessly perfect and alluring, the promise of every thwarted ambition Antigone and her brother Rudyard share) to finally coax her out. But once she does, Antigone discovers an unusual knack for personal reinvention. She is constantly trying things, from making chocolates to directing plays to writing pornography, and always ready to leap at the next creative challenge. She becomes the thematic center for so much of the show’s exploration of yearning – whether to be understood, to find romance, or simply to live. Despite her corpselike “creepy girl” front (the shadows are her companions), Antigone is always trying to step into the light, embracing life far beyond the corpses in her mortuary. And even there, she remains endlessly imaginative, turning embalming fluids into art. In the midst of death, life creeps in.If Antigone is in constant progression forward, her brother Rudyard is the consummate stick-in-the-mud. He will not move for the world, the world must move for him. It rarely does, unfortunately. A lesser show would turn this comic type into a tormented figure of fun who brings bad things upon himself, without any redeeming qualities, a classic unsympathetic protagonist. Time after time he is offered the chance to be better, to improve upon himself. He rarely takes those chances. And yet Wooden Overcoats uncovers the graces and nuances in his stubbornness and absurd rages, his desire to turn back the clock to the days when the Funns held the monopoly on Piffling Vale’s funerals. It’s telling that he is the originator of the show’s iconic “Other people are all there is” line, delivered so off-handedly it’s almost as though he can’t believe he has to say it. When he finds himself as the village archivist, not only is he granted the gravity he long sought, but his belief in the past (and what’s important about it) is precisely the key that opens the door to a long-sought victory for everyone in Piffling Vale. And there are certain things which he is immutably right about. Chief among them, his belief about the importance of funerals. Even if (as the series begins) he can’t quite get them right, he knows how fundamental a proper memorial is to the human experience. You’ve got to get the body in the coffin in the ground on time.Unexpectedly, this is something he has in common with the endlessly breezy Eric Chapman, his archnemesis. Now, Eric is a fellow who has no problem being liked, or seemingly accomplishing miracles, bringing excitement and flash to memorial services and gaining the respect the Funns crave. His motto “Enjoy yourselves!” is delightfully loathsome, the blithe arrogance of the man who has everything. And yet the trick Wooden Overcoats pulls off with him is perhaps even trickier than it does with the Funns. Chapman could simply be a golden boy type, an unbreaking wall for the Funns to throw themselves at and beat themselves against for their own amusement. Or he would simply be a slick con man pulling the wool over the eyes of everyone but the Funn Funerals team. Yet in practice Chapman is both – and something more too. His likability flows from a desperate need to be liked, a hole in himself that he needs to fill. There is a core sincerity to him that pulls all these pieces together into something richer. And at the center of it, there is a rock-solid principle he shares with Rudyard: Death deserves dignity. Save the absurdity for life.For all its hilarity (and Wooden Overcoats is a wildly funny show), it’s that sincerity that gives the show its juice. And the balance between the two allows for something quite remarkable in its cast. Even as they’re acting ridiculous, they’re taken seriously because we understand exactly why they’re acting ridiculous. Which means that in any given episode, a character can serve as the lead, they can serve as a major supporting character, or they can serve as comedic spice just popping in and out exactly when it’s needed. It’s an exceptional balancing act – one many shows aspire to, but full pull off so adroitly.Take Georgie Crusoe, the fourth key member of this ensemble, the Funn’s beleagued “I can do it all” assistant (and briefly the target of Eric’s romantic advances, though her interests lie in a different direction). At the start of the series, Georgie is primarily a supporting character, wielder of the catchphrase “I’m great at [insert whatever the show needs her to be great at]”. Yet as the show goes on, Georgie grows to occupy more and more of the dramatic center as we learn her own ambitions, her hopes and dreams, and also what roots her to Funn Funerals, what makes it more than just a job. “Putting the Funn in Funerals,” the third season finale and arguably its finest episode, is centered on her backstory, finally revealing how she came to Piffling Vale, and her greatest moment of crisis. Along with Antigone, she is one of the show’s great engines against stagnation – while Antigone seeks to express herself, Georgie seeks excitement and growth, the struggle between the desire to see it all and the desire to find a place to belong. She could be described as the show’s secret beating heart – if not for the fact that the whole ensemble is the show’s beating heart.Ambition abounds throughout this series, as it must throughout life. There is no character who does not want some kind of advancement, who is not actively seeking change and improvement. From Mayor Desmond Desmond’s desire to grow Piffling Vale from village to town, to Jennifer Delacroix (Piffling FM)’s want to move her radio station beyond her parent’s kitchen, to Dr. Edgeware’s simple need to just take a damn nap if people wouldn’t keep ending up in one of his two hospitals, everyone is looking for something more. The Reverend Wavering, for example, is introduced as a very silly comic type: a preacher who openly isn’t sure whether or not to believe in God. Yet he too nourishes his own dreams – those of being an erotic author. It’s a long story. And a good one! For as much as Piffling Vale seems a small village where nothing much changes, it is positively replete with creative endeavors – the circus, the cinema, novelists, journalists both print and radio. These all keep building the impression of a world bursting at the seams to be something more, to show everyone that they can be more than what they currently are. And so life bursts forth. Life is unstoppable. Even as our protagonists’ business is death, they cannot stop living. Even if Rudyard and Antigone are in a stupor akin to the bodies they put in the coffin in the ground on time when the series begins, as much as Chapman forces them to adapt, the desire was always there. They just needed a spur. And so, they do not change. They simply become more thoroughly themselves.But it’s not simply creative yearning that runs wild on Piffling Vale. Romance and sexuality barely simmers under the surface. Again, Antigone is a central figure here. The conflict between her desires and her repression is writ large across the whole cast (save Rudyard, who cares not for such things). Her cinema habit is French erotica – but, hilariously, only the most exceptionally boring ones. It’s a sublime contrast in how far she will go to sublimate what she wants. But it’s not just her. “Sexy literature” is a frequent pastime on the island. When a nude calendar is suggested as a possible fundraiser to save a landmark, the people of Piffling Vale leap to it with aplomb, characters of all ages, sexualities, and genders taking part. Yet there is romance too. While Desmond Desmond and Nigel Wavering are often two of the silliest characters in their show, their romance is very sweet, a necessary balm to the darkness of Georgie’s loss at the end of Season 3. Speaking of Georgie, her romance with Jennifer Delacroix (Georgie’s girlfriend) becomes the center of one of Season 4’s best episodes, a touching tale of work-life balance that also involves a good ol’ comedy angry mob. But it all comes back to Antigone and Chapman. What begins as hilarious under-her-breath mutterings of lust from Antigone grows to mutual respect, to the recognition of kindred spirits, to (perhaps) something even more. To go back to A Matter of Life and Death, of course they’re cast as the two lovers separated by eternity who must struggle past all the forces of the divine to reconnect. Their funeral parlors may be only across the square, but it seems an equally impossible distance to cross. By the end of the show, they begin (tentatively) to cross it.Now, from what we’ve detailed before, it might be easy to guess that Wooden Overcoats is a gloopy bit of saccharine. That is decidedly not the case. Despite all this heart, Wooden Overcoats is sublimely, riotously funny. It can be gleefully mean, it careens from farce to shaggy dog story to spoof, but above all else it is funny. One episode turns the simple line “I’ll park the car” into one of the finest running gags in any episode of audio fiction (few shows do running gags better, whether in one episode or across the whole series, and this may be the apex of that achievement). Rival attempts to provide grief counseling go hilariously awry due to Chapman’s need to put a sunny spin on everything and Rudyard trying to literally make every word count. An investigation into who nicked a fiver from the Village Council turns into a delicious spin on Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. And yes, there’s a clown funeral. For many, many clowns, each body revealed in turn as Rudyard stumbles across them lying everywhere in Funn Funerals with a thud and a honking horn, a slow-burn sequence that just gets funnier and funnier with each thud and honk. Physical comedy isn’t always easy in an audio medium, but somehow Wooden Overcoats pulls it off.And of course, if we’re talking about the gleeful absurdity of Wooden Overcoats, we must spare a word for our narrator Madeline, the “funeral house mouse” whose desire to pen a bestseller leads her to tell her memoirs of living with the Funns, Georgie, and Chapman. Putting the tale from a literal mouse’s-eye point of view is a thoroughly delightful conceit, balancing Madeline’s worldliness and wry point of view with her very small physical stature. And yet she too nurses ambitions far beyond her ken. Her deliciously droll take on events provides the proper grounding, even as she is arguably the wildest conceit of the story.I would be remiss, I suppose, in not naming the wildly talented cast and crew who pull this show off. And yet what can be said about them? That time and time again they nail it? That Felix Trench (Rudyard), Beth Eyre (Antigone), Tom Crowley (Chapman), Ciara Baxendale (Georgie) and Belinda Lang (Madeline) are one of the strongest central ensembles in any audio fiction show, able to deliver whatever the show asks of them at the drop of a hat? That Andy Goddard and John Wakefield direct and produce it to a tee? That James Whittle’s score hits the nail on the head (given that properly scoring comedy is actually one of the trickier prospects in scoring, a sterling achievement indeed)? And, of course, that David K. Barnes as the head writer executes the evolution of the show with dazzling precision as it moves from a more blackly comedic Season One towards its warmer resolution in Season Four – while still not losing the funny.It's telling how a series ultimately ends. There are points in the final season where it seems like the show could be going for a darker ending, or perhaps something more definitive. But instead, life goes on in Piffling Vale – though not as it has before. Change does come, and change is good, but it does come with melancholy as well. And our final grace note is one of comic chaos. Rudyard, Antigone, Chapman, Georgie, Madeline, and all the good citizens of Piffling Vale (except the ones whose bodies were put in the coffin in the ground on time) will continue on, not with everything solved, but perhaps with everything moving forward. Or not! Everyone backslides often enough, but they’re still making progress anyways.So let’s return to the opening of the series finale, that daring extended allusion to A Matter of Life and Death. Quite frankly, A Matter of Life and Death would be an appropriate alternate title for this series. Whether Antigone writes a smutty book, or gets to watch the erotic and boring French cinema she chooses, if Georgie finally gets to ride in a helicopter, if Desmond and Nigel get married, if Rudyard can finally get a new kettle – these, to them, are matters of life and death, just as important as the funerary rites they all must carry out. Or perhaps we should slightly tweak it, to reflect the true order of things here: A Matter of Death and Life. Because Wooden Overcoats does not end with death. That’s just the start of things. You’ve rather got to keep living, and keep living for other people. They’re all there is.