Ewan McGregor’s Fargo accent is part Abba, part Deputy Dawg
Call me an irrational optimist but, after its deliciously strange and funny start, I’m prepared to believe that Fargo (C4) is back to its finest and will stay that way. Hoo yes, okey-dokey, as they say in Minnesota.
Of course, I made that mistake with Fargo last time round, when the series could not sustain the surreal brilliance of the first episode, with its shoot- outs and UFOs. Over the next ten weeks it dribbled away into slush.
This time it’s more restrained. Not so self-consciously bizarre, less ostentatiously odd. Quirky instead of full-on crazy. Except, that is, for the casting — Ewan McGregor stars as Emmit Stussy, a successful businessman being blackmailed by gangsters, while his frustrated loser of a little brother Ray is played by . . . Ewan McGregor.
During the opening party at smug Emmit’s palatial home, the camera hinted that we would never see them in the same frame. There’s rich Ewan in a white tuxedo, schmoozing his guests, while poor Ewan is in the corner, silently throttling a champagne glass.
But moments later, they were sitting across a desk in Emmit’s den, chatting away as the lens swung between them in a continuous shot.
It was difficult to imagine the two
DELUSION OF THE NIGHT: ‘I know you lot think I’m Pablo Escobar,’ bragged a 15-year-old phone thief arrested on The Met: Policing London (BBC1). The coppers fell about laughing. A billionaire crime lord, this toerag was not.
men were one actor — they barely even looked alike.
They share an accent, though, the Minnesota twang that is part abba, part Deputy Dawg. McGregor has it perfectly.
It’s peculiar that the only actors these days who can do really good american accents are Brits.
Not that David Thewlis bothered. He played a crook with a vault full of dodgy dollar bills that needed laundering, and he sported a North london accent so precise that you could almost identify which street in East Finchley had been his childhood home.
He was denying it, though. When a puzzled Emmit asked where he was from, Thewlis deadpanned: ‘america.’
Fargo, inspired by a 1996 film by the Coen Brothers, revels in its curious details.
Fate hinges on unconsidered trifles, such as the scrap of paper that blows out of a car window: without it, a burglar goes to the wrong house, where he kills the occupant, which leads to his own murder and sets the whole story cartwheeling away . . . all because of a scrap of paper. and it was just such a detail, a spark that sputtered onto a bundle of twigs, that brought about the most famous blaze in history — the Great Fire of london in 1666.
Historians Suzannah lipscomb, Dan Jones and Rob Bell retell the story, filling in much information that is generally forgotten, in The Great Fire (C5) which continues tonight and concludes tomorrow. Every schoolboy knows (or did, when that sort of thing was taught) the conflagration began at a bakery in Pudding lane.
But what your teacher omitted to say was that, in 17th-century England, pudding was not a dessert, but a polite name for offal. That must be why, even today, we don’t eat black pudding with custard.
Much of the show was an arsonist’s delight, explaining how the September winds not only spread the flames but doubled their intensity, and why wattle-and-daub buildings only burn when they are run- down and dilapidated.
Rob even pinpointed the spot where the Great Fire started and laid a blue plaque. Unluckily, it was in the gutter, on a double yellow line.
Plaques on the ground are never a good idea. Spike Milligan saw one on the deck of HMS Victory that read: ‘Nelson fell here.’ ‘I’m not surprised,’ Spike said. ‘I nearly tripped myself.’