Kellams: This is Ozarks at Large. It is time to bring our culture vulture, April Wallace, back into the studio. She’s also an instructor at the University of Arkansas. Welcome back.
Wallace: Hello. How are you?
Kellams: Very good. We’re leading up to Halloween on Saturday.
Wallace: We are. My children are reminding me constantly.
Kellams: What are you going to recommend this week?
Wallace: I am just off in Bake Off land. It’s just that time of year, and I love it so much. “The Great British Baking Show,” as it’s known here in the States. Are you a fan?
Kellams: I am. I believe our household discovered it, like so many others, during the pandemic.
Wallace: Yes.
Kellams: And we found the earliest seasons, but I thought it was very uplifting, very comforting, very supportive.
Wallace: I do love this more than any of the other culinary shows because they are not soft on contestants. It is very uplifting, but the way that they give critique is so balanced. It’s so focused on technique.
And all of the contestants, if you haven’t seen it, are amateurs. They’re just home bakers who do this for their friends and family. And they practice a lot and they make some really lovely things. But I like that the feedback is always, you know, “You did this part right. And I can see, you know, what flavor combination you were going for there, but it just didn’t work this time.”
Kellams: Wasn’t spongy enough.
Wallace: Right. Right. Sponge, as they call it in Britain, is cake.
Kellams: And I guess it has a similar appeal to, I used to watch “American Idol.” There’s a similar, like, you know, you’re rooting for the people. It’s a little less about their abilities and a little more about, like, getting to know them.
Wallace: Right. But this has a very different feel from “American Idol.” I just really love that it celebrates diversity, in particular not just of ethnicities, but, like, cultural backgrounds. Any time a contestant makes a dish from their homeland and talks about, you know, how their grandmother used to make it, or how it used to bring people together over a holiday that maybe they don’t celebrate in the U.K., that is seen as exceptional on the show. And they always love it, and they always help give a little more attention to our differences, but to celebrate them.
Kellams: So there are still new seasons.
Wallace: Yes. It’s currently in a new season right now on Netflix.
Kellams: Netflix. OK.
Wallace: And if you really like it, there’s also a “Junior Bake Off.” So watching children do baking is an extra level of fun.
Kellams: I bet.
Wallace: And in the other direction, there is a “Bake Off Professionals,” which is a little more stringent. Also this week, I’d love to recommend “Dead Like Me.”
Kellams: Good, because I thought we were doing, through Halloween, I thought we were going to have darker comedies.
Wallace: Yes, obviously, “Bake Off” is not that. Sorry.
Kellams: No.
Wallace: “Dead Like Me” is, though. This one was released in 2003, and you can find it on Prime. It centers around George Lass, played by Ellen Muth. And she is an 18-year-old grim reaper. And no, she does not wear the black cloak or carry the scythe, but she looks like a normal person walking around in typical life.
She met her untimely death when a toilet seat fell from the International Space Station and reentered the Earth’s atmosphere and landed directly on her. She, at the time, was struggling to get into the next phase of life because she had dropped out of college after a very brief stint and found herself at the Happy Time Temp Service, where she and her very unimpressed attitude were trying to find a job without luck. They told her she needed more education, she needed more training and she, most of all, needed to learn to smile, which she does not do.
Unfortunately, in the afterlife, she finds that she still needs a job. She gets pulled into this group to become a grim reaper. They need a certain amount of undead to help people cross over into the afterlife, so she finds that it’s not going to get her out of learning things and learning to work with people. Her manager is Rube, played by Mandy Patinkin of “Homeland” fame. Oh, and so they’re a wonderful duo.
He is rightly tough on her when needed, but such a comic relief. The show is very dark. You watch people die every single episode, but it’s also very funny. I realized, saying that out loud now, it doesn’t sound funny.
Kellams: No, no, no, no. I think we get the idea.
Wallace: Sure. It’s tongue-in-cheek. It’s, so this sounds, you know, there’s also the show “The Good Place,” which was about a woman who gets transported to the next realm. And she, too, finds out that there’s bureaucracy and chores and responsibilities. Interesting that, and they kind of came out within the same time frame.
Kellams: I don’t like to think of the afterlife with bureaucracy.
Wallace: Yeah.
Kellams: I think I’d be unimpressed as well. We have enough of that.
Wallace: Yes, exactly. Well, there’s plenty of supernatural stuff in this. And enough of the, you know, the relationships with other grim reapers and, you know, getting to know their group dynamic. But also, she’s not the one killing people. She’s there to actually help them. Yeah. So there are these things called gravelings that do the actual action of the death.
Kellams: There used to be a show called “Touched by an Angel,” but I think there was a character in that show, because they were angels and it was supernatural, and I think they were trying to make them, I think it was a very family-friendly show. But OK, you’ve seen it, but wasn’t there also a character in that that was kind of the angel of death, like when this angel showed up?
Wallace: That’s a really good point. Yes, yes, there was. I haven’t thought about that one in a while, but yeah, good connections. It’s just, these are very different tones. Yes, yes, it’s worth the watch. I think episodes are about an hour long.
Kellams: OK. And there were several seasons?
Wallace: Three, four. Yes, I think three.
Kellams: OK.
Wallace: It did not go on forever, but it was...
Kellams: None of us do.
Wallace: Touché. For a book this week, I would recommend “The Ocean at the End of the Lane” by Neil Gaiman.
Kellams: Yes, I’ve not read this, but I want to.
Wallace: I’m going to leave you my copy.
Kellams: What?
Wallace: Because it’s, I know I’ll get it back from you.
Kellams: Yeah. Yeah. Oh, my goodness. It looks like it’s something that can be read in a day or two.
Wallace: It is. It’s under 200 pages. Yeah. Honestly, Neil Gaiman meant it to be a novella, and it is technically over that, but it is a short book.
Kellams: Gotcha.
Wallace: This is less fantasy-driven than his other titles. So if you know his other works, which are fantastic, this is a little more rooted in reality. But it does have magic. It is very dark, very mysterious and mystical. But a middle-aged man returns to his childhood home to attend a funeral, and as he’s sitting there, he begins to remember many things from his childhood that he had forgotten, including relationship with his friend Lettie and her mother and grandmother. All this stuff comes flooding back, and it’s very character- and feeling-driven, which is not like Neil Gaiman’s other works.
I listened to an interview of him talking to a crowd at Google. It was one of their, like, associates, sort of special events about this book. And he said he wrote it for his wife when she was in Australia making an album. She’s a musician, and he missed her a lot. And she was very involved in the creation of the album. And so he thought, “OK, our daily text exchange is ‘I love you. The end.’ So I’m going to write you something.”
And he decides to use some autobiographical elements of his life to create a short story for her. And so there is a 7-year-old boy that is the main character, and some of it is from his life. But he decides, “She’s not a big fantasy reader,” even though he writes a lot of fantasy.
Kellams: Yeah.
Wallace: So he dials down the fantasy, and he thinks about, “What else does she like? Well, she likes me, so I’ll put in things for my life. She likes feelings. I do not, because I am a man and British. I’ll just have fun with this.” So he starts to write the short story and realizes it’s not a short story, it’s a novella. And then he writes more and more and gets into it and realizes it’s a book. He makes some calls, and it becomes arguably one of his most popular.
Kellams: Yes.
Wallace: A lot of people responded really well to it, but it has just enough. I think you could finish it in an afternoon. I think I took it on a weekend trip and it just blew through it. But it is fantastic. I would recommend it to anyone.
Kellams: It’s Neil Gaiman, “The Ocean at the End of the Lane.” You also recommended “Dead Like Me,” which can be found on Amazon Prime, and “The Great British Bake Off” show, which most of the 2,000 seasons can be found on Netflix. And it’ll be post-Halloween the next time we talk.
Wallace: Well, I hope you have a very good one.
Kellams: I hope you do, too.
Wallace: Can’t wait.
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