Alliterative ur-cockney Danny Dyer, the human text from which all other cockneys are cogged, is back acting on our telly screens. This is a good thing. He is a saintly thespian genius, born to the sound of Bow Bells. Behold his scowling boatrace, his weary old mince pies. The things those little black Fisher-Price dots have seen. (He has the head of a Fisher-Price cockney). EastEnders, for example, on which he acted for eight years. Or The Wall, a Netflix quizshow in which Dyer was the hype man for an inanimate glowing wall, feeding it contestant after contestant with affectionate glee.
Look at him in the new comedy series Mr Bigstuff (Wednesday, Sky Max/Now), loquacious, bestubbled, quick on his trotters, the epitome of east London manliness. Does Dublin have an equivalent of Danny Dyer? Old Mr Brennan, perhaps, though Old Mr Brennan is just a disembodied voice, a free-floating dialect, while Dyer is a cockney accent made flesh, created in some estuary Oppenheimer’s lab. Or maybe Mattress Mick, though Mattress Mick wasn’t mentored by Harold Pinter. Danny Dyer, believe it or not, was mentored by Harold Pinter. (Apologies to Mattress Mick if he was mentored by Pinter.) He’s a genuinely good actor.
In this programme, as in life, Danny Dyer is a manic pixie dream cockney, and he is filled with all the counterintuitive wisdom and gently profane chaos that that implies
So confident is Danny Dyer in his sense of self that he named his daughter “Dani Dyer” even though that’s basically the same name. (It was clear to me, even when “Dani Dyer” was on Love Island, that Dani was just Danny in a good wig.) So confident is Danny Dyer in his sense of self that he has leaned into being typecast. Nobody ever says, “Danny Dyer, I would like you to play a flautist having an existential crisis in wartime Budapest,” or, “Danny Dyer, I would like you to play Percy Bysshe Shelley in my impressionistic exploration of romantic poetry,” or, “Five words: Danny. Dyer. Is. Jesus. Christ”. Although they should cast him in all of those roles.
Sadly, casting agents are more inclined to say, “Danny Dyer, I would like you to play a cockney geezer with a penchant for violence but a heart of gold,” and they have him quote not the words of Shelley or Jesus but words like, “We won’t stand here and be treated like utter shit c**ts,” or, “What the f**k? Are you going to plunge me with that object d’art?” Though for all I know those might be lines from Shelley or Jesus. I haven’t read all their poems.
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When we meet Danny Dyer in Mr Bigstuff he is quaffing beer, smoking fags, wearing a leather jacket over a string vest and carrying the ashes of his father in a tin. Before we know it he’s engaging in random violence against employees in a carpet shop or brawling with a semi-naked man in a tanning salon. I can totally imagine Danny Dyer doing both of those things, and probably for a good reason. And I also know that what I’ve just described is merely an average Tuesday for you and that you probably think this is a documentary.
But it’s not a documentary; it’s a comedy drama. Mr Bigstuff is about a meek lower-middle-class striver, Glen (played by the show’s creator, Ryan Sampson), whose troubled life with his kleptomaniacal fiancee, Kirsty (the excellent Harriet Webb), is upended by his estranged brother, Steve, a cockney geezer (guess who) who trails destruction in his wake but also teaches Glen all about assertive if deranged masculinity. In this programme, as in life, Danny Dyer is a manic pixie dream cockney, and he is filled with all the counterintuitive wisdom and gently profane chaos that that implies. Mr Bigstuff is grimily disgusting, broadly funny and occasionally even emotionally profound. That said, I am still holding out for Danny Dyer’s Jesus Christ (a pearly king of kings). Come on, you cowards: cast Danny Dyer as Jesus.
For other models of masculinity you could try Vikings: Valhalla, in which everyone looks a bit Jesusy but acts a bit Danny Dyery. It returns this week for a third and final season on Netflix. Warrior priestess Freydis (Frida Gustavsson) is now the leader of the town of Jomsborg, a Viking settlement filled with artisan craftsfolk, progressive gender politics, pagan spirituality, practitioners of alternative medicine and interesting facial hair. It’s basically Stoneybatter. In the first episode Freydis meets and has sexy shenanigans with a hippie who’s spent a lot of time in India and can’t stop talking about it. That is also the type of thing that happens in Stoneybatter.
In Rome, meanwhile, human metaphor King Canute is petitioning the pope for political support in his schemes against his enemy (the sea, probably); in Sicily, Freydis’s big-brained brother and future “discoverer” of America, Leif Eriksson, is exploring new knowledge from the east, probably in order to start an electronics company. Then there’s Harald the rightful king of Norway, who along with Leif is helping the Byzantine emperor lay siege to a partially CGI fort filled with Saracens. My advice? Attack the fort before it goes into postproduction. It’s all an opportunity to see Viking warriors battle alongside roman centurions against Saracens and possibly cowboys or dinosaurs. I mean, why not? Anyway, Leif and Freydis, unlike some of the other protagonists, are people of culture and learning, and they aspire to higher things than mere conquest. But they are also, thankfully, people of braining baddies with swords, so when they aren’t thinking high-minded thoughts they’re balletically murdering people. This is, lest anyone tell you otherwise, fun to watch.
In The Locals (Monday, RTÉ1), Luke McManus’s fly-on-the wall documentary about the local elections in another former Viking stronghold, the stabbing and gouging is all metaphorical. McManus follows a selection of candidates in north-inner-city Dublin as they canvass and campaign and ultimately win or lose seats on Dublin City Council.
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He does it with a very light touch. The film captures small but telling moments of comedy and drama from the canvass: a neighbour talking movingly about how the Independent candidate Geraldine Molloy was kind to her late son; a constituent barracking Ray McAdam of Fine Gael for allegedly failing to send a letter; the former lord mayor Nial Ring making a fry-up for his mother on count day; Daniel Ennis of the Social Democrats rushing from the count to go to his child’s christening; the inflammatory anti-migrant campaigner Malachy Steenson maintaining that Martin Luther King, whose picture sits in his office, would support his candidacy; Ennis at a football match between locals and international-protection applicants insisting that politicians need to support everyone in their community.
A candid look at politics in Dublin's north inner city
There’s a lot in this film. It stands as a tribute to grassroots democracy and kind-hearted activism in a vulnerable community, but it also documents something more cruel and more divisive entering the mainstream of Irish politics for the first time. I hope McManus makes a similar film about the next general election.
