After Life

I recently discovered a hole in my life, nothing of major concern, but I was on the hunt to fill the void left following completing some binge worthy television. So after hearing a radio show with Ricky Gervais talking about the third series of the After Life, I thought I’d dip my toe in to see if the show would grab my attention and whether it would fill that hole.

I liked many of his previous shows, I find his style to be what I would label ‘self-conscious comedy’. The sort of humour that you find yourself trying to control, you can’t explode into laughter without first checking your surroundings, comedy where you need to check if your own moral compass is working fine before allowing yourself to relinquish the social norms of political correctness, where you need to quickly ask yourself will the woke-army cancel me if I laugh at this. This is exactly what Ricky Gervais does best, he sticks two fingers up at canned laughter, and makes us squeam before we smile. Our in-breath is used to see if it’s ok to consider if this is funny and then on the out-breath chuckle ourselves into submission.

I enjoyed several of his past series in this way, I found the Office amusing, but not laugh out loud, but this was my own awkwardness, seeing how I prided myself on being a corporate monkey at the time. The show Extras was brilliant, notwithstanding that pre-laughter sense-check, it was truly brilliant. And so I ventured into watching After Life with the same level of excitement.

Oh my! I was wrong about this TV show, and that’s meant in a good way. I watched the series right from the first episode and I will aim to navigate without offering spoilers, after all I’m not really one for writing reviews. The show centres around grief, depression, and self-worth, with a heavy sprinkling of common decency, warmth, love and empathy. Of course, there are plenty of funny moments, probably more than I originally noticed. As I watched episode after episode, I found that I was bingeing for different reasons than I had with previous Ricky Gervais shows.

This show was one of the most honest portrayals of grief and depression that I’ve ever seen. Yes, it was carried along by the humous rebellion that all his past work is laced with, but it had something far more grounded and serious at its core. The fact that the show was based on a true loves’ lost, a life-partner taken from him by the cruel maiden called cancer, but the story unearths how despite efforts from within and from those knocking at the window, it maps out the linkage of events to depression, that despite standing metres away from a colourful fruit tree, your eyes can only focus on the dark clouds in the distance, your blindness to the beauty in front of you, as your eyes adjust to the grey and angry clouds now overhead, throwing the colour in a monochrome mash of shapes that you just try to avoid.

As I binged watched all 18 episodes in just 4 days, I often asked myself why I was so transfixed, sure I laughed and chuckled every so often and the comedy was sharp and honest like it always is. I found myself believing Ricky’s character as him, a testament to a great actor or was it’s an outcry from someone revered as one of this generations greatest jokers. I wonder if this was actually Ricky’s’ attempts are pre-empting and preparing himself for the sad reality that at some point he will lose someone he loves more than life itself, after all we all will.

I have suffered personal grief myself, losing my mother to cancer when I was only 23 and she was sadly only 50 herself. I’ve also been close to others who have lost parents younger than is usually expected. I have also (in-directly through my wife’s friends) known a couple who have tragically lost a new born child. No two stories of grief and loss are the same, no one’s interaction with their own feelings of sorrow are the same. We all find a hole in our lives, each in a different and unique shape. Some voids can be filled with other joys, or some can just be blurry with the journey of time. But most of those feelings of grief are not shared alone. Losing a parent often means that loss is burden on the joint shoulder of fellow siblings, or losing a husband, wife, life partner can be shared with your offspring. Rarely do we suffer loss so isolated and alone. And this is the vision that the show After Life outlines. Ricky’s character has no one apparent to share his grief with, no one who he can see as a fellow passenger, bound and strapped into the same raft as it is tossed and thrown on the ocean waves that represent the unplanned future, the vastness of “where heck are we heading now?”.

Of course, Ricky Gervais is a public figure, I do not know him and I can’t really say I know much about him. But I know that he has no children, and from talk show interviews I’ve seen he appears to have a very stable and star-crossed lovely relationship with his beloved partner Jane.

For me, this is the true sadness and reality of that TV show. This isn’t a comedy show, this isn’t even a chuckling drama. After Life is a meditation, it’s Ricky Gervais’ attempt at preparing himself for the inevitable future awaiting either him or his life-long partner. And I truly thank him for sharing such a personal, intimate and scary journal with us.