I started watching Nick Hornby’s State of the Union determined to follow the advice of Lucy Mangan in her five-star Guardian review and not binge it all in one sitting. I failed. Ten ten-minute dramas and I wolfed the whole lot down without getting up from the table.
I’m sure short-form comedy isn’t meant to be viewed like this. Each episode should be savoured, and in the case of State of The Union it’s easy to see why. The premise of the show is simple. Tom and Louise meet in a pub every week ten minutes before they are due to attend a session of marital therapy in a house across the road, and they talk. Their talk is pretty good stuff. It’s funny and it’s clever, and you need to keep your wits about you — so it’s easy to see why Lucy Mangan offers her advice. Such rich fare is served up on the understanding that it won’t be consumed in one go.
But the binge-watch guzzle does have its advantages – one of them is that it makes you more than usually aware of issues of continuity. As I watched I found myself looking carefully at who buys each week’s glass of white wine and pint of London Pride, at what Tom and Louise are wearing, who comes in first etc etc.
I also found myself looking closely at The Guardian Crossword.
In an early exchange when Louise asks Tom what they have in common Tom answers, ‘We’ve got two kids, crosswords, Game of Thrones…when it’s on’. The crossword was clearly once a shared experience but when we first see Tom it’s become, for him, a very solitary activity. He’s a man without a clue in every sense. Baffled by what went wrong in their marriage (more specifically Louise’s infidelity with Matthew), he is also, it seems, baffled by The Guardian Crossword. In the early episodes he sits with it on the table in front of him, pen in hand, but we never see him filling in an answer. (I know exactly how he feels. Maybe Tom, like me, has struggled since Rufus stopped giving us the easy one on a Monday)
In Episode 6 Tom sits at the table, an A4 print-out of that day’s puzzle in front of him, grappling with a clue (‘She got Gomorrah’d’). Later in the scene Louise picks up the sheet, asks who today’s setter is (it’s Arachne) and suggests that they do a couple of clues before they go in ‘ as a kind of morale-boosting exercise’. Louise gets two clues very quickly, giving us the sense that she may be better at this game than Tom.
At the beginning of Episode 9 things are different. Tom sits at his table with the puzzle in front of him but, unlike earlier, he seems less baffled . He even gets a clue. ‘Get in!’ he says to himself as he inks in the answer – and when Louise arrives we realise he’s pleased with more than his clue-solving.
In the final episode Tom talks of the ‘cornucopia of things we had in common’. When asked to give examples the first one he mentions is ‘crosswords’ (this time it comes before kids). We now realise that there have always been three in this marriage—Tom, Louise, and The Guardian Crossword— and the key to its survival may be ensuring that, when it comes to sex and the crossword, they keep doing it together.
Tom says ‘sometimes a crossword is just a crossword’. In Nick Hornby’s wonderful State of The Union The Guardian Crossword is much more than that. It may even be the star of the show.
(The clues are from Arachne 27536 (15 June, 2018). Apart, that is, from ‘She got Gomorrah’d’. How many letters, Nick?)