200 Words On... Crews of Losers

Last weekend was a good one for a favourite trope of mine.

On Saturday afternoon, with the rain pouring, I watched It Chapter Two, which has arrived on Amazon Prime over the last fortnight, and enjoyed hanging with the Losers in their decomposing club house. There’s a lot wrong with the movie (if I have to watch another creepfest which begins with children singing nursery rhymes in a minor key I’m quitting for reals) but it was heartening seeing a gang of dysfunctional outsiders take down a spider-god in a subterranean cave. Again.

Sunday night I checked out Stephen Merchant’s The Outlaws and found another ensemble cast of ill-starred misfits thrown together to clear out a rotting building, this time for comic purposes. It’s terrific. What is it with Bristol and comedy crime dramas? This is a very close cousin of Lloyd Woolf and Joe Tucker’s Witless – and all the better for it.

Audiobook time came around and, late to the party as per, I started Mick Herron’s Slow Horses. Whaddayaknow – it’s about a gang of spies, ostracised and consigned to career limbo… and operating from grotty premises in central London.   
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I dunno. It’s like buses. You wait for one…