I think it was on my third attempt that I actually managed to finish reading Lord of the Rings, a rite of passage among my teenage peers. Sure, I might have skipped over some of the songs, but I’d read however many pages of the thing in its three volumes, and it felt like an accomplishment. It helped give me an exaggerated respect for books, as a result of which I’d carry on with them regardless of whether I was enjoying them or not, as a point of principle.

It wasn’t until I was 22, and struggling through Giles Goat-Boy by John Barth that I realised I could, you know, just stop reading. A lightbulb moment. The book is enormous, and amusing from time to time, as in the section that reframes the Oedipus legend as a tale of the wild west, but there’s just too much of it, most of it hopelessly indulgent, as might be expected from an author who’s an academic professing to write an anti-novel (anyone who can tell me what that is, I’d advise not to).

Liberated by the realisation I could just stop, I’ve since continued to abandon books before they’ve finished. Why bother, when there are so many more promising things to be getting on with?

And why stop with novels? Does anyone really need to hear Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music once the first five minutes has given you the gist? Watch incomprehensible Romanian productions of The Tempest that even Shakespeare would have found obscure? Wade through all 12 volumes of Tsugumi Ohba’s Death Note manga series, when it’s clear after 5 that his irritating portrayal of female characters isn’t going to change?

Life is too precious to waste on art that makes no attempt to communicate with an audience. And yes, that applies to films too. Has anyone seen Liquid Sky? I hope for your sake that you haven’t. It’s a repellent tale of aliens feeding off the vital fluids – sexual and/or narcotic – of vacuous 1980s New York hipsters who find every utterance they make, like, totally meaningful. Horrid things happen to horrid people in a horrid film basically. But somehow I sat through the whole thing, maybe because I’d paid for my ticket and wanted to see if it became tolerable. Or because I didn’t want to emulate the people I’d seen walk out of Mishima not long before, a film I found utterly compelling in its highly stylised storytelling, but I know some people found pretentious beyond belief.

Now, if I find that my attention is not with a film, odds are it’s because it’s lost my interest. I might doze off, to come to when a door slams or a gun is fired, and see a few more minutes before deciding whether to watch it properly or to take the hint of my sleepiness and leave. Yes, I’ve become someone who walks out of films. Not many, admittedly, but frankly if I’m administered a soporific then I’m likely to doze, and when I wake up I’ll make my exit. It’s not a lot to ask, is it, that a film maintains your attention throughout. That’s got to be the minimum bid made by a screenwriter or director, surely, to keep the audience awake. And I feel no shame about slumbering if that contract is not abided by, or walking out altogether if things don’t get any better.

This blog will go on hiatus, returning on Sunday 20^th, for excellent reasons that will become apparent on my return. Have a good few days.

You’d think writers would have an ear for dialogue, but it amazes me how many don’t. Note that good dialogue need not be naturalistic, but its rhythms and twists inevitably have their roots in real speech, however far the writer has taken them in the service of character and story.

One of my favourite lines in the English language is from David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross. It’s so simple, and it makes me smile every time I hear it. “Get them to sign on the line which is dotted.” Not, “Get them to sign on the dotted line,” you’ll note, the line that so many writers would have opted for, and which serves the same purpose, and even has a rhyme. No. “Get them to sign on the line which is dotted.” Get it yet? The rhythm, the rhyme, the eccentricity of the phrasing: it’s a sheer delight. Every now and then, I might find something in my own writing that approaches the same level of joy for me. Not, please, that I am comparing myself to Mamet, who can construct whole scripts from well disciplined syllables. But take, for instance, a line from A Ghost in the Garage, which you’ll find in the writing samples here on the site. I didn’t appreciate it until it was read out in a group, and people laughed, and I realised how ridiculous it sounds. The line? “In a manner, mon amour.” Say it out loud and you’ll get it. Repeat it a few times and it starts to take on the goofball quality of the Muppets’ song Manha-Manha.

Note in these instances it’s the sound of the words that’s the issue. The content is pretty much irrelevant. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that if you don’t relish the glorious and absurd range of noises that the human mouth is capable of, then you’ve got no business being a writer.

I keep a notebook with me most of the time…more than one usually. But this particular one is to capture language as it emerges from peoples’ mouths and as it appears in the wild (ie, I don’t take anything from fictional sources, though I do have sections for technobabble, psychobabble, and adspeak). It’s something I’ve been doing for nearly three years, since doing a superb course called Captivating Communication with NLP trainer Michael Breen and performance poet Murray Lachlan Young (most known for the controversy around his piece Simply Everyone’s Taking Cocaine, which caused all kinds of fuss and led to Murray being given a record deal and dubbed the Million Pound Poet). We looked at how Murray came to create his pieces, which starts off with a process of collecting language in just that fashion. The phrases he comes across are then glued together, morphed, and generally played with until something resembling poetry comes out. Here’s the first piece I came up with using that method:

Monstering through meaning

A tyrannosaurus lex

Sparking up synapses

A self-perpetuating hex

A professional style blender

Here to queer the decks

A lyrical reminder

That language is sex

Want a go yourself? Here’s a starter pack with a few of the scraps of languages I’ve sampled, and may well use in some form one day, and which you can now play with too:

concrete evangelist

iconic fabric

label-conscious homage

ladder-climbing arselicker

I could see the temper in your knuckles

his heft was too much for the rattan chair, and it went kerplooey

disco trauma

truckstop wankfodder

a little bit anxious, a little bit wide-eyed, a little bit late for my train

coke-dealing wheel-clamper

chestnuts and acrobats

Some years ago, I was one of a number of writers approached to do a treatment for a biographical drama based on the life of German artist Johannes Koelz. It was a great opportunity to get immersed in research, about the artist and about Nazi Germany, and I thoroughly enjoyed developing my treatment. I was lucky enough to make it through the first round and was then paid to develop a more detailed treatment and script samples. Sadly, that’s where the projects stopped for me, and I’ve heard nothing of it since. Anyway, I remain proud of the initial treatment I did, which follows:

FRACTURE (working title)

A whirlwind of activity as Claire Koelz (late 30s) frantically packs her family’s possessions with help from neighbours. Her husband Johannes (40) is more concerned about what to do with a huge painting, saying he needs a day to deal with it. Claire screams that they have less than 48 hours to leave the country: Johannes retorts that the painting has consumed him for more than a decade now.

Johannes is driven to a timber mill. His triptych’s antiwar sentiments are clearly at odds with the Nazi regime. The mill owner saws the picture into pieces. Johannes instructs him to distribute them to a few trusted people, and takes one particularly treasured piece for himself.

The artist returns to find soldiers at his house. He joins his family, who have been hidden by neighbours. When the soldiers go, they ready to leave. Son Andreas (18) says he’d rather stay with relatives. Johannes insists that all the family will be going to England.

Johannes, Claire and daughter Ava (10) board without Andreas. Claire and Ava are clearly distraught. Johannes shows no emotion until the ship sounds its horn…

…which becomes the noise of a train. It passes, revealing teenage boys either side of the tracks, clutching portfolios and paint boxes. Young Johannes, and Adolf Hitler. They’re both nervous on their first day at art college, introducing themselves (first names only) when they reach the college gates, each trying to overtake the other on the way.

Johannes is a promising artist, Adolf less sure of himself, influenced by the charisma of others more than what they say. The students circulate an incoherent mix of isms: communism, nationalism, mysticism and anti-semitism. Adolf is bullied, until Johannes intervenes.

The art course ends with a lively party. During it, the bully who attacked Hitler is brutally beaten by Adolf’s new cronies. Johannes is horrified. Adolf says his mind is made up: what use is art now they’re old enough to serve in the Great War? Fireworks explode…

…becoming bombshells. Johannes is one of his unit’s few survivors. He risks death by getting out of the trench to save a Corporal, Muller, who loses a leg. The two sing…

…a drinking song performed raucously by students in a cellar bar. They discuss Germany’s future: to Johannes their naïve talk sounds empty. The students taunt a younger Claire, who works there. Johannes, in army uniform, watches. He’s about to act, but she handles the louts perfectly well on her own.Johannes comes to the bar next day in civilian clothes. Claire comes in to pick up her wages: she has a young son, Andreas. His father died in the war. Claire directs Johannes to the street he’s heading for a job interview.

Claire next sees Johannes dressed as a policeman, bloodied in an anti-Jewish riot. Johannes arrests the art college bully – now a fanatical Hitler supporter. Claire tends to Johannes’ wounds, asking if he is soldier, or policeman? I am an artist, he says. And artists have to pay to do their work. Adolf is led away, cheered by admirers.

Claire visits Johannes in his apartment with a photo of her son’s father. She wants Johannes to make a portrait to remember him by. The sketch is never finished: instead, they make love.

Now living together, Johannes starts to sell his paintings. It’s Claire who keeps the household functioning. Johannes comes in excited: a commission big enough that he can quit the police job. Claire too has news: she’s pregnant.

By the time of Ava’s birth, Johannes is earning just enough to keep the family together. He paints for those he’d rather avoid, and funnels his guilt and self-hate into painting his satirical triptych. The time he devotes to the triptych is time he’s also not spending with his wife or children, causing growing tensions between himself and Claire.

There’s dissent too with Andreas as he enters his teens, his adolescence mirrored in the rising power of the Nazis. That threat makes itself felt among the family’s radically minded friends. Some capitulate, others suffer for their beliefs, or plan to escape.

A messenger calls for Johannes. Chancellor Hitler welcomes his old friend, and commissions him to paint his portrait. He will be required to wear a Nazi uniform while he paints. It’s a career-defining opportunity. A chance for security. And a refutation of everything Johannes believes in.

Adolf turns up for his first sitting. Johannes doesn’t. He makes his way home to discover Andreas wearing the uniform of the Hitler Youth.

Johannes knows that the only course left open to him is to flee. To travel, he needs his papers in order. The official he meets shows Johannes the warrant he has received for his arrest, and burns it in front of him. ‘They will send another. It will take 48 hours.’ Johannes now sees that the official has one leg: it’s Muller. Johannes runs home, causing birds to spiral into flight…

…they’re gulls, seen from the ship as it docks in England. Claire finds work, Johannes does portraits for people he despises just as much as his former patrons, and for a brief while it seems that their new lives will be peaceful, even if separated from Andreas. That peace is fragile though, threatened every time they open their mouths and speak with a German accent in a country that’s learning to hate Germans.

Uniformed men - British police officers - hammer at the door as Johannes hangs his sole fragment of the triptych. He is taken, and put onto a train with other German men. He protests that he will do anything to fight Hitler, but in vain. He and the other unwilling travelers are abused and have their personal items confiscated as the train steams into a tunnel…

…and another emerges from a tunnel in Germany. Andreas is on board, one of the train crew, numbed by what he sees. The people it carries wear yellow stars and pink triangles. In contrast to the Germans on the English train, the Jews and homosexuals are quiet, resigned to their fates.

In England, Ava comes home from school. Claire asks what she’s done today. Ava produces a picture from her bag: all of them, Johannes and Andreas included, together as a family. Claire pins it up next to the postcards Johannes has been sending them from an internment camp in Australia, and the fragment of his triptych. Close in on that fragment and pull back to see all of ‘Thou Shalt Not Kill’. Stay with that image, exploring different details during the end titles.

Those are the beats of the story. What’s trickier to convey is its style and feel. My model is ‘Cabaret’, which brilliantly and beautifully portrays Germany in the same period, concentrating on its characters and their relationships. That is my intent in telling the story of Johannes and Claire, whose relationship is shaped by and exists within an extraordinary time. That period is central to the story, but I believe we only do it justice to a contemporary audience by concentrating on the characters rather than adhering to facts. The choice of Hitler as a character is problematic, but those obstacles can be overcome. Alternatively, another character could be used, who grows up with Johannes and becomes a Nazi official. Similarly, because of understandable sensitivities on the part of Ava and Siegfried, I have created a different son – Andreas – for Johannes and Claire.

After all that thought-provoking and sensitive stuff about dealing with the Nazi era, it was refreshing to be told by a friend that I should take another route entirely. Inspired by the similarly titled American comedy, he reckoned my treatment should be a knockabout farce called Dude, Where’s My Portrait?

Two friends of mine have lost their mothers in recent months, and in both cases the question is what, if anything, can be said. And what makes the difference seems to be silence, giving the grieving person space to say what they need to.

Silence is in short supply in many films. One exception is No Country for Old Men, the latest offering by the Coen Brothers. Recently they’ve been dabbling in light comedy, and I respect their willingness to explore what they’re capable of. But this new film reaffirms they’re at their strongest when in territory they’ve made familiar to us through their darker work; Fargo and Blood Simple in particular.

The story is driven by the discovery of a case containing $2 million by welder and Vietnam vet Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin). It’s a sum with the potential to change his life forever, and that’s exactly what he sets out to do. Only, other parties have an interest in this cash – as indicated by the number of corpses Llewelyn encounters in the process of finding it – and getting to spend it will not be easy. In particular, he needs to worry about Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), a psychopathic killer with a trademark Coen Brothers haircut. These developments are communicated visually in the main, cause and effect shown beat by steady beat, action leading to reaction and consequence.

Not having read the Cormac McCarthy story the screenplay is based on, I couldn’t tell you how close it matches the original. At any rate, I’m assuming it was chosen because it’s very much in tune with the Coens’ sensibilities. There’s regional flavour, West Texan in this case; strongly characterised parts for even the smallest roles; and an abundance of idiosyncratic detail.

Above all though, what makes No Country for Old Men stand out is its gravity. Oh, there are the usual Coen Brothers laughs along the way, but make no mistake, this is a serious film. And nothing demonstrates that more than the ending. I won’t spoil it, since the film has only just opened.  Let’s just say that the story ends at an unexpected point that can lead to only one inevitable conclusion.

It’s a breathtaking finale, essentially throwing up so many plot points in the air to say ‘Look, there’s something big happening here, something that matters more than entertainment, and you as an audience need to face up to that’. The rest is silence, pretty much, the film’s end credits being a musically slender business. And that’s what stayed with me as I left the cinema into the night and the city, only to hear as I walked away the strains of a busker I like, a middle aged black guy whose voice and guitar playing are steeped in the blues. Blues is cliché in musical form, but there’s no getting away from some things, and that’s why it’s important we have people to sing, and write, and make films about the biggest cliché of all: the fact that we’re all going to die one day.

Grant Morrison is a name you’re unlikely to know unless you read comics. That’s hopefully going to change in the nearish future with the release of We3, a film he scripted based on his own comics story about animals that are experimented on to become weapons for the military. He’s a fascinating writer, able to concoct the most outrageous stories, that inevitably have a real spark of humanity at their heart, and I’ve been rereading him of late in an effort to understand how to write mythic stories in the modern age.

The recently released collected edition of JLA: Ultramarine Corps serves to demonstrate Morrison’s approach: he thinks on an epic scale, with whopping great seven-league beats to tell enormous stories about larger than life heroes. And, it’s done with a real sense of joy and humour.

The Ultramarine Corps of the title were invented by Morrison some years ago when he was the regular writer on JLA (which stands for Justice League of America, fact fans). They’re a group of supersoldiers in essence, experimented on by a military madman. At the start of the story they’re taking on Gorilla Grodd and his legion of super-apes, and they reckon they’re winning. But Grodd is a tough cookie, and he’s allied with another baddie, the sinister Neh-Buh-Loh, who tells us “My original country is in the cold region of the Vampire Sun. I was born of the Eternal Fogs, there in Last Country…I prepare the way for my Queen of Terror.” This injection of what sounds like legend injected into the hyperreal superhero world is typical of Morrison, who stripmines myth and legend for its potential in telling new stories.

And let’s not overlook the myth of the superhero. In this tale, we’re presented with a quantum keyboard that can rewrite reality. Robot duplicates of Superman and Wonder Woman and other JLA members to activate when the real ones are otherwise engaged in a parallel dimension, in this case the infant universe of Qwewq. Even Aquaman, so often a lame character in the hands of other writers, grows in stature under Morrison’s guidance, “with muscles that permit him to swim Niagara Falls upstream.”

Batman’s role in all of this is particularly interesting, Morrison writing him as the brains of the outfit, with a plan for every occasion. But this is the same Batman known in other comics for patrolling the streets of Gotham City. Are they really one and the same? Morrison has an explanation at hand, as Batman reveals a cupboard full of futuristic gadgets to his faithful butler: “I’m opening the sci-fi closet, Alfred. Don’t tell my friends in the GCPD about this…did my flying saucer arrive from the factory?”

Gorilla Grodd has managed to triumph over and control the minds of the Ultramarine Corps thanks to his alliance with Neh-Buh-Loh. The JLA arrive just in time to prevent Batman being eaten by the fascist gorilla, and then proceed to give a beatdown to everyone else involved.

When the dust is settled, there’s the question of how to deal with the Ultramarine Corps, whose triggerhappy ways have led to a lot of problems. It’s left to Superman to explain: “These ‘no-nonsense’ solutions of yours just don’t hold water in a complex world of jet-powered apes and time travel.” Their punishment? The Ultramarine Corps are banished to the infant universe of Qwewq, which has evolved without superheroes to protect and guide it. They get the chance to redeem themselves, and Earth is rid of a bunch of characters designed to lampoon the violent excesses that many contemporary comics creators are driven to in the absence of an imagination as exotic and generous as Grant Morrison’s.

The American election race is gathering momentum.  Barack Obama won the first round in Iowa, but with the support of women voters Hillary Clinton clinched the second, the New Hampshire primary.  What was it she said or did to win support?  Well, a few tears and the declaration that “I listened to you and, in the process, I found my own voice.”  Is it just me, or did that come across like a soundbite precisely targeted at the female Oprah-watching demographic, schooled to relish narratives in which women endure suffering in one form or another but rise above it and come to ‘find their voices’?  Go to a bookshop if you don’t believe me: it’s a high-selling modern genre. 

Or maybe I’m just a bit sceptical at the moment, having watched ITV’s Thursday night double of Moving Wallpaper and Echo Beach.  The first is a sitcom about the team behind a soap opera set in Cornwall, the second is that very soap opera.  A cracking and clever concept, brought to you by Red Planet and Kudos, and I’ll be sticking round to find out how well it’s executed.  

The reason for my cynicism about Hillary’s speech was the uneasy feeling that I could sense the backroom machinations that had led to it.  That’s the appeal of Moving Wallpaper, which lifts the veil that’s kept the creation of a soap opera from its viewers up till now, or at least flirts with the idea.  And it does so with quite a degree of credibility, the show’s producer Jonathan Pope saying he wants Echo Beach to have “wit, class and a permanent erection”.  His nemesis, the network’s Head of Continuing Drama, instructs Jonathan to hit the ethnic quota, saying “We’ve got Dev from Coronation Street and not much else,” which is rather spikier than I was expecting to hear. 

The opening episode of Moving Wallpaper ended with the team gathering round in Jonathan’s office to watch Echo Beach, another playful touch that carried through into the soap opera itself.  I was surprised how much visual storytelling was involved in the opening scenes of Echo Beach, certainly more so than you’d get in the majority of Eastenders or Coronation Street episodes.  But does it have what it takes to drag viewers back and build up a relationship with them like those shows have?  Hmm. 

In tone, Echo Beach has a good dose of the breezy Australian approach to soap, and in Jason Donovan one of its stars too.  It’s fast paced, with a musical backdrop through much of what’s happening, much of which revolves around sexy young things cavorting on the beach.  And there are a few sexy older things, including ex-Eastender Martine McCutcheon, for retro appeal and what passes for gravitas in these parts. 

Part of the fun was seeing how threads of Moving Wallpaper were realised in Echo Beach, for instance the decrepit state of the surf shack that Jason Donovan was opening, because Jonathan Pope had blown the set design money on a wet-room for his office. These are fun shows, with some real wit amid the froth, and I’ll be checking them out to see how they develop.  Besides, with the way that the American election is developing, I need a reliable form of escapism.  

In 24 Hour Party People, Joy Division lead singer Ian Curtis – associated with mordant integrity – is found hung, his feet swinging in front of a tv screen that’s playing a bizarre sequence. A chicken is on a hot metal plate, and in moving its feet away from the surface appears to be dancing. A very American yeehah is heard over the top. The suicide occurs on the eve of the band’s American tour.

Later, at a crucial takeover meeting with London Records, the new Happy Mondays album is the ace in Factory Records label boss Tony Wilson’s hand. A healthy-looking buffet is spread on the £30,000 table in the Factory boardroom. Shaun Ryder dismisses it as being ‘bunny food’, and he and the other band members go for Kentucky Fried Chicken, even refusing the offer of it being ordered in to get it themselves.

It’s in large part thanks to the Happy Mondays that Factory is in this situation at all, having blown the money intended for recording in Nassau on crack and weed. And Ryder, who exhibits thuggish tendencies not evident in the portrayal of Curtis and Wilson, is emblematic of a shift in the kinds of culture that led to the formation of Factory in the first place. Wilson is insistent that Ryder is a poet in the league of Keats – and even God agrees with him, though God takes the form of a bearded version of Wilson, that he – and only he - sees while smoking a spliff on the roof of the Factory building. The joint is shared with members of New Order, the band who’ve been with him since their early days as Joy Division, who for all their excesses have more claim to musical credibility than the scally Mondays. Ryder sells Wilson the DAT tape of the music the band recorded on their expensive holiday: there are no vocals, and getting his lyrics on the music is what’s led to the meeting with London to begin with. Shaun Ryder’s not just ready to dance: he’d be happy to be served up in a family bucket of finger’ lickin’ poultry pieces if it was heavily sprinkled with cocaine.

Birds and flight are another rich source of meaning within the film. It opens with a sequence in which Wilson flies a hang glider for a local news report, and he breaks the fourth wall to tell the audience that this is a reference to the myth of Icarus, and to look it up if necessary. The first mention of the Happy Mondays is when the lads of the band poison thousands of pigeons, whose bodies plummet from the sky and litter Manchester. Chickens, interestingly, are flightless birds – though, like Ian Curtis, they do a weird little dance when the heat is on.

Stories are often about unreasonable people. Ones we agree with, and would like to be more like. Erin Brockovich. Han Solo. Inspector Clouseau. And ones we vilify. Darth Vader. Freddie Krueger. Bridget Jones. And there are ambiguous characters too, who we are attracted to and repelled by at the same time, and are all the more compelling for that. Hannibal Lecter. Tony Wilson as portrayed by Steve Cogan in 24 Hour Party People. Many of the characters played by John Belushi.

A hero is someone who wants to change at least an aspect of the world, inner or outer, though in the realm of story at least it can be supposed that each contains the other. As above, so below is how alchemical thought expresses that relationship. A new paradigm in the story can be indicated by some combination of the two: conflict resolved internally will be mirrored in the way the protagonist deals with others in a personal drama, for instance. In a more epic story, after slaying a dragon, the mythic hero lets loose a contented belch after eating a well-earned steak.

What about when a hero wants to keep things the way they are in a changing world? That’s a possibility too, seen less often: one example is Dodgeball. The easygoing protagonist owns a rundown gym inhabited by a variety of curious characters whose endearing eccentricities find no sympathy with the avaricious owner of the corporate-style fitness centre across the road. Sure, characters go through transformative arcs, there’s a mentor to help them accomplish their personal and collective alchemy, and geeky guys get good gals, but this is fundamentally a story about maintaining a safe space for individuality in a world of growing conformity.

If you’re looking for a cutesy statement of theme for Dodgeball, ‘It’s being different that makes us the same’ would be about right. At the other end of the spectrum is Independence Day, with difference being the threat rather than something to be celebrated. The world, which as the title suggests is functionally identical with America, is under threat from alien attack. Only a melting-pot of raggletaggle heroes as varied as Will Smith and Jeff Goldblum can save the red, white, and me and you…as long as their uniqueness is at the service of the military-industrial complex. That’s like the hero of Dodgeball agreeing to be bought out by his empire-building rival, a prospect that produces an instinctive shudder.

Independence Day is an endorsement of The Man, who in his Dodgeball incarnation takes the specific form of cheesy fitness entrepreneur White Goodman. This good white man is size-conscious, status-driven, sexually frustrated, and fundamentally just doesn’t Get It. Remind you of any alpha males of your acquaintance, from ones running the world’s biggest economy and down? I doubt the hegemony will be quaking in its boots – they’ll be chuckling along with the rest of us, perhaps with a hint of forced laughter - but ridicule can be a powerful tool.

In Blink, Malcolm Gladwell outlines what happens when an undercover reporter exposes the secrets of the KKK and incorporates them into episodes of the Superman radio show, beloved of America’s kids, who – for a while – stopped pitting the Kryptonian hero against bank robbers in their play, and instead pitted him against grown men dressing up in bedsheets to torment minorities. The consequence was a fall in Klan membership that lasted for decades.

Of course, America isn’t the only country looking to maintain its version of the status quo: in Hero, the enemy to China is within, and – though there’s arguably some ambiguity – the preservation of the state outweighs individual concerns. Not an unexpected message from the nation that brought us Tiananmen Square and the ongoing suppression of Falun Gong, but certainly an unusual stance for an internationally successful movie to take. But look! Martial artists, and the way they jump it’s almost like they’re flying! Lush settings, exquisite cinematography! The lure of the exotic! Ever get that feeling when you’ve had a Chinese that you’d like something more?

What sort of man was Neil Armstrong? It’s a question that few of us have been tempted to ask, mere mention of his name being enough to trigger a corresponding pop fact appearing in our brains that he’s the first man on the moon, and that satisfies any curiosity about him.

Buzz Aldrin though. Now, there’s a tragic figure. He spent the rest of his life in Neil Armstrong’s shadow, and never emerged from it strongly enough to establish his own identity in anyone’s mind – most especially his own.

I’m pondering astronauts because I’ve been watching a one-off episode of Wire in the Blood, the show about kooky criminal psychologist Tony Hill - a fine performance by Robson Green. Now, there’s a man who knows how to cover his traces – the strength of his acting is such that I barely think of his singing career as part of Robson & Jerome, a double act coaxed into something other than life by necromancer Simon Cowell.

Like your astronaut, your crime show needs something about it to remain in the public consciousness. Morse had his classical music, that Jag, and gruff interactions with Lewis. Resnick had jazz and deli sandwiches. Prime Suspect’s Jane Tennyson was the woman DI with the drink problem.

This, you’ll gather, is all in the realm of branding: establishing the nature of your show’s protagonist with broad brush strokes so they won’t be mistaken for anyone else. No chance of that, when you’ve got big old Robbie Coltrane playing Fitz in Cracker with his gambling, womanising, and the rest. But who exactly is Wire in the Blood’s Tony Hill? He’s got some of Fitz’s idiosyncrasies, a tendency to something like Asperger’s perhaps. And - contrarily - there’s a touch of Columbo about him too, playing low status to advantage; in last night’s episode breaking the inside door handle of his hire car and using the awkward moment that followed as an opportunity to ask some pertinent questions.

Beyond that, I’m pushed to define who Tony Hill is. The nearest we get to a definition is the running theme, explored visually in many opportunities, that Hill is an empath: we see him in tricksily-shot situations echoing ones occupied by others, identifying with killers, victims, and whoever else. It was reinforced in last night’s show by a bit of dialogue: ‘That’s my job – the imagining of pain’, and it’s there in the show’s promotional strapline too: ‘Get inside the mind of someone who’s out of theirs’. But that’s problematic frankly: saying your protagonist’s Unique Selling Proposition is that they blur the boundaries between themselves and others is another way of saying they’re just not distinctive characters (in advertising terms, it’s like Coke admitting that their fizzy brown liquid tastes rather like Pepsi). And in many ways Tony Hill isn’t strongly distinctive. He’s vulnerable, flawed, and not too long ago in the last run of the series was recovering from a brain tumour.

OK, so Tony Hill is not a conventionally strong character, but maybe one suited to today’s viewers, willing to embrace a hero’s flaws and all that (see House, Monk). At any rate, what we’re left with – we hope – is strong writing and performances. And Robson Green is a reliably strong actor in this role, willing to stretch himself in ways that many leading men would be unwilling or unable to do. As for the stories, they’re variable: I’ve seen good episodes and I’ve seen weak ones. Some are based on books by Val McDermid – I’ve not read any – others are originated for the show.

Which leads me to think that the most distinctive feature of the show is its enigmatic title. What does Wire in the Blood mean, exactly? In one interview, Robson Green mused it was an allusion to a genetic kink, the sort of quirk that might give rise to the cases that Tony Hill is asked to deal with. Which wasn’t necessarily what T. S. Eliot had in mind when he used the phrase in one of his poems. I’m willing to bet it wasn’t one of the ones about cats.

Cautionary tales are an interesting genre, essentially allowing viewers the vicarious thrill of a look at transgressive behaviour, only to punish it and restore all that is good and precious at the end. Derailed is one pernicious example. Clive Owen is led astray by Jennifer Aniston of Friends – presumably cast because she’s just the kind of edgy minx that middle-American men fantasise about. The moxie turns out to be allied with a treacherous Frenchie – zut alors! - and after losing his money and the life of the only black man he knows, Clive thoroughly regrets his dalliance with the flagburning jezebel. The story doesn’t have the courage of its convictions though: Aniston is killed at the film’s climax, not by Owen (who the intended audience would kind of like to have kill her, only he’s got to return to the straight and narrow at this point) but by a stray bullet in the showdown. This bit of flimflam is another example of a One Step Remove (see entry for Jan 2). So, Clive gets his family life back. He even gets to meet another black guy, who mentored the one whose death he was involved in, thus trading up from a bad black man to a good one. Order is restored. Even some mainstream Christian commentators found it offensive.

The same issues can be explored from another angle. Firewall positions Harrison Ford as the moral force at the centre of a story where his values are under attack. He’s a family man forced to do the dirty by a bunch of crooks who’ve spotted that the internet, having woven its way into every home and workplace, can be a thing of evil. Ford knows that better than most, since he’s in charge of a bank’s online security. The bad guys are led by Brit Paul Bettany, here on behalf of amoral psychopathic Eurotrash and thus quintessentially of the internet. He’s gathered a group of regular American folk, who probably ran old-fashioned numbers games or even had proper jobs before their roles were outsourced to online casinos and call centres overseas, hence edging them into criminality. And wouldn’t you know it, Bettany can and does kill his American cronies when they let him down. Americans are used to losing their employment through the invisible hand of the market, but being shot by your supervisor is crossing the line. Harrison Ford’s family are a plucky bunch though, and their greater knowledge of home and hearth allows them to pull through, the head of the family pitting his hacking skills against the bad guys. He robs them of the money they got him to relieve his employer of before restoring the integrity of the family unit. Run credits.

Hmm, Harrison Ford as a hacker? A hacker upholding family values? Times have changed. And that’s why screenwriters need to find ways of creating stories that reflect the world we’re living in and the worlds we’d like to live in, using the methods implicit in the changes that are happening to shape more distinct and relevant films.