Well now. I do my best to maintain a positive note where possible, while at the same time being something of a realist. But I pretty much lost my happy thought when I attended an event the other night all about the financial implications of digital media, ‘organised’ by an outfit called Show and Tell Films. Having witnessed them in action, I’m in no hurry to show them any projects of mine, and instead I’ll try and focus on the useful parts of the evening. For an alternative account, go back a couple of days to the Choke review, and read the comments by Mike Donald: meeting him was pretty much the highlight of the evening. In every other respect, I have participated in events run at primary schools that were put together more effectively and impressively, and they don’t have the backing of a half dozen or more sponsors including Skillset.

Onto the good news. The panel included some genuinely interesting people, and I’ll summarise the points they made. This was an evening of questions rather than answers, the principle question being how on earth someone had hired Nathan Barley to put it together. Nevertheless, and allowing for the ongoing difficulties with the sound system which made understanding what some people said very difficult, here’s a round-up of the salient points:

Peter Buckingham – Head of Distribution & Exhibition – UK Film Council

Old models of film and revenue are based on geographical territory. Now, communities seem to be overtaking nations: how does or will that affect production and distribution? And what does that mean for the notion of the ‘local’ story?

How does a filmmaker get value back? Who are big companies looking at to assist them in their projects, and what kind of deals are being struck? eg If an online vendor wants to offer films, how are the deals structured?

Digital rights management is another growing issue: what do you allow consumers to do with your product? Are they allowed just to watch it? If so, how often? Can they play with what they’ve got to make something of their own? How can this be arranged?

The key to some of these questions is to understand actual consumer behaviour rather than assume older models will continue to apply. What is clear is that we’ve dealing with a new model. Some aspects of this are exciting: new methods of production and distribution can cut out older gatekeepers such as commissioners and distributors. And some projects are even funded by their audiences.

The notion of the ‘long tail’ is important here. The future is one in which films will earn small amounts of money for a longer time than is currently the case. Hence unions meeting about getting a cut of revenues into the future.

Louise Brown – Head of New Media – Channel 4

Louise centred on Skins, a brilliantly effective cross-platform success. The show was tied in to MySpace early on, and is an example of a new trend: marketing departments commissioning content. That has led to real world spin-offs such as launch parties for the new series of Skins.

The show’s audience is very engaged: its use of social networking sites fits in with the generation it’s aimed at. Trainee crew members are being sought from fans.

Louise also raised the point that digital media gives people the opportunity to become benefactors, and used the example of The Guild, an online comedy based around online game World Of Warcraft initially backed by fans and now attracting big sponsors.

Stemming from that example, a question of my own: what is necessary for people to contribute? I feel that the answer is a sense of belonging…

Michael Cowan – Founder – Spice Factory

This is a new age with potential for anyone with the guts to go for it. He referenced a film made for a few thousand pounds that’s gone on to make a decent profit in a distribution deal, and Paranormal, made for $50,000 and which Disney will be distributing at large in 2009.

Ed Warren – Creative Strategist – ad agency Mother

The change that many brands are now facing up to can be expressed simply as a shift from being attached to that which people are paying attention to, ie adverts in commercial breaks, to being the centre of attention. Examples are the Shane Meadows film Somers Town and Pot Noodle: The Musical.

Cauri Jaye – Operations Director – WISIWYG Films

Revenue share is the key to making money in the online economy. Old notions of a minimum guarantee for distribution mean nothing in a market that is being tested and is still in evolution. The broad pattern is smaller chunks of money over longer periods of time. When there’s enough data for patterns to emerge, a return to guaranteed fees may be possible.

Innovation is the key. For instance, the guy who sold pixels on his webpage used the money he made to make a film. It didn’t do well, but he got it made. Now that’s been done, you need to come up with something else. Another success has been someone who set up a competition about a film he’s making, the prize to win a laptop. Having got 2 million competition entries, he’s gone to a studio to ask for the money to make the film in question, knowing he’s now got a built-in audience for it. Snakes on a Plane had a similar online genesis.

So, I got my feedback from someone high up the foodchain at Talkback Thames concerning my pilot episode for drug worker drama The Sharp End, which I pitched recently at Channel 4 and wrote about here.

Kind words were written about the work I’ve put into the project so far, and it’s great to get kudos for that. What’s interesting is getting feedback from someone of this stature, who is clearly used to thinking at a level that is currently alien to me, but which I’m planning to embrace. Relevant quote follows:

“The treatment shows that you’ve done the research and know the world. But to tantalise commissioners, I’d be inclined to pull back on this a bit and instead focus on showing that you’ve devised big, bold charismatic characters that are really going to engage us, and that there are enough big stories to make 8 60′ episodes.”

Fair comment? Absolutely. It has to be said that I was and am so fascinated by the world of drugs work that I took its inherent drama as unquestionable. But what fascinates me doesn’t necessarily compel audiences to switch on in their millions, which has to be the objective if you’re thinking television drama.

Are my characters big and bold enough to stand by Kat Slater and Frank Gallagher? I’d like to think so. But if I haven’t yet convinced a potential backer that my characters are every bit as fascinating and frustrating as those icons are, I clearly need to do some more work. And I will…in time. But first let me lick my wounds and find another way to bring this project to life.

I’m convinced The Sharp End will be brilliant television, and the limited industry response I’ve had so far has been favourable, so there’s plenty to feel good about. The issue is whether this is going to be a pitch that people like and maybe gets me work on other peoples’ projects, or if it will find a champion who wants to get it made. Pragmatically, either result would be good. But writing isn’t about pragmatism.

What interests me about the feedback quoted above is the insight it gives into what life is like in a commissioning meeting. The commissioner clearly believes that characters are the hook that gets viewers engaged and enraged. And that’s a refreshing thing to hear, as a fan of character-based drama.

All I’ve got to do now is come up with a way of convincing people at production companies that my stories are peopled with characters that commissioners will get excited about. Which, you know, I should have sussed by now already. Only, when I look at what’s on television I don’t see it populated by charismatic types whose every move fascinates me.

OK, you’ve got your Ecclestone and now your Tennant in Doctor Who, but I’d be pushed to name many more characters whose stories compel me to flick that on switch. And besides, once you get under the hood and start writing yourself, you soon realise that character and story are inseparable: to stay with the Doctor Who example, Captain Jack was an awesome character when he first appeared, but when he cropped up on a weekly basis in Torchwood a lot of that glamour went because many of the stories in the first series were frankly risible.

Back to the drawing board then? Well, not really. Much of the work I’ve done on The Sharp End still stands up — and there’s also the fact that I’m dealing with just one person’s opinion here, however well placed and authoritative that opinion is. But yes, this news is indication that a rethink is in order if I’m going to make this series catnip for commissioners, which is ultimately the objective.

There was a time when buying cult books was a more involved process than going to the section of a record shop with that title, and choosing from the top sellers by Hunter S. Thompson, William Burroughs, and Charles Bukowski. Independent bookshops could be found off the beaten track, and the people working there were often committed to…well, something other than just making money for Borders.

I mention this having seen Choke, an adaptation of a Chuck Palahniuk novel. And something has happened, either to Chuck or to the world at large, since David Fincher’s searing 1999 version of his Fight Club hit the screen. Where Fight Club was raw and provocative and bulging with dangerous ideas, Choke seems pretty much like its trailer presents it, a knockabout comedy for audiences who’ve enjoyed Pineapple Express and the life and works of Kevin Smith (like it or not, they come as a package deal).

Now, I do enjoy a lot of American comedies, but I can’t help thinking Choke aspired to being more than that. Whether the problem is in Palahniuk’s source material, its translation to the screen, or wider issues, I’m not quite sure. After all, a story about a guy who attends a group for sex addicts, has a warped Anjelica Huston for a mother, and fakes choking incidents in restaurants so he can get emotional and sometimes financial support from the people who rescue him, should be kind of disturbing, shouldn’t it?

The fact that this all plays well enough as comedy is what’s truly disturbing. YouTube has created a culture that not only watches car crashes, but rewatches them and sends them to its friends. People kill themselves online and are egged on by viewers, or jump off buildings after being taunted by a waiting crowd recording what happens on their phones, to reference two recent news stories.

Now, I am fully aware that this is a partial picture, and that there are plenty of fine things coming out of our new digital age. Collaborative endeavours are being realised that wouldn’t have been possible without computing, and even computers at rest can contribute to the search for cancer cures and so forth through distributed software. All well and good. But is it possible too that exposure to a myriad shocking images has numbed us to the power of something more shocking still: the radical concept?

Maybe writer-director Clark Gregg intended for mainstream success in his take on Choke. Or maybe, norms have changed so much that what would have had shock value a decade ago now just gets a cynical response. It’s hard to rage against the machine when you depend on the same machine to get your product out to the consumer, after all. And when that rage itself has been commodified, become just another brand value, where is there for the would-be radical creator to turn?

There’s something about apocalyptic scenarios that gets the imagination going. First there’s the creativity needed to come up with the particular flavour of apocalypse. Nuclear accident was popular back when we lived in the shadow of the mushroom cloud. Why not get more fanciful though? Nanotechnology has its own particular downside with the notion that the world will become a ball of grey goo. And what would happen if dogs started walking on their hind legs and ordering us about? However fanciful it sounds, you can bet a science fiction writer somewhere has come up with something even more bizarre.

But what’s really interesting about apocalyptic scenarios is the aftermath. How people react, the choices they make, are the core of drama, and end of the world settings give a whole new scope for drama to unfold in. Survivors starts when a lethal strain of flu takes hold of the world and kills most of its population, but really it’s about what kind of life people opt for in the absence of all the things they’ve taken for granted.

It started predictably enough, with glimpses into the lives of a cross section of people we’ll presumably be spending more time with in the next five episodes. A woman who loses her young son, away on an adventure holiday. A prisoner who kills the warder who wanted to keep him locked up for the next twenty years. And my favourite pairing, an 11 year old Muslim lad and a half-Kuwaiti playboy whose fridge is stocked with caviar and champagne.

The business of the world falling apart was handled reasonably enough given the constraints of a BBC budget, with a mix of inspired and clunky moments. The cut from the playboy saying to his latest conquest ‘You can’t get to sleep with your hair wet, you’ll catch your death’ to bodies at a hospital was clumsy, but I loved the more poetic jump from the prisoner shooting a gun to a sky full of ominous clouds. The image that stays with me more than any other is of the young Muslim lad finding all the worshippers dead in a mosque, still kneeling in prayer.

Based on the book and 1970s series by Terry Nation, Adrian Hodges has done an admirable job of reinventing Survivors. The later portion of the opening episode promises plenty of interesting material to come. Just how will a world that communicates by Facebook and text cope with the disappearance of those services and the necessity of working together to survive?

There’s an underlying deep green philosophy to questions of this nature, ever more relevant in the resource-stretched world we’re living in, plus some fundamental questions about the nature of community and the individual. If those questions can be resolved with some inventive friction between survivors of different outlooks, some wielding golfclubs studded with Stanley knife blades, so much the better.

If the promise of the first episode is realised, Survivors promises to be the BBC’s second strong drama series with elements of the fantastic to debut this month: this and Apparitions share an undercurrent of speculative intelligence that I’d like to see more of on screen. And they’re both shows I’d love to write for.

Moral seriousness. Two words pretty much guaranteed to deter anyone reading this piece from reaching its conclusion. And the words which came into my head as I was watching Martin Shaw go into a lighting shop glaring with the lamps it contained, and all of those lights dim as he came across a lampshade made of human skin.

Dimmed lights don’t rate as special effects, but the simple power of that image is what distinguishes Apparitions from any number of shows dabbling in the supernatural. Oh, there was more going on than that, and it even involved someone floating in midair at one point, but really what matters with this show is the power of the ideas it explores. The images are a way of conveying those concepts, not just a source of cheap thrills for the audience.

Apparations is all about an exorcist, Father Jacob, who is targeted by demons as he gets closer to becoming the Catholic Church’s Chief Exorcist. That kind of pressure goes with the territory, and in this second episode the heat really started to rise for Father Jacob.

Heat, fire, and flames were key notions within the story, which saw Jacob’s otherwordly enemy use the argument that ‘Hell is worse than a million Holocausts’. What made the debate particularly compelling was that the demon arguing this case seemed to sincerely believe that he was doing Father Jacob a favour by wanting to exorcise God from him, and forgave Jacob for what the demon had earlier referred to as throwing them back in the fires from which they’d escaped.

The fact that Jacob used distinctly worldly violence to trick the demon into being subdued is one point in favour of the demon’s paradigm. You almost feel sorry for them, until as it’s pointed out elsewhere, it was Satan that was behind Hitler, and hence the Holocaust. Meaning that God might be guilty of contributory negligence, but no more than that, free will being what it is.

Me taking such notions on board, and not a Catholic bone in me, gives you an idea of how convincing Joe Ahearne’s writing is, supported by some strong performances too. And intelligent writing is the key to this show’s success. As the Chief Exorcist says of his opponents’ tactics, ‘Every word is designed to snare you’. Like a timeshare sales pitch, but even more insidious, Apparations has woven its spell on me, and for at least an hour a week I buy into a medieval worldview.

Is that such a surprise though? After all, two of my favourite shows are The Shield and Spooks, and they feature moral conundrums of the knottiest sorts, with a side order of action for good measure. And good drama has done that since, well, there’s been any drama at all. The Oedipus stories are corking tales, and Shakespeare always gave his audience credit for more intelligence than a lot of modern television programmers do.

Success on the screen can give rise to imitations, but often the wrong lesson is learned. When Tarantino burst into popular consciousness, what did the studios do? One choice would have been to back new talent. The other was to commission a series of ultimately forgettable crime flicks where the violence was served with awkwardly hip dialogue (see Things To Do In Denver When You’re Dead and its teethgrating references to ‘boat drinks’ if you really need a reminder). Let’s hope that if Apparitions is viewed as a hit, it spawns not dodgy occult dramas, but television which inspires, confronts, and challenges, whatever its surface characteristics.

It has to be said that The Sound Of Music is not even close to being on my 100 best films list. But without it, one of my favourite pieces of music wouldn’t exist. Sax titan John Coltrane’s rendition of the Rodgers and Hammerstein song My Favorite Things is music of beauty and power that translates the base metal of its source material into something golden.

Equivalent alchemy happens in the world of comics on a regular basis. Jack Kirby’s ludicrous but brilliant artwork brings Stan Lee’s hokey stories to life in any number of their collaborations, but particularly on early Marvel titles such as Fantastic Four and Thor. And where would Alan Moore be without collaborators Melinda Gebbie, Dave Gibbons, David Lloyd and Kevin O’Neill? Each brings something utterly right to the stories they work on: they’re literally unimaginable without the talents of those particular artists.

For similar reasons, I very specifically chose Corrina Rothwell to bring the concept of a young undead girl to life in an animation we’re jointly developing. Corrina’s style brings out the emotions of the characters, rather than the gruesomeness, which would be the wrong road to go down in a project that’s intended for a younger audience. Similarly, Andy Tudor’s work on another animated story we’re developing about a group of children living on a Martian colony, isn’t just about his tremendous graphic skill, but a reflection of his lifelong fascination with NASA and astronomy.

Which is to say, it’s all about the collaboration, stupid. And right now, ’stupid’ is the best description of the Canada Council for the Arts, who have listed Mariko Tamaki as the sole creator of the childrens’ book Skim, illustrated by Mariko’s cousin Jillian. For a full account of the situation, read here.

To be fair, we can assume naivity on the part of the judging panel rather than wilful ignorance. But to get across just how dumb this move is, consider the following thought experiment:

Imagine Spider-Man drawn in the style of Fungus the Bogeyman.

Or Watchmen drawn by brilliant childrens’ book illustrator Quentin Blake.

For that matter, what would a Roald Dahl classic for children be like with art by Watchmen artist Dave Gibbons?

Get the idea? In comics, animation, and good illustrated books, art and text are a seamless whole. If they’re not, at least one person isn’t doing their job properly. And if one person’s letting the side down, the whole thing fails to achieve the spark that can occur when collaborators add to each others’ contributions.

Which isn’t to say that there aren’t plenty of generic, typical, mediocre comics and animations out there. But any fule kno that there’s a difference between the cool of the first animated Pink Panther series and the subsequent one where, of all things, PP talked. Likewise, the magic that Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely conjure together in We3 and their other collaborations in the world of comics is arguably unmatched by either’s partnership with anyone else.

There’s a click with Morrison and Quitely as surely as there was between Scorsese and De Niro, or Bjork and Nellee Hooper; confirmation that much modern art is the product of the indefinable spark of talents rubbing together, rather than older notions of the singular genius auteur. And it’d be nice if the Canada Council for the Arts woke up to that fact.

Rear Window starts as it continues, with a bravura display of visual storytelling as the camera swoops round the courtyard visible from invalided James Stewart’s window, and through the windows of his neighbours. Each new view presents a tale, a vignette that’s somewhat heightened rather than purely naturalistic, bringing to mind the urban cartooning of New Yorker Will Eisner.

The core of the story is Stewart’s discovery of what he believes to be a murder, but it wouldn’t engage the viewer emotionally without seeing Stewart’s relationship with his girlfriend. Played by Grace Kelly, Lisa is a glamourous socialite who has become embroiled in the life of Stewart’s hardbitten photojournalist, L.B. Jeffries. Problem being, she’s just too perfect in his cynical eyes. He’s a worldweary hack who eats crocodile guts and goes without shaving for days at a time, she’s a fashion devotee who is forever draped in haute couture: they’ve been dating for a while, but now marriage is on the cards Stewart is getting cold feet.

That dynamic may be corny, but assisted by sharp dialogue it pulls the audience into the action, in a script by John Michael Hayes from a short story by Cornell Woolrich. To give one example of the tenor of what’s going on, I love the line “Think the rain would have cooled things off. All it did was make the heat wet.” And what heat. It’s 90 degrees plus, which is why everyone’s got their windows open for Stewart to peek through, each apartment’s occupants defined by their place in the relationship spectrum, from flirty ballet dancer Miss Torso and her numerous suitors, through to sad Miss Lonely Heart, an eager pair of newlyweds, and the salesman who kills his bedridden wife.

Casting James Stewart as the snapper was a shrewd move on Hitchcock’s part, his easy amiability making you forget the fact that he’s essentially a peeping tom. A modern remake would place Tom Hanks in the same role, but let’s hope it doesn’t come to that: Rear Window is just fine as it is, no need for an update. And the peeping tom element is central to the story’s structure, the stakes raised as Stewart goes from using his eyes to binoculars, and from them to the zoom lens of his camera, through which the first thing he sees is the killer wrapping up a set of knives, and I don’t mean giftwrapping.

Hitchcock’s command of viewpoint is masterful, the story unfolding image by image as the camera brings Stewart’s perspective to life. It’s so brilliantly realised that you hardly appreciate it’s happening, the camerawork and edits effortless and involving. Sound is spot-on too, the ambience of the neighbourhood playing a role in what’s happening, with a built-in soundtrack courtesy of a composer working on a new piece at the piano in his studio apartment.

The action of the story is also its emotional journey. Lisa does the skulking about that Jeff’s broken leg prevents him from, and in the process she enters his world of action and risk, and he comes to care about her more deeply when she’s in jeapordy. Putting yourself in danger as a result of your partner’s amateur sleuthing might not be advice you’d get from Relate, but it certainly works for Stewart and Kelly in this brilliantly realised thriller from 1954.

Novelist and comedian Alexei Sayle was interviewed in last Saturday’s Independent. The bit that stood out for me was his musing on characters, stating that he wasn’t convinced by some of what he’d read of late, the writers being consumed by an urge to ’save’ their flawed characters. For Sayle, that doesn’t work: “For me the challenge is to present a bad character who stays bad, but at the same time show their humanity.”

Hmm. That made me think. I remember a friend who’d written a short story in which a character had a physical problem, an emotional problem and a psychological problem, all of which were resolved by the end, and thinking that it was all a bit convenient. Nice as it is for problems to be resolved in a few pages of neat prose, it doesn’t have the stink of life about it. Not if the problems are interesting ones anyway, which are surely the ones you want to be writing about, and reading.

All this, needless to say, applies to screenplays too. And the films they spawn. Especially those dismal offerings wherein a protagonist’s deep-seated issues are resolved merely by familial bonding or the love of a good woman. Bleaagh. Happy as I am for people to experience such catharsis in real life, on screen it tends to raise my blood pressure.

You’ll note my own issue by now. That I don’t want stories to be comforting tales of maladjusted people sorting themselves out. Well, actually, I can stomach such yarns, but only if the problems are really interesting, and the journey to resolving them compelling, and not just a case of treading water for 80 minutes until union with a significant other is reached.

If you’re looking for someone to blame for all this, Freud isn’t a bad place to start. ‘Sickman Fraud’, as NLP creator Richard Bandler dubs him, isn’t much rated in psychology departments these days, but his sticky influence is all over English courses. Sure, students get a dunking in structuralism and some other theoretical stances (of which I’m equally critical, but let’s save that for another time), but the Freudian worldview remains big in English departments.

See, writers will come up with dramatic situations partly influenced by whatever their paradigms for psychology are. And Freud’s is tiresomely fixated on sex and the family, often at the same time. Which is all well and good, and without which we may not have The Grifters. Mind you, Sophocles wrote Oedipus without having consulted the beardy Viennese cokehead, so that’s another theory out of the window, isn’t it?

Well, no. Freud usefully explored sexuality at a time it was taboo, to be fair. But having done so, it’s all he could see in terms of human motivation. Which is pretty much like the thing that happens when you buy a new car and notice lots of others of the same model on the roads. Only, in Freud’s case, wanting to do weird things to their exhaust pipes.

Which is to say, sex and death is all very well, but there’s a lot more to human experience than that. I developed a psychological thriller earlier this year, and part of the motivation was to do a story that owed nothing to Freudian psychology (of course, Freudians will say I’m suppressing its deeper presence…see how easy this shit is?).

I’ve alluded to NLP in this blog before, and that in turn has led me — among other things — to study hypnotherapist Milton Erickson, systems thinker Gregory Bateson, family therapist Virginia Satir, and do Feldenkrais-influenced bodywork. I’ve also read Jung, and find Tarot an interesting model for exploration. I find all of these approaches useful, but the thing is that my learning is ongoing and dynamic.

It’s that constant refreshing of what goes on in your head, the exploration of new models and data, that keeps you alert to nuances and possibilities that you won’t have been aware of before, and which some simply won’t perceive. And the greater variety of perceptions and concepts you experience, the more interesting the stories you come up with are likely to be. With New Year 2009 coming up, what could you spend some time exploring to keep your noggin noodling in new ways?

The plan was, buy a whole bunch of sausages as a present for a friend’s birthday, so they could be served at her party. And with Johnny at Beedham’s making the bangers, I knew they’d be quality: his meats grace the plates of Nottingham’s only Michelin-starred restaurant, whose chef Sat Bains is slowly becoming a bit of celebrity. And thanks to Sat, Johnny too has been getting his share of media appearances and plaudits.

So, there I am with a bag of seven varieties of sausage, and my urge to consume is not satisfied. I’ve bought a gift for someone else: surely it’s now my right to treat myself. Which is how I come to find myself at Zavvi, which used to be Virgin and I can’t help pronouncing ‘chavvy’, looking through the DVDs for anything where value and interest intersect.

I try to be discriminating with my DVDs, having reached a point where I’m weeding the chaff out of my collection to leave room for more. So the box set of the complete Cold Feet is out, even at a bargain price: I like the show alright, but well enough to have it as a feature in the room’s decor? A bumper set of Prime Suspect fails to make the cut, partly for similar reasons of bulk. Also, I recall some of the middle-period shows being patchy. Besides, Lynda la Plante scares me, and I’m not sure I could cope with her peering at me from the DVD extras. And how many serial killer stories set in wet northern towns can I stomach anyway? If I am going in that direction, Cracker is the more attractive option…but not attractively priced.

How about West Wing? The wheelie bin-sized complete set is a snip at £50, but frankly the more attention I pay to the antics of pretend politicians, the less I get to attend to America’s actual president, whose story interests me more. All the Monty Python ever is available for a reasonable price too, but I have a feeling I’ve had enough of Cleese, Idle, et al in my life.

Onto the movies then, since there don’t seem to be any tv collections taking my fancy. Besides, by this point my attention is captured by the cute Chinese goth-lite store assistant, and my legs as well as my eyes follow her into the film section. Hmm, what have we here? All the Matrix films bundled together when I already have the only decent one of the trilogy? I think not.

What about those actor-themed sets, with three films by Paul Newman, Steve McQueen, or whoever? The trick with these is that you get two films you really do want, and a third you’ve never even heard of, from a point before their career got off the ground and they were working with, say, Roger Corman. Or they’re from the latter part of their career, either proving they haven’t still got it, or making one last stab at credibility in an attempt to emulate what happened to Bruce Willis when Tarantino got hold of him…only with less successful results.

There is of course the option to buy nothing. But at this point I’ve been there for a while, and feel some kind of exchange is owed thanks to the enjoyment I’ve got from the Chinese woman. And it’s at that moment that my eyes rest on a Clint Eastwood trilogy, one that breaks the rule alluded to above by sticking resolutely to his Sergio Leone period. Fistful of Dollars, For A Few Dollars More, and The Good, The Bad and The Ugly for £10. And the box says there are oodles of extras, not least the best sound on these films ever, which I’m sure I won’t appreciate as much as the poor sod who polished it to get that accolade.

At the tram stop on the way home, the woman next to me drops her bag with a glassy clunk. She picks it up again and shows me: ‘Cornflakes and wine’. I nod, like this is just the sort of combination that people buy all the time. Which of course it is. I raise my bag: ‘Sausages and spaghetti.’

Just how do you do a serious-minded drama about exorcism in an age of populist fundamentalism, from the sort that gets the headlines for all the worst reasons to dogmatic atheists getting onto the bestseller lists? It’s a tough brief, and it’s to the credit of writer and director Joe Ahearne that the first episode of BBC1’s new series Apparitions is as good as it is.

There’s a lot of information to get across to set the scene for the inevitable exorcism. It’s a particularly and peculiarly Catholic business, and the show’s protagonist is a potential successor to the Church’s number one exorcist. Father Jacob, sonorously played by Martin Shaw, is approached by a young girl concerned that her father is possessed. He takes her claim seriously, if only because exorcism work must be thin on the ground, and her pocket money could make all the difference between carrying on and signing on.

Is the girl’s dad possessed, or merely an especially zealous fan of Richard Dawkins? Well, given the show’s premise you won’t be surprised to hear that supernatural forces are at work. And the situation is depicted very effectively, a whole bunch of exposition squeezed in pretty much effortlessly to bring the audience up to speed on exorcism and the Bible. I was particularly taken by Father Jacob’s claim that “when the church first started, every Christian was an exorcist”. Room there for a computer game, I reckon, and a trashy tie-in B-movie with disciples hurling lightning bolts at demonic dinosaurs.

Should you mistake all this for Jesuit propaganda, another strand of the story features a gay priest who won’t be getting Vatican approval any time soon. Nor will the programme’s backstory, setting up Mother Teresa as a target of demonic forces, and whose death spookily coincides with the young girl’s conception. All interesting stuff, and the BBC is to be commended for bringing it to our screens — better this than another tiresomely eccentric detective with a signature sandwich pursuing pretentious serial killers.

The original idea for the show came from Nick Collins. No idea who he is, or what the circumstances of that origination are…let’s hope Collins has been better treated than some people who’ve come up with concepts that others have gone on to develop. The fact that his name is there on the screen is encouraging, anyway. And I hope he’s pleased with what Joe Ahearne has done with the idea.

Apparitions is a very welcome outbreak of the fantastic in BBC1’s post-watershed lineup. I thoroughly enjoyed the first episode, and look forward to seeing what’s coming up. It’s very much an adult show in terms of its themes, its imagery, its intellectual heritage, and that’s to be applauded. Here’s to the success of the series, and fingers crossed for future seasons.