Damn. A week ago, I was singing the praises of Spooks. This time, I’m not so convinced. But don’t worry: I come not to bury Spooks, but to offer constructive feedback.

It’s partly my own fault for rewatching last night’s excellent BBC1 episode, which I’d seen previously on BBC3, before getting excited enough to watch another of the BBC3 previews. Exactly the same urge that compels me to have the second slice of carrot cake, the one where you realise the buttercream icing is in fact made with cheap margarine.

So, what went wrong? In a word, money. The premise of the episode — and if you haven’t sussed by now that I’ll be writing spoilers for what’s to come on BBC1, then this is your final warning — was that a big player on the London financial markets was in fact intent on bringing down capitalism for unconvincing reasons of family background.

Now, in a James Bond film I could accept such a set-up without blinking. But Spooks is, usually, cut from a different cloth (I’ll draw a veil over that dismal episode where they end up protecting the life of a rockstar a couple of series back…). Generally though, Spooks inhabits a more recognisable world than that currently inhabited by Daniel Craig.

Problem being, your antagonist was thoroughly unconvincing, a caricature of mercenary capitalism as thought up by someone whose only knowledge of it was whatever research was necessary for the episode. Not that I’m any kind of expert in such matters, as my bank manager would attest. But I’ve read Liar’s Poker, Michael Lewis’s brilliant account of life among people who make the money markets tick, and even met a few folks who dabble in that line, and by comparison the Spooks baddie was a two-dimensional twerp. His plan to bankrupt Britain was equally simplistic, all to do with destroying a Scottish bank and forcing the government to bail it out in a way that would empty the Exchequer’s coffers. There was a bit more handwaving involved, but that’s the gist.

So, the main business of the episode was somewhat lacking. Good thing that there were many commendable elements to it. Boss man Harry’s ongoing exploration of Russian penetration of MI5 saw him interrogating his elderly colleague Connie about her illicit romance with a colleague. Harry necessarily hurt Connie in pursuit of a mole and discovered a vital clue as a result. Maybe a bit quickly sketched, but this was a subplot after all, and worked at an emotional level. And in the main plot there was some grim business about what Ros felt obliged to do with the bad guy to achieve her objective, that felt appropriately ick. Ros also scored points for her behaviour when the baddy’s partner in crime had a gun to her head, proving once again that ice runs in her veins.

So, overall, a less than resounding 6 out of 10, thanks to the ineptness of the main storyline. But the other business continues to persuade me that Spooks really is one of the BBC’s best shows, and one that’s well worth keeping an eye on.

Much of the time, writing seems a nebulous business.  Anything goes on the page…or does it?  In doing some development work on someone’s short film project, I once again become aware of the kind of thinking I’ve evolved about what makes a script work. 

Partly, that perspective allows me to see things that would clearly be redundant.  In this case, a scene which too early and clearly establishes that a central character is due a come-uppance.  Also, having established that said character is a nasty piece of work, there’s no point in giving further examples of it if they don’t shed extra light on their personality and motivations.  Another page or more saved. 

That bad guy is too monotone in depiction for my tastes, so I suggest that he also be a new father.  Still a shit, but I like to throw something into the mix to make the picture more complex, more human.  The writer-director isn’t convinced, partly because he’s so sold on this guy being a baddy, also on a practical production note because he’s not sure where he can wrangle a baby.  I suggest that a recording of a crying baby will do the job just fine, which is a useful suggestion…but still not one in line with the creator’s concept of his villain.

An old standby comes in handy on this occasion: swap a character’s gender to see if it makes things more interesting.  On this occasion it does, and before now that suggestion has led to whole new stories being developed.  One director I worked with had a notion of a house being broken into, and when I suggested it was a woman breaking in, a whole new scenario opened up.  Who was she, what was she after?  It turned out to be a mother looking for evidence that her son was gay, a world away from the conventional situation the director had begun our session with.

I see my role as akin to that of coaching: I’m there not to pull apart someone’s story, but to help a creator realise the best possible version of their vision.  One client came to me having had her script shredded in a script report she’d paid lots of money for, with no suggestion of what could be done to improve it.  Between us, we went back to square one and discovered her motivation, and then rebuilt from there so that her script — or at least the next version of it she went on to write — would be in line with that vision.   From being despondent when she called me, we concluded our session with her in high spirits — not the job itself done, but in a much better position to tackle it.

It’s too easy to dismiss someone’s creativity, far more interesting to help them fulfil a project’s potential by getting them to think bigger and think differently.  In pursuit of that goal, I’ll use whatever methods seem appropriate at the time.  With one client, I got him to pretend to be Pi director Darren Aronofsky, and stride round the cafe we were meeting in declaiming how he’d work with the source material in question.  Hey, whatever works: the guy has come back to me for further consultations.

Bottom line is this: creativity is a state of consciousness, or a whole bunch of them, and my job is to help people to tune in to theirs.  If they’ve come for consultation on a project, clearly they’re not finding it easy to get there solo, so I’ll do whatever it takes to limber up or limbo down until the sparks are flying once again, and they’re coming up with solutions for whatever apparent problems they had.  It’s fun, especially if you can do it over mocha and a piece of pecan pie.  And it might not be what most people professionally involved in script development do, but hey…it works.  Check out the script doctoring section elsewhere on this site for more info.

What is it about transgressing the law that makes it such a popular subject for drama? Given the amount of big and small screen time devoted to different perspectives on this topic, it’s a question worth investigating. The last couple of nights have presented two very different takes on what makes crime fascinating, from the long established ITV show The Bill, and new American import Life.

One distinction between the shows is that The Bill is an ensemble drama, while Life centres round one central character. That difference shapes the programmes in interesting ways. The cops of Sun Hill have differing personal styles that affect the way they do their jobs, and that sometimes leads to conflict within the team. That range of approaches and personalities makes for the programme’s key appeal: how the letter of the law is interpreted by people of divergent character.

Life is a very different show, and one that is very much representative of 21st century genre television, when the tried and tested formats have been running for decades and anything new must have something different to offer to viewers. We’ve seen the same happen in medical dramas with the success of House, where Hugh Laurie synthesises Sherlock Holmes and Simon Cowell to create a uniquely appealing character. And clearly the makers of Life are hoping for a similarly distinctive appeal with their protagonist, Charlie Crews.

As played by Damian Lewis, Crews is a cop who’s been let out of prison after serving a decade there wrongfully. Meaning he’s interesting for at least three reasons. First, he doesn’t understand some aspects of the modern world, eg the internet and phones that take photos. Second, he’s been given oodles of money as compensation, which he’s invested in a flash car and house. Third, the reason he survived his time in prison is because of his adoption of a Buddhist stance on life. These factors can be played with in the context of a crime drama to produce endless interesting permutations for the writers to toy with.

So, Crews is the axis around which the show rotates, and my fear is that the writing is already leaning to the hip end of the spectrum to give it a Unique Selling Point. And it sounds a bit cutesy to me, Zen reduced to fortune cookie aphorisms. But maybe there’s an audience for that, because god knows it was hard to find much distinctive about The Bill. Well written and acted it undoubtedly was, but there was a strong feeling of deja vu in this evening’s episode. One of the guys poses as a taxi driver and gets caught up in delivering dodgy packages in a storyline that connects to a posh bird who has been supplying her friends with coke. It was all very competently done, but the only original aspect was the young woman being represented by her father, a barrister, a mix of professional and personal which created some of the show’s more interesting moments.

Certainly The Bill can impress – witness the bombing storyline a few months back – and make the most of its ensemble cast. But given the inevitable familiarity of many of the storylines run on a show about to celebrate its 25th birthday, is it any surprise that new shows head in the direction of Life, in an attempt to find fresh life in the genre? The danger being that shows dependent on a protagonist’s idiosyncrasies risk those qualities losing favour with the public without solid writing and performances.

As long as we live in a society with others, we will continue to be fascinated by those who transgress the shared rules by which we are obliged to live together. And there’s always going to be a place on the tv schedules for shows which examine that truism. Specifically how that’s done is a question of playing with some of the variables that past tv dramas have been constructed with: team or individual focus, legal or criminal perspective, ongoing drama or fixed end point, etc. Playing with those permutations has given us Dexter and Hill Street Blues, Cracker and The Sopranos, Columbo and Wire in the Blood. There’s every reason to assume a bright future for viewers from the darkness at the heart of those shows.

Again with the spies.  In Burn After Reading, spies are used in satirical vein, proof that noone knows anything.  In Quantum of Solace, they’re to be admired: full of maverick glamour and depicted as if in credit card commercials.  And then there’s Spooks.

Spooks is unusual in that, for a good while at least, every series was better than the preceding one.  Hard to say whether that’s still the case, but if the show has reached a plateau it’s one at an enviable height.  This time round, the boys and girls of MI5 continue to be part of an international web of intrigue, with Russia making a surprise reappearance as one of the key players, behind the death of one of the show’s most liked characters, the blonde bombshell Adam Carter.

Make no mistake, Spooks has its own glamour.  Its black-suited characters are forever meeting shady contacts between the pillars of classical buildings, and there’s a clipped minimalism to the script which with some sardonic humour too makes them come across as very bright indeed.  And they’ve got our best interests at heart, which is more than can be said for some of the actual players in British espionage, who in days gone by at least included a seam of barking mad right wingers intent on bringing about rule by a military and public school elite lest the democratically elected Labour government get too pally with the unions.  The Spooks characters are cut from a different cloth: to be admired, and looked up to, but not with the kind of chummy empathy that’s possible with characters on Coronation Street, say.

So, if Ros and crew aren’t insane free marketeers or rugger buggers with plans to rebuild Empire, what are they?  That’s a question that gets to the heart of what Spooks is about.  Its characters recognisably live in a world torn from today’s headlines, with economic crises, Al Qaeda, an American election and Eastern Europe in turmoil.  And they’re trying to respond to that world in such a way that it safeguards a modern pluralist multi-cultural Britain.  Which is why the show includes a young Muslim in its ranks, posing as a fanatic in order to infiltrate an Al Qaeda cell.  And that same commitment to hearing the voices of others explains why a senior Al Qaeda figure wants to negotiate with the MI5 crew, on the condition that a prominent civil rights lawyer who has acted against the agency is present.

It’s clever stuff, all about the knots and intricacies created by the ethical dilemmas of espionage in the modern world.  Sure, there are more emotional storylines running through, about one agent recovering from a bomb blast, and the team responding to Adam’s death, but the principal focus is on the thornier matter of ethics.  And it brings them to life brilliantly: nothing like adding guns and street chases to a storyline about the relativism implicit in judgements of Islamic fundamentalism to make a scene ratttle along.

This is high calibre television, intelligent enough that I can’t keep up with all its intricacies, except when I’ve realised on a second viewing that there’s a certain amount of smoke and mirrors going on in Spooks: the emphasis is on maintaining momentum rather than exposing the workings of the plot to considered thought, and that’s just fine.  The sense of being alongside the protagonists as they’re following suspects, interrogating them, being tempted to step over whatever line it is seperates us from those we define as enemies, is brilliantly achieved.

More than anything, Spooks is a kind of 21st century morality play, that happens to wear the trappings of an action thriller.  No accident then, that its writers include old school political dramatists such as Howard Brenton.  It’s a fine show, and I’d say an important one, bringing issues alive more than the news media manages to for the most part, and with audiences willing to come along for the ride.

Drugs and humour rarely go together. Ask Richard Pryor. In my case, I also have years of evidence to call on of stoned people reverting to conversations about either their favourite childhood television shows, their need for snacks, or the last time they were high.

Believe me, there might have been ounces of weed involved, but there weren’t even trace amounts of comedy. Which makes it surprising that I still find the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers so reliably amusing. Gilbert Shelton’s counterculture heroes are still going strong, and have recently had their adventures collected in a thumping big anthology, or indeed Omnibus as the cover describes it.

The action starts way back when, and one of the surprises is seeing how relatively sexist the hirsute trio’s adventures are by modern standards. I have no problem with that, just saying. And it’s inevitable because the Freaks are simultaneously of their time and transcend it, their status as archetypes allowing them to continue to get laughs these days when so much of their hippy era is viewed with suspicion or worse.

All very well, but how did Fat Freddy, Phineas, and Freewheelin’ Franklin get to become archetypes in the first place? Well, it’s partly about the way they look: they really are credible looking avatars of their tribe. But without solid writing creating strong stories for those images to inhabit, they’d be relegated to t-shirts and bumper stickers, whereas in reality their comic sales are still strong: 40 million since they started.

The strength of the stories, intricately connected with the quality of the cartooning, is in depicting a lifestyle that continues to be a rite of passage for many. There’s a point in The Matrix where the protagonist is offered the choice of the red pill or the blue pill. He chooses the one that leads to the revelation of truth. For the Freak Brothers, being offered a red pill and a blue pill presents no dilemmas: snaffle both, then follow them up with a rainbow of other pharmaceuticals, and cap it all off with a reefer of the finest ganja available.

It’s all about the pursuit of the high, which the likes of Terence McKenna say has evolutionary purpose, but which in the case of the Freak Brothers more often than not leads to devolution in ethics and behaviour. Which is interesting, and apt: hippies the Freak Brothers might be on the surface, but they’re not pure children of the stars. They’re greedy, selfish, dirty and horny, characteristics which make them much easier to identify, even if you’d rather not identify with them yourself.

The stories range from one-pagers to multi-issue epics, and I rather feel that Shelton’s plotting skills aren’t up to the latter. A shame, though all of the adventures have their moments. Some of the tales are broadly credible, others much more fanciful, but the consistency of characters and artwork (despite different cartoonists working on the stories) gets across that it all fits together, kind of. Better that than the kind of contortions needed to read several of the titles that Marvel or DC put out and convince yourself they’re part of the same world, anyway.

I took around three weeks to read the Omnibus, last thing at night, and pretty much every night I was guffawing at some or other aspect of the stories. Fat Freddy buying a gun to shoot game and being ordered by the others to eat the ‘roof rabbit’ (ie rat) he kills when he accidentally looses the gun at the ceiling. Norbert the Nark being overpowered by the gaseous side-effects of a Mexican meal when the trio come back to their apartment that the agent has rigged with a device to smell marijuana. Franklin being beaten up by his girlfriend when she smokes the special dope that Phineas laced with testosterone to help maintain his manhood. There’s some truly classic humour among these 600-plus pages, and you don’t need to be a dopefiend to enjoy them. Here’s hoping that the comedy successfully translates to a planned screen adventure for the Freak Brothers…

Less than 24 hours ago I was writing here that Burn After Reading would make it hard for me to take Hollywood spy films seriously. And now here I am reviewing Quantum of Solace, the latest in the James Bond franchise.

Could I take it seriously? Well, more so than most Bond films, which I’m not really a fan of other than the Sean Connery ones, and even those I don’t consider essential viewing. As for the charge of espionage, it’s hard to view credibly since Jim spends most of the new film hurtling round the world like a football hooligan underwritten by the British tax payer to biff various dodgy foreigners for unspeakable behaviour.

Not a lot of tradecraft on display in other words, unless it happened while I was blinking: some of the edits were seriously fast. They’ve been like that since Daniel Craig took over the 007 role, in a blatant attempt to catch some of the considerable thunder of the more raw and credible Bourne films. Last time round, the emulation of Bourne was more than apparent. This time round, they’ve sneaked back in some older Bond elements so you can be sure which franchise you’re viewing.

Those vintage elements, in no particular order:

Dizzying change of location: in Quantum, Jim starts the story in Italy and travels to Haiti, Bolivia and Russia before he can stop for a piss.

Bond girls: barely has Jim had the chance to mourn Vesper (or was it Vespa, and in which case is she named after the scooter?) than he’s buddied up with babes Olga Kurylenko and Gemma Arterton. Nothing like a few nano-seconds of grief before getting your leg over again.

Megalomaniac baddies: in this case a Mr Greene, whose surname would lead you to believe his PR about environmental change, but is in fact a sinister power broker intent on controlling the world’s utilities. At least he’s not a dubious racial caricature with a physical disability, as so many of Fleming’s baddies are.

Hotel rooms: admittedly, recent job ads in the press suggest Her Majesty’s spies are not highly paid. But they make up for that with outrageous expense accounts. Bond is a globetrotter in the vein of Alan Whicker, only staying at the very best places.

Product placement: I wasn’t keeping up, but the number of times I’ve been exposed to advertising tie-ins in the last couple of weeks indicates the humungous scale of the marketing operation.

Gizmos: not much in that department this time round, but there was a very impressive computer data screen set-up clearly modelled on the one in Minority Report.

The perils of transport: whether he’s piloting a plane, driving an Aston Martin, or in charge of a motorboat, chaos and carnage is sure to follow Mr Bond.

In other words, business is pretty much as usual for Jim. Which is what you’d expect. The franchise has been given a much needed overhaul, but with that in place there are already signs that old habits are starting to return. The death of Bond’s lover from the British consulate in Bolivia, coated in oil to provide a crap red herring, was a blunt allusion to Goldfinger that didn’t make a whole lot of sense. And Jim sending Greene to die in the desert with a can of oil to drink by way of payback felt forced.

To sum up then, if you like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing you’ll like. Personally I prefer the Bourne films, but as long as Daniel Craig is in the role of Bond I’ll be checking out what he’s getting up to, and not being surprised when I’m not at all surprised by the familiarity of it all.

The business of who knows what is very important within a film. It applies to what the viewer knows as well as what characters understand. Get the balance right, and you can create all kinds of effects on the audience. Viewers knowing that a protagonist is dying, and her kids being ignorant of that fact, has one effect when she bids them farewell. The children finding out at a later stage in a letter from her creates a different response.

Generally speaking, managing information in this manner is what creates much of the emotional impact of a story. It’s also critical to how plots operate. Thrillers in particular depend on the intricacies of audience knowledge versus character knowledge: knowing that the hero’s gun has just the one bullet left when he commences the showdown with the bad guy puts us even more in his corner as he has to delay his shot for the right moment, or improvise an alternative weapon.

So, the control of epistemology (ie how you know what you know) is vital to the success of a screenplay. And playing fast and loose with that rule of thumb is central to the effect that Burn After Reading has on an audience. The semiotics of the film tell us that this is a spy thriller, what with the zoom from space to the CIA HQ, the titles appearing with electronic noises onscreen, the bombastic soundtrack.

But the scene that we’re privy to isn’t one we’re conditioned by these cues to expect. No insider secrets about Chinese cyphers or rogue assassins here. Instead, a tightly wound John Malkovich getting downgraded in his work as the result of his drink problem, which he responds to by saying that compared to his Mormon counterpart, everyone has a drink problem.

And so it continues. Malkovich tries to share his shattering news with his uptight wife, but she’s more concerned that he hasn’t got the cheeses for their party that night. In fact, given the prevalence of espionage in this film, the biggest secrets we learn are about peoples’ sex lives. The spying game seems ludicrous, grown men running about taking very little information far too seriously. Finding herself in possession of a computer disk containing Malkovich’s memoirs, Frances McDormand’s character does what you’re supposed to do in a spy film and tries to sell them to the Russians. No dice: they’re not interested.

All that spying does in the film is increase everyone’s level of paranoia, a fascinating and valid comment on espionage as a genre and way of life. George Clooney’s character is convinced he’s being pursued by the CIA and that eventually becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. All the running round is done on the basis of sexual shenanigans and worthless intelligence memoirs, though the characters are fully engrossed in fantasies about the meaning of what they’re doing.

It’s a fascinating stance for a film to take, and a brave one: Burn After Reading is, as the senior intelligence people at the CIA HQ acknowledge, about nothing in particular. The characters invest meaning in what they’re doing, but really they’re just getting worked up about nothing. And that’s as sharp a take as you’re likely to see about espionage as any, one that came through stronger on my second viewing of the film after seeing a trailer for Ridley Scott’s forthcoming spy thriller, Body Of Lies. I’ll watch it, and probably enjoy it, but after Burn After Reading it’ll be hard to take Hollywood espionage stories seriously.