Sitcom is a curious form of writing, and more than that of performance.  For the com to emerge from the sit, it seems to be traditional for the actors to exaggerate things in a fashion that I find unconvincing, and which is very much one of the conventions of the genre.

Tonight saw the first episode of The Old Guys, a new BBC1 offering created by Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong, the partnership behind the highly successful Channel 4 sitcom Peep Show.  The core of the matter is in the title: this is a series about two older gents, Tom and Roy.  Tom, played by Roger Lloyd-Pack, is the edgier of the two, a bit of an old hippy in some respects.  Roy, portrayed by Clive Swift, is more along the lines of a conventional older tv character, a suburban chap who probably spent his career in a series of offices.

The show opened with some relatively risque material about Alzheimers and prostate cancer before settling into more familiar sitcom territory.  The two men are sharing a house for reasons that are never explored, which is a shame since it could be the basis of interesting material: two guys in their twenties living together is hardly unexpected.  For the men to be doing the same in their sixties, there almost certainly is the basis of a story there.  Maybe it’ll appear in a future episode.

Guess who lives across the road from our elderly protagonists?  Jane Asher, who’s having a party and wants the lads to help prepare it.  Only, she never actually makes it clear whether they’re invited to the party, or just expected to be her skivvies.  What passes for the plot hangs on this slender thread, in a script by Simon Blackwell: not sure whether we’ll get to see Bain and Armstrong do any of the wordwrangling themselves, or if their role is to oversee apprentices.

Certainly, there was a touch of Peep Show in the two guys having a competition to see who can go longest without peeing.  And even more so in the denouement of this storyline, featuring the pair of them pissing into Jane Asher’s kitchen sink in full view of hostess and guests.  It was pretty much as entertaining as that sounds, and took quite a lot of contrivance to arrive at a mediocre payoff.

There was a subplot concerning Tom’s daughter, who Jane Asher tries to hook up with her son.  Tom gets his oar in and suggests via Facebook that his daughter is up for fun 24/7 in an attempt to hasten a tryst, not least because the bloke earns £80,000.  And at the party, Tom is assumed to be poking fun at the son: the lad has just had dental cosmetic surgery and talks with a lisp and, wouldn’t you know it, Tom too is talking funny having burned his mouth eating a toasted tomato sandwich.

There’s nothing especially bad about The Old Guys, but there wasn’t much that shone about it either.  Which is a shame.  Maybe future episodes will do more with the characters than was on display in this first story.  Historically, some sitcoms take at least a couple of series to hit their stride, which has always baffled me: what is it that makes them harder to create than any other form of scripted entertainment?  And what am I going to watch in the meantime while waiting for The Old Guys to shape up into something altogether more compelling than its opening shot?

For a couple of weeks now, since I upgraded my computer, I’ve had a new screensaver.  It’s the cover of Howard the Duck 16 which you can see about halfway down this page.  It’s not the best cover of the series, but it’s the issue that gave me some insight into what it is to write for a living, and which I read and reread in my teens.

It isn’t even a story: writer Steve Gerber had messed up and missed his deadline, and rather than reprinting an earlier issue, which was how such matters were typically dealt with, he instead put together a comic that infuriated some readers, and delighted others.  The comic comprised a dialogue between Gerber and his web-footed hero, and a series of hastily penned essays and accompanying illustrations.  Some of them, I suspect, had been in Gerber’s possession for years, and finally found a home in the pages of this unique publication.

Let’s be honest: it isn’t even particularly well written in places.   But there’s something altogether fascinating about it, exposing as it does some of the wiring of a writer’s head, and with that insights into how Gerber did what he did in this often remarkable comic.  A quarter of a century before its time, this comic was a DVD commentary about the series and its creator, and it fascinated me.

The issue is titled Deadline Doom, and that concept too enthralled me.  At that point in my life, the only writing I did that had a deadline was for homework.  Not long later though, and I’d be writing for fanzines, and that gave me a greater sense of responsibility than anything I’d had to do for school.  Plus, it introduced me to a community of older guys who put zines together, and they were an interesting and welcoming bunch for the most part.  For some reason, women didn’t seem to be involved in zines, at any rate the ones I was aware of, but I barely noticed at the time.

I kept up my involvement in the zine scene through my student years, and was then left with the question of what to do now I’d got a degree.  There was no obvious answer, but I knew I liked writing so applied for jobs that seemed to have something to do with it.  Monday Guardian jobs basically.  And one day, under the influence of whisky and painkillers following a wisdom tooth extraction, I applied for a job with a letter in the style of Raymond Chandler.  That letter secured me a meeting with an ad agency in Herts, and they offered me a job as an advertising all-rounder.

It became evident pretty quickly that of all the aspects of being an advertising all-rounder, the bit I found enjoyable was writing the ads.  And thankfully that’s the way things went for me, albeit for tragic reasons.  The agency’s only copywriter, also a director of the business, was very ill, and I had to step into his shoes.  They were loafers, this being the late 80s, and he wore them with a white suit that had its sleeves rolled up.  Anyway, the ads had to be written by someone, and that person was me.

What that meant was, I had a lot of deadlines.  Bottom line is, the Watford Gazette is not going to take a recess because the agency hasn’t got its ad sorted out: space has been booked for the ad, and an ad will appear, and not a half-arsed excuse for its absence told in the form of a duologue with a cigar-smoking duck.  OK, that ad may not be the best one on its page, let alone the best you and an art director have crafted, but damnit the ad is there for the world to see.  Or all of Watford, at any rate.

Deadlines are important because they produce adrenaline.  And adrenaline is important because it stimulates the fight/flight response.  You either take one of those options, or the chemical rush impels you to conjure a solution from wherever concepts dwell.  And there’s a buzz about that experience that never leaves you, whether you’re still knocking out ads for local papers, or slaving away on a feature film treatment that’s got to be with the producer for tomorrow morning.

Anyone who’s read this blog for a while will have noted my antipathy to some of the default settings used by lazier thriller writers.  I’m thinking here of the sort of characterisation that says giving your protagonist a hobby and a preferred type of food counts as three dimensional.  And that serial killers are a hyperintelligent breed akin to cryptic crossword setters, who leave behind a trail of clues for their nemesis to collect after three ad breaks and a couple of red herrings.

There’s too much of that lazy contrived crap out there, and I can’t be the only one who’s tired of it.  I’m more than sure of that, having watched the concluding episode of the Sally Wainwright scripted ITV three parter Unforgiven.  This was simply superb television, that substituted the convoluted machinations of unbelievable bad guys for the messy interactions of credible and flawed human beings caught up in a situation that reached from the incomprehensible violence of the past to mess up the lives of people here and now.

Unforgiven was chaotic in all the right ways.  The poltergeist storyline set up in the first episode turned out to be nothing of the sort, a lovely counterexample to the general rule of thumb that a gun seen in the first act will be fired in the third.  There was no room for the supernatural here; no need to call on forces beyond purely mortal and fallible ones.  Tonally though, the non-poltergeist was right, setting up a sense of wrongness echoing through the years in the farmhouse where a teenage girl and her younger sister had been expelled by police and bailiffs fifteen years before and responded with lethal violence.

Sally Wainwright’s script was brilliant in its sense of life as lived, and not as conveniently plotted.  Sure, different strands of the story did get to have their varied resolutions, but it was all done in an understated and natural-feeling way miles removed from the generic contrivances of most screenwriting.  The man who wanted revenge on Suranne Jones’s character for killing his father exacted his retribution by kidnapping the young woman he believed to be her sister…but snatched the wrong girl.  And he was driven not just by whatever purity of motive might exist in avenging your father’s death, but equally by the feelings churning in him after catching his brother in bed with his wife.  That kind of complication didn’t confuse matters, it just made them feel more real.

The business of the two sisters reconnecting after all this time — the letters sent from prison had never reached the younger sister in her new home — was handled expertly.  Suranne tracked her sibling to university, and built up a picture of her by listening to her play piano and interact with friends.  All from a safe distance.  Contact was inevitable though, and was forced by a third character when vital information was needed from the music student and Suranne had to confront her to get it.  Any number of other writers would have pussyfooted round that scene, but the aspect of being forced into it worked a treat, and made it natural for the two women to communicate, however awkwardly, thereafter.

It’s rare for television to reach the heights that Unforgiven attained, and it’d be unrealistic to expect something just as strong to follow it.  The omens are not promising: the forthcoming Whitechapel promises — guess what — a serial killer reenacting the Jack the Ripper killings.  Ho hum.  I shall endeavour to contain my excitement.  It’s safe to say there’s a market for such guff, and from time to time it can be watchable, in the same way that the occasional burger in your diet does no harm.  But, as the saying has it, why have burger when you can have steak?

Gus Van Sant has made some curious choices in his career, most notably the bizarre decision to do a carbon copy remake of Psycho.  But when he’s focused, as he was in his Columbine school shooting film Elephant, he can do some remarkable work.  And thankfully it’s that Gus who’s at the helm of Milk, a recounting of the political life of businessman Harvey Milk and his successful quest to become the first openly gay voice in American politics.

The fact that Milk’s campaign happened as recently as the 1970s seems inconceivable now, and it’s precisely because of that lack of appreciation of history within popular culture that this is such a valuable film.  America has proven it can cope with a black President, but there’s still considerable progress to be made as far as acceptance of homosexuality is concerned.  Having films like Milk in the mainstream rather than the arthouse plays a part in the process of normalisation.

All of which makes the film sound dangerously worthy, and thankfully Milk is anything but that.  It’s a warm and multifaceted exploration of the life of a man who simply had the guts to stand up and be counted on behalf of his community at a time when homophobia was widespread and often expressed in the form of violence.

What I didn’t realise was the extent to which Harvey Milk was responsible for San Francisco being known as a gay city.  According to the film at least (this is a matter I am otherwise ignorant about) it was Milk circulating a list of gay-friendly businesses that helped turn the Castro into the gay part of town: those who accepted the pink dollar flourished while others dwindled away.

That was an interesting move to make, and points to Milk’s origins as a Republican businessman who understood how economic leverage works.  Milk himself, superbly portrayed by Sean Penn, is an utterly credible character, a pragmatist who finds himself moved by the situation his community is in to do something concrete by standing for public office.  Dustin Lance Black’s script synthesises what must be oodles of research into a journey that must have been much more frustrating in life than it could possibly appear in two hours or so of screen time.

Harvey is someone I’d love to have met, his ability to implement change in the real world an inspiring one.  He wasn’t just the voice of the gay community, but an early example of someone who recognised the rainbow coalition, and the importance of minority groups standing by one another in the face of bigotry and exploitation.  It was Milk who extended the hand of friendship to the Teamsters union and got the gay community to boycott Coors beer — the union reciprocated the favour and welcomed openly gay truck drivers to their ranks.  This act of fellowship came at a time when Anita Bryant and others were campaigning for homosexuals to be removed from their jobs: make no mistake, it was a sign of defiance.

While Milk rightly concentrates on Harvey’s political career and the events leading up to his assassination, there’s no separating ideology from the life he lived.  Nor could there be: Harvey Milk’s actions came from who he was, and the world he lived in, and the two were seamless.  And no making Harvey a saint either: he’s presented in a light that makes his everydayness part of the story.  He’s a man, like any other.  But unlike most, he rose to the challenge his community faced, and didn’t back down.  And that’s what makes Harvey Milk worth making a film about.

I must admit, I went to see Valkyrie more for professional script geek reasons than because of a burning desire to see the film.  Problem # 1 being that a story about an attempt to kill Hitler runs into interesting problems given (spoiler alert) the way World War Two turned out.  And Problem # 2: Bryan Singer has failed to impress since his debut feature, Usual Suspects.

So, how did the writers cope with the first issue, and was Singer able to overcome the second?  Well, Christopher McQuarrie and Nathan Alexander do a reasonable enough job, but there’s a sense that both they and Singer sense the weight of history on their shoulders, leading to portentuous lines such as Hitler’s “to understand National Socialism you need to understand Wagner”.  That may be a slight paraphrase, but only slight.  Oh, and Hitler is the only Nazi with a German accent.  The others are portrayed by British actors, except for the hero, Tom Cruise, whose American accent makes it clear he’s the good guy.

Nazis are a funny bunch: their stylish Hugo Boss uniforms make you think they’re heroic, but their tendencies to acts of appalling evil say otherwise.  Some of them, that is.  This film is rightly clear that there were good, bad and mediocre Nazis.  The good ones are out to rescue Germany from Hitler’s clutches, but it’s a difficult task when confessing to finding the Fuhrer lacking in any way was grounds for torture and possible execution.  Good thing that Tom Cruise is on hand to see the right way forward, though ‘hand’ is a word his character is probably sensitive about given he has three fingers in total.

Most of the time, he gets on fine with those three digits: he shaves and dresses himself perfectly well.  It’s only when he’s setting up a bomb designed to off Hitler that his lack of fingers becomes an issue, an indication of how rigidly functional this film is.  It can be seen in other respects too: when the Nazis gather together, they inevitably do so around a big map on a table, as they do in so many other war films.

For a story that’s in part about the humanity of the Germans in a time of terror, we don’t get to see much in the way of idiosyncratic, warm, human behaviour.  Rather, it’s all grim and focused.  And that’s kind of inevitable, given the choice to make the film a thriller in style.  I’m not convinced that was the best choice: compare the nuanced Germany you get to see in Polanski’s The Pianist with the relentlessly militaristic one in Valkyrie, and the former wins out for me as a picture of life under occupation by your peers.

The focus on the heroic nature of Cruise and his comrades sends out mixed messages that I find inappropriate in a film of this sort. Sure, we get to see some prevarication on the part of some of his colleagues, but that’s ascribed to them thinking politically rather than them having very human fears and differences of opinion.  The lack of that kind of shading weakens the film, but maybe subtlety is not what to look for in the director of X-Men and Superman epics.  It’d be interesting to know how much input Singer had into the writing process, and whether this project started as something more multi-faceted than what I saw on the screen.

I’m not a New Year resolution kinda guy, doing pretty well at setting directions for myself without the need for an arbitrary deadline.  But one desire, which came out of a couple of workshops I attended in December, was to take up classes in impro comedy.  And come January, that’s just what I did.  I did the second session last night.

What are my motivations?  Well, it’s partly about becoming more spontaneous in groupwork, which I’m sure will be useful in leading my own creativity workshops.  And with two coming up between now and early March, might as well hit the ground running.  Besides, being more flexible in the moment has got to be useful in any context.  Never know when I might get kidnapped by deranged gunmen and have to get out of it by improvising a ragtime song about Bin Laden.  Plus, coming up with ideas on the spot might help generate material for stories that I want to devote more time too.  And, somewhere in there, I feel the glimmer of an urge to do stand-up comedy, for the sheer hell of it rather than as a new career direction, and this can only help prepare me.

Last week’s class had three more people.  This week we just had three.  Plus the tutor, a New Zealander doing a Philosophy PhD.  Which may or may not help you answer the question of what kind of people run impro classes.  Anyway, Charlotte is a kind and good-natured philosopher, and her feedback as we went through the session was very helpful.

Broadly speaking, the class consists of exercises and games, the former preparing you for the latter.  One exercise was to stroll round the room pointing at objects and giving them the wrong names.  Sounds silly, but doing it with confidence takes a certain swagger, as you point to a cushion and declaim ‘Baby rhino’.  Finesse that for a few years, and you’ll be well equipped for work as a spindoctor.

The games you’ll be familiar with if you’ve seen Whose Line Is It Anyway? They’re tremendous fun to do, as long as you can rely on your colleagues to support you and play fair; ie accept the ridiculous propositions you make rather than putting them down.  The alphabet game is one classic, our first featuring two astronauts whose sentences begin with subsequent letters of the alphabet and magicking from nowhere a twisted scenario in which one astronaut’s oxygen is running out and the other refuses to share.

Our favourite game was one in which we created a poem on the spot as a trio.  The theme was to do with a character and their wish to achieve a particular goal, and our contributions had to rhyme.  I found my natural home as the third contributor, doing my best to wrap up the preceding lines to create something along the lines of a story.  And we managed that more often than not, which while not up there with the invention of the Swatch was nevertheless an achievement of sorts.

The biggest stretch for me, not surprisingly, were the games when physical rather than verbal skills were called for.  In one game we had to relay the death of poor Mrs McGinty to another player, and could only convey the means of her demise physically.  Sounds easy?  Well, each person adds to the sequence and has to remember and act out again what happened before.  By the end, she’d died as a result of shooting herself, having her eyes explode, injecting a lethal dose of heroin, being run over, having a safe fall on her, being strangled, subjected to eletrocution, attacked by a shark, and experimented on by aliens.

If you’re looking to limber up your imagination, and have a lot of fun with likeminded people in the process, I heartily recommend that you give impro a go.  And if you don’t believe me, think about some of its leading exponents: Stephen Fry, Josie Lawrence, Ken Campbell, and Greg Proops to name a few.  Sure, you won’t make it look as effortless as they do, but achieving that effortlessness takes a lot of effort.  And that starts with finding where your local impro class is.

I pulled a chest muscle recently.  Well, it started with the one, the consequence of swimming, and then — as the doctor explained, muscles are like the British workforce: one goes, and the others come out in sympathy.  It hurt a lot — even breathing was painful, and using my right arm was pretty much out of the question.  Anyway, if that’s the sort of anecdote you relish, I can heartily recommend seeing The Wrestler.  If you’re a bit more squeamish about torn tissue, strained ligaments and the like, you’re better off steering clear.

What all that suffering is about…well, that’s something I’m still pondering.  There is a school of thought that says serious stories are essentially the depressing ones, since they describe what life is like more accurately than comedies, romances, etc.  This of course begs the question of ‘accurate according to who?’.  And the answer to that turns out to be academics and critics, who as a breed are a joyless bunch for the most part.  Imagine trying to put a smile on Brian Sewell’s face and you’ll get the idea.

Anyway, some people fall for the idea of seriousness meaning depressing, and Darren Aronofsky is one of them.  And he does it well, as anyone who’s seen Requiem for a Dream can testify.  Whether it needs to be done is another question, one that doesn’t seem to have entered the director’s head.

Essentially, The Wrestler is a high quality B movie, a touching tale of a hasbeen fighter on the gimmicky wrestling circuit still at it twenty years after his heyday.  In large part, it’s the casting of Mickey Rourke that makes it work: he’d have to be extraordinarily dense not to empathise with the story given his troubled history, and he’s far from that.  He doesn’t just look the part of Randy ‘The Ram’ Robinson, he inhabits it, a pumped-up and buffed monstrosity whose immense head seems part doberman.

Scripted by Robert D. Siegel, the film capably gets across what it’s like to live in Randy’s world.  He’s a desperate creation, whether he’s rocking out to 80s hair metal bands, trying to forge a relationship with a stripper, or quitting the world of wrestling to work on a deli counter.  But Randy — don’t call him Robin — was born for the ring, and returns there once again for a rematch with his old nemesis, The Ayatollah.

If you thought there was something tragic about actors from cult tv shows peddling their autographs at conventions, wait till you see what the equivalent wrestling nostalgists are like.  Still celebrating their heroes two decades on from their prime, it’s the fans who are as much to blame for what Randy goes through — which includes having industrial staples whapped into his flesh by an opponent looking for a new crowdpleaser — as the fighters themselves.  Well, you could perhaps take a bigger view and have a look at the economics of the system as it affects the also-rans, taking America’s lamentable healthcare into account too, but the film’s focus is firmly on what happens in the ring.

It’s very well done, but I have to ask what the point is.  I’ve seen documentaries on the world of wrestling that are more insightful than this, and good as Rourke’s performance is it’s part of a film that takes a view of its characters at the outset of the story and doesn’t much change from that point.  To sum it up in four words, actually two: hurt people hurt people.  If that’s a worldview you want to see presented on screen, you’ll relate to this film.  Otherwise, get out and have a drink with a friend, go for a walk, whatever.  Just don’t pull a muscle while you’re doing it.

Who would have thought that I’d ever have cause to be thankful for Chris Tarrant?  Yet without him, would Slumdog Millionaire exist?  Who knows for sure?  All I know now is that Tarrant is a small price to pay for the existence of this superb film, which as you doubtless know charts the progress of a poor Mumbai lad in his teens on India’s version of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?.

The tv show provides the screenplay with its structure: a simple and elegant choice that leads to excellent writing by Simon Beaufoy, on his finest form here since The Full Monty.  How much he’s assisted by the novel that the script adapts I don’t know, but on screen it works beautifully.  As you are probably aware, the quiz host — a splendidly oleaginous creation — asks the contestant a series of questions, each time doubling the prize money at stake, until it reaches the millions implied by the name of the show.  To provide a bit of extra assistance, the competitor is allowed to ask the audience for the answer, have half the wrong answers removed, or phone a friend.  And it’s the ‘phone a friend’ part which provides the story with its theme and helps to shape its structure.

Now, at this stage, you’ve got a perfectly workable story anyway.  A young man who on the surface wouldn’t seem to be that knowledgeable does really well in a tv quiz, and in the process gets to find out who his friends really are.  Good stuff.  What makes Slumdog Millionaire transcend that basic premise is its setting.  Putting the action into the whirligig chaos of modern Mumbai is a great example of something that cinema does beautfiully: introduce us to another world.  And here, it’s that of India’s street kids, three of whom we meet at an early age and who we trace up to the present of the film when, in their teens, the two boys and girl have drifted apart.

Mumbai is very much part of the character of the film, and we imbibe a sense of what life is like there for those without money.  We’re also introduced to those who do have it, in the form of a villainous tycoon who takes one of the lads under his wing and makes the girl his mistress.  He’s a brute, and a believable one, a kind of Hindi Ray Winstone figure.

Dev Patel, best known at this point for Skins, is excellent as Jamal Malik.  There’s something about him that engages audience sympathies above and beyond the trials and tribulations the script puts him through.  Mind you, when you see the unlpeasantness he experiences at the hands of the police, who torture him thinking that the chai wallah is surely cheating, you can’t help but reach out to him.  And it’s this interrogation which is the other structural element of the film: as he’s questioned, he recalls the variously grim, fantastic, and comedic life events that have supplied him with the knowledge that’s so useful to him in the quiz.

It all seems effortless.  Most of the time I’d be very wary of a script employing so many flashbacks, but here they’re not at all irksome or tricksy, instead an inevitable consequence of the nature of the story.  Oh, and on a technical note, the flashbacks are always primarily emotionally-driven, their expositional qualities less obvious because of that.  It’d be nice if more writers and directors bore that in mind, and I’m suffering a flashback to Guy Ritchie’s oeuvre even as I type this.

Anyway, Slumdog Millionaire is masterful stuff.   It’s a gorgeous, life-affirming movie that proves feelgood doesn’t have to mean braindead.  The performances are strong, the writing is sublime, it looks wonderful, and there’s a lively soundtrack too.  Film of the year already?  Well, that remains to be seen, what with it only being January — but director Danny Boyle has set the bar high with this wonderful movie, easily his finest to date.

I haven’t, as far as I know, come across the work of writer Sally Wainwright before.  But on the strength of Unforgiven, the first part of three of which just ran in ITV’s 9pm slot, I’ll make sure to follow her work in the future: this was television of rare quality, intelligence apparent in every choice made by writer, director, and cast.

At the core of the story is Ruth Slater, about to start a new life as a fork lift truck driver having spent the last 15 years incarcerated for killing two policemen.  As portrayed by Suranne Jones, most known for her flinty flirty time as Steve MacDonald’s wife in Coronation Street, Ruth is someone who makes little effort to make herself likeable.  But you still come to warm to her, through her desire to connect with the sister she hasn’t seen since the latter was just six.

After that…things are less straightforward.  There are several strands to the story, and it’s a tribute to Sally Wainwright’s scripting skills that we maintain our interest in them without necessarily getting resolution on any.  There are the people now living in the house that was a farm when Ruth lived there, who may perhaps be having poltergeist problems.  But that thread is handled in the same no-nonsense way as the rest of the story, nothing obviously ooky-spooky going on here.

Then there’s the two brothers, sons of the eldest cop who Ruth killed, the dominant one convinced — but selfishly — that his life would be better if his dad was still alive.  It’s the younger brother that actually spots Ruth, leading to a strong conclusion to the first episode.  And there’s the teenage girl who gets involved in a car accident, who turns out to be Ruth’s sister, now a gifted young musican living with a family who want Ruth to have no contact with her.  Only, the people living where Ruth was brought up are family lawyers, and agree to do what they can to put the sisters in touch.

There wasn’t a false note struck in writing or performances throughout.  The story takes place in several social worlds, each credible and not subject to caricature.  The same can be said for the characters: everyone’s perspective made sense.  You feel angry when with the brothers who’ve been robbed of their father, just as you do when you find out that Ruth has been without her sister for so long, and feel equally for the family who’ve looked after that sister all this time.

I’m fascinated to see what happens next, and equally happy if it develops to become more of a crime drama or a supernatural one.  It makes a pleasant change to come across a drama where the cards aren’t stacked so clearly, especially after the aberration that is Demons, another new ITV offering that wears its influences (Buffy, Buffy, and Buffy) all too painfully.  Not fair comparing a family show with an adult drama? Maybe not, but imagine if the same imagination were applied to creating a series for the whole family as was utilised in developing Unforgiven. ..

Oh?

It’s been done?

And the show is Doctor Who?

Fair comment.

Next episode of Unforgiven is at 9pm next Monday.  Watch it if you can.

I was chatting with a friend who noted that two films she wants to see at the moment are adaptations.  The Curious Case of Benjamin Button started life as a short story by F Scott Fitzgerald, published first in Colliers Magazine.  The Reader was initially an award winning novel by Bernhard Schlink.  Which begs a few questions.  Like: how can a short story and a whole novel both be adapted in such a way to end up with a feature length film?

Simple answer is that the short story will have been expanded, and the novel condensed.  It’s more interesting to pursue another line of enquiry though: in what ways has the source material been adapted to realise it in screen form?  Shortening or lengthening a story are the very least of the choices involved in translating from one artform to another.

Check out these versions of the same song, by Lambert, Hendricks and Ross and Joni Mitchell.  The words are the same, but the arrangements are very different.  Both are of their time, the LHR version emerging from jazz hipster argot in the fifties, Joni’s picking up the same threads for the therapy-prone seventies.  I’ve also got — but YouTube hasn’t — a late nineties version by Jazzonia, featuring a rap from Grandmaster Melle Mel, the melody carried by a flute and the lyrics delivered by a female singer in a fashion worthy of one of Jerry Springer’s more sanity-divergent guests.

Which is the ‘real’ version of the song?  It’s a pointless question, and the same applies to the distinctions between screen and prose versions of the same story.  What appeals to a particular writer or director in translating a book to screen could be anything from the protagonist’s character arc to the moral dilemma at the story’s core.  Bringing that to visual life requires thinking about the whole in a new way, the better to serve what’s interesting in the original.

On this site you’ll find my adaptation of classic horror yarn The Monkey’s Paw.  I saw in it the potential for a spot of high adventure in the Flashman tradition, changing the backdrop of the story to the Boxer Rebellion in Hong Kong as an excuse for some feats of derring-do that catapult the viewer into the action straightaway before the slower burn of the narrative kicks in.  Rather that, I thought, than stick with the original’s tried-and-tested prose solution for the supernatural story of having one of the characters relate a tale of unspeakable goings on to another.  Fine on the page, not much fun on screen.

At some level, every story is a form of adaptation.  I’ve recently written a speech to be delivered by a former world champion sportsman.  It draws heavily on his life history, and the substance of it is factually correct.  More importantly, it has a rise and fall that owes more to dramatic structure than the haphazard flow of events that life itself tends to present, the better for the audience to empathise with the speaker as he relates his ups and downs, and what he’s learned from them.  We relish pattern, and from pattern deduce meaning.  One of the writer’s jobs is to pattern their material in such a way that the meaning derived by the audience is the one s/he intends.

Ultimately, an adaptation rests on its ability to convey the theme/s that the filmmakers value in the source material.  Which is why the more pedantic viewer gets upset when favoured moments don’t appear onscreen, and characters are rolled into one another if it turns out they serve similar functions that might as well be performed by one actor than several.  But really, isn’t that what we all do?  The same pedant, when relating his or her life story, highlights some episodes at the expense of others, and relegates some friends and relative to the sidelines when they were crucial to the teller’s success in whatever endeavour they’re telling you about.  Whether we call ourselves writers or not, we’re all adapting our experience into varying degrees of fiction.