Plasticine.  Mophead.  Cheesegrater.  Anodyne.  Marmalade.  Anchovy.  Platypus.  Soda siphon.

There’s a fun exercise I learned from impro that’s good for upsetting what’s going on in your head.  Look around you — walking if you wish — and name the things you see, calling them things they’re not.

Tablet.  Chalk.  Toilet duck.  Celery.  Manitou.  Skeleton.  Panoply.

Three minutes of that and your head starts uncoupling meaning from perception: a brilliant starting point for coming up with something new.  Doesn’t have to be good — that’s irrelevant at this point, the whole point of this being to suspend the judgement that we so often impose on our generation of ideas and instead allowing ourselves to swim in novelty.

Tramline.  Needlepoint.  Glowstick.  Reflection.  Chandelier.  Lunchbox.

Once an item is freed from the name that it typically has, its potential as stimulus is liberated.  If a lightshade is an umbrella and pencil holder a coffee percolator, then that’s how they’ll apparently function, if only momentarily.  And, the mind being what it is, able to forge connections and make patterns wherever, it can draw parallels.  Of course a lightshade is an umbrella!  You can use it to shield yourself from the rain well enough, and the pencil holder could be used to contain coffee even if the mechanics of percolating it elude me for the moment.

All very well, says the cynic, but what good is this playfulness?  Well, I personally find that play doesn’t need to be defended, but if you’re up against someone who wants to apply cost benefit analysis to your flirtations with consensual reality, consider the example of the post-it note.  It’s the result of a batch of weak glue, which was therefore commercially useless — at least if you’re stuck on the idea of glue as a permanent solution.  If instead you find uses for it that make a virtue of its weakness, it becomes something else entirely. And that’s what happened: the weak glue was used to stick notes to musical scores, and some bright spark then generalised from that instance to develop a product that’s been found in offices worldwide for decades now.

‘The words we use influence the thoughts we think more than the thoughts we think influence the words we use.’  Robert Anton Wilson said that, and he was a smart cookie who had more than his fair share of innovative ideas.  So much so that he sometimes came up with new words to contain them, the better to use them again and share them with others.  Fnord.  It’s an example that’s taken up by one of Wilson’s chums, NLP co-creator Richard Bandler, never short of a neologism to help get across some of his notions.  Some years ago I was asked to contribute to some marketing work by Bandler’s then UK business partners, Paul McKenna and Michael Breen, and noticed it was something they did too, morphing up new words to describe anything from their logo to the mood of delegates on their trainings.

New words are all about noting distinctions.  And distinctions are incredibly useful in mapping uncharted territory.  Someone had to come up with them for drama: the experience of theatre existed long before people talked about act breaks and catharsis, but it was by developing such a vocabulary that others were able to learn how to write, direct and perform in plays.  One problem with film is that it’s saddled with many of the preconceptions of theatre, and not all of them are relevant: what works on stage and what makes for good screen drama are not necessarily the same.  In fact, one newish word exists to describe when they are too similar: ’stagy’.

Years ago, The Book of Liff defined a whole bunch of phenomena for which words didn’t previously exist.  How helpful would you find it to ascribe words to patterns and situations you’ve found in your writing, your thinking, or life in general?  Even if you never share them with anyone, they could form a useful way of recognising elements of your experience.  And if you did let them loose into the world, your pet term could become the next asbo, crackberry, credit crunch or milf.

You’ve got to feel some sympathy for Alan Moore.  The weirdbeard bard who demonstrated what truly great writing can achieve in the form of a comic script is subject as we all are to the hype announcing the arrival of Watchmen, the film of the comic series that Moore wrote and Dave Gibbons drew.  Only, in Moore’s case, he wants nothing at all to do with the movie.

It’s a stance which says a lot about the Northampton writer’s integrity, that he’s prepared to forsake the pots of gold that Hollywood can offer.  Money doesn’t interest Moore: what he’s earned over the years has been spent excavating the cellar of his modest home into a labyrinth, on buying a farm in Wales that friends of his live on, and on various magical texts and artefacts.  He’s a man of curious but relatively simple means, and trying to embroil him in movie biz hype and bullshit just doesn’t work.

Presumably someone told him how amazing the film of From Hell, his tour de force collaboration with artist Eddie Campbell, would be.  Hmm.  And then there’s the big screen version of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.  Whoops.  So even though I rated the film of V for Vendetta — by Moore and artist David Lloyd — by that point Moore was sick of the whole business of turning his impeccable works of graphic fiction into homeopathically diluted interpretations aimed at 16-24 year old baseball cap wearers.

You could look at Moore’s entire career as a succession of instances of him getting huffy and taking the ball away.  But that’s to miss the ethical stance he takes on his work, easily done since so few people have such an outlook.  He’s burned his bridges with DC Comics, fed up of their continued ownership of work he created for them two decades and more ago.  Watchmen was supposed to revert to ownership by Moore and Gibbons when, as expected, it went out of print.  Only it never has been, what with it being eulogised ever since, copies being on university syllabuses etc, and DC have made a fortune from it.  So tired of DC’s dissembling, dubious accountancy, and censorship is Moore that he now has nothing to do with the publisher at all, not even taking their money: his royalties go to his artistic collaborators.

So, will I be watching Watchmen?  Yes, if only as an exercise in seeing a translation from one medium to another.  The trailers haven’t got me convinced, what with the slo mo action sequences, impossibly gravelly voices, and sexed-up characters.  Somewhere along the line, and to noone’s great surprise, director Zack Snyder has turned Moore’s vision of out of shape egotists parading their insecurities in vigilante costumes into a tale of heroic sexbeasts clad in spandex dancing to the tune of a bombastic soundtrack.

Or, you know, maybe I’ve got it wrong, and the not-at-all homophobic director of 300 really is a boy wonder when it comes to bringing comics to the screen.  Let’s hope so.  But whether or not the film is any good, the comic will continue to be a piece of flawed genius.  And Alan Moore will continue to bring his wonders to the world, as he has with ABC Comics titles Promethea and Top 10, in his ongoing League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (soon to be brought to discerning audiences by Knockabout), his pornographic tale Lost Girls from Top Shelf, and his forthcoming second novel, Jerusalem.  And anyone who can maintain such a high quality and variety in such a prolific workload clearly does have functioning marbles.  If anything, we need more people to emulate his creative stance, rather than continue to serve up watered down versions of what only the man himself can come up with.

So, I’ve got a couple of workshops coming up, each exploring aspects of creativity for different audiences and with different ends.  The first I’ll be doing for an organisation supporting artists to develop effective businesses, and happens in Yorkshire.

I was asked to do a session on networking, but the way I view it the more important stuff is getting mind and body primed before embarking on the whole networking thing, and that’s what I’ll be covering in my session with LOCA this Thursday morning.  Never let it be said that I failed for want of ambition.

The idea here is to explore the prerequisites to networking, which primarily include attitude.  And the way I see it, the most useful attitude for expanding one’s network is one of curiosity and playfulness.  There’s nothing worse than a grim faced franchiser determined to enlist you in their operation: I’m all about supporting people to forge connections based on mutual interest and shared outlook, heading in a general direction together rather than sharing a specific goal.

Exactly how we do this is what I’m working on at the moment.  But it will include exercises from impro comedy designed to increase flexibility of communication, anecdotes gleaned from years of hustling with greater or lesser success and specifically including a lifechanging story from visionary performer Ken Campbell, all threaded together using learnings I’ve acquired through NLP training.

The following week, I deliver a full day training concerning creativity and problem solving in Norwich for the region’s screen agency.  I’m looking forward to that day in a big way, and have been mulling over possible approaches to it since I was given the gig some months ago.  Again, it promises to be an eclectic event, though with a focus on filmmaking as the event is designed for up and coming filmmakers.

There’ll be a novel approach to goalsetting featured in the Norwich event, a variation of a process I was introduced to by NLP trainer Michael Breen that I (and others) found very powerful.  The whole business of pointing yourself in a direction and achieving whatever has been covered in myriad ways by various worthies, and many of them make this core lifeskill as enthralling as a particularly onerous homework exercise.  The approach I take is radically different, and like much of what I do in trainings is a whole body experience and not just some intellectual exercise.

There is an undeniably magical element to an effective training.  What’s going on is a group experience that leads people from their comfort zones, where homeostatic processes keep things just so, into liminal territory.  And that’s where the exciting stuff happens, when you’re led somewhere you’ve not been before, and encounter new ways of understanding, perceiving and doing that you can make part of your repertoire on your return.

That description of learning will make little sense to those who associate it only with poor experiences in the world of formal education or dubious workplace seminars.  But if you cast your net wider, to the life lessons you’ve learned in all aspects, you’ll have a greater appreciation for where I’m coming from.  Art and relationships have the capacity to change who you are, or at least how you approach life, and it’s by understanding the processes involved in those transitions that it’s possible to utilise them within a workshop setting.  So, that’s my aspiration at least — and I can guarantee that I’ll accomplish it without recourse to roleplay or beanbag cushions, twin scourges of the conventional training…

Self-publishing is frowned on in the mainstream publishing world, seen as second best compared to having the imprint of a respectable publisher on your book.  Well, there are less respectable publishers about as the conglomerates have grown, and maybe digital printing on demand is set to change the way the market works.  In comics though, being the master of your own destiny as creator and publisher is a route that’s been taken with varying degrees of success by creators including Dave Sim (Cerebus), Paul Grist (Kane) and Nabiel Kanan (Exit).  A more recent recruit to their ranks is writer and artist Carla Speed McNeil, creator of Finder.

In each case, the creators mentioned are notably idiosyncratic talents, whose work does not readily sit in the comics mainstream, whether the one represented by superhero titles, or the equally fantastic and stylised manga scene.  To inhabit the mainstream you need to fit a recognisable niche, and Carla Speed McNeil’s talent and imagination are simply too far-reaching to be contained by a genre tickbox.  She describes her work as ‘aboriginal sf’, a description which establishes an appropriate distance between her work and that of science fiction tales with more familiar trappings of starspanning space vessels and ray guns.

Finder features a society comprised of different clans, who interact in a world that has some degree of overlap with our own.  Many of the clans are pretty insular, so it helps that the titular finder of the series is an outcast wanderer called Jaeger, who gets to see more of the place he lives than most as he completes curious errands for a variety of people who employ his services.  Being a finder is a complex business, and gives Jaeger motivation beyond sharing itchy feet with his clan brethren to keep on the move.  Which is convenient for coming up with stories, but — as ever in Finder — feels like that’s just the way things are.

Carla Speed McNeil is a creative fountain with an interesting angle on everything from Hitchcock films to sexuality, fortune telling to the detective story, stopping by at such themes as the appropriation of culture by commerce and the effects of domestic abuse.  All of which risks making her sound like a distant polymath, but for the evident spiritedness of her stories.  She is a highly skilled writer, and her art brings her world and characters to life very well, if unconventionally: it’s as if you’re getting a peek into Carla’s mind, which in truth is where all this happens.

I did an interview with Carla Speed McNeil some years ago.  It was conducted by email, and edited to bring some semblance of order to the delightful mix of tangents that we pursued.  Her lively mind is constantly exploring new possibilities, and it’s from that fertile mixture that the adventures of Jaeger and the other characters emerge.  Not that adventures is the best word to describe some of Carla’s best work: of the sequence of collected Finder stories, Talisman is a beautiful depiction of the power of story to a child; Dream Sequence is a poetic exploration of virtual reality that also functions as a metaphor for the relationship between creator and audience; and Five Crazy Women portrays some of Jaeger’s friends and lovers, and is collected with a superb single issue dissection of male attitudes to women as Jaeger catches up with an old friend in a bar.

Take a look at Carla’s website, and see which of the stories particularly appeals to you: she has the first chapters of most of her trade paperbacks online, and is now putting her work up there first rather than publishing it in individual issue format.  Maybe that will have some effect on the pace and structure of her graphic novels in future, though it’s hard to imagine how Carla’s sophistication as a comics creator could improve much.  But, people were probably thinking that about Alan Moore when he was working on Miracleman…

It’s amazing the attitude that many creative people have towards making money.  I often come across people who have a sense of entitlement, figuring that they’re owed a living because of the clever stuff they think up.  And, well, that’s simply not the case.  A whole bunch of stuff has to happen between you coming up with a concept and being paid for it, and many supposedly creative people absent themselves from that process, believing it’s someone else’s job to get involved with the likes of marketing and networking and whatever else is involved in thinking entrepreneurially.

Bottom line is, a sense of entitlement in your twenties is the surest way to failure in your thirties.  Or whenever: it’s less about specific ages than it is about attitude.  Think about it: if you really do believe you’re some kind of creative wonder, wouldn’t it naturally follow that you apply some of that creativity to the way you approach your career?  Or is it just me who has weird ideas like that?

Back when I started looking for freelance copywriting work (some years previously I’d been a full time copywriter) I knew I had to promote myself to find some clients.  It was a necessity: I’d invested what money I’d made doing a load of speech and video writing for a charity in a three week trip to San Francisco and the deposit and first month’s rent for a new flat.  I created some flyers offering myself on half-day free trial to some local ad agencies, on the basis that a fun promotional campaign might be a good way to communicate with people who traffic in such concepts every day.  And it worked, well enough: I got some takers for my services who hired me for years to come.  Sure, there were a couple who took the piss and tried to get more work out of me for nothing, dangling a non-existent carrot, but even that was useful: it’s just as important to know who not to work for as find clients you do want to hook up with.

So, promoting yourself in such a way that you stand out is one consideration.  Another is networking effectively.  Now, I pretty much detest formal networking situations: a friend invited me along to a breakfast networking event she was part of, and I soon discovered that attempting to bond with strangers in a Travelodge while clutching a bacon cob is not my thing.

Besides, the whole thing was screwed up.  The way it worked was that the group could only have one member from each of the professions it represented, and you were supposed to pimp those people to new contacts.  Issue being, I would never recommend someone without having worked with them and been impressed: how can I be expected to vouch for someone without knowing them or the style of their work?  And there was some seriously messy stuff going on there.  We went round the table and introduced ourselves, and one woman barely made herself heard above the clink of teacups.  Naturally, she was an assertiveness coach.  And as for the chiropracter…well, if I’m going to be meeting people at seven in the morning when they’re eating sausage and beans, then make sure those people are prone to back injury: how about going to the local greasy spoon and getting to know the builders there?

In fact, I’m a very good networker, but I certainly don’t do so by abiding by the rules of protectionist networking groups. The thing is, get your attitude straight.  Don’t think of what you can get out of someone.  Think instead what you can do for them, and cultivate a whole network of people who can support one another.  I frequently put people in touch with one another, since the health of the overall group is what matters.  Besides, it makes people more likely to recommend you to their contacts in turn.  And that’s not just theory: I’m having the best year in terms of earnings, interesting work and opportunities that I’ve ever had, and this while we’re apparently experiencing a credit crunch.  And if you’ve been reading this wondering what it has to do with screenwriting, then read it again…

Annie Griffin is an acquired taste, one I picked up a few years back when the first series of The Book Group came to Channel 4.  The American writer-director has a sharp eye for the social games we play that mask our baser urges,and creates exquisitely awkward comedies from what happens when the personal agendas of different people interplay in the same space.

As with The Book Group and Festival, New Town is set in Annie’s adopted home of Edinburgh, depicted with the sharp eyes and ears of an unusually observant people watcher.  The story centres on an exclusive area of the city noted for Georgian architecture.  The characters are a wealthy bunch for the most part, and much of the story concerns Purves & Pekkala, two pretentious architects and their adopted son.

It also involves Archie Linklater, who as head of Scottish Heritage is in charge of preserving New Town’s character, and a wife who pressures her solicitor husband into buying a new home for them there.  “Normal people want things to be nicer and nicer and that’s what life is all about,” is her argument, and it’s typical of Griffin’s writing that she camouflages truly chilling sentiments in innocuous language.

The core of the tale is that the two architects are stuck designing kitchens for people who don’t, in their eyes, deserve them.  They’re a creepy Gilbert & George style combo, dressed identically in minimalist grey suits with a triangle of red handkerchief just so.  We first see them refusing to let one of their clients put a decorative tile into the kitchen they’ve designed for her, insisting it will grow on her within a year.  This isn’t the work they want to be doing however, and a property developer offers them the opportunity to redevelop the interior of a classic Playfair designed church, a temptation that literally gets them drooling.

Naturally, things don’t go according to plan.  Purves and/or Pakkala push Archie Linklater off the roof of the church, an incident that ripples throughout the story.  There’s a double whammy for the architects, who are first told that their benefactor now wants to turn the church into a carpark, and ultimately discover that Linklater was pressured into approving the first redevelopment plan, by an estate agent doing her bit to stimulate the local economy.   Crime doesn’t pay after all, it turns out.

There are other elements to the story, which arguably make it a bit too scattershot in its impact.  Personally, I like that Griffin works on a big canvas, and enjoyed seeing other strands, such as the naive and headstrong island lass who comes to Edinburgh to study art and is unsettled to discover her love for drawing landscapes doesn’t help her fit in with other, more sophisticated, students.

Ultimately it’s that storyline which provides New Town’s conclusion, as the island girl reflects on what she’s learned from her art tutor: she does indeed learn to draw what she sees in her mind rather than literally portraying what she sees outside…but what she draws is still in the ‘realistic’ mode she prefers.  This is familiar territory for Griffin, who is sceptical about the more fanciful attitudes of artists and those in their social orbit, but is all in favour of people exploring the creative urge.

It’s a shame that this sharp sixty minuter was tucked away on BBC4 on Valentine’s Day, with no pre-publicity that I came across.  If you come across it, or anything else with Annie Griffin’s name on it, I urge you to set some time aside and treat yourself.

Two work colleagues end up in bed.  There’s enough rapport between them to have sex, but not for them to maintain anything other than an awkward conversation afterwards.   He  makes a clumsy comment about the drawer full of condoms on her side of the bed.  She says that they date from the time her boyfriend was alive.  A little later the man breaks down in tears, and she calls him a cab home.

It takes real insight to use words to X-rays peoples’ thoughts, feelings and actions and expose the gap between the way we are and the way we’d like to be.  Making audiences laugh in the process takes something extra.  Free Agents does just that, and it’s Channel 4’s highly promising new sitcom in the Friday 10pm slot, previously occupied by such strong contenders as Peep Show and Father Ted.

Scripted by Chris Niel, the first episode was a dark and insightful look at contemporary relationships.  Alex and Helen, convincingly portrayed by Stephen Mangan and Sharon Horgan, work in the same media business for their sex-obsessed boss Anthony Head.  It’s impossible for them to avoid each other after their ill-advised coupling, and neither is in a suitable emotional state for a relationship.  Alex is getting used to being a weekend dad, Helen coming to terms with the death of her fiance: they could be good friends if either was emotionally mature, but where would the fun for audiences be in that?  This is awkward comedy after all, more in the tradition of Hancock and Steptoe & Son than the cosy world of Will & Grace or Friends.

The plotting was designed to accentuate emotionally uncomfortable situations.  Alex tells the photo of his kids on his phone that he loves them, and is overheard by Helen who is horrified by the thought he might be declaring his feelings for her.  Helen gets drunk on her own and mourns the loss of her partner, exposing the vulnerability which leads to her ending up in bed with Alex for a second time.

Free Agents is painful, skilfully written, and altogether credible, humour being just one of the responses it provokes.  The last comedy to resemble it in tone was The Book Group, written and directed by Annie Griffin.  It also has something of the darkness of Nighty Night about it, without that show’s active malevolence.  Personally, I’m a lot more interested in scripts that explore this darker territory than feelgood shows like Gavin & Stacey, the appeal of which eludes me.

A large part of the show’s success comes from the excellent pairing of its two leads.   There’s a natural feel to their performances, the acting belonging more to mainstream dramatic tradition than the often queasy mugging required to bring conventional sitcoms such as My Family to something that really doesn’t bear much relation to life.

Presumably Alex and Helen will continue to interact awkwardly for the remainder of the series, and by the looks of the preview for next week’s episode it looks like Alex at least is set to date other people along the way.  Which is a perfectly intelligent way for the show to develop, and I’m confident that on the basis of the first episode Free Agents will shape up into a series well worth watching.

For reasons that I’ve never really worked out, a lot of the best writers of American comics are British.  And the very best of them have surnames beginning with M.  Alan Moore’s the one the public are most likely to be aware of, thanks to his weirdbeard appearances on television in the eighties, when his Watchmen was redefining what could happen in the medium.  Grant Morrison is the next, and his takes on mainstream superheroes have often been breathtakingly audacious, while his creator owned work pushes the envelope in a way that few other writers can hold a candle to.  The third M is lesser known even to comics readers, and his name is Pete Milligan.

Like Moore and Morrison, Milligan’s early work included stories for 2000AD that were well above the baseline for the science fiction action yarns the comic trades in, adding fascinating concepts to the staple mix of aliens and punch-ups.  One benefit of writing for 2000AD is that writers get used to serving up their stories in dense chunks, a handful of pages at a time.  Take the discipline required to do that into the relative luxury of the 22 pages that American comics usually consist of, and you’ve got one reason for British writers standing out in the scene.  And with only the best Brit creators making it over to the States — artists as well as writers — it’s no surprise that some excellent work was done.

Milligan’s brilliance took a while to register with me, and there are times when he overloads his scripts with ideas at the expense of coherence.  Still, better a glut of concepts than the poverty of them normally found within the pages of a comic.  Shade the Changing Man was his longest running series, about an alien with the capacity to morph reality.  At least that’s what it seems to be.  As it went on, it became clear that Milligan’s bigger interest was with the relationship of his protagonist and his two female fellow travellers: Milligan writes women like someone who actually knows some in real life, and has interesting conversations with them.

There were a few mini series for DC imprint Vertigo too.  I recently picked up all eight issues of Minx for £5, and it’s thoroughly enjoyable.  The world it depicts is fascinating, with a monkey astronaut returning to Earth and in psychic contact with a select group including the heroine.  Meanwhile, a twisted sadist is rearranging peoples’ bodies so that they’re no longer human.  Somehow the American president is involved in all this.  Sparky fun, and interesting to see art by Sean Phillips before he developed the signature style that you can see in his collaborations with Ed Brubaker.  The classic from this era is Enigma, available in collected form with moody art by Duncan Fegredo: it’s the title a lot of people rate as Milligan at his finest, but I never quite got what the hype was — one to read again, I suspect: Milligan’s subtleties definitely merit a second viewing.

More recently, Milligan did a wonderful run on X-Statix for Marvel, taking a tired bunch of mutants and turning the title into an incisive satire on media machinations.  It runs out of steam as it goes on, but there are some wonderfully dark and twisted moments along the way, and plenty of room for Milligan’s signature explorations of identity and sexuality.  Art by Mike Allred is spot-on, like some kind of psychedelic animated Saturday morning show that adults never got to see.

Human Target was a dubious tv series that had its origins in a seventies DC comic.  Milligan built on the basic concept of a man who impersonates others to produce some excellent thrillers about a protagonist who loses himself in the identities of those he doubles for.  There’s real intelligence at work in these stories, and different story arcs have different artists, most of them more than capable.

Milligan has just started work on Hellblazer, Vertigo’s flagship horror title, and I’m looking forward to see what he does with its protagonist John Constantine.  His moral ambiguity and bisexuality are perfect for Milligan to explore, and if his current writing continues the high standard set in Milligan’s recent Moon Knight annual for Marvel, where he was superbly accompanied by artist Laurence Campbell, I’ll be picking up his Hellblazer collections for sure.

How much fun do you have when you’re writing?  I ask, because having seen the second episode of Moses Jones, it’s clear that Joe Penhall is enjoying himself immensely.  And that’s something I respond to.  You could call it self-indulgent, but when I hear his characters compliment each other on their names — and it’s happened a few times now — it makes me smile.  Getting a good name for a character is really satisfying, and why not share the joy?

Similarly, who couldn’t warm to Denis Waterman doing a speech about his appreciation for the ladyboys of Bangkok?  Maybe Penhall didn’t know that the lines would be delivered by the former Minder, but there’s a real relish to the writing regardless.  Yes, Moses Jones is ultimately a serious tale about intrigue in London’s Ugandan community, but that doesn’t mean the writing should be po-faced and forever dragging its audience into the mire its characters live in.

I like to think there’s always room for zest and attitude in writing.  One day some years back I saw the curious double bill of Vera Drake and Team America: World Police.  It wasn’t formally a double bill, they just happened to be two films I wanted to see and I caught them one after the other.  Now, a Mike Leigh film about an abortionist was never going to be a barrel of laughs, admittedly.  But every choice made in that film was designed to make the experience bleak for the viewer.

The closest I’ve come across that atmosphere otherwise was watching Downfall, about Hitler in his bunker in the last days of WW2.  And at least the makers of that film had the excuse of historical veracity with regard to the decisions they made.  Leigh was just being a dour sod for the sake of…what exactly?  Sharing the despair of a woman in a story totally contrived to make us feel sorry for her?  Short of filming Vera to look like there was a halo above her, Leigh did every damn thing he could to load the film in favour of his protagonist.

Now, there is a place for art being serious, but that doesn’t require the artist to be serious along with it.  You’re letting yourself and your potential audience down if you don’t allow for the three dimensional reality of life, which includes humour at inopportune moments.  When I was commissioned to do a treatment based on the life of Johannes Koelz, a German artist who refused to paint a picture of Hitler, a friend suggested I take a comic slant on the story and call it Dude, Where’s My Portrait? I veered towards a more conventional portrayal of what went on, but in some ways wish I’d followed up that suggestion.

Comics writer Grant Morrison followed one of his many wayward urges in writing The New Adventures of Hitler some years back, a surreal imagining of Adolf’s time in Liverpool as an art student (it could have happened, fact fans!).  It was a fine piece of work, and a perfectly valid story, and it was interesting to see the fallout when Pat Kane, former Hue and Cry member, decried Crisis magazine for serialising the strip.  The fact that young Adolf encountered Morrissey singing to him in his wardrobe, among other escapades, didn’t fool Kane: he knew Morrison was a fascist of some sort even for featuring the German leader in his fiction.  Interestingly, the fascist mindset is characterised by some psychologists as being intolerant of difference and new ideas, so if anyone was being a fascist it was more likely Kane.  What you’d call the Pat response, I guess.

All of which is a plea of sorts for writers to loosen up.  You know that Waking the Dead is going to be a humour-free zone within five minutes of it starting, and the same goes for anything with Lynda la Plante’s name on it.  What makes a show like Moses Jones refreshing is its acceptance of the full spectrum of human experience: violence, sexuality, politics, music, loyalty, humour, hunger.  That relish is there too in the work of Paul Abbott, William Burroughs, Thomas Pynchon, Shane Black, to pick a few names at random.  And you know what?  Given the alternative, that’s the list I want to be on.

From what I hear, it’s pretty much standard practice to send tv script editors and others involved in bringing things to the small screen on Robert McKee courses.  Not just them in fact: ad agencies send their staff to get hyped up by McKee as he blunderbusses his audience through his scriptwriting bootcamp with his evangelistic take on all things story.  Like it or not, ad people are trying to pull on your heartstrings just as much as the dramatists we sanction for that purpose.

Makers of documentaries and reality shows are present at such events too, and the results are more than apparent at times.  Pretty much every reality show has a writing staff who engineer the escapades that its participants endure.  The lines might not be scripted, but with planning and editing it’s possible to create an experience that has the same shaped narrative arcs and emotional pull as a feature film.

One case in point is Gordon Ramsay.  He’s been reinventing failing restaurants in Britain for a while, and now he’s doing much the same in the States in Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares USA.  You’ll note that the premise is cunningly concealed in the title, making it that much easier to come to a decision when you’re scanning the listings.  It’s the same with films: beautiful movie Magnolia might be (is, in fact), but its bland title is nowhere near as indicative of its contents as 2001: A Space Odyssey, Slumdog Millionaire, or Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

The format is brilliant.  Ramsay is summoned to a restaurant that’s having bad times.  This evening’s featured a dysfunctional family for good measure: diabetic dad Joe can’t let go of the kitchen and criticises son Sam at every turn.  Mum wants the best for both the men in her life, but is it any surprise the business is failing?  Between the fetid emotional atmosphere and poor quality microwaved food, the Italian family and their restaurant are on the fast track to oblivion.

That neatly takes us to the first turning point in the story, when Ramsay stops acting like a concerned customer and starts work on turning the business around.  This is where his trademark swearing comes in, as Ramsay gets behind the scenes and discovers just how messed up things are.  It’s entertaining stuff with a good sideline in getting across how a professional kitchen should be run, and how far short of that many actual kitchens fall.

So, does all of this make Ramsay the hero of the show?  He certainly gets a lot of screentime, but seen from a screenwriting perspective Ramsay is in the role of mentor.  That is, he facilitates others to make changes while staying the same himself.  Ramsay’s tough persona is a constant, though we get to see cracks in it when he deals with his charges: he really does care, and he’s prepared to go to any lengths to achieve change.

No shortage of grounds for conflict then, with one of the world’s finest chefs getting stuck into a family situation that would do Freud proud.  And sure enough, there are fireworks, and a camera onhand to capture them.  There’s no emotion like vicarious emotion, and here there’s plenty of high drama in that regard.  Better yet, it’s unscripted: instead, energy has gone into creating a situation in which drama is unavoidable.

It’s after Brian the sous chef (he could have been a Sioux chef, this being the States) walks out mid-service that father and son are compelled to work together, like it or not.  At any rate, that’s how it comes across after the edit.  And, wouldn’t you know it, they pretty much manage to function as a team.  Not that dad’s going to give up on the kitchen easily: after spending his life in the trade, and convinced his son is useless, it’s difficult for him to move on.

All of which makes for compelling viewing.  Ramsay is a fascinating character, a tough love mentor who goads his charges into success and has no time for tired old habits, whether that means boil-in-the-bag chicken meals or a mother standing back from a situation between father and son that needs her active input.  Fabulous stuff, and after the payoff Ramsay gets to ride into the sunset, at least before coming back the following week with another recipe for putting a restaurant back together again.

What does all this mean for screenwriters?  Well, if the likes of Ramsay are finding gold on a regular basis, it’s our job to offer something even more precious.  That could mean added emotional intensity, greater stakes, or whatever.  But with reality tv delivering on those counts thanks to the application of concepts from the likes of McKee, the Hero’s Journey, etc, we’ve got to do something either above and beyond the hit that reality can give, or go in another direction entirely.