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.