Inspiration is an interesting business. The interplay of fact with imagination can lead a writer in all kinds of directions. My appreciation of science isn’t hampered by my failure to understand it: semi-digested nuggets from New Scientist have given me some fine ideas. Other writers take inspiration from history, as with Frank Cottrell Boyce’s discovery that the National Gallery’s pictures were stored in a Welsh mine during World War Two. Quite how long he’s known that I couldn’t tell you, but it’s led to a book, and now his own adaptation of that book in the form of a BBC1 drama, Framed.

Trevor Eve plays the custodian of the nation’s art, who when a leak threatens the pictures is obliged to transport the pictures to Wales once again, as his predecessors did to save them from the Blitz. What follows is a family-friendly delight, the pictures transforming a small community, and that community in turn leading to changes in crusty Trevor’s take on life.

It’s all done with a delicate touch. The things Eve takes for granted in London aren’t nearly as straightforward in remote North Wales. He asks for The Times at the newsagent, and is asked whether that’d be the Country Times or the Caernarthan Times. Coffee comes in jars, not cappuccinno cups. And small boys who talk knowledgeably of Donatello and Raphael and Leonardo are discussing their favourite Ninja Turtles, not Renaissance artists.

There’s a danger of it all being rather mawkish, but the writing and performances have a wit to them that transcends cheap sentiment. Besides, look at Trevor Eve and you inevitably think of autopsies, thanks to several seasons of Waking the Dead.

Eve tries to keep the presence of the paintings a secret, but that’s just not possible in a small community. And this is a story about a man’s heart opening up, which it does to the local schoolteacher, a woman who chose to stay in her home town and make things better rather than move away. Their gradual romance culminates in a lovely scene where Eve romances her in a cavern lined with some of his favourite classical paintings. Sweet stuff.

It’s not just Trev who’s transformed. The local butcher comes out of a long depression thanks to the presence of art, and the family who run the local garage are all touched by it in various ways. They’re the engine that drives the plot, dad having done a runner to try and find some money to sort their problems out, the rest showing creative and entrepreneurial flair in relieving the National Gallery man of his money while being inspired by his art to think about their own lives differently.

Lovely as it all is, there was unfortunately a problem with Framed. And that was the writer’s desire to tie up every conceivable loose end. So not only do we see the garage family’s dad return, but he comes back with a toy zebra for his young son — an allusion to some advice he gave him earlier. There’s all sorts of shenanigans involving kids replacing one of the National Gallery’s pictures with one they’ve come across. And that in turn transpires to have been pinched from the National Gallery archives when the pictures were first brought to Wales in World War Two. Eve and the lovely teacher not only hook up, but we see her pregnant in the last scene. Enough already! It’s a rush of exposition which is frankly unnecessary — the resolution could have been handled with a sketch, and not this detail-heavy denouement.

That complaint aside, Framed was a lively and warm drama that I’d like to see more of on television. Programme makers are generally more comfortable with post-watershed material than what happens before nine, and this was a lovely example of how to keep a family entertained with material of quality and intelligence. More like this please.

When you’re dealing with a genre that’s already had plenty said about it, what can you possibly do to kindle some sense of freshness, of difference? In the case of The Hurt Locker, writer Mark Boal and director Kathryn Bigelow have chosen to create a war story focused on a group of men who’ve been bit part characters in many other films, but never to my knowledge been the core of attention: bomb disposal technicians.

The film lays its cards out in a first scene of incredible tension. A bomb disposal robot rolls up to an explosive device covered in sheets. With humour born of bravado, its operators vie for control of the machine, wanting to use its camera to peek through a hole in the sheets, and have problems doing so. “Pretend it’s your dick,” says one of them, cementing the machismo of these men firmly in the mind of the audience. Minutes later, one of them is dead.

But this is the army, and men are replaceable, and the new team leader has a more gung-ho outlook than his predecessor. It’s to the script’s credit that the effect of different bomb technicians’ personalities on their approach to work is so clear. The heartstopping business of bomb disposal makes huge demands on the operatives, who have different approaches to dealing with the insane risks they face.

The critical business is all about reducing risk by turning unknown factors into known and controllable variables. But in Iraq’s streets, pretty much everything is an unknown. Every face at a window is potentially an enemy, and that holds double for those seemingly being friendly. At any given moment, a goat may wander into the field of operation and block a crucial line of sight, a mobile phone could signal a remote detonation — or someone speaking to their sister. The camerawork captures this chaos beautifully: how are burger-fed representatives of Uncle Sam meant to cope with the reality of doing their job in a country where they’re not welcome?

This is filmmaking of a high order. Bigelow doesn’t impose a signature on the material, instead letting the characters and situations speak for themselves in all their dark adrenalised horror. Again, and again, the team dispose of bombs — but there’s no sense of repetition or redundancy here, every new encounter revealing another facet of the personalities of the three core characters. We see them off duty and on, the guys getting drunk and hitting each other in the gut as hard as they can — even their bonding moments are characterised by violence and danger.

An intermittent countdown tells us how long the unit have to stay in Iraq before returning to America. The camera follows them, revealing the empty desolation at the heart of the team leader’s life as he wanders supermarket aisles with a trolley in search of the breakfast cereal that his wife has asked him to find. How can she possibly understand what he’s been through? And how can he adjust to a life of domesticity after the atrocities he’s witnessed?

There’ve been a few films devoted to the Iraq experience, and The Hurt Locker has documentary realism in its favour: even if some of the scenes and details have no factual basis, the clear research gone into the rest of it carries through to create a compelling worldview. For a bigger picture of the conflict and America’s role in it, Three Kings continues to have plenty to recommend it. For a ground level depiction of what life and death are like for soldiers who’ve chosen to specialise in bomb disposal, and what that says about the American military industrial complex that continues to find men to play such a role, The Hurt Locker is a powerful portrayal of life during wartime.

I have an award. Check out what Pip posted to see. And now I am faced with the onerous responsibility of recognising seven others worthy of the title Kreativ Blogger. In no particular order then (you can imagine a drumroll if you like):

1) Grant Balfour’s Guild of Scientific Troubadours is a wonderful conceit. Links to scientific nuggets, and songs inspired by them once a month. Of course. It takes a mind as diverse as Grant’s to fit it all in.

2) Paul Watson, as well as being kind enough to put this site together and do behind-the-scenes stuff that I don’t understand, keeps a very sharp and well-informed blog about digital creativity over here. Always ahead of the game, and thought provoking for any creative types seeking to create and profit from a digital presence.

3) Alex de Campi is a talented writer and filmmaker, whose music promos are as offkilter as the bands she chooses to work with. Her blog is frank and thoughtful.

4) David Byrne can make anything interesting, as you’d expect from a man whose former band did an album called More Songs About Buildings and Food. His blog ranges wide, and he is ever articulate and informative.

5) Colleen Doran’s accounts of her experiences in the comic industry, and her advice on how to conduct yourself professionally in the creative field, are gems.

6) Also working in the world of comics, Laurence Campbell’s distinctive noir take on the likes of The Punisher and Moon Knight has been winning him fans at Marvel. He’s not the most regular blogger, but there’s always some lovely artwork to gawp at.

7) Chris Morris is the lovely man behind the NLP Connections forum, an oasis of sanity in a field with more than its share of oddballs, and whose considered non-partisan stance I have a lot of admiration for. He likes meerkats and jelly babies.

The other responsibility I have as a Kreativ Blogger is to ennumerate seven of my favourites. You already know about my tastes in film, television, and comics, so I’m going to ramble about some musical loves…

Jah Wobble has provided some of the finest live gigs I’ve seen, with sensual bass-heavy journeys through dub, folk, jazz and world music. If you get the chance to see him, take it. Check out what’s happening over here for clips of him playing live, and browse the online shop while you’re there.

Miles Davis has been part of the soundtrack to my life since I first heard his records as a child. Restlessly inventive, he reinvented jazz several times through his own efforts. If all you’ve heard is Kind of Blue, that’s just the start; his electric period from the late 60s to mid 70s is an amazing amalgam of influences that Miles imposes his inimitable stamp on.

Bjork is extraordinary in so many ways. Her voice was the most distinctive element of The Sugarcubes, but that didn’t prepare anyone for the dance-inflected intimate albums that have followed. More than that, she’s a compelling live performer, reinventing tried and tested songs for new combinations of musicians or because a new arrangement has occurred to her.

King Crimson are a paradox for me: I can’t abide most prog rock, but love the band that most people associate with that movement. Their ceaseless inventiveness has resulted in some truly striking music, and their commitment to moving forward despite losing older fans in the process is a tribute to the integrity of founder Robert Fripp’s vision.

On U Sound aren’t an act, but a label, headed by production maestro Adrian Sherwood. Their roster includes everything from Tackhead’s urban funk, to the experimental world dub sounds of African Headcharge, the sly wit of Little Annie, and much much more.

Frank Zappa has accompanied me since I caught one of his more accessible albums at 17. I’m fascinated by the range and depth of his creative output, from the early work with the Mothers of Invention, through to his 70s jazz inspired output, and the unique take on electronic and orchestral music he was developing before his death.

Rush have been a guilty pleasure for longer than I care to think. They’re a stadium rock outfit, but they’ve done some genuinely moving and inspirational work, even in their satin cape period. And, as their devotees will relentlessly inform you, they sure can play their instruments.

Interesting, what’s sometimes needed to make a concept tick into life. I’ve been playing with an animated short for a few days. The basic notion of having buildings talking I could see working. But for some reason I couldn’t find the voice for the hero building. Until I realised, this was the one that should be silent: it’s the comments of the buildings either side, combined with the action on screen, that define the character of the protagonist. Bing. Once I’d got that sussed, it was fairly straightforward to write.

OK, so let’s look at that in more detail, and see if there’s a principle that can be learned and applied elsewhere. At this point my thoughts turn to the notion from linguistics that any comment you make is somehow edited from the reality it represents: that linguistic utterances are subject to processes of deletion, distortion, and generalisation. Hmm.

Now it starts to make sense. By applying the principle of deletion — not allowing the hero to talk — I was forced to find other methods of getting across their character and journey. Which I did, through the comments of the adjacent buildings and what the audience can see as the buildings change over time.

Ah, I hadn’t mentioned that bit. The other constraint I imposed on myself was to tell the story of the buildings over fifteen years, as the neighbourhood changes and the fortunes of the different buildings go up and down. I chose timeslices that would accentuate change that had happened, since I don’t think anyone would have the patience to watch 15 years of animation unfold in real time. Besides, it would probably take 30 years to animate 15 years, and that’s just won’t do: my client is understanding about the creative process, but their budget and patience only extend so far.

I’ve used deletion before as a device in a radio play I wrote, A Ghost in the Garage. There, the notion was that a family were showing their holiday slides to a friend who never actually speaks: we get to know about him, and his relationships with the family members, through the things they say to him. It was all a ridiculous conceit; I liked the idea of using radio to convey a slide show, and a character who may or may not actually exist. If you’re sad at having missed this play, you’re not the only one: though it’s received favourable feedback from a producer, it was never picked up for broadcast. Hey ho.

I’m working with someone at the moment, helping them to develop the script for a feature that will be made next year. He’s made an interesting choice about a principal character, whose presence is felt across the film but who doesn’t physically appear until one critical scene late in the story. Again, a form of deletion: even in the character’s absence, he still has a powerful presence.

Think about it when you’re stuck with some writing next time. Is there something you could omit that would sharpen your structure, depiction of characters, or whatever else? Sometimes, what’s not there is at least as telling as what actually is. You can sense this in soap operas, when some big emotional scenes are skipped over or done in shorthand, because to write and perform the material will only be redundant since the audience knows what’s going on and is playing that scene in their mind already.

Jazz pianist Paul Bley has a fairly minimal style, and said of it something along the lines ‘The piano has 88 keys, but I’ve worked it down to the few that are any good’. It’s a good line, and he’s not kidding: rather than skittering all over the keyboard Keith Tippett style, or spitting out clusters of notes like McCoy Tyner, Bley’s delicate approach is informed by restricting himself to a small palette within the overall set of keys available to him.

As I write, I’m listening to a new edition of the Robert Fripp and Brian Eno album No Pussyfooting, a landmark ambient music recording. The version of The Heavenly Music Corporation currently playing is at half speed — which means it’s taking twice as long to unfold as this improvised piece for guitar, tape decks, and effects took to create in the first place, back in September 1972.

Why the half speed version? Well, this is music that merits attention, the layers of sound accreting like smears of colour in a Rothko painting. And it’s not like it belongs to the blues or any other kind of tradition where its slower pace marks it out as different: this was and is music that owes nothing to the musical mainstream, as different from the music that came before it as it is from the ambient music that followed in its wake, much of which seems airbrushed by comparison.

I don’t have the patience for experimental film that I have with music. But I appreciate it when a filmmaker stretches what’s done with the toolkit they have in order to create a different mood — at least if it’s in the service of narrative, which is what fundamentally keeps me watching a screen.

Case in point: Coppola’s The Conversation. An amazing film, even the thought of which haunts me. Gene Hackman plays a surveillance expert asked to record a conversation between two people. He puts incredible and ingenious effort into doing so as the two talk in a park. And spends the film trying to decipher the noises he’s recorded and turn them into recognisable speech. The longer he spends doing so, the more the rest of his life falls apart. His obsession destroys him, until he’s left at the end of the film in the ruins of his apartment. It’s the film’s sound design that holds it together, a semi-abstract soundscape that like Fripp & Eno’s work rewards the attention its given, capturing Hackman’s disintegration with heartbreaking precision.

Then there’s Mishima. A few people walked out of this fascinating film when I saw it as a student. Co-written and directed by Paul Schrader, it tells the story of the Japanese writer and political figure of the title. It does so episodically, with each chapter becoming more abstracted from cinematic rules for reality, and entering the space of the stories its protagonist writes. I’m not sure it’s a film I like, but I certainly appreciated what it was aiming to do, and enjoyed the Philip Glass score. Now, all these years later, it’s a film I want to see again.

Then we come onto a rarity. At any rate, I know only two other people who’ve seen it, and that’s because I was with them when we watched it together. Encounter at Ravensgate is a bizarre Australian film concerning UFOs and other Forteana that left the three of us dazed when we left at the end, unable to speak for a good twenty minutes. I couldn’t tell you for sure what made it so potent, and the one scene I remember is when a UFO zoomed over two cars that were in a chase, and swapped the music that was playing in the respective vehicles. Simple, but brilliantly effective.

There are so many films to talk about at this point. David Lynch’s work I generally like, though his seeming lack of interest in story has lost me as a committed viewer. Gus Van Sant’s Elephant manages to be both literal and poetic as it renders the day a school shooting takes place with eerie mundanity. Lynne Ramsay conjures beauty from the overlooked in Ratcatcher, and integrates music and image together beautifully with a corkscrewing story in Morvern Callar.

Much of the time in these pieces I concentrate on narrative. But that’s only one aspect of a film, and by playing with all the other parts in new ways, you can create something as unique and unexpected as the films that have surprised and delighted you. How you get to the places these films have reached is by thinking about image and texture and sound and tempo, and what it would be like to combine those elements in ways that you’ve not come across before and speak to the heart of your story.

I’ve just started to read the novel House of Suns by Alastair Reynolds, and the short piece preceding the first chapter has done lovely things to my head. “I was born in a house with a million rooms,” it starts, “built on a small airless world on the edge of an empire of light and commerce that the adults called The Golden Hour, for a reason I did not yet grasp.”

In that first sentence, there’s more imagination than I’ve encountered in some whole volumes. It’s something that interests me at the moment, having just read Jonathan Hickman’s graphic novel Pax Romana. Again, imagination is the keynote: under the control of the Vatican, a military force is sent back centuries in time to ensure the dominance of the Holy Roman Empire. Boom: when did you last come across a concept with that kind of scope?

Somehow, Hickman deals with that idea and its ramifications in one slim volume. Yes, you could say that the scale of the thinking is so big he doesn’t do his story justice. Hickman uses the device of a narrator recounting events to a young listener that enables him to skip through chunks of detail. What would be a chunky trilogy in the hands of some authors is a regular sized graphic novel for him. The emphasis is on ideas and their resolution, with several sections pretty much text-only recounting the arguments of the time travellers about the ethics and practicalities of what they’re doing.

For me, it’s interesting to compare Pax Romana with the much-feted Asterios Polyp. By striking chords familiar to readers of well-received ‘grown up’ books, and demonstrating a facility with realising intellectual conceits in graphic form, Mazzucchelli has won support from those who feel that comics should aspire to mainstream notions of the highbrow.

Hickman will never be reviewed in that way. Especially now that he’s banging away playing with Marvel’s toys. Hopefully he’ll continue to come up with creator owned work demonstrating greater imaginative flair than needed to get a group of guys in tights to beat the snot out of another similarly clad gang.

What makes Hickman stand out is his design sense. His use of info graphics informs his storytelling choices. Timelines are part of how Pax Romana functions, Hickman laying out significant narrative events in paragraphs tracing a sequence from the appearance of 21st century troops in the 4th century BC to 1421 AD in the amended timeline, when man has a colony on Mars.

Of course, big ideas don’t have to be confined to science fiction. Dave Sim and Gerhard did 300 issues of Cerebus without a rocketship or raygun, and with plenty to say about politics and religion. Berlin, by Jason Lutes, is an ambitious sequence of graphic novels about life in pre-WW2 Germany. Brian K. Vaughan’s Pride of Baghdad is a commentary on war in Iraq in anthropomorphic form.

Those examples are well and good, but the market continues to gravitate to giving a diminishing audience more of what it thinks it wants, rather than exposing it to tastes of difference. Comics readers are like toddlers who turn up their noses at any new food offered them, and twenty years later are stuck eating peanut butter sandwiches, baked beans and fries, with can of Coke in hand, still baffled by the notion of vegetables or spicing.

Or maybe it’s worse than that. There’s a fine true tale about a radio station that started up in Florida that was only going to play Led Zeppelin. And before they started up properly, they did test broadcasts, playing only Stairway to Heaven and one other Zep classic for several days. On encountering this on their radios, local police came round to the station armed for trouble, since clearly a diet of such uniformity indicated the presence of a madman…

I’m just saying.

I don’t know if Paul Abbott had Liza Tarbuck in mind all along for the lead role in Linda Green, but she did a fine job at bringing the character to life at the turn of the century in two seasons of the series for BBC1. Only the first has found its way onto DVD, and on seeing it in a charity shop I couldn’t resist the urge to buy: what with Paul Abbott writing most of the episodes, and other contributors including Russell T. Davies, with guest roles for Christopher Ecclestone and David Morrissey…anyone claiming they’re interested in writing for British tv would be a fool to pass up an offer like that.

So, who is Linda Green? Frankly, a breath of fresh air: a curvy woman in her 30s enjoying being single, and making the most of the opportunity to bed men who cross her path. She’s based on a friend of Abbott’s, though whether the real Linda works in a second hand car showroom and sings at a social club three nights a week, only the two of them know. The specifics matter less than the bigger picture.

What’s refreshing over the course of the series is that Linda doesn’t go the Bridget Jones route and whine. Instead, she takes life by the balls, and though she does experience some upsets in the ten episodes, doesn’t recourse to getting engaged or dieting to resolve her problems. It’s not that the series wrongfoots the viewer, just that interesting three dimensional women are in short supply on television.

Sexual frankness is something of an Abbott trademark. In the scope of the series, Linda’s best pals are enticed to a foursome, and later attempt to pick up a third party using the internet — a plan which falls flat and results in their house being burgled. Linda dabbles with bisexuality, only to discover that women are just as shit partners as men. Returning to men, she picks up a teenage virgin and instructs him in pleasuring her, only to tire of him and arrange to pass him off onto her much younger sister. When Linda’s mum comes to stay, she’s up for watching porn with the rest of her pals when they come round for their usual boozy Wednesday night catch-up. The only time when there’s shock attached to sex is when a friend mistakes what he sees when Linda is on her knees in front of her pants wearing father, and says social services will need to be called.

Linda is a fundamentally happy woman — it tends to be when she compares herself to others that she feels she falls short. The Russell T. Davies episode is all about this, centred on someone the friends went to school with, and whose funeral they attend as a joke of sorts. Only, it doesn’t really work like that, and they end up contemplating their own lives — the deceased made few ripples in her life, but can any of them say that their deaths will make any more impact?

Linda’s friendships are important to her in the absence of a partner and children; something that’s true of many people her age and even older these days. Her friends go back to primary school; they’ve grown up together, been bastards and bullies and treated lovers like shit and now settled down into something like maturity and responsibility. It’s this shared history that makes them interesting and sets them apart from the characters in Cold Feet, who appeal because of who they are hooked up with.

Linda Green was a series of quiet quality. It doesn’t draw attention to itself with the underclass antics of Shameless. Nothing much happens, frankly. But if you’re interested in well-written and portrayed characters interacting in ways that convince you of their lives, their dilemmas, their unforced humour, then this is viewing that will share its treasures every time you care to remind yourself of what state of the art tv was like in 2001.

One mark of a skilled creator is the ability to capture truths of their craft in few words. Years of learning go into producing what can come across as truisms, making it all the more frustrating when novice creators ignore the wisdom of their elders and insist on learning things for themselves. Hey, we’ve all done it. And the truth is, it takes a certain degree of experience of your own to recognise someone else’s wisdom.

In this case, the pearls are produced by cartoonist Kyle Baker, one of the industry’s leading talents, in this interview concerning his contribution to DC’s Wednesday Comics, reviewed a while back right here. Anyway, the critical bit of the piece, which is well worth reading in full, is found in this nugget about the character Hawkman, whose adventures Baker chronicles in the weekly comic:

“The big challenge in writing for a hero who carries a mace and sword is that these are not defensive weapons. There is no ‘stun’ setting on a mace. A mace is designed solely for smashing bones and tearing flesh. As a writer, I can’t give Hawkman a human adversary. It would be cruel. If the plane hijackers had been normal human beings, Hawkman would have bashed their skulls in and stabbed them. Even though the hijackers have shot the pilot, the punishment exceeds the crime. On the other hand, beheading a giant space lobster with a sword seems quite all right, even heroic. A man using a mace to battle a T-Rex seems positively sporting.”

Baker makes his point with humour, and there’s a danger that it obscures the very pertinent points he is making. So I’ll spend a while demonstrating in a pedantic fashion exactly what makes his comments so smart and relevant to anyone who fancies calling themselves a writer.

The bottom line is, design a story so that all the elements integrate. An antagonist should be well matched to the protagonist, preferably one step ahead of them for the majority of the story until the hero finds whatever it is that will enable them to prevail. In Hawkman’s case it’s a whacking great mace. It could just as well be the realisation that their opponent has power only because an implicit acceptance of their right to bully, and conquering that interior glitch will enable the hero to win on the outside too. Different genres have their preferences for whether the critical moment happens on the inside or the outside, and it’s often clear that each reflects the other: if Hawkman can’t fly it’s likely to be down to inner conflict, even if the story wraps it up in magical or science fiction trappings.

Put Hawkman in a story where emotional nuances count for more than wingspan and martial prowess, and you start to realise the limitations of the character. Unless you’re a writer of Alan Moore’s calibre that is, and can go on to uncover layers to Hawkman that readers had never previously suspected, but your story convinces them were there all along. Only, you’re probably not Alan Moore, so I suggest you save such deeper character work until you’ve got some of the basics under your belt.

That said, mixing things up is interesting. You might not want to go as far as seeing Hawkman undergo therapy (though a gangster’s explorations of his psyche fuelled The Sopranos perfectly well), but there’s inherent interest with putting a winged barbarian in a setting where diplomatic skills count for more than swordsmanship. That could lead to humour, or the realisation that Hawkman is a lot cannier than most readers would initially imagine. At any rate, the capacity to surprise the reader is to be cherished — as much as fans like their heroes to go and do the things they’re most known for, mixing things up from time to time is a good thing. Remember Indiana Jones shooting his sword wielding opponent? Worked a treat because of audience expectation that Indy would reach for his trusty whip. If we didn’t know Indy used a whip, it’d just have painted him as a less stylish hero, and that wouldn’t do. The more work you put into setting things up well, the more fun it is when you mix them up later.

So, I went to the nurse this evening and she had blood test results for me which say that I’m not diabetic. Which is quite the relief, since for the last month — since the notion that I probably am diabetic has been in the air — I’d been living as if I was. Not snacking on any carrot cake or tarte au citron that’s been in my vicinity, avoiding cappuccino with powdered chocolate sprinkles, that kind of thing.

For a month though, I’ve had insight into how a diabetic thinks. Or at any rate, how the diabetic version of me thinks. And that was an interesting experience, confirming a long held model of how beliefs work. Robert Anton Wilson put it thus: ‘what the thinker thinks, the prover proves.’ That is, you hold in your mind a hypothesis, and you’ll sure as hell find evidence for it.

And that aphorism, heuristic, whatever you want to call it…is a good one to bear in mind when you’re developing characters. I am no fan of composing quasi-Freudian biographies tracing the influence of bottle feeding on infant detectives — too easy to produce reams of irrelevant guff, and fall into the trap of believing it whether or not it’s useful for the story. But I do like a good shorthand for getting across a character’s internal processes, since that will provide valuable clues about their behaviour, which is the bit of them we have access to when we see them on screen.

This week’s episode of The Street featured an alcoholic character whose entire personality revolves around drink. Things changed for him when he discovered he was a father. Given something that mattered more to him than waking up in his own vomit, his behaviours started to change — but the years of alcoholism were still a big part of who he was. The tug of war between the different aspects of his character made for strong drama, particularly given that the mother of his son had pretty much written him off — she served to some extent as a means of dramatising his inner conflict.

Note that systems of belief and perception are intricately tied together and self-perpetuating. The nature of drama is about changing a character’s perceptions/beliefs so that they can then act in a new way. This is all about liminality; the dance at the borders of consciousness, which can become a journey to a wider understanding or can result in someone confirming that their existing borders work perfectly well, thanks. Films are about the former, much television writing shows people meandering round the latter territory, since most series are about keeping their characters just so. Can’t have House mellowing and opening a bakery, or Captain Jack letting someone else fight the good fight when he’s first in line for intergalactic scraps and shags.

The trick with writing characters for television is to give them enough variance within their parameters that a range of responses is possible. Whereas a film character can be boiled down thus: they will respond differently to a given stimulus as the end of the film than they did at the start. Which might sound kinda clinical, but is a useful rule of thumb when developing a screenplay: if it’s not true, then something is probably amiss with your protagonist.

Structurally, such issues are to be found at the inciting incident and resolution of stories, to be technical. Someone who uses a gun at the start of the story holsters it at the end. Someone who blushes, learns to kiss. And so on. The thing is, lining up the character beliefs with the action of the story, to ensure that character is what’s driving the plot, and not something incidental to it.

Coming home tonight, late back from the cinema, a trio of youths made comments about my clothes, disrespecting my trousers in particular.  It’s got all the hallmarks of a ‘youth gone bad’ story, except I decided to credit them with humour rather than malice.  As a result, I got talking to one of them in particular, and discovered he’s bound for France on a one year basketball scholarship.

All this, of course, was possible because we shared a spirit of fun.  And besides, they were right — my trousers are too short.  The result would have been very different had I been brutal gangster Jacques Mesrine, whose life of crime I had just seen recounted in Mesrine: Killer Instinct.  At least that’s if the premise of the film is to be believed, and that Mesrine’s violent tendencies were exacerbated by institutional terror.  His first taste was as a soldier in Algiers, and a later dose of solitary incarceration in Canada just strengthened his loathing of authoritarian brutality.

The film zips through a decade of Mesrine’s life expertly, brief scenes capturing key moments in his personal and criminal life.  Presented with a job in a lace business by his father, Jacques instead opts for a wayward life “off the books” that a friend is already living, and which provides him with a cool car that he’d never get to drive as a junior functionary in a lace factory.

The two friends burgle a big house and, lightning fast, Jacques pretends they’re cops investigating the case when the owners come back and find them amid their belongings.  It’s a scene of wit and bravado, and that plus the company of women is mighty attractive compared to the conservatism of living with his parents.  Pretty soon Jacques cuts a rakish figure, spending money easily and finding women even easier: even his Spanish girlfriend having their baby doesn’t slow him down.  Tellingly, it’s crime boss Guido who waits in the hospital with Jacques for the birth, and not his own father.

Why stop at one baby?  Next thing you know he’s the father of three, and having spent a while in prison is doing his best to go straight as a model maker.  But that doesn’t last, and pretty soon he’s doing what he enjoys best, having made it clear to his wife where his loyalties lie by shoving a revolver in her mouth.  It’s just one of many violent scenes in the film, this one particularly telling because of its emotional aspect.  Make no mistake, Jacques is a bastard, albeit a fascinating one.

Directed by Jean-Francois Richet, it’s a fast moving and gorgeously filmed tale with a strong central performance from Vincent Cassel.  He’s got something of the old school matinee idol about him, and an edge of danger too: the combination makes him fascinating to watch, especially given the scale of his adventures.

Unwelcome in France, Jacques and his new lover make their way to Canada and get hired to look after an infirm millionaire.  All goes well at first, but when the lover argues with the gardener who’s served the millionaire for twenty years, he gives them their marching orders.  Which only goes to show that elderly men in wheelchairs shouldn’t assume that wealth means they have power: Jacques and his girlfriend kidnap the old boy, and the resultant case puts them high on the list of Canada’s Public Enemies.

Things necessarily slow down when Jacques goes to prison in Canada, to establish the new environment and the appalling regime which is used to try and break Mesrine.  Ultimately, the attempt backfires: Jacques is determined to escape the prison, and manages not only to do that but to come back and try and bust the other prisoners out too.  It’s a measure of how sick the regime is that such camaraderie develops between Mesrine and the other inmates.

This is just the first part of the Mesrine story, and I’m fascinated to find out what happens in the second, which charts what happens to him in the latter years of his life.  As an adaptation of a man’s life, this is one of the strongest films of its type I have seen, and head and shoulders above the great majority of British crime films.

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