One of my favourite films last year was Bronson. It was about a disordered and sometimes violent man with creative impulses, based on a real person, and it was framed by the protagonist appearing on stage in the style of a music hall performer.

Fast forward a few months and we have Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll. Which features a disordered and sometimes violent man with creative impulses, based on a real person, and is framed by the protagonist appearing on stage in the style of a music hall performer. I’m not, incidentally, suggesting any skullduggery here. Merely a confluence of ideas. As Charles Fort commented, remarking on the proliferation of people coming up with steam engines in the nineteenth century, “It steam engines come steam engine time”. Besides, this film started shooting just after Bronson was released: no chance of cross-contamination then, though it’d be interesting to know what the makers of each film makes of the other.

There’s not a lot to choose between the two films, truth be told. They both feature charismatic performances by their lead actors, in this case Andy Serkis — of Gollum fame — portraying songwriter and entertainer Ian Dury. He does so with brilliance, capturing Dury’s charm and malevolence equally well, and his shift from sounding Cockney to a voice more reflective of his middle class upbringing.

Dury is a hopeless case, unable to function on his own. That’s nothing to do with his disability and everything to do with his self-indulgent and temperamental outlook. But there’s still an impish joy about him, which attracts first a wife, and then a girlfriend, both struggling to deal with a man who refuses to take responsibility for himself…or his children. He has a son and daughter, but she is pretty much overlooked while the film lavishes attention on the boy Baxter. I’d be interested to know where in the development process his sister’s story got abandoned, and for what reasons: it would be unsatisfactory even if these characters were fictional, the fact that they’re based on real people leaves too many questions hanging.

As well as his lovers, Dury has someone else he can’t do without in the form of musician and composer Chaz Jankel. It’s his way with a tune, and the competence of the new band, that takes Dury from the clodhopping dysfunctionality of his first group, Kilburn and the Highroads, to the chart success of The Blockheads.

With that success, things don’t get any better for the singer. He continues to be an unpleasant arsehole, a largely absent father, a selfish lover. All of which would be miserable if it weren’t for the stylistic devices adopted by writer Paul Viragh and director Mat Whitecross. The story has a basic forward movement, but at any given moment is likely to dip back into Dury’s past, sketching his childhood struggle with polio and the Dickensian hospital the disease led him to stay in, his relationship with his own brusque father, and any number of tantrums.

Alongside Ian’s story, it relates how his son Baxter grows up. Idolising his dad but unable to rely on him, Baxter becomes a witness to his father’s showbiz excesses, and it’s no surprise when he takes amphetamines at a young age, influenced by Ian’s manager. Turns out that having a shiftless and unreliable father doesn’t work wonders for your own development, a revelation that will come as no surprise to Carrie Fisher for one.

Never mind the psychology though, and relish a film that does a fine job of creating a three dimensional portrait of a minor British hero, whose understandable anger came through in his highly enjoyable art. So, as an appetiser for the film itself, here’s a couple of examples of Ian Dury & The Blockheads at their finest: Reasons to be Cheerful, Pt 3, and a live version of the classic Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick.

The longer people hold on to the idea that Alan Moore defines intelligence and quality in comics, the harder it will be for writers of equivalent magnitude to take their place alongside him. The field of comics is small enough that it’s only got room for one genius writer, so for now Grant Morrison and Pete Milligan and Ed Brubaker and Jason Aaron have to stand to one side for the big beardy miserablist. And now another writer has come up with a work of ferocious intelligence easily the equal of anything that Moore has done.

I’d come across Mike Carey before, and checked out a collection of his Lucifer series for Vertigo, which didn’t do anything for me. Reheated Gaimanisms from what I could see. Then I started hearing good things about The Unwritten, the first collected edition of which has just appeared. And it’s good. Better than good. Carey wrote it, and Peter Gross provides art which relishes body language and sets the tone perfectly.

Fiercely intelligent, and fun with it, The Unwritten is a classic case of having your cake and eating it. Centred on Tom Taylor, a young man who was the model for his father’s fantasy character Tommy Taylor, the story explores the intersection of the father’s fictional milieu, reader response to it in the form of fan websites and conventions, and the nature of fiction itself. Hey, you can’t fault Carey for lacking imaginative ambition.

Tom’s life is deeply entrenched in fiction, having been brought up with encyclopedic knowledge of how real locations and fictional events dovetail. His version of the world is equal parts raw sensory experience and literary history, and there’s a psychogeographical aspect to the story that accelerates when Taylor travels to the Swiss castle he was partly raised in, also the birthplace of Milton’s Satan and Shelley’s Frankenstein.

The comic is similarly rich, layering a well-paced adventure story that sees Taylor attempting to unravel the truth about himself: can he even rely on his belief that he’s the child of his parents, or was he adopted? Alongside that drama, there’s a wider picture unfolding which seems to involve genuinely magical forces. And a kind of postscript to the first storyline suggests the battle lines of this conflict were drawn a long time ago, and involved Rudyard Kipling for one.

This is a story that could only have been written by someone who’s been writing for some time: the meditations on writing, awareness of industry types, and sheer knowledge of the field says as much. And I’m glad that it’s delivered by a creator who works in comics: the pulp roots of the form, and the conventions which Carey abides by, make the story a lot more fun than it might have been in the hands of an overly serious prose writer. Or maybe it’s just me that found Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum ponderous and dull compared to the fleet science fiction take on much the same stuff peddled by Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea in their Illuminatus trilogy.

Tremendously enjoyable, the effect of The Unwritten is like reading a fantasy comic that’s got its own built-in publishing history and fan response, all wrapped up in the same issue. If you’ve got any interest at all in how fiction comes into being, the interplay of life and art, how readers respond to texts for good and otherwise, then The Unwritten will appeal to you immensely. Speak it quietly, but the text parts of Watchmen were kind of dull, and that pirate stuff was like being hit over the head with a blunt metaphor: here, the different strands combine to create a web you’ll love being part of, and will want to return to.

People like films for different reasons. Given my involvement in screenwriting, it’s no great surprise that I’m a big fan of the story as the central element of film. But others will like a film because of who’s in it. Casting is a sufficiently powerful aspect of film that one of the few factors that will lead to a movie’s success is the presence of star performers. Kevin Smith and Quentin Tarantino owe much of their success to the entertainment value of their dialogue. And where would David Lean be without majestic landscapes to capture on celluloid?

Given these various factors which contribute to the total experience of a movie, make sure you give each of them some breathing room in your screenplays. I’m writing a script at the moment which depends in part for its effectiveness on my ability to suggest a link between a hospital and one of its patients, at least in his mind. The hospital location is an important part of the film, and as the protagonist goes from being ill to getting well that needs to come across in how the setting appears on screen. But to convince whoever the director is that it’s the right route to take, I first need to capture that elusive connection on the page.

Think about how some of your favourite films have created their magic, and work out how you can use words that will result in special cinematic moments in your films. It all starts with the screenplay. I’ve always been taken by the amazing staging of characters in Kurosawa films: groups of samurai or villagers in his historical films are inevitably choreographed in ways that communicate much about their character, status, and relationships. What would I need to do to be able to write such a scene, rather than just doing the bare minimum of ‘a group of villagers come out of a tavern, led by a wily elder’?

It’s considering these elements that will raise your screenplay above the generic and take it into a league of its own. Sure, you’ll be influenced by those who’ve come before you. But learn well, and learn from those aspects of films that speak to you that others seem not to be able to reproduce. What’s to stop you coming up with solutions that would normally be in a director’s domain? If they like what you’ve written, all the more chance they’ll go with your script. If not, at least you made the effort to use words to create an experience, and not just another chunk of description.

I was really taken by the effect used in the Christmas Dr Who story to turn humans into copies of the Master. It was simple, but effective, and may well have been influenced by a similar effect in Jacob’s Ladder. It’s all to do with moving the head so fast that it blurs. Think about how you’d like your effects to appear on screen: it’s your job to inspire a director and a bunch of specialist animators, model makers etc to come up with something special. And it starts with letters, that become words, that become sentences. Don’t just assume that the FX work will be someone else’s job: you’re the custodian of this story, and it’s up to you to get across to people reading it just how things look, sound, and even smell.

None of this detracts from the brilliance of David Mamet’s suggestions in On Directing Film: you still have to create a story in discrete beats, a sequence of A, then B, then C giving the viewer exactly the information you want them to have at that point, that gives you precise insight into how they’re thinking and feeling. Those building blocks will always be one of your primary tools as a screenwriter. But you also need to think wider. Consider the finished film in the very best version of it you can conceive of, and work out how to capture its impact in the words you write.

I have mixed feelings about Hustle. Thing being, I am fascinated by deception, the art of the con, and all that stuff lovingly documented by close-up conjuror Ricky Jay and celebrated in scripts by his buddy David Mamet. Which puts me firmly in the show’s catchment area, you’d think.

Only, in practice, Hustle is more often than not a disappointment. A half-baked piece of tame light entertainment, implicitly hampered by its protagonists being ‘nice’ con artists, who target nasty people and liberate their money to exact revenge on behalf of hapless third parties.

So, I am surprised and happy to report that the first episode of the sixth series was tremendous fun. The pace was zippy, the attitude jaunty, and the whole was a skilfully written and directed piece of pop entertainment of quality and distinction. In some ways, I was reminded of what people go on about, and on and on about, when they reminisce about shows like The Avengers (sixties incarnation): cheeky sexy fun that’s somehow essentially British.

The episode started gleefully with a fake Kylie Minogue tv shoot, set up to relieve a central casting Arab sheikh from £250,000. Only, this was a bogus Kylie who was really one of the gang that Michael Stone (aka ‘Mickey Bricks’, I kid you not) leads. Gleeful nonsense, in other words.

Their next victim is plucked from the headlines: a banker whose institution has been bailed out by the taxpayer and has pocketed a fat pension. A panto villain — his nickname was Piggy for godsake. Boo, hiss. And oh, what joy — however predictable — to see him stitched up by the crew…

What made things different this time round, and will continue to for this season, is that Mickey meets his near-match in a sexy Detective Chief Inspector determined to add his scalp to her impressive collection. Only, Mickey likes his scalp where it is, and has no intention of giving it up, even for a woman who — to use the show’s vernacular — is mostly posh with a bit of dirty thrown in.

Of course, the team turn up top. But it’s a close thing. And part of the skill is in the hands of writer and series originator Tony Jordan, who structures the episode so that you find out what happened for real in a flashback. Meaning maximum tension is extracted beforehand by showing Mickey together with the mark and the briefcase containing a cool half million the fat banker is going to hand over, and the police busting Mickey when he has the case in his red hand.

There were some suitably cool directorial flourishes, in the tradition of the show’s flash visual vocabulary. Split screen shenanigans used to good effect, play with time distortion, and general dynamism where colour and shadow were concerned. It all helped give the show a sheen that goes with its high-rolling subject matter, altogether appropriate since the benchmark for this kind of material is set by expensively styled films like the Ocean’s series.

Tony Jordan must have been cackling with some of the lines he came up with, referencing Anne Widdecombe’s arse and having the pseudo-Kylie’s Arabic patron tell her that her version of Locomotion was shit. I’ll leave you to check out the full picture over on iPlayer — thankfully it convinced, and amused as much as it convinced. Otherwise the whole would have fizzled out as surely as a Star Wars prequel, audience goodwill pissed up the wall by cynical opportunism.

So, kudos to Kudos — the production company responsible for the equally stylish and sophisticated Spooks for BBC1, and The Fixer, similarly distinctive over on ITV. Three audience-friendly returning series with intriguing high concepts. Nice one, guys.

An old woman lies in bed. On the wall is a glass case containing butterflies pinned to a board. She dies. At her funeral, when she’s being buried, a butterfly alights on the gravestone before fluttering away.

Forgive the shampoo commercial subtlety of the above, but thanks to a great script doctoring session today in my second meeting with a filmmaker developing his next short, I’ve been contemplating symbolism.

This stuff gets you early, and gets you hard when it works. I saw The Red Balloon countless times when I was a child, drawn to it every time it appeared on tv. It’s a gorgeous French short from the fifties, about a young boy who is followed around by a magical balloon. He becomes the subject of interest and envy from other kids, and some of them conspire to burst the balloon, the bastards. But a whole swarm (never mind the right collective noun) of balloons appear and swoop the lad into the sky.

It is not recorded if the balloons take him to a height so vertiginous that he blacks out or freezes to death. That’s outside the scope of the film, because what matters is how the balloon functions as a symbol. At the age I watched it, I wouldn’t have been able to tell you about the balloon being emblematic of youthful buoyancy and optimism crushed by the pressure to conform. Or how the flight into the skies at the end taps into religious metaphors of acension. But without knowing the words, I felt all of those things, and more. Which is why I watched the film time and again.

The mystic Gurdjieff was a dab hand with symbolism, it being part of the stock in trade of guru types to speak in riddles. He even had a symbol for how to communicate with symbols, using the metaphor ‘bury the dog’ to get across that the meaning of the symbol should be obscured. And even the ‘dog’ itself some say is a symbol, representing the role of Sirius (the Dog Star) in his teachings.

Point being, do what you can to make the meaning of your symbols indirect. Besides, you can do little but that. Once an image is loosed upon the screen, the person who placed it there loses control over what happens to it. Different audience members will respond in different ways. A rhubarb plant has one meaning to an audience who’ve grown up eating the stuff in crumbles. Quite another meaning in India, where a plant resembling rhubarb has poisonous stalks but edible leaves.

My A level English teacher, quite the feminist, was fascinated by a passage in Tess of the D’Urbervilles (or Baskervilles, as we insisted). In it, Tess skims milk, and Hardy draws attention to the sensuality of the experience. The English teacher was convinced that the device Tess used for skimming was phallic. The way I figured, it had to be something more like a tennis racket, since it’s a job you need something with surface area for. I was left baffled, and curious about what sort of penises the English teacher had encountered if she reckoned the skimmer was a phallic symbol.

Symbols are chocolates in a box. Pebbles on a beach. Plasticine waiting to be turned into a Wallace, a Gromit. And the better they are, the more they resist being pinned down to precise meanings.

I really was looking forward to a triumphant end to the Russell T. Davies years on Doctor Who. And the audacious conclusion of the previous episode, which saw the population of Earth replaced by doubles of The Master, was a creepy and bravura cliffhanger of truly cinematic dimensions to end on. Shame then, that tonight’s final episode, also David Tennant’s adieu from the series, turned out to be such a damp squib.

Really, I should be used to RTD pulling stunts like this. He is without doubt a brilliant showrunner, his imprint on every aspect of the resurrected series — often to breathtaking effect. The choice of Christopher Ecclestone as the first of the new Doctors. The triumphant opening story with Rose, demonstrating that the show could work for the whole family and not just a dog-eared fanbase. And perhaps most importantly, the choice of some truly excellent writers to work on the series — above all others, Paul Cornell and Steven Moffat.

Truth is, many of Russell’s own episodes were the weaker ones of the series. Recall the dreadful business with the London bus stranded on a desert planet offered up as an Easter special. But equally, he can sometimes deliver the goods — the Waters of Mars episode was a triumph, though how much of that was down to his co-writer? Well, I’d like to think Russell was responsible for the excellent stuff that led up to the Doctor’s demise, as the Timelord’s arrogance got the better of him for a while, until the suicide of a woman he’d saved from certain death in the face of his hubris made him realise he was out of control.

So, all that good work building things up, only for the final episode to be such a letdown. An anticlimax at least if you were expecting any sane resolution to the nasty goings-on with the return of the Gallifreyans, and the perfidy of the Master. Instead, the audience were fobbed off with vague handwaving that purported to deal with knotty plotty matters.

A real shame then…but RTD is a master at delivering emotional connections, and the latter chunk of the programme was essentially a greatest hits montage, as the Doctor and his writer revisit characters they have loved and bid them farewell before handing the reins of the show over to Steven Moffat. And, damn you Russell, it worked: my eyes were damp as we got to see Rose again, and I couldn’t help smiling as Captain Jack was slipped a piece of paper with the name of the guy sitting next to him in the nearest I’ve seen to the Star Wars cantina scene in the Dr Who universe.

A pity that Russell emphasises the heart of his story to such an extent that the brain expires from oxygen starvation: this is after all a science fiction show, and some attention to the intelligence that characterises the best of the genre would be welcome. But maybe that’s to come, along with new Doctor Matt Smith, when Mr Moffat takes over. Let’s hope so.

That blend of emotion and intellect can be achieved; Duncan Jones pulled it off in his triumphant debut Moon. And he’s one of the people I’d turn to in Steven Moffat’s situation of being given the keys to the BBC’s best asset. While we’re playing make believe let’s add some others to the list: comics writer Grant Morrison, science fiction novelist Alistair Reynolds, screenwriter Diablo Cody. Which gives you some indication of the problems faced by the people in charge of a series that attracts such attention. Whatever you make of Russell’s tenure on Dr Who, it’s attained a status it never previously had. Here’s to success in his future ventures.