A friend of mine interviewed Martin Scorsese once, and said that the filmmaker was without doubt the most intelligent person he had ever talked to. His range of interests was wide, his knowledge of them deep, and he could talk about them with ease to a diverse audience. Being one of the most cultured men of the twentieth century, and maintaining that status in this new one, is quite an accomplishment. But it’s not the sort of gig you actually go out and stake a claim for, not unless you’re Jonathan Miller anyway. And in Scorsese’s case it’s all incidental to his primary reputation as a filmmaker. Quite simply, there isn’t anyone else like him — making Goodfellas, Raging Bull and Mean Streets alone puts him at the pinnacle of his art. Which is an unenviable position to be in. Especially when he falters, as he has on this occasion with Shutter Island.

I am predisposed to liking Scorsese, and was excited to hear that his new film is in part a homage to Hitchcock. It also indicated that, relatively speaking, Scorsese was looking to slum it this time round, and enjoy making a B-movie. Which I have no problem with. Thomas Pynchon can move from highbrow acclaim (Gravity’s Rainbow in particular) to enjoying himself (Vineland, Inherent Vice, voicing himself on The Simpsons) and that’s viewed as part of his charm. So, why can’t Scorsese do the same? He’s made his Rolling Stones documentary, and done his tv series on jazz and blues music, so why not now do a film that’s lighter in tone?

All very well in theory. The same theory that says wasps shouldn’t be able to fly. Problem being, Scorsese seems incapable of approaching anything without gravitas and aplomb. If he were to buddy Bruce Willis with a labrador in a film for kids, there would still be critics poised to explore themes of redemption and sin in what transpired. As a friend puts it with regard to relationships — she comes with more baggage than Pickfords. So it is with Scorsese.

For the first forty minutes or so of Shutter Island I was hanging on to every beautifully conceived image, following every movement of the camera, and I was transfixed by what was going on. Then I stopped to think about what was going on, and it all started to unravel. A couple of Federal Marshalls are sent to a remote island where a group of criminally insane patients are experimented on by a sinister doctor. Fabulous setting, perfect for some kind of shenanigans…but what follows is ultimately trite and annoying, playing games with unreliable narrators that have a kind of crossword cleverness but minimal emotional affect.

All of which is a massive shame. All the performances are strong, but there’s only so much you can do with a crummy story, and for that we presumably have to blame Scorsese himself for wanting to adapt Denis Lehane’s original novel, as well as screenwriter Laeta Kaologridis for the adaptation. Based on the film, I have no desire to go back and read the book. Any story suggesting in the 21st century that mentally ill people invent people whose names are anagrams of their own suggests a total disconnect with any awareness of actual mental illness, for a start. I’ve been on a ward myself in connection with being bipolar, and I don’t recall meeting anyone constructing acrostics out loud, or composing sonnets when Thursday’s curry was served.

OK, no fair to expect the film — or any work of art — to have to connect with real world stuff. But what we’re left with in its place is not enough to sustain an audience that’s grown to expect material of substance from Scorsese. Which takes us back to where we started, unfortunately. I don’t want to see Scorsese trapped into any sense of obligation to repeat himself — but if he’s set on serving up such vapid material, there’ll come a point when I won’t be the only person less eager to see what he’s doing. Maybe if he really has nothing left to say, then Scorsese should indeed say nothing.

Pilot episodes have a big job to do, involving viewers with the characters, themes and stories of their particular world. I’ve built up a modest collection of DVD box sets for the first seasons of American shows, and plan to write about their debut episodes.

If you were going to pitch Burn Notice for British tv, the obvious way would be to say that it’s ‘Spooks meets Hustle‘. That is, it combines the espionage drama of the former with the geezery jokiness of the latter. Dig a little further and you’ll realise that, in terms of tone and technique, it borrows from one of my favourite shows when I was a kid — The Rockford Files.

The similarity kicks in early with a laconic voiceover as intelligence operative Michael Westen has a bad time in a well-realised Nigeria (a few market stalls and lots of colourful cloth work wonders, seriously). He’s there to pay a bad guy not to blow up an oil terminal, and is just arranging the financial transaction when he discovers he’s the subject of a burn notice. That is, he’s been fired, and no longer has access to the intelligence community resources he was able to call on. That said, he’s still a resourceful sort, and manages — after taking out a couple of goons and borrowing a motorbike for a chase sequence — to fly back to Miami in something like one piece.

There’s an interesting mix of reality with glitz and tits when the action shifts to Florida, and I’m not sure it’s entirely successful. And I suspect the reason is because of the tension between the different forces involved in crafting the pilot. There’s a solid story here, but just to make sure the viewers aren’t tempted to turn over, the show is packed with images of babes in bikinis, and redundant use of stopframe and fancily processed imagery should, god forbid, the audience be unable to bear 60 seconds of tradecraft voiceover without hip hop beats and slick edits.

For all that, Burn Notice is a strong show, and one I will continue to watch. The problems are minor and understandable given the unforgiving market for new television. And there’s plenty to relish. Michael Westen is an intriguing protagonist, who shares some of the familiar issues of the pop fiction spy, but also has a domineering mama who manages to track him down more easily than Mossad. There’s humour there for sure — being tailed while you’re giving your mum a lift to hospital pretty much defines entertainment — but also a rich vein for writing that could serve well to explore what really makes Westen tick.

There’s an intriguing supporting cast too, with Michael having an Irish ex who there seems to be unresolved issues with, and a former trainee who provides him with his first job, looking into the disappearance of some artwork and jewellery from a property developer’s mansion. Add a landlord who’s a former Georgian minister of culture hoping that Michael will clean up his nightclub’s drug problem, and a washed-up friend who reckons ‘tanning is an art and a science’, and you’ve got a rich mix of characters I want to know more about.

The whole package reminds me of Steely Dan — breezy jazz tunes that are easy on the ear but smuggle in sordid stories in the lyrics. Show creator Matt Nix, who wrote the pilot, has crafted something sly and witty here, and I’ll be coming back for more. Fingers crossed, the focus will be more on Michael’s complicated situation as the series goes on, and less about the surface glamour of Miami. One thing I think we can all agree on is that the 21st century doesn’t deserve a Miami Vice comeback, as the Michael Mann film sadly demonstrated.

A decade or so back, I heard an astonishing album, the debut from Godspeed You Black Emperor! It brought together elements from Morricone through to Black Sabbath to create haunting soundscapes suggestive of a world on its knees. It was, dare I say it, cinematic in conception, with lengthy tracks going through different sections, often accompanied by found sound recordings of street prophets or singing children.

Godspeed are on hiatus, but key member Efrim Menuck has another band in the form of Thee Silver Mount Zion Memorial Orchestra, who I experienced live last night. Comprising two violinists, a stand-up bass player, a drummer who plays occasional keyboards, and Efrim himself on guitar and vocals, they played no more than six pieces in their 90 minute set, each combining elements such as quiet/loud/quiet/loud dynamics, Efrim’s ragged voice set against more conventional backing vocals from the two women players, haunting guitar, and sections for strings alone.

The raw power and unusual instrumental mix got me thinking of what lessons could be learned from the show that could be applied to screenwriting, on the basis that there’s always something to learn if you set your mind to that task. And what I came up with reassured me, particularly about the rather unusual screenplay I’m currently working on. For instance, the band’s emphasis on emotional impact over technique and polish is refreshing when so much of what’s seen on screen is technically sound but souldead. They might use strings, but at heart they’re punks — itself suggesting that there’s nothing to stop you or I plundering the films of the past for tools that can help tell our stories now. Don’t be afraid of overt emotionalism, of saying something loud and directly — there are times when passion really will win through, especially if that passion is presented in a setting you’re less familiar with.

That last point bears investigating some more. Efrim’s singing is crude at best, but set against a quasi-classical backing the effect is electrical. That in turn points to the power of juxtaposing savagery with sophistication. And don’t be afraid of extended sequences. Something I’m conscious of with the screenplay I’m currently writing is that it has a rhythm unlike anything else I’ve written — something about it lends itself to long scenes. That’s an organic quality that helps bring out the nature of an unusual protagonist and his worldview, which are at the core of the experience of the film. Seeing the band strengthened my resolve to keep that flow, rather than be tempted to do conventional edits and slick transitions. Those work well for some projects, like some production helps a song become daytime radio-friendly, but they’re not the qualities that will make this particular film work, any more than forcing Paul Greengrass to use conventional photography rather than the handheld aesthetic he used for the Bourne films would have worked.

Coming out of the gig, I was behind a woman who complained to her friend that all of Silver Mount Zion’s songs were the same. Well, that’s one take on things. It’s like saying that all Led Zeppelin’s songs were the same, given they draw on a particular style of larger than life blues rock. What’s more the case is that both bands have a certain vocabulary that they use to express a fairly narrow range of emotions. Which is pretty much how genre works in film too: you know in advance, more often than not, what type of experience you’re in for on the basis of the trailer. If it floats your boat, you’ll be inclined to give the movie a chance at the cinema or a few months later on DVD.

There are some works that create their own genre however, and that’s a choice you can make in your own work. But be prepared to stand up for it, and defend it. One person whose perspective on film I tend to respect doesn’t seem to get the script I’m currently working on, but I now see that as a sign that I’m doing the right thing: they’re interested in developing projects that are too mainstream and cosy for my tastes. Clearly not the person to bring this one into being. And knowing that, I can find a more suitable team to go forward with, as Efrim has with Silver Mount Zion. Asked if they’d play a festival, he joked that they’d look odd standing between big corporate banners in the daylight. But at night, indoors, their music makes perfect sense.

One of the issues I have with Green Zone is the fact that it makes a complex situation too neat. In its effort to get across a political point — that troops on the ground were deluded about WMDs with tragic consequences — scriptwriter Brian Helgeland whittles off the edges of an organic situation seething with complexities and ploughs a linear story through the middle of what’s left. Compare and contrast with The Hurt Locker, scripted by Mark Boal, which is ripe with the kind of detail that could only come from someone who’s immersed themselves in the realities of America’s presence in Iraq. Which isn’t to say that Helgeland’s script is free of such complications — but his insistence on getting a point across makes the film weaker than its Oscar winning peer.

I’m reminded of what happened when Africa was mapped. The straight lines on the map of the continent bear no relation to any geographical or social realities in the continent itself. Rather, the territory was literally carved up by chaps back in London looking to parcel the land into manageable chunks. Never mind that much of Africa traditionally works along tribal lines, where different cultures co-exist in the same territory, and there are rivalries and allegiances between them. What mattered was imposing a British model of governance, which to this day continues to be responsible for some of Africa’s problems.

As with Africa, so with the territory of the imagination. We might start out with ideas of doing a tale that has such a point to make, certain beats to reach, a specific conclusion to get to. But in the actual writing of that story, I’d almost view it as a failure if it hasn’t grown beyond the scope of that initial treatment into something bigger, better, and ultimately other than what was initially conceived. To expect otherwise is to have a reductionist view of the writing process, and that would be — for want of a more suitable technical term — bloody silly.

I’m writing a screenplay at the moment and continue to be surprised and delighted at the differences between what I’d written in the treatment and what I’m writing in the script itself. And it’s a liberating experience. I’ve discovered a vein of comedy in one character I hadn’t anticipated that helps leaven what could otherwise threaten to be ponderous. I’ve realised that a lot of the opening material works better as a continuous sequence, which presented particular technical challenges that were a worthwhile struggle to take on. I’ve found that one sequence I breezed over in the treatment is a key beat in the story, and found a way to deal with it using sound and image rather than resorting to dialogue. All of these challenges were implicit in the material, but were only fully realised in the moment of writing.

The reason for this is the distinction between what Alan Moore calls ‘high altitude mapping’ — that phase of writing in which ideas assemble and coalesce into themes, image systems, and so forth — and the actual matter of writing the script word-by-word. In the first, you’re laying out the pieces in a dissociated way, which is a different experience from the first person perspective you get writing the setences sequentially. There’s yet another layer of perceptions to be experienced if you arrange a script reading (ideally with actors), and discover what it’s like to inhabit the viewpoint of just one character. That can be very instructive; you’ll discover times when your character wants to speak when they don’t at the moment, other times when they need to say something other than what’s written for them, and so on.

None of this should really be a surprise. After all, a screenplay is an immensely complicated dance between different viewpoints. Sometimes the audience is experiencing situations from the perspective of a protagonist. Then of an unrelated character. Then a neutral stance might be taken on as a new location comes into view. The cumulative effect is what makes a story distinctive. And, in my experience, I tend to trust it when that gives rise to stories which are less organised and linear than the writer had originally envisaged. Otherwise, you might as well stop at treatment stage, admitting that you’re going to have no further original thoughts about the story.

I was recently approached to run a one-off class on Narrative and the Marvel Universe. How bizarre and beautiful is that? A chance for me to get my geek on in the biggest way, showing off knowledge of Marvel Comics that I don’t normally have the chance to display, and ally it to what I’ve learned about stories and how they work.

Really, any consideration of Marvel’s fictional universe has to start with the means by which it was produced, and the reasons for some of the choices made. Rewind to the 1960s, and Stan Lee was one of a handful of creative titans in what was described to readers as the Marvel Bullpen, a legendary place where Stan ‘The Man’ Lee would hang out with artists Jack ‘The King’ Kirby and Johnny ‘Ring-A-Ding’ Romita.

Accounts from participants say that comics would be created as follows: Stan would have a rough idea for a plot, and act out some of the key scenes. The artist’s job was to turn that brief into a fully pencilled story. Then an inker would go over it so the art could be reproduced, and Stan would add dialogue and captions. It was a production line process, all about efficiency. And it meant that artists were fully co-creators of the material they drew, even if legally Marvel tried — and try — to claim otherwise.

Artists would embellish the stories with details that Stan hadn’t envisaged. Apparently The Silver Surfer came about when Kirby drew a character soaring through space on a cosmic surfboard, without Stan having asked for one. Quite where his cod-Shakespearean speaking style came from, I have no idea. Anyway, the point is that the production process itself created the characters and world(s) they inhabit. Add to that the audience’s desire to see characters fighting and chasing, and that accounts for much of the contents of the comic.

Stylistically, Marvel’s comics were very different from DC’s. Where DC stories happened in an imaginary world, Marvel’s most definitely occurred in New York. And that air of supposed realism applied to the characters too. Rather than being cut entirely from heroic cloth, Marvel’s heroes were tormented. Spider-Man had dear old Aunt May to look after, a college course to keep up with, and girl trouble. The X-Men were misfits and freaks brought together under the roof of what, for all the money that went into it, was a school like the one readers went to, with the same rivalries and traumas.

A few years into the publisher’s success, and new creators were needed to come up with new titles. These were often youngsters who were not only comics fans, but communicated in their work a wider appreciation of their culture and times than the first wave of comics creators. Steve Gerber and Doug Moench brought a fuzzy social awareness to the comics they worked on, and had a more distinctive personal style than the writers who came before them. They were a product of their time, influenced by underground comics and 70s American cinema. Just as much a product of his era, Jim Starlin took Marvel into the stars, creating stories on a truly epic scale — in their very different ways, Starlin and Gerber wrote about America’s personal growth movement.

The Marvel Universe has always been a pretty catholic place. It encompasses crime-ridden Hell’s Kitchen where blind martial artist Daredevil patrols the rooftops. The farflung reaches of the cosmos where the Guardians of the Galaxy fight alien evil. And the swamps where muckmonster Man-Thing trudges. Take a step back, and you’ll see what’s going on: Marvel doesn’t just publish superhero comics. It continues to this day with titles like The Punisher to draw on its pulp roots. And though the core titles might be the likes of The Avengers, there’s always room for science fiction and horror titles too.

Ultimately, it’s about satisfying fan demand, and finding new fans. Which is why there are initiatives like the Ultimate titles, a revamped Marvel universe suitable for 21st century novice readers. And why, from time to time, there’s been room for titles like Dracula and Master of Kung Fu when the market can support them.

The Marvel Universe is constantly evolving, through the interaction of forces including market size, success of films featuring Marvel characters, the rise and fall of fan favourite creators. You can’t look at the comics themselves without appreciating how they came to be that way.

The thing with writing is, nothing’s wasted. There are things I wrote years ago that I continue to pull out and dust off and send out. And it’s happened again just now. Breaking In, which you’ll find as one of the scripts on this site, has been chosen as one of the plays that Drip Action will put on during a festival week in August. Which will be its third outing so far.

Breaking In was written in 1997, and the rehearsals started with the play two thirds written. Which is one way to do things, but not necessarily one I’d recommend. Fortunately we had two excellent actors in Johnny Lynch and Dee Whitehead, who guided by director Cris Green conjured up the characters from that first chunk of story, and then cemented it all into place when I coughed up the final third of the script.

The play was requested by Nottingham Playhouse, one of four off-stage productions I did there. I learned a lot doing those shows, not only writing them but getting involved in producing and direction, and — most important — having access to gaffa tape, the secret currency that theatre shows work on. They asked for a play about the power of language, and I did my best by incorporating what I was learning about hypnosis at the time as part of my NLP studies. The part where Greg and Jill are talking at the same time at the end uses a lot of that knowledge — fun for me to overhear from a RADA tutor in the audience that he was ‘entranced’ by the show.

It’s true to say that we attracted a larger audience to Breaking In than the Playhouse managed to pull to their main stage production of the time. Which I like to brag about because I wasn’t paid to write the script, so technically I can’t call it a commission. Sucky attitude, I reckon: if you’re going to ask people to write shows and not pay them, the least you can do is give them payback in some other form. Being able to use the word ‘commission’ would be a start: besides, what else do you call it when someone asks you to create some work for them?

Johnny and Dee were both in their 40s, and that and their relationship to the characters gave the production a particular feel. Johnny, quite a character himself, went out one night and only used lines from the script when he talked to people. One way to rehearse, I guess. A few years ago, a chance came up to put it on again with performers in their early 30s. David McCaffrey and Louise Hooper brought a very different energy to a production directed by Iain MacDonald at the Hen & Chickens in Islington, for a series of performances as part of the venue’s Guerrilla Theatre Week. Just as fun, though the organisers failed to produce the press reviews that we’d been promised. Hey ho.

And now it’s up for another showing, as part of a one week festival in which a number of plays will be performed. This time round I get to experience the novelty of payment — £150 isn’t much, but it’ll get me to Arundel and back to see it playing, and if I’m lucky I’ll receive another £200 for the best play. Fingers crossed. It ain’t all about the money, that’s for sure — but it’s just as surely welcome.

All this for a one-act two-hander, the starting point of which was me wondering about a man and woman whose first sight of each other is at extremes of their experiences — his appearance in CCTV footage on Crimewatch, and hers in a porn mag, the photo taken by a man who’s part of both their lives. If you like the sound of that, and you enjoy a good bit of swearing, I reckon you’ll get on with Breaking In.

You know that thing when someone says “you’ve got to meet so-and-so, you two are so alike”? Those words are the surest death knell of a potential friendship that I’ve yet heard. Having been told that this other person is so like yourself, when you’ve put so much time into being the one and only authentic version of you there is, it’s no surprise that you view the imposter with suspicion. As it is with people, so with films sometimes. Green Zone was so the sort of film that I’d like, what with being made by Bourne director Paul Greengrass and with its star Matt Damon, and — even more exciting — presenting a contrarian perspective of the search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq in 2003, that it could have been made just for me. Which is a lot to live up to. Sad then, but not surprising, to report that it didn’t really work for me.

There’s an easy analysis of the film’s failure — it falls between two stools. One is Greengrass the populist, who crafted two of the three Bourne films so expertly, outBonding James Bond in bringing intelligent thriller spectacle to the mainstream. Then there’s the politically motivated Greengrass, responsible for Bloody Sunday, concerning the Irish conflict of the same name, and United 93 about the doomed September 11th flight in which passengers fought back against terrorists. Green Zone is what happens when Greengrass attempts to occupy both seats at the same time. As a result, he lands on his arse.

It starts promisingly enough, with Damon as an American soldier charged with finding WMDs, who for the third time in a row comes across a site where they’re supposed to be only to discover that there are none there. He has no reason to suspect anything other than faulty intelligence, but as the story progresses it becomes clear that there’s a bigger picture which troops on the ground are unaware of. WMDs were the justification for the invasion, which is going ahead for the simplest of political reasons — best summed up in an American protestor’s banner of the time, ‘How did our oil get under their soil?’.

I’m totally in favour of the idea of the film, so what happened between concept and execution for me to be fundamentally unsatisfied by it? Most likely, it’s that it bears some of the hallmarks of Greengrass’s Bourne style — action perceived by a subjective camera — without delivering the payoffs of an action film. Instead, and rightly, it becomes a story about a soldier’s quest to discover the truth. And it’s a story that doesn’t really deliver the goods.

Easy for me to say as an armchair critic, when of course Greengrass and crew rightly desired to make a film that is a box office hit to reach as wide an audience as possible. How then to do satisfy that objective? Perhaps by making the film and more Bourne-like. The Manchurian Candidate — first time round with Frank Sinatra, not Jonathan Demme’s remake (good as it is) — was a powerful piece of subversive filmmaking during the Vietnam era that didn’t make a direct connection with contemporary politics but tapped more subtly into the mood of the time. Same with The Third Man. Perhaps, as with both those examples, something more elliptical rather than direct would reach a large audience.

Besides, Iraq has already found its definitive film in The Hurt Locker, which isn’t overtly political, but in its scenes of the traumatised bomb disposal expert in a supermarket back when he’s in the States is more eloquent than any on-the-nose story could ever be. The definining political film of our times, about the jockeying for war rather than war itself, is In The Loop, which conveys the souldead venality of the political class with the same inspired clarity that Hogarth brought to his monstrous etchings. Next to those fine films, how could Green Zone compete?

There’s something about the work Jeff Lemire that brings to mind the work of two of my favourite creators. With writer Ray Bradbury and singer-songwriter David Sylvian he shares a genius for evoking landscapes haunted by childhood, by love and loss and growing old. And he does so in the form of comics that he writes and draws, a chunky collection of which are to be found in Essex County, an anthology published by Top Shelf.

Lemire is Canadian, and there is a distinct sense of place conjured up in his lyrical linework. The Essex County of the title is the setting for three interlinked stories set in an imagined rural Ontario drawn from Lemire’s own upbringing. Place and time are as important as the characters he crafts. A young boy who imagines he is a superhero, brought up by his uncle, with whom he has no real connection — his emotional life is experienced with a former ice hockey player. The truth of their relationships is uncovered slowly, and reveals layers of pain and confusion that echo from past to present.

With linework akin to that of Ted McKeever, and powerful full page images of people in relation to their environments, the stories have a distinct folkloric feel, poised somewhere between the everyday and the eternal. The tales reach back into decades past, but the emotions go back further still, dealing with timeless emotions and situations.

Autobiographical comics — or at least the majority of autobiographical comics I come across — tend not to interest me. Their authors have not led lives that interest me, or want my pity, or lack insight. Exceptions are few and far between: I love Eddie Campbell’s Alec stories for their idiosyncrasy, and suspect that what I value about Lemire’s work is its universality. I’ve never played ice hockey, and have no particular interest in it beyond the bloody thrills to be enjoyed in the film Slapshot, but a story in which one brother loses a fight in order to enrage his brother into seeking vengeance for him — on the ice — is one that I can empathise with.

This is deceptively simple work. It can be read quickly, but stay to relish the effect of the subtle lines, the inventive transitions that lead from present to past, from then to an eternal now. The words are straightforward, but powerful. This isn’t just rural Canada — it’s ancient Greece, it’s Shakespeare’s England, it’s right here and right now with the bullshit and tinsel stripped away, and only primal truths left.

Essex County is my first and only encounter with Jeff Lemire. He’s now working with DC imprint Vertigo on a series called Sweet Tooth, which seems to add a magical realist element to his repertoire of archetypal situations and emotions. The setting is a post-apocalyptic world and the protagonist a youngster called Gus who sports a fine pair of antlers. It’s been getting excellent reviews, and I’ll be picking up the first collected edition when it appears. Also for Vertigo there was The Nobody, a graphic novel riff on The Invisible Man which got mixed reviews.

Where does Lemire go from here? I’ve a feeling that with his unique art style, and his ability to write too, he could follow in the footsteps of the equally indefinable Paul Pope. Certainly, it would be good to see someone emulate Pope’s breadth of vision and involvement in a range of compelling projects, each driven by a singular if indefinable obsession. I use Pope as an example in the best sense — not someone to emulate for his career moves and project choices, but for the clear passion which infuses everything that bears his name.

Stamp collecting is all about assembling small pieces of paper with illustrations on them, taking them away from the original context they were used in and displaying them in special books. Face it, stamps are pretty much the same the world over, give or take a triangular one from this country, a picture of a cosmonaut on that one, and so forth. I find it easy to be dismissive of stamp collecting, but in truth the tv schedules offer programmes just as formulaic — and I speak as a fan.

Right now, I’m watching Masterchef. Once again, a group of hopefuls assemble to impress the hosts. The first challenge is to create a dish from the ingredients provided. While they do so, they’re interviewed about their hopes and passions, to enable the audience to build up a relationship with the contenders. The judges agree on a couple of cooks as being clear winners, a couple more as being hopeless, and quibble over who of the remaining two will go through to the next round of three contestants.

Thrust into a professional kitchen during lunchtime service, the three are put through an ordeal there before having to come back to the studio and cook the presenters a kickass meal of their own devising. And the very best of those contestants gets to progress further. It’s like this every episode until we get through to play-offs, and a victor is declared. Simple as that: yet millions of people tune in to see amateur chefs juggle different combinations of meat, fish, and veg to win over the show’s hosts.

Weird, that I complained in my last piece about the familiarity of Crazy Heart, and am now celebrating just the same when it appears on the small screen. I know already that when Masterchef finishes I’ll switch to see Gordon Ramsay belittling American restaurateurs in the process of helping them reinvent their offerings to the public. And I can tell you now how the show will go. Gordon will turn up, order food that he barely touches. He will use his reputation to ensure the restaurant is full for an evening service which will fall apart due to the higher numbers and bring tensions to a head among the team. And after threatening to walk out on the biggest bunch of clowns he has set sight on, Gordon will get to the root of the personal issues involved in the eaterie’s failure, and resolve them in time for the restaurant to get a makeover of its interior and its menu, which will be served triumphantly to a full house.

Thing being, humans like the familiar. Note that we have a seven day week, rather than an endless succession of new days. Those seven days are broken down into 24 hours, and those hours need to be filled with something. Which breaks down into paying for tv, and watching it.

The trick is to balance repetition with difference. Use the same structure to deliver different stories, however similar they are to ones we’ve already seen. You know The Bill will always get their man, and now the show runs after nine that maybe scenes and language will be spicier than before. The Doctor will continue to save Earth, whether he’s wearing David Tennant’s face or Tom Baker’s scarf. Scooby Doo and the gang will forever investigate supernatural mysteries, only to find out that the source of the scare is a greedy landowner or possessive janitor. And so on.

Better than that, having watched these adventures once, we go back and re-experience them — sometimes in the company of hundred of others, in the case of Star Trek conventions. And can even buy them on DVD to ensure we can always get that same hit of House whenever we want. The more I think of it, the less sense this need for repetition makes. But then I look at my Amazon wishlist, and see the number of box sets for shows I’m already familiar with, and start to relive the moment when I first caught Robbie Coltrane as Cracker, or reminisce about The Water Margin…

Silly me. I go to see a film about a country musician, and am then disappointed when the story is formulaic, built on an overfamiliar melancholy refrain. Never mind that Crazy Heart is beautifully performed by leads Jeff Bridges and Maggie Gyllenhall, it doesn’t really step outside of some very narrow confines, and as a result there’s really nothing to report other than if you like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing you’ll like.

Which is a shame. Written and directed by Scott Cooper from a novel by Thomas Cobb, Crazy Heart is a film that stands foursquare in the tradition of the music biopic, even if in this case its subject is fictional. Bridges plays Bad Blake, a grizzled country singer with a drink problem and a troubled past. If it pains me to write those words, it pained me even more to watch the highly expensive resources devoted to this stereotypical story do nothing other than exactly what you’d expect them to.

So, Bad Blake starts off playing at a fleapit venue, and uses his reputation to secure free booze, and sleeps with a woman who associates Bad with her own heyday way back when. Then he does the same again. You could rinse and repeat indefinitely, but of course we’re in need of an Inciting Incident, which comes in the form of a journalist half his age: Ms Gyllenhall. In my eyes, her performance is stronger than that of Jeff’s, which is to say she gleans more interesting results from unpromising source material. She’s a single mum, a bit in awe of Bad’s wayward talent (that he wastes), while she has no pride in her own writing.

Anyway, after he crashes his stock car she comes to visit him in hospital, and…

Hang on, the stock car business didn’t happen. It was one of the scenes I made up to invigorate what was happening on screen: something that could have happened and would have been more adventurous than what does unfold. Did I mention Jeff and Maggie get it together? That she’s won over by his old school charm despite knowing he’s been married four times and has a first name that’s a bit of a signifier? What about her ability to melt his heart so that he’s inspired to write songs for the first time in years? And that it all goes horribly wrong in a bittersweet way, so the two bruised romantics are once again left on their own?

Well, that’s how it all hangs together. There is, naturally, a redemptive element to all this. In my fantasy version, Bridges realises his problems are down to adopting a corrosive masculine archetype, and aided by ecstasy tablets in a San Francisco leather bar, discovers an empowering new identity, and rerecords his greatest hits with a new manlove angle. But no, instead he goes to Alcoholics Anonymous, where I have a horrible idea this project was conceived in the first place.

Listen: there is nothing wrong with Crazy Heart. It’s beautifully acted, and tugs at the heartstrings just so from time to time. But it’s utterly predictable, doing nothing new or interesting with the raw ingredients it’s constructed from. Which may explain why it was so heavily tipped for Oscar glory, but does nothing for me as a viewer or a writer. I’m not looking for novelty at every turn, and the pursuit of it can be tiresome in the extreme — but Crazy Heart is so safe that it misses the chance to do something special, something that might just be beautiful.

A couple of paragraphs back I toyed with the idea of a gay element to the film, and it’s interesting that three of the most remarkable films of recent years — Far From Heaven, Brokeback Mountain and Milk — have effectively been quality mainstream movies with a gay angle. Now, maybe that in turn is old hat — and I look forward to the day when gay relationships are depicted on a regular basis by actors happy to take such roles — but surely there has to be some new angle to a story about a broken down country singer who has problems with drink and women. Please?