Someone who’s seen a film treatment I’ve co-developed said that they very much like it, but were concerned about some predictable elements. The tone of their communication suggested that they felt this was a problem, and I can see where they’re coming from. After all, you don’t want to second guess a story…do you?

I saw How To Train Your Dragon earlier, and predicted much of what was to come. And you know what? It didn’t spoil my enjoyment of the film one iota. And it wasn’t predictable because of being a film primarily for children. Not at all. It’s just that, once you set up the characters and plot and world they inhabit, there are only so many ways it can plausibly go and hold your interest at the same time.

Sure, the dragons in the film could have torched the village and dropped the Vikings into a volcano. But that would have lent the story an unnecessarily apocalyptic tone for an audience of a tender age. And yeah, the hero — Hiccup — could have used his dragon-friendly ways to rule the Vikings by fear as their despotic leader. You know what though? Those would have been pretty shitty stories for a bunch of highly talented writers and animators to turn their attentions to.

So, How To Train Your Dragon is kind of predictable. Guess what though? The story is delivered with such relish, such panache, such joie de vivre, that it matters not a jot. What counts is how enjoyable the experience was, and let me tell you it was a hootenanny compared to the smartarse games played in Shutter Island. If Scorsese’s looking for a real challenge, I’d recommend he makes a film for a young audience, and find out whether his Hitchcock riffs and colour schemes pull the wool over young eyes as well as those routines lull his adult viewers.

Imagine a friend is telling you a story. Maybe you were at the event that the tale relates. Do you interrupt her as, laughing aloud, she sandpapers actuality and introduces other elements to tell a yarn that gets you feeling as good as she clearly does? Or do you pull her monologue apart for inconsistencies and contrivances that push it closer to a three act structure than what ‘really’ happened?

Being unpredictable for its own sake only goes so far if you’re interested in engaging an audience. It might fascinate David Lynch, but you’ll note his work rarely troubles the box office and that he helps fund himself through his online presence. That’s far from a criticism: it’s a good business model…at least for someone who has dabbled with something like the mainstream from time to time and profited from it.

Brains like patterns. Can’t get enough of them. So if anything, they’ll tend to find evidence of coherence even when there isn’t any — which explains the attraction of conspiracy theory. Work with that tendency — there’s a whole industry devoted to helping you to do so, with the likes of Syd Field and Robert McKee offering their versions of how film structure really works.

Thing being, it’s not the structure that people go and see films for. They go to be moved, to laugh and cry and empathise with people going through journeys analogous to their own, even if those journeys involve spaceships and spies and Eddie Murphy in a fatsuit.

If a friend asked for a fiver and then cleared off, never to be seen again, you’d be understandably annoyed. And confused. As with friends, so with films. A trailer helps create a contract in the viewer’s mind. One that tells them what sort of film they can reasonably expect for their money, and what kind of emotions will be involved in its realisation. You can honour that agreement, and ideally do so with some wit and style, throw some curveballs in to keep them on their toes. Or you can run off with their money. Only, do that, and they won’t be coming back to see anything of yours again — and they’ll make sure their friends know you ripped them off.

I’m heading towards smug at the moment, which is never a good thing. But I’ve come up with two play outlines and script samples for each in the past week, and I’m really happy with them. And whether or not the theatre people who asked for the ideas bite, I’m more than satisfied that I’ve come up with concepts worth developing further one day, as stage or radio pieces probably.

The two concepts are very different. One is concerned with terrorism and celebrity, and hopefully has a satirical element. The main development process involved taking note of John Truby’s take on raising the stakes in a drama (it’s far from original with Truby, but I dipped into his Anatomy of Story for a refresher), so the story gets more and more intense as it continues, each new piece of information threatening to topple the whole over. That was a fairly technical approach, and it worked well, and made me realise how close thrillers and farces are structurally. Both follow that pattern of the stakes being raised, and tension is the result: the big difference is that farces resolve that tension with humour.

The other idea I’d got started as a small fun one, drawing on a world that fans of Shameless and Withnail and I would enjoy. But it became increasingly dissatifying as I wondered how to turn that seed into a full script. I wanted more, but I didn’t know what I wanted more of. Except that I didn’t want to get stuck in a world of seedy characters having misadventures. For all sorts of reasons, many of which I can’t articulate, I wanted to do something bigger and stranger and other than that.

If you’re stuck in your thinking, put on someone else’s head. It’s something I’ve done quite a bit over the years, getting psyched up to come up with ideas by giving myself guidance from the imagined perspective of writers I admire for one reason or another. And somehow I knew that the writer I wanted to step into the shoes of for this project was Pete Milligan. I’ve written about my admiration for his comics work, which is effortlessly sophisticated and multi-layered and resonates with some fascinating influences, and I knew I wanted some of that for my play.

All very well, but how to go about that? I used to write myself notes as those other writers, and have even coached myself aloud as Alan Moore and others, but I’ve never tapped into my version of Pete Milligan before and those methods seemed redundant. I just waited, and then had an epiphany. Like you do. I realised that the protagonists of my story could transcend their seedy junkie beginnings, and become iconic English figures. And not just any English icons: they’d be St George and Boudicca, sharing a flat.

Quite how all this transpired, I couldn’t tell you. I know that ‘I’ didn’t come up with it. But when ‘I’ decided to write it influenced by Milligan, that’s the solution that came up, and I knew immediately it was the right one. Why St George? Well, it was his day on the 23rd, and something interests me about the fact that many people are kind of embarrassed by the English flag. It’s associated with football fans and the far right, and I think that’s sad. Not that I’m any kind of patriot, but I don’t see why this potent iconography should be tarnished. A bit of research turned up the fact that St George had a Roman father and Palestinian mother. Perfect: what could be more English than an immigrant, given that the nation’s history is one of successive waves of migrants?

Something about St George and Boudicca sharing a squalid flat and being visited by their drugs worker ignited all kinds of notions in me, and what’s resulted — in the plotting of it, and the brief extract I’ve written — is the nearest I’ve so far got to a state of the nation play. Blimey. Whether the theatre company are interested in that play, or the other one, I’m chuffed that I’ve come up with two strong ideas that have stretched me in good ways. And I’d like to thank the version of Pete Milligan that exists somewhere within me, for contributing to the process. Nice one Pete. Thanks also to Ms Chapple for valuable feedback.

Have a look at this, the script for The Losers. Based on the excellent comics series by Andy Diggle and Jock, this adaptation by Peter Berg and James Vanderbilt is a great model for anyone keen on the kind of high octane action fun that tends to do so well at the box office worldwide when it’s done properly.

In particular, let’s look at the first eleven pages. There’s a masterful job of tension and release done from the off. Opening on what seems to be a scene of someone suffering in a desert setting, a lightning reframe reveals that the anguish was bogus, one of a small group of friends goofing around over a game of cards. Which in turn acclimatises us to the tone of what’s to come: already we have experience of tension being turned into laughter.

The game isn’t played for money, but for weapons. Deadly sexy weapons. Owned by deadly sexy guys, described with magnificent economy: Cougar being a ‘Sniper Rock-God’ is a particular favourite. They’re passing the time while on their way in a truck to a mission, effortlessly swapping the kind of snidely funny lines that men everywhere wished they exchanged with their buddies.

That mission? To use a laser device to target an Afghan prison for destruction from the air. Only, there’s a complication. Kids. And having seen one of our heroes with a tattoo of his own child, it’s reassuring to know that these guys have standards where this killing people business is concerned: they have no intention of letting children die.

Only, there’s a lethal air barrage on the way to the target. And our heroes decide with barely a pause that they’re going to get in there before it arrives, and save the kids. Which counts as a good indicator of their convictions and cojones — and provides the audience with a glimpse of the mad killing skillz that these guys have.

In short order, the guys off the forces guarding the prison, and discover a group of abused children. To underline the fact, a pervert is caught in the act of readying himself to sexually assault one of the kids, which means it’s ok to kill these bastards, and confirms that our guys — and by implication the audience — are on the side of the angels.

But wait, there’s something more. In one of the prison cells, an unspeakably tortured American asks if the newcomers will off him. And reveals that he knows the badass who’s sent them on this mission, and refused to rescind the order just because there are kids on the premises. In fact, this whole operation is about designating the prison a target so this guy — an American behind enemy lines, betrayed by his commander — can be killed.

Naturally, our guys put the poor sod out of his misery, before heading out of the prison complex at speed — because of course the airstrike is on its way, raining death and destruction on anyone the gang haven’t already disposed of. Meaning an opportunity for some high speed driving, barely in time to escape destruction from above.

Well, I don’t know about you, but I’m exhilerated. And massively impressed. In just a few pages a worldview has been created, and characters who articulate different aspects of it through their solid teamwork. Prowess has been shown, with weapons ranging from old fashioned knives to the newest of guns. Camaraderie has been displayed, in a way that musketeers of old would applaud. And a sinister enemy has been identified, who we strongly suspect will turn up in the story again, and whose corrupt and cowardly actions provide motivation for the band of brothers to take action against.

What more could you want? Frankly, if this doesn’t impress you, nothing will. This is an excellent adaptation of very strong source material, translating Diggle and Jock’s comics creation into mainstream cinema with finesse. I was already looking forward to the film. This screenplay will give me plenty to think about before that happens, not least because I’ve got my own action-thriller-with-a-twist I want to write, one of these days.

There’s an exercise I sometimes get people to do in writing classes, to do with status. It’s inspired by a scene in Fargo, in which protagonist William H. Macy goes to visit criminals to ask them to kidnap his wife, a course of action he’s sure will set things to rights but which of course has the opposite effect.

Things start badly when Macy turns up an hour late, which has made the bad guys annoyed, a point that they come back to much to Macy’s chagrin. It also transpires that the kidnappers want a $40,000 upfront payment, which Macy’s character hadn’t bargained for. On top of which, they’re — reasonably enough — confused about why he’d want his own wife kidnapped.

Each of the beats in the scene contributes to the overall sense that Macy is out of his depth. The fact that he does a lot of umming and aahing is a further indicator of his bewilderment. All of this occurs, by the way, in the context of Macy being in a liminal zone. That is, space that his character is not familiar with, which he does not know the rules for. His actions here will determine much of consequence — and it’s no surprise that having fluffed things this early on, they only get worse when the kidnapping actually commences.

Anyway, I use that scene to get people to look at what constitutes status, and then to demonstrate that understanding by having them reverse the situation. That is, have Macy be the high status character, and the kidnappers low. It can happen all kinds of ways. If the kidnappers are broke, then the offer of work puts them on the back foot. If the client has the power to blackmail the kidnappers into committing the crime, then once again s/he has greater status. Size tends to be a clear indicator, at least in some contexts: a big bruiser of a doorman clearly controls the entrance to a nighclub in a way that Charles Hawtrey would find it hard to.

There are more subtle signifiers too. If you go to someone else’s place, as host they have higher status — unless you bring with you the attitude you have in your own larger more expensive residence. Clothes traditionally indicate status in some circumstances — hence judges wearing wigs, and graduating students hiring mortar boards. And language is important: if asking for a favour, you’re probably best off beseeching the person with the authority to confer it rather than telling them what to do.

All these facets of status are considered and weighed up when we interact with people, and are therefore useful to take on board when writing a scene. At the moment I’m writing a few sample pages of script for a play I want to be commissioned, and have spent some time considering the respective statuses of the three characters.

The protagonist begins with high status as he has something — a highly marketable true story — that a publishing agent wants. But at the same time, the publishing agent has the ability to say yes or no to that story, which gives her considerable power: she has the keys to the kingdom. And her assistant, new to the job, apparently has low status — but for reasons central to the plot ultimately has the highest status of all the characters.

Working that dynamic out helps me decide how to play the story. Who has the opening gambit, how it might be responded to, and countered, and so on. And then how the whole situation changes when the agent’s assistant reveals her hand. Status alone doesn’t determine what unfolds, but it’s a key tool in keeping track of what’s going on for each of the characters — and that goes for any story you’re working on.

Dr Who has a built-in refresh switch with the protagonist’s habit of regenerating. Gives the audience a chance to respond to someone new, buff up the franchise for the contemporary audience, as is happening at the moment with Matt Smith. But what do you do when a superhero is arguably in need of a new approach? The readers can be very dogmatic about their relationship with the man in the costume…is it possible to maintain that rapport while reinventing it?

That’s the challenge Grant Morrison took on when developing his take on Batman. He’s one of the great icons of all time — does he even need a rebranding? Maybe, maybe not. But when the results are as captivating as Morrison’s version of Batman & Robin, you’ll get curious about why more comics aren’t as fun as this, regardless of whether there’s been some reinvention going on.

I’d checked out some of Morrison’s earlier work on Batman, but it didn’t seem to have the vibrancy that I typically associate him with. All of that culminated in an apparent death of Batman, for which DC also pulled in big gun Neil Gaiman to do a special issue that rapidly appeared in an overprived hardback, leaving me feeling that the dominant theme of this renewed focus on the Caped Crusader is money.

Something that characterises Morrison’s outlook though is a delightful lack of cynicism, and all this time working on Batman has resulted in a very fine take on Batman & Robin. In the absence of Bruce Wayne — who the characters believe dead but I can inform worried readers is merely way back in time, working his way back to the present via a series of one-off comics set in different eras — former Robin Dick Grayson has stepped into his mentor’s Batshoes. He’s a different sort of Batman, a younger man unencumbered by the darkness that runs through Bruce’s life. Accompanying him, Bruce’s son Damien, who as his name suggests is a bit of a handful: he’s Bruce’s son, brought up by his mother, herself the daughter of one of Batman’s arch enemies, R’as al Ghul.

What this means is an interesting new dynamic: a Batman who’s unsure he’s worthy of the mantle, and a Robin who’s convinced he could do the job better. Ah, the arrogance of youth: little sod is only ten years old, but he’s already worked out how to make the Batmobile fly. If I was Batman I’d be worried about sarin gas booby traps in the Bat-toilet.

All of this is brought to amazing life by artist Frank Quitely, the greatest of Morrison’s collaborators. He’s there for the first three issues of the Batman & Robin comic, which comprises the first half of the just-released hardback, and will return in the future. The other half is illustrated by Philip Tan, who is perfectly good, but a more conventional artist than Quitely, whose sense of three dimensional space and how to utilise it to create compelling images is extraordinary, and combined with a fundamentally European style ensures his comics look outstanding.

A hero is defined by his villains, and Morrison comes up with a doozy in Professor Pyg, a psychotic surgeon who creates his own flunkies through grafts, transplants, and other operations you’d not get on the NHS. He and his retinue speak the lingo of travelling circus folk, which gives rise to some lively dialogue, and Pyg’s insanity gives his words an extra twist. Pyg, I’m sure, is named after Pygmalion, in which Henry Higgins turns flower girl Eliza Doolittle into a lady — Pyg does something similar, only with more scalpels than in the George Bernard Shaw version of the story.

Fine entertainment, Batman & Robin is all about kinetic thrills, and there’s not much more to it than that. Except given that Morrison is the writer you’ll also get interesting characters and quality dialogue. How long it will last I have no idea, given that Bruce Wayne is on his way back. But while it lasts, enjoy what’s on offer.

So, the BBC is opening its doors to the Writers Academy once again. And it really is an outstanding opportunity for those who wish to develop a career with the world’s most venerable and respected commissioner. Only, one of the things I’ve learned in the last couple of years is that career path is not the one I intend to pursue.

I’d love to write for some of the BBC’s shows, I really would. Dr Who would be my absolute dream gig, but then there’s The Street, and Spooks, and Survivors, and maybe something original for CBBC that would allow me to recapture the eerieness I felt watching Children of the Stones way back when.

But there’s no guarantee that being in the Writers Academy will open those doors. Sure, it’ll increase your chances — but the core task of Writers Academy is to groom writers to script the BBC’s flagship shows: Eastenders, Holby, Casualty and — on the nursery slopes — Doctors. And I realised a while back I have no true passion for any of those programmes.

I’ve written for Doctors, and had a lot of fun doing so. Learned some things of use, too. But having got my first idea approved and developed, I found that I was still more excited by what I’d done for my trial script than what transpired as my first tv episode was brought to fruition. And as I produced more, and more, ideas for a second episode, I realised what part of the problem was. As a writer, your job is to create a distinctive episode. As someone involved in the show, your role is to ensure a consistent series. And those two responsibilities don’t always dovetail. There’s a danger of truly distinctive elements getting sanded down by the compromises involved in working on a branded property.

It took a while to reach that — possibly controversial — conclusion. And I continued to produce concepts after my second episode was broadcast. By which point I realised I was also in a pool of 200 other writers also generating a multitude of concepts for the show. Which had to get past first your script editor (mine were both lovely people I had a good working relationship with) and then people further up the food chain before getting a go-ahead. Now, let’s say each writer contributes 15 one page outlines to their story editor in a season…you can see where this is leading. Generating such a concept could take a day or more, so while the chances are better than that of a spermatazoon fertilising an egg, it increasingly started to feel like a numbers game I wanted no part of.

So, I opted out. Actually, that was part of a wider commitment to only work on projects I felt truly passionate about. And guess what? I’ve been happier since then, and more satisfied with my writing. That’s where my drug worker series The Sharp End came into existence, which has been well received by everyone who’s seen it, and which I’m waiting for someone to bite at — or offer me interesting work on projects of their own. And it’s led to any number of other opportunities, such as the invitations to work with an up-and-coming theatre company and talented filmmaker that I wrote about recently.

All of this suits me because I have an entrepreneurial streak as well as a creative one. I’d rather take a chance on developing projects of my own, getting involved in the networking and production side of it all, than spend a career working on someone else’s shows that I don’t have a real feel for. It’s that simple.

So, I won’t be applying for the BBC Writers Academy. But it remains a superb opportunity for those of you who have a genuine love for the shows it’ll get you involved with: Academy graduates are increasingly involved in scripting those dramas, so there’s a clear route to stability and success to be found. I wish that worked for me, but it really doesn’t, so I’ll be taking my chances elsewhere. Wish me luck.

A few days ago, in chatting to a friend, I compared comics writer Mark Millar to Malcolm McLaren. And with McLaren now dead, I’m going to explore that comparison some more. What I’d got in mind was their ability to hype projects that tend to collapse under more than a minute’s thought. But that’s fine, because a minute counts as an attention span these days, and both men have demonstrated their ability to occupy young minds perfectly well for that duration.

This is something I’m especially conscious of having seen Kick-Ass. I’m pushed to know what to say about the film other than it’s crass and entertaining, and if you’re in the mood for that then it’ll provide empty calories perfectly well. There is blood and there is swearing, and it’s all done with a laconic attitude. And it took a good deal of thinking to make it that way, lest you think I’m being dismissive.

Just as Stan Lee and Steve Ditko bottled sixties teen angst and distilled it to come up with Spider-Man, Mark Millar and John Romita Jr (himself the son of a classic Spidey artist) have concocted something entirely in tune with 21st century adolescence. The teens in Kick-Ass are plugged into Facebook and Myspace, victims of street crime, and are considered gay by their objects of desire. A world away from the dilemmas that young Peter Parker was faced with, and there’s no sense of the aspirational aspect of Parker’s character. He wanted to do well at college, and as a press photographer, and had a sense of duty when he became a superhero. In Kick-Ass, the protagonist is motivated by nothing more than the desire to be as cool as the characters he’s grown up reading about in comics.

If Millar is McLaren, then Kick-Ass is his Bow Wow Wow. Huh? Well, just as the controversial element of that manufactured band was 13 year old singer Annabella Lwin, the real stand-out character in Kick-Ass is Hit-Girl, an 11 year old brought up by her father to be a killer vigilante.

McLaren had a knack for spotting the coming zeitgeist, as he did brilliantly with Buffalo Gals — which introduced turntables as an instrument to many — and Double Dutch — a whiff of Johannesburg packaged without the coffee table element that was part of Paul Simon’s dabbling with African sounds. Millar has a similar capacity to see what’s on the horizon and respond to it, drawing attention to what he’s doing so you know he’s the man with the plan. And, like McLaren, he knows the value of a collaborator, working with artists at the top of their game — Bryan Hitch on The Ultimates, and various other fan favourites on one spectacle after another.

Note the distinction between spectacle and spectacular. Rarely does Millar’s work live up to the exuberant hype he puffs it up with. The exception is Red Son, an imaginative and well-executed alternative version of Superman had he landed in the corn fields of the Soviet Union rather than America. That project brought together Millar’s interests in politics and comics, and is very well-regarded. But it hasn’t sold that much, and Millar’s career trajectory is all about hitting the big numbers. Which is all well and good, and he’s got it down to a fine art — there’s something about his work which resonates with the core comics readership. But as with McLaren, that’s a skill more to do with identifying a demographic than conjuring up something of substance.

Go see Kick-Ass and enjoy the hell out of it. There are thrills and spills aplenty, and it’s delivered with verve by director Matthew Vaughn and his co-writer Jane Goldman. Just don’t expect to have anything to think about afterwards — Millar likes to wind people up, but it works mostly on the Barnum principle (‘You can fool some of the people some of the time…’) rather than because he’s saying anything that bears investigation.

Someone contacted me earlier today by Facebook, asking if I’d be interested in writing the script for a low budget feature they intend to make. I had to pinch myself, since the filmmaker in question is someone I consider highly talented, and who I’ve always felt some kinship with despite us never having met.

And that approach is one answer to the question of why I maintain this blog. One collaborator, a good friend at that, has never really understood why I write anything for free. And it’s not something I can explain in purely rational ways. Maintaining a web presence is not easily reduced to something that can be identified in a cost/benefit analysis. I do it because I enjoy it. I do it because I want to build up my profile. I do it because I enjoy the discipline. I do it because of the unexpected things that happen to me as a result.

The filmmaker’s overture was not today’s only step forward. I had a meeting with a theatre company who’ve established a good reputation for their work, and identified an opportunity to collaborate that none of us were expecting when we first sat down around a coffee table. There was something we knew we would talk about, and we did. But then this other thing came up, which if all works out you’ll be hearing more about soon.

So, advance two spaces. It feels good, and it validates the approach I’m taking to develop my writing career. These are very interesting times, and it’s possible that Mr Gladwell’s tipping point is nearing for me. But, the trick is not to get too caught up in the possibilities. Right now, and write now, is what matters. There are three ideas to develop for the theatre company, and so far I have one. There is a short story to be read that the filmmaker wishes the script to be developed from, and the process of assembling my thoughts about it. Oh, and there’s the screenplay I’m writing, which is a little behind schedule. And a novel, for good measure.

All of this is fine. All of this has been achieved by making good use of my time. What seems to work is either doing work, or doing other things. No need for all that other stuff which used to consume me, about wondering whether I’d ever get anywhere, whether I was any good. All that kind of thinking does is waste energy that could be more productively used in writing, in networking, in blogging.

Put another way, the above amounts to saying ‘cut out the trying’. There is only doing, and not doing. Anything else is an indulgence. Which includes the speculation about approaching a tipping point. That may be the case. It may not be. Pondering about it is an irrelevance either way.

All of which gives a samurai-like dimension to the life of the writer. And why not? It beats endless agonising and reflection and recrimination. I’d rather be Mifune than Woody Allen any day. Except, for all the angsty stuff, Allen gets things done. That’s the thing. Also noted by someone on talking to Helena Bonham Carter about her husband Tim Burton, commenting what a practical man he is. That makes sense. Making films is not a pursuit for dreamers who only dream. This is a business. And it’s a business for people who get things done.

It’s 11.15 at night now. Time to do some more work. To write up the first play idea I have, and see if I can conjure another one. And then, I will sleep. A few nights ago, I dreamed of the filmmaker who contacted me today. I wonder what I’ll dream of tonight?

I read an interview with Jack White of the White Stripes recently. He talked about the challenges of keeping the band’s live performances fresh, and the solutions he’d come up with. They were refreshingly straightforward, and effective. For instance, he keeps the keyboard just that bit further away than he can get to comfortably when he needs to play it. Meaning there’s a moment when he might not actually get to it on time. Adds to the tension, brings on the adrenaline he needs to pull a rabbit out of the hat once again.

As with the White Stripes, so with Dr Who. The show has just come back with a new Doctor in the form of Matt Smith, who thankfully proves himself a livewire on screen, an edge to his performance that unquestionably places him alongside Tennant and Ecclestone in the recent Who pantheon. As well as a new Doctor, the show has a new ringmaster in the form of Steven Moffat, who has written some of the most celebrated episodes in the new incarnation of the show, and who now gets to put his imprint on the series. Make no mistake: he does so with aplomb.

It’s clear that there’s a particular and satisfying tone to Moffat’s work. He’s got a real resonance with childhood fears, as demonstrated most by the episode Blink, about a race of aliens who move when you’re not looking at them, and turn to statues when your eye is on them. Truly creepy stuff, as the characters forced their eyes to stay open while being surrounded by a swarm of these dread stone angels. And just the kind of thing to terrify kids.

Moffat hit some of the same buttons with his first new Who episode, centred on the relationship of a deeply unpleasant alien menace that you can only see through the corner of your eye. The eye in question belongs to Amelia Pond, a sweet Scottish girl living in an English village, whose life is turned upside down by the magical appearance of the Doctor in her young life, and his broken promise to come back five minutes later. He doesn’t. Instead, he reappears twelve years on, when Amelia is now kissogram Amy, and has been defying therapists who have tried in vain to get her to dismiss her encounter with the Doctor as a fantasy.

Now, the Doctor is back. To take on that extra dimensional beastie, which has slipped the attention of its alien captors, who are prepared to destroy the Earth’s population in an attempt to get their prisoner back. Which is where the Jack White comparison really comes in. Had this episode been based in London, or Cardiff, the Doctor would have been able to call on UNIT, or Torchwood, or at any rate some well-tooled contacts to help solve the problem. Instead, at the point when he has only twenty minutes to save the world, he’s in a village in the middle of nowhere. Which presents an even greater dilemma than having your keyboard out of reach.

That choice of venue tells you a lot about Moffat’s intelligence, and bodes well for the future of the series. Never mind the details of the way the Doctor saves the day once again. What counts more is the tonal stuff. The fact that Prisoner Zero can take on human form, but gets things eerily wrong: imitating a man walking a dog, it’s the man who barks. As a woman with her young daughters, the mother’s voice comes from a child’s mouth. Perfect to give the sort of unsettling feel that young viewers relish about Dr Who. The alien captors have a similar quality of wrongness about them, appearing as humungous eyeballs suspended in the centre of crystalline chandelier spaceships.

One episode in, and I think we can safely say that in Matt Smith and Steven Moffat, Dr Who remains in rude health, and if anything is invigorated by the fresh talent bringing the Time Lord’s adventures to the screen. Roll on next week’s adventure.

What little I knew about Alias before watching the pilot episode suggested that it was to spies what Buffy was to vampires; a female-centric slice of entertaining hokum. In practice, just as Buffy turned out — occasionally anyway — to do a blindingly good episode, I’ve been seriously impressed with just how good Alias is on the basis of this first chunk.

Starring Jennifer Garner as Sydney Bristow, the show opens with a sequence of the heroine in peril, before flashing back to her life as a student. Her scholastic ambitions are mixed with a relationship with a decent guy who does the decent thing and proposes to her. With tragic consequences. Opening up to her lover, she tells him she works for SD-6, a division of the CIA — a decision which leads to his death when an agent is sent to eliminate him.

And that’s not the least of it. Turns out that SD-6 aren’t in fact anything to do with the CIA, but are in fact a front for a collective of sinister baddies — we can tell, because at least one of them is Libyan — who formed their own operation some years ago. Strewth, what a realisation, finding out you’re working for the wrong side. Not only that, but her dad turns out to be part of the picture in the worst possible way…he’s working for SD-6…or is he really there on behalf of the good guys? And who said the CIA were the good guys anyway?

Written and directed by J.J. Abrams, this is high-octane storytelling of unusual intelligence for a successful mainstream show. It looks great, moves quickly, and the action scenes are exciting and credible enough to buy into. There’s also a grim sequence in which Sydney is tortured, and though we thankfully don’t see anything gruesome there’s no doubt that she’s in real peril — which in turn justifies the way she turns things rounds on her tormentor, who is petrified of her but she lets off relatively light in the circumstances.

As with Buffy, this is a show that seems to have a big mythology associated with it from the outset. The interaction between CIA and SD-6 promises plenty of intrigue for the future, and having her dad at the centre of it all keeps things personal for added emotional impact — important since sometimes all the duplicity of spy stories can leave the viewer both cold and confused.

It’s smart stuff. A smart and attractive heroine guarantees an audience of both sexes — Sydney is highly capable, and needs her wits about her to survive in the deadly world she’s part of. She’s written strong but credibly so, having worked as a spy for several years even before the action of the pilot commences. At the same time, she’s easy to identify with as a young woman at college who plays sports and likes guys — she’s fairly easy to empathise with, a flesh and blood woman with identifiable motivations and emotions. And that core needs to be there for the show to maintain its appeal — this is not the time for Mamet style shellgames and wheels within wheels if those ploys risk losing the emotional connection with the protagonist.

The one area of the pilot that didn’t work for me was the music. There’s a fairly constant soundtrack of bland rock music for the most part, and it seemed shoehorned in. One awkward sequence had a ‘meaningful’ song playing which it turned out Sydney was playing on her stereo at home. Cute, in an annoying way. And even when I knew and liked the music used, as I did with Peter Gabriel’s ‘Here Comes the Flood’, I didn’t think it complemented the scene well. The music worked best when there was a dynamic orchestral score for a fight sequence — anything with lyrics and the words got in the way. But that’s a relatively minor criticism of a pilot episode that I thoroughly enjoyed.