I thought I knew what I was going to write about in this piece, having seen The Infidel. It’s a film with a lot to commend it, a comedic exploration of cultural identity spinning off what happens when a Muslim taxi driver in London discovers he’s actually adopted, and was Jewish by birth. Naturally, this happens at a time of maximum inconvenience: when his son plans to marry the daughter of a firebrand fundamentalist Muslim cleric. And in looking into his actual rather than presumed roots, he wants to hide what he’s actually doing from his family, with the comic consequences you might expect.

All of which paints The Infidel out to be a farce, a genre that has its roots in the stage. And really, that’s one of the film’s failings. It barely embraced its cinematic potential, consisting largely of set pieces involving people sat together in rooms and exchanging views, connected by a plot that saw the mad mullah to be revealed as not the person he’d like you to think he was, and all being well in the end.

Scripted by David Baddiel, it was funny enough on occasion, but came across very much as a series of intellectual points. In fact, one of the key scenes was a debate between the cabbie and the mullah, and frankly films aren’t good or bad because of the force of their intellectual argument. And that was a point reinforced by what I discovered just before I started this piece: one of my favourite jazz musicians, violinist Billy Bang, died a month ago.

The memories and feelings stirred by that knowledge are more powerful for me than the conscious mind tricks of The Infidel. I’m thinking simultaneously of the first Billy Bang record I came across, on vinyl; the concert I saw him play in a Birmingham hotel as a warm-up to a residency in London; the CDs I picked up over time tracing different facets of his style and interests.

And that reminiscence takes me to Four Lions, which has the emotional power that The Infidel lacks. The Chris Morris film makes no pretence of being even-handed, of engaging in the liberal tradition of rational debate. Instead, it forces you to empathise with Muslim terrorists by making them as real and inept and confused and vulnerable and funny as the rest of us are. No concern with balance within the film itself — we’ve got a media dedicated to doing Islam down and linking it to terror; how can one 90 minute film seek to redress that imbalance?

The point of all this? There are script gurus out there who have got people believing that scripts should follow certain templates and strictures to be acceptable to Hollywood. To be fair to the likes of McKee and Truby, what they actually say is considerably more nuanced than that. The general message is learn the form before you play with the form. Same with music: get those scales down before you soar off into the realm of improvisation.

It’s sad to see wannabe writers handicapping themselves by obeying restrictions which many of their peers will tell them are essential, but in practice are arbitrary. If you’re going to make a mistake, make your own mistake in a heartfelt and honest way. You can always find other ways to do what you had in mind. But unless you reach beyond the formulaic in the first place, how will you ever discover what you’re capable of?

Billy Bang bought his first violin in a pawnshop. A friend convinced him it could be a means of communicating what he felt and wanted to say. He dedicated himself to doing exactly that, committing himself to a life of almost certain poverty, as fortune favours few in jazz. It became his life path, and it all seemed to lead to his greatest accomplishment: assembling other musicians who’d fought in Vietnam, and some Vietnamese players, to come together and create music that communicated what they felt about the war, and about the impact it had on them all. If I could look back at my life knowing I’d created art as truthful as those two albums, I’d know I’d lived my life the right way. And that counts for more than any amount of doing the right thing, the professional thing, the industry thing, when your heart’s not in it.

I’m delivering a workshop on creativity and spirituality tomorrow, without being quite sure what I’ll be doing, and quite how I’ll connect two domains that for many people exist in separate boxes. It gets even more unlikely when you consider that there are those who deny that they are creative while acknowledging that creativity exists, and others who don’t recognise a spiritual dimension to their own or anyone else’s lives. And I’ve got an hour or so to set the record straight, and ideally give those present an experience which makes clear the traffic between both areas. Gosh.

It’s currently quite fashionable to be an atheist or humanist if you’re a creative of some sort. And that’s fine, but more often than not such a stance is about people making a political statement concerning organisations whose dogmatic outlook leads to repressive behaviours. In that regard, I’m all in favour of taking a stand. But what I don’t want is for spirituality in its widest sense to be sneered at in the way that I sometimes feel is being done by the advocates of atheism.

Now, admittedly one of the biggest problems with looking at creativity and spirituality is the outpourings of those who advocate that there is valuable common ground. I’m not at all sure the world needs any more New Age wibbling about sacred energies and the cosmos and all that. What perhaps we do need is more creators along the lines of Blake and Turner, both of whose work has a sense of the numinous without ever pinning down exactly what such might be.

‘Numinous’ is frowned upon by many in the contemporary art world. There’s a suspicion of experiences that evoke awe, as witnessed in some of the critical reaction to the ‘indoor sun’ that Olafur Eliasson created for the Tate Modern. That notion of being lost in something greater is pretty much the antithesis of academic-style art appreciation, which tends to be a cerebral experience where the role of the curator in choosing stuff is seen as just as important as the stuff chosen.

Cutting through the wads of theory surrounding both fields, my conclusion is that creativity and spirituality are often in practice names for the same experience, of going beyond our usual bounds and into something other, from which we bring back affirmation and inspiration. It’s a very personal business, but because it happens to lots of us, it’s possible to see patterns of similarity — which is pretty much the sequence I’ve just outlined. Which is also, if you think about it, another way of articulating the Hero’s Journey.

In the days before heroes improvised raps to see who was mightiest, or fought against the evils of a corrupt police department, they had other things to concern themselves with. They stole fire from the gods, learned from the birds the secret of flight, took for themselves the secrets of speech. These were epochal experiences, sure enough likely to be metaphorical, in which humans learned about the ways of the world they lived in.

Maybe it’s because we live in a world where music is created by manipulators with business skills rather than issuing forth from the hands of players into the ears of grateful audiences; where stories are associated with people whose names are embossed on the covers of books and who continue to write even after they have died; where films are more and more designed by committee to remind us of the tv shows we enjoyed as infants, that the notion of spirituality being an aspect of creativity is seen as ridiculous. And that’d be a shame. Making spirituality embarrassing is the surest form of censorship I can think of, and that’s something worth contemplating at greater length than here or in the session I’ll be running tomorrow. Wish me luck…

Amanda Palmer has steadily been making an impression on me since I first come across her song Leeds United, the video for which is directed by filmmaker and comics writer Alex de Campi. She’s talented, and has a genius for utilising her innately independent outlook to develop strategies that make the most of the net’s ability to support creative talent. And she’s pissed off, by the reaction of her former high school to a play on the Columbine shootings that was planned there. I wrote what follows in response to Amanda’s call for contributions to her blog about the importance of creativity in the school learning process:

I went to a very conservative grammar school for boys, one of those places that has pride in its long heritage. We even had a school song, that started ‘Where the iron heart of Englad throbs/Beneath its sombre robe/Stands a school whose sons have made her/Great and famous round the globe’.

It was, as you may imagine, a pretty traditional learning environment, and worked excellently for producing students who did very well academically. Which was fine, but also meant that it was not so good at dealing with students whose hearts and minds were more off-kilter, myself included.

Into this mix came Gary Hedges, an English teacher with a passion for George Orwell and a former career in the wrestling ring who was the spitting image of the guy featured in the poster for David Lynch’s film Eraserhead. His enthusiasm for literature was contagious, and though some of the students were mean about his appearance, others of us were captivated by his unruly charisma.

Faced with wading through the treacly prose of The Master of Ballantrae, a Robert Louis Stevenson text that I suspect the school had bought in bulk when it was first published, Mr Hedges recognised that we were resistant to the book’s subtle charms. He did something unheard of, and got copies of a new book: A Kestrel for a Knave, by Barry Hines.

Filmed by Ken Loach under the title Kes, the book told the story of a young working class boy our own age, a scruffy towndweller, and the relationship he develops with a bird of prey. It’s a raw, vital story a million miles removed from the aura of the very traditional grammar school in which we read it, and Mr Hedges knew exactly what he was doing in giving us the chance to read it.

That book helped cement the odd-looking English teacher as a powerful influence in my life, one who helped decide its course. Now aged 45, I’m a freelance writer. Some of the time I work in the corporate world, but my heart is in creative projects that Gary Hedges helped ignite a passion for — I’ve written drama in many forms, from tv shows to a play used for training prison officers, and one of my best experiences in that domain is devising a show about dyslexia with a group of actors led by a dyslexic performer who had failed at school because his condition went unrecognised. Performing that play to audiences of school age children and their families was an electrifying experience, as they recognised situations and emotions they lived through every day being turned into theatre before them, and had the chance to share their responses with us in workshops afterwards.

I did some freelance work at an ad agency once, telling one of their resident copywriters about that aspect of my career, and that led to us talking about our backgrounds. She’d done really well at school, and was full of praise for the English teacher who’d spurred her on. With a little questioning it turned out she’d gone to the sister school of the one I went to, a grammar school for girls. And that inspirational teacher? Gary Hedges.

There are ideas so simple, so perfect, that when you hear them there’s not much to do beyond go ‘But of course’. Take vampires. A notion worn ragged by over-exposure. Only, there are still things that can be done with them given the right confluence of concept and talent. Which is what happened when writer Steve Niles hit on the notion of a vampire story set in Alaska, when it’s night for a month at a time. How come this story hadn’t been told before? For whatever reasons, Steve Niles got there first with 30 Days of Night, and the rest is history. Or at any rate, a fun comic and movie that have spawned all kinds of sequels.

And now someone else is at it. Another comics creator, J.G. Jones — until now known for his excellent art — has co-written a graphic novel called Dust to Dust with Phil Bram. The concept? As Jones himself explains, “It’s set in the Dust Bowl in the 1930s in Oklahoma. A series of murders is terrorizing a small, secluded town, and the murderer is using the massive dust storms to cover his trail.”

That gets an ‘of course’ from me. And it’s interesting that, as with 30 Days of Night, a fact of geography and history is used to shape a story in a significant way: the concept is entirely wedded to time and place, which helps create instant distinctiveness.

A watered-down version of this is done by the inordinate number of thrillers set in the days before mobile phones, as a pretext for situations which just wouldn’t happen now if the characters were able to communicate with each other as they move about. And that’s fine to a point, but there’s going to come a time when audiences want something other than a lack of telecommunications to be driving their dramas of choice.

The Dish uses a real world episode as the spur for its drama: the moon landing, and the consequent desire to show what was happening to a global audience. Set in Australia, it relates what happens when all manner of mishaps threaten to deprive viewers of the sight of Neil Armstrong bouncing along in low gravity, making him as lightweight as this charming confection.

Millions, scripted by Frank Cottrell Boyce, uses a fictional incident to drive the narrative: the imagined switch from the pound to the Euro, meaning that the kids who come across a bag stuffed with old money have just days to spend it before it’s worthless. It’s a cute conceit, and a fun film.

You can allude to fact without actually rooting your story in truth. The notion of guards protecting the President is a thriller staple, and a number of films have played with that basic concept. In writer-director David Mamet’s Spartan, the twist is that the President’s daughter is kidnapped. For In The Line Of Fire, a defining moment in the life of bodyguard Clint Eastwood was his failure to stop JFK being shot. Now, he’s determined to save the current incumbent from an assassin.

I’d put money on more than one production company having put together packages for films set during next year’s London Olympics: the games could be an irresistible backdrop for the right story. Let’s hope it’s a good one, and that it results in a film that’s as memorable as some of those mentioned in this piece.

Get it right, and the synchrony of time and place and story can create something that wouldn’t be as powerful without all three elements working together. There’s a sweet spot there that can create a resonance with audiences that stories rooted purely in fiction can’t quite reach. The story of Titanic is one filmmakers have returned to time and again for just that reason.

There’s a particular strain of writing I come across — and it’s something I’ve encountered in every medium — that has a common strand. The thing being, it isn’t about anything. A narrative is presented, and we get to experience it, and stuff happens, but there’s nothing actually there. Characters are named but the names are the only way of telling them apart. People experience stress and conflict and it seemingly leaves no trace on them. And though the story comes to a halt, there’s a difference between that and reaching a conclusion.

Two writers exemplify this in their novels. One is Jeffrey Archer, the other is Martin Amis. I read an Archer novel out of curiosity, wondering how it was that the well heeled Tory could sell bucket loads of books. Actually, I’m still wondering. In the one I read, a few characters were vying to be prime minister, and there was some kind of interesting stuff about the machinations of party politics. But the characters themselves never seemed to come to life. They were mannequins, nothing more.

What was concerning was the traumas that the characters went through. They went through divorce, miscarriage, and worse, but there was no sense of an inner life that was troubled by these experiences. It was recounted, but not conveyed in a way that convinced me the characters were feeling anything about the hell they were going through.

Martin Amis was a similar experience, with a bigger vocabulary. Again, it seemed that the author was describing things without reference to actual people. And it struck me somewhere into his prose that what he was doing was writing in relation to other books. Human beings didn’t come into it at all — this was fiction that existed purely because of other fiction.

There are cinematic equivalents. 21 Grams, scripted by Guillermo Arriaga, struck me as an over-extended episode of Doctors with delusions of profundity, and I was equally unconvinced by Arriaga’s Babel, which he directed as well as wrote. I knew there was something supposedly potent happening on screen, what with the international hopping about and contrast between lifestyles — it must all mean something…mustn’t it? And then I realised it didn’t. Arriaga is the cinematic equivalent of one of those poseurs who call themselves a traveller, whereas us mere mortals are tourists.

I’m reminded of someone I once knew, who’d happily travel to Nepal or Bali, but would turn their nose up if you suggested going to Aldi. By all means be interested in the world we live in and the people we share it with — but remember that it and they start on our doorsteps. I wonder if the French fascination with the work of Mike Leigh is because they think he’s telling them something about the British, oblivious to the similar characters and stories in their own lives.

Every now and then I’ll come across someone in a writing class who doesn’t want to write about ‘normal people’. Sometimes, I suspect, it’s a reflection of their emotional immaturity. Easier to deal out the tropes of a genre story than engage with your own feelings. Riff on Tarantino, churning out obscenity-studded references to pop culture. Walk in the footsteps of James Cameron, aiming for spectacle but forgetting the connective tissue that’s always present in his films.

Often it’s young writers who approach their work in this way, and that’s understandable: without experience, what do you have to draw on but the books you’ve read, the films you’ve watched? The example of Archer, Amis, and Arriaga demonstrates that supposedly mature adults can suffer from the same lack of affect, producing work that has the form of a story, but lacks the emotional impact that one told from the heart can have.

I’ve been into swimming of late. Been most days, sometimes in the pool for seven in the morning. Which is quite the shock to the system, but one this unfit bod could do with. And it’s great. The whole thing of immersion in the water is a joy, even for as cackhanded and corpulent a swimmer as me. Plus, the pool turns out to be a great place to go with things to think about — a dunk in the water and I emerge with ideas that can be pretty handy.

Today, I thought I had two chances to go for a swim. The early morning slot doesn’t run on a Thursday, but there’s another session around noon. Only, I got caught up in some freelancing-related communications and that didn’t happen. No worries: the pool opens again at five. So I set out with towel and trunks, and…ended up in a cafe bar I don’t normally go to. Thanks to another communication failure, if I went swimming at five I’d have missed an appointment at six. Grr.

The venue I ended up in has gone through different incarnations. Where it was a haven for coke dealing and pool players, it’s calmed down, and I’d sussed that there’d been a change of management from the new signs up at the window advertising Caribbean-sounding food. No surprise then, to find two black guys immersed in conversation — one behind the bar, the other sitting at it complaining about how his life was going.

Well, with no swimming to enjoy, and an appointment about an hour away, I got talking to them. Turns out the customer is an African computer studies lecturer who’s stressed for various reasons he didn’t elaborate on. I didn’t ask him to. Instead, I chose to offer him some time looking at his issues using a method I find useful, telling him — with more than a glimmer of truth — that I work as a coach at times.

At that, the equally African barman perked up. Turns out he’s a coach on the quiet as well. No bad skill to have in a customer-facing role when your job is to keep those customers plied with their drinks of choice. In his case, he’s been impressed by Solution Focused Therapy when he was working with homeless people, and adopted it enthusiastically for his own life issues. And, for that matter, the customers he deals with.

Anyway, I worked with the computing lecturer for a while, and the barman joined in the conversation, which after the ‘coaching’ finished turned into a freewheeling chat about thinking styles, logic, marketing, cybernetics, tai chi and how — adept as we all are in such things — we are at a loss to understand women. All of this accompanied by some rather fine coffee: the barman announced he was going to make my first one Cameroonian, and the computing lecturer insisted on paying for that cup so I had another coffee later, this one Kenyan.

There was a writer on Radio 4 today, talking about how his new novel is heavily influenced by some or other literary classic that I’ve not read. Oh, and his first novel too walks in the footsteps of a weighty precedent. And there’s an extent to which all of us stand on the shoulders of those who came before us. Only, isn’t part of the point to add to the back catalogue of stories not with commentary on existing ones, but by drawing from the well of our own experience?

The writer on the radio coyly admitted that the analytically-knotted self-torturing protagonist of his new book may just have something in common with its author. No shit, Sherlock. But who, I say who, needs to read about intellectually tormented artists? There’s a whole world out there to engage with, to experience at first hand, rather than mediated through someone else’s account of it. Sure, you’ll fall flat on your face from time to time…but isn’t that the point? To live life, make of it whatever you will, and use that as the basis of your art? Better that than peek through your fingers as yet more possibilities pass by…

It was probably at the point that a flying shark pulled a hansom cab into a sky full of likewise soaring shoals of fish that I accepted that wherever Steven Moffat was taking us in the Christmas episode of Dr Who, I would be at his shoulder. The show was a triumph of — and celebration of — imagination, that managed to do that thing Neil Gaiman pulls off so well sometimes, of being at once postmodern (in this case, by reinventing the Dickens classic A Christmas Carol and setting it on another planet) and a thoroughly old-fashioned slice of rip-roaring fun.

At its heart, was heart. The frozen heart of a little boy who’s grown up despite himself to be the image of his fearsome father, and who through the Doctor’s meddling with time had his heart melted by a beautiful girl. It was pure fantasy, but now and then Moffat the science fiction writer made some token effort to provide cod-scientific explanations for the flying fish and whatnot…every time he did so he was bitten by one of the fish, a lovely way to tell himself and the audience to just shut the hell up and enjoy the spectacle.

And what a spectacle. Set on a colony planet with a Victorian vibe, the whole had a steampunk feel that looked a treat — a monstrous weather-control machine akin to a Wurlitzer designed by Frankenstein, metal pods to hold frozen family members in as security against loans, and the ubiquitous goggles that have become shorthand for steampunk. Mix all that, and stir with a beautiful woman serenading a dying shark to coax it back into life, and there was more imagination on screen for one hour than I’ve seen the BBC concoct in the last hundred or so I’ve seen of their programming. It certainly beat the prospect of watching cot death on Eastenders, which is what the nation’s broadcaster deemed fit for its Christmas special.

Now, there’s an audience for dead babies, and there’s one for phantasmagoric triumphs of the imagination, and I know which I lean towards. There is indeed a case and place for social realism on our screens, though realism got mixed up with miserablism somewhere along the way, which was never the point of socially committed drama. But in the same way that a whole market has developed of books with soft-focus photos of unhappy people, with titles like The Woman I Called Mum, and Beaten and Bloody recounting allegedly true tales of woe, there’s an audience for similarly downbeat telly. You can see them in the script conference, wondering what woe to visit on the people of Albert Square: “I’ve got it…Christmas is a time when a baby was born. How about we celebrate by having a baby die?” High fives all-round.

I should reiterate that I’m a big fan of the BBC. Conceptually, anyway. It’s obvious though that someone else should be in charge of the actual programming. The poverty of imagination is shocking for a supposedly creative organisation. Someone I know was invited to attend a BBC course designed to gee up writers to come up with ideas for shows rooted in fantasy and science fiction. A great idea. So what did the BBC do? Invite writers whose CVs were studded with episodes of Doctors, regardless of whether or not they’d got any demonstrable interest in or commitment to genre storytelling. Having heard some of the ideas that they came up with, it’s no surprise that nothing has come of that particular initiative.

And it’s not hard to get that stuff right. Points for trying, for sure, but I could rally up a more convincing bunch of creators to do what the BBC had in mind with just a few emails and phone calls. Get them together in a hotel for a week under the guidance of Philip Palmer, whose reputation as a science fiction novelist is secure and also has experience as a writer and script editor for tv, and I can guarantee that wonders would result. It’s that easy, if you want it to be. If you want it to be…

Paul Haggis has written one of my favourite films: In The Valley Of Elah. And he’s written other notable ones, including Crash and Million Dollar Baby. Which puts him high on the list of writers I’d like to have a chat with. Well, there’s no danger of that happening in the immediate future, but I did acquire a DVD in which Haggis is interviewed by producer Mike de Luca when I subscribed to a film magazine. The magazine never did anything for me, but I’m more than pleased I got the DVD.

What attracts me to Haggis’s work is his capacity to present morally complex stories without editorialising. You could say that there are no answers in his work, only questions, and that’s something he’s conscious of, saying that what attracts him to a concept is “some great human dilemma, some question I don’t have an answer for”.

It wasn’t always that clearcut for Haggis, who was lucky enough to break into tv writing in his twenties, and made a hefty amount of money on sitcoms. He views that time as being invaluable to his ability to write filmable material to a deadline. But something was missing, and it took a while to figure out what it was. One lightbulb moment was his presentation of a script to a producer he’d not worked with before. The producer asked “What’s it about? What does it mean to you? Where does it come from within you?”. Haggis’s puzzled response was “It’s supposed to do that?”

It took Haggis some time to venture beyond the security of his tv gigs to explore the world of film. He was driven in part by a dream in which he saw his own grave, on which he was described as the creator of Walker, Texas Ranger. Figuring he wanted to be remembered for something other than a Chuck Norris series, Haggis started to apply the craft skills he’d learned to matters that mattered.

It’s fascinating to note that two of Haggis’s biggest successes — Crash and Million Dollar Baby — were speculative scripts. That comes from his commitment to following your own muse rather than industry trends: variety of experience counts for more than a subscription to Variety. In turn, that dovetails with a belief that he articulates thus: “It’s always good for a writer to be an outsider of some sort.” Even, to some extent, an outsider from the film business — get too caught up in it, and there’s a danger of second guessing what people want rather than following your gut instinct.

Clearly, there is a career to be made by writing at the behest of others. I’ve done plenty of it myself in the form of the freelance copywriting work I do. That’s fine: there’s a clear mutually beneficial exchange of thinking and writing skills in return for money. I have no problem with that. But I wouldn’t pretend that such work nourishes my soul in the same way that the screenplay I’m working on does. And I spent a lot of time pursuing projects that ultimately proved unsatisfactory for me with one filmmaker in particular. But I don’t regret that experience: how can you know for sure what’s right for you until you’ve found out what’s wrong?

Making those distinctions takes time. It’s also why I gave up on Doctors after a couple of episodes. Competing with a couple of hundred other writers for episodes on a daytime series I felt no true passion for, to be rewarded with the opportunity to script more medical drama that doesn’t interest me but gets a bigger audience because it’s shown at night — the carrot the BBC dangles to novice Doctors writers — is not, it turns out, my idea of having a good time. Particularly when the Writers Academy is producing writers who are increasingly providing the material that the BBC is interested in.

I don’t know what will be written on my grave. But I do know that I’m living a happier life following, in my own way, the example of Paul Haggis, than I ever would churning out medical dramas in line with the strictures of someone else’s five act formula.

Something like a decade ago, I was asked to participate in a theatre project that would be devised jointly with its performers. My contributions came in the form of writing, but the nature of the process took me to places I wouldn’t have gone had I merely been asked to come up with a script.

Oh, there were chunks of what we did that were scripted, but some of the really interesting moments in the development process came when I helped to shape the improvisations that the actors did, capturing the best moments and recording them in written form so they could be reliably repeated for audiences. There was also the business of the piece — In Your Head — being about dyslexia, inspired by the personal experience of actor Dennis Palmer. How to turn that intimate knowledge into a universal drama?

All I can say is, we did it. The show went down brilliantly with audiences, in large part because it focused on the emotional impact of dyslexia in the context of family life. Many of those who saw the play had lived their own versions of that, and probably hadn’t expected to see drama that brought such a taboo (which is how many continue to feel about it) before an audience.

In Your Head had a loose connecting thread, on which were placed scenes that varied widely in style. A father’s pained monologue as he recalls taking his son to the zoo and his shame at being unable to read the signs on the cages. A fourth-wall breaking comedy sketch outlining tactics dyslexics use to get served when they eat out. A spoof game show. A song, even, written and performed by Dennis, sometimes accompanied by guitarist Oliver ‘Pog’ Fokerd. All rounded off by a stand-up routine from the hero, affirming that he’s accepted his dyslexia and now appreciates its benefits as well as its downside.

Point being, that In Your Head was a fantastic learning experience in all kinds of ways. The experience of putting it together, and then of performing it to a variety of audiences, and doing what we could to find financial support, was ummissable. There were personal problems between members of the group, and realising that it’s possible to work with those tensions, as well as attempt to deal with them, was also educational.

It’s easy to get caught in a rut. I’ve been in them myself over the years, and got out to the other side. You can wait for that to happen of its own accord, and that can take a long long time. Or you can intervene in your own process, throw a spoke in the wheel to find out what happens when you’re put outside your comfort zone. And better you do that as a matter of your own choosing, than be forced into it by circumstances.

The latter principle is something I learned in discovering a little about SAS training. The whole idea is to train yourself for tougher circumstances than you will actually encounter in the real world. That way, going to the default settings created by your training will see you through, rather than in peril.

As with the SAS, so with scriptwriters (and it’s not often you get the chance for a sentence like that). What can you do to write beyond your current limits? To challenge yourself in ways that will raise your game? It’s something I’m conscious of at the moment, engaged as I am in a redraft of a screenplay. The current version simply doesn’t work after an engaging first third, so I’m making it into more of a thriller than it first appeared to be. Which is obliging me to think about the story in new ways, so I can set up red herrings and reveal the information to the audience appropriately — skills that I’ve lacked until now. Hey, it was good enough for Hitchcock, so I figured it was time I caught on. And if that set of writing skills is one you already have, rather than congratulating yourself, how about identifying somewhere you fall short, and extend your reach?

There have been a few sniffy reviews about Machete, and they’re the sort that tell you more about the reviewer than the film. Face it: the trailer shows a pug-ugly Mexican chopping people up with the titular blade, getting tooled up with heavy duty firepower, and hanging round with women who don’t seem able to afford much in the way of clothing. That, and a pounding soundtrack, tell you pretty much all you need to know. Oh, and it’s called Machete. What were you expecting?

Actually, co-writer and co-director Roberto Rodriguez does overdeliver on his high-impact promise, delivering a satire on right wing politics and attitudes to Mexican immigrants along with the expected violence and machismo. Which is what drew Robert de Niro to the film to play a Bush-flavoured political candidate I imagine. Maybe he wanted to be in a film with Steven Seagal too. Who can say?

So: if you like Judge Dredd (the comic, not the first movie) you’ll pretty much get where Machete is coming from tonally: there is black humour at work, maybe subversion too. It may be that you’re a fan of grindhouse films too, Machete having its origins in the generally risible package that spawned the Tarantino dud Death Proof. Tarantino treated grindhouse as some kind of movie buff in-joke but forgot to deliver the cheap thrills that Rodriguez rightly puts centre stage. Machete is the realisation of that promise, unencumbered by a Tarantino turkey to go to the market with.

There is absolutely a place for this kind of B-movie hokum, and especially when it comes equipped with radical undercurrents. The film is all about the plight of Mexicans in Texas, who are looked down upon and victimised while being central to the state’s economy. Which could be the sort of subject that an engaged liberal filmmaker is drawn to, and maybe they’d get a worthy film made, but would it have the visceral power and anger that Machete has? I doubt it.

This is a film I’d love to show to white American teenagers. And to Latino ones for that matter. And everyone else who’d benefit from seeing a call to arms that’s rooted in action cinema and not deadly dull humanist debate. In this week of student activism, with teenagers penned in by police in freezing conditions, wouldn’t it be great to see a film inspired by the zeal of those young protestors, something cheap and cheerful to fling together in a few months and bang out on the screens to be a totem for audiences alienated by Cameron and Clegg’s diabolical double act?

Machete isn’t going to win prizes for…well, anything. And that’s fine. I’ve had enough experience of film festivals to be very jaundiced about films designed for that dismal circuit, rather than the general public. I went to a festival in Gothenburg and heard at least one director say that she or he wasn’t bothered about audiences. Which pretty much makes my blood boil. Unless films result in getting bums on seats, the whole process is reduced to a job creation scheme for tossers, and — particularly when that process is state funded — that attitude bears no relation to what motivates me to be involved in filmmaking.

Hey, a polemic: not had one of those for a while. But — back to Machete — it gives you some idea of the power of this simple, striking, bullshit-free film, that it inspires me to want to go out there and make something of equivalent power about some of what’s going on in Britain today. One of the functions of art is to give voice to the voiceless, and I’d rather that were done in a manner that communicates with a large audience than speaks to just a few. Mr Rodriguez, and your collaborators in this endeavour, I salute you.