I’ve several times received praise from actresses for the female characters I’ve written without being sure why such positive feedback is merited. And then I look at scripts which have made it to the screen and find myself bewildered that the writer has seemingly never met a woman in his life.

One of the primary problems is that many writers continue, even in the 21st century, to define women by their relationships with men. They are wives, lovers, mothers. Which for a start omits some of the more interesting relationships out there, like colleague, employer, sibling or rival.

I suspect part of the issue is the majority of male writers don’t consider the issue of gender with regard to their male characters. ‘Bloke’ is the default setting for so many of the men who appear on screen. So they only stop to consider sex and gender when it applies to those with a different chromosomal arrangement. And particularly when it relates to the fantasy casting of a woman they fancy.

Never mind that writers supposedly have some insight into human character, a claim which is laughable when you consider how many men write women. Insight into character can only come about through a sincere interest in people, and preferably across the contexts they operate in and not merely in their capacity as sex objects.

Fortunately there are exceptions. CCH Pounder’s character in The Shield, Claudette Wyms, is a nuanced portrait of a woman who seeks the captaincy of the police station she’s devoted to so she can clean up its corruption and serve its community. Only, the part was written for a male actor. Pounder loved the character though, and insisted that it wasn’t retooled for her, and the result is a crackling three dimensional performance that reaches parts most actresses don’t get the opportunity to explore.

Soap operas, which have a higher female audience, are notable for some great women characters. But I’m always curious about whether that starts with the writing, or the actress. June Brown’s portrayal of Dot Cotton in Eastenders is a thing of wonder, and some of the show’s best episodes have featured her with just one or two friends, allies, and rivals, such as ones years ago when there were three-handers with Dot, Ethel, and Lou.

But still. I think of the women I know, and struggle to find fictional counterparts as fascinating. My mother, who went through a traumatic divorce to start a new life running a launderette in a rundown part of Birmingham where the most decent people around her were the out-and-out criminals. An ex who has reinvented her career once to do better for herself, and is in the process of doing so again so that how she earns her money is a better reflection of the person she is. An acquaintance who lives in a field that’s literally off the beaten track, in a caravan with her children, raising horses to sell to families who’ll never understand them the way she does.

I’m loathe to subscribe to any particular ideological take on writing, but it seems to me that as long as many male writers continue to perceive women in the role of virgin, mother or whore, that audiences will continue to suffer such stereotypes in every form of popular fiction. Good actresses can rescue bad scripts: imagine what they could do if they were given a good one.

It’s not all bleak of course. Helen Mirren has found some notably excellent writers on Prime Suspect and in The Queen. Meryl Streep dazzles in everything I’ve seen her do, Julie and Julia being a particular recent favourite. And Jodie Foster continues to make shrewd choices, bringing an extra dimension to what could be formulaic roles in thrillers like Panic Room, and developing projects of her own with more personal passions.

There are some details that cement a film to a particular culture or worldview, even if there was every intent on the part of the filmmakers to create something for everyone. In the delightful Toy Story 3 it’s the fact that, in climbing up to a toilet seat, one of the characters first puts a piece of toilet paper onto it. There’s something very American about that, an exaggerated concern for health and hygiene that comes from a country where advertisers have succeeded in making the public paranoid about even the possibility of germs.

Often, it’s what goes into us rather than what comes out of us that makes for culturally revealing film scenes. Where would Italian American family gatherings be without lavish attention to the food prepared by mama? Meals are part of the fabric that binds families of all sorts together. There’s a warmth and pervasive reinforcement of social roles with Italian American eating in particular — Scorsese’s films are full of that kind of detail. It’s easier to get someone to do a hit when you’ve filled them with home made pasta and a fabulous ragu first.

Food is universal. Seeing how people eat and drink helps to understand even supposedly alien cultures. Tampopo is the glorious story of a Japanese widow who is aided in her quest to run a successful noodle bar by a truck driver and his friends. Food is part of sex play, and part of everyone’s routine — an old lady becomes the bane of a shopkeeper’s life by the simple act of squeezing his vegetables.

When a filmmaker wants to convey the otherness of a non-human species, food is a common first port of call. In Dark Crystal, looming gothic creatures impale small scurrying ones with surgically precise cutlery in a banquet scene. The prawn-like aliens in District 9 have a thing for cat food. And leave it to the Klingons to drink blood wine accompanied by a side of gagh: living worms.

Food is just one signifier that says a lot about a culture. The Market: A Tale Of Trade depicts what happens when a Turkish would-be wheeler dealer tries to get into the mobile phone market in the nineties as the first network reaches his area. There’s a great dichotomy depicted by two simple scenes: an old lady determined not to let phone engineers plant an ariel on her land, and the hero — unconvinced about phones at this point — being swayed by greed as he hears how young people in other parts of Turkey are going crazy for them.

A film about someone cheating on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? could have been made about Major Charles Ingram, and it could have been an interesting tale full of suppressed greed and very British stuff about class. Setting it in Mumbai was a stroke of genius, and Slumdog Millionaire became a much bigger success than a British equivalent could ever have been, for the way it opened up contemporary Indian society to a mainstream audience that had never seen and heard one of the world’s most exciting cities.

Through being able to capture visual nuances of every sort, from patterns on clothes to what’s growing in someone’s garden, facial expressions to the way a child puts her shoes on, film is uniquely capable of depicting how different people live, responding to each other and their environment. In difference there is richness, and from it we see through new eyes and learn more about the world we share.

All of the projects I am working on seek in part to depict worlds that will, to a greater or lesser degree, be new to the majority of viewers. In writing about homelessness, criminal behaviour, the experience of being psychotic, what London is like through the eyes of young people from somewhere else, I’m hoping that audiences will respond with the same fascination that I did when I discovered the differences that captivate me.

I got into a lovely conversation with someone earlier, a woman who spotted my Page 45 bag as I went up to buy a smoothie at the till she was working behind, and recognised me as a fellow comics geek. We were still talking an hour later, joined by a couple of other people too, in a freewheeling chat about how race and class and sexuality are depicted in stories. Which all sounds very po-faced, but the conversation was anything but: views and examples and counterexamples were exchanged in a very friendly fashion, without the animosity and entrenchment that such discussions can often lead to online, where there’s no visible connection between the views people express and the manner in which they articulate them in person.

Brought up in the eighties in the Caribbean, my new acquaintance loved comics and only had access to those published by Marvel and DC — there was no market for indies, or at any rate no one speculated on the possibility of one. She became a big fan of the X-Men as written by Chris Claremont, at a time when I too was engrossed in their adventures. But J had a whole different take on the characters thanks to her sex and race. This was at a time when Claremont was arguably one of the more progressive writers in the medium, making a point of creating powerful female characters in his stories, which also featured considerable ethnic diversity.

For all the kudos Claremont received for the wider spectrum of characters he wrote about, there was a distressing undercurrent to what happened to the female ones. More than once, one of his heroines would begin to explore her sexuality — usually signified by a change to a stereotypically ’sexy’ outfit — and discover that her powers were boosted as a result. Only, such explorations inevitably ended up with them turning evil not long afterwards. It happens once, and it’s a story. More than once, it kind of creates a pattern. One which says something about its creator — and has a particular resonance for a young woman of colour reading what happens when one heroine after another discovers lingerie and genocide in quick succession.

These things matter. They might not be noticed so much by the white males who constitute a large part of the mainstream comics readership, but to J they sent out a consistent and negative message about what women are like. No great surprise that she stopped reading comics for quite a while, though as much as anything that had to do with the ascendancy of Rob Liefeld in the nineties and the industry reshaping itself in his misshapen and crosshatched image.

J came back to comics, saying it was Marvel’s Civil War event that drew her back in, and Mark Millar’s Ultimates that persuaded her to stay. She was and is more persuaded by the relative diversity of the Marvel Universe compared to DC’s fictional sandbox, where attempts to introduce a wider ethnic mix are short term, as the company concentrates on what it supposes its core (white, male) audience is, and once again offers them (straight, white, male) icons. I’d like to think that good will yet come of the integration of black writer Dwayne McDuffie’s creations from his imprint, but right now the jury is out.

Is it any better over there in the world of indie comics? Hmm. J at least is not convinced. Exactly how many of Alison Bechdel’s Dykes To Watch Out For aren’t either at college or are graduates or even professors? I’ve joked before that the reason I’m not bi is partly because of all the workshops you have to go to, but is it really true that you need a degree to be a lesbian?

It can sound pompous to suggest that writers have duties of any sort. But I believe it’s important to create in whatever fictions you write characters who are truly representative of people in society at large. Fiction is a mirror in which people should be able to see themselves, and if we’re not considering what we do we’re at risk of perpetuating a world in which non-white children try and bleach their colour away, homosexuals struggle to find counterparts for themselves in books and on screen, and women wonder whether they’ll ever be defined by anything beyond their relationship status.

The last time I spoke to my dad, Ray, he said the story of his stay in hospital would make a good script. As ever, his ability to find something in the situation that I’d enjoy came to the fore. Even, in this case, when he’s suffering from cancer of the spine. A broken arm, the consequence of his weakened bones. And a chest infection that he’s finding it hard to fight because of the weakness of his immune system. I’m travelling to see him tomorrow, and maybe we’ll find out how that story ends.

My dad and stories go together. He’s told them all my life, and that’s a large part of where my love of stories comes from. When I was young, and Ray lectured at a university, many of the people he befriended were foreign students. I got to meet them, and hear their stories, and they too became part of my father’s stories. Babalola the Nigerian, whose mother was a village butcher, and instructed us to ‘feather’ the goat we kept at one point, and who on going strawberry picking with us ate pounds of the fruit when he discovered that pickers were allowed to eat them too, bringing back an empty punnet to be weighed. Seet from Singapore, who thought that the signs on the motorway with numbers in them depicted the minimum speeds that motorists should travel. Yogesvaran — Yogi — from Malaysia, who played hours long games of Risk and wooed Kamala, who was less than half his size.

And then there are the stories that Ray himself features in. Buying blouses and liqueurs at auction and keeping them in a garage at home, to be sold to a dizzying array of acquaintances. Installing an artificial tree in a pub on one or other of the jobs he acquired kitting them out with interiors, a business timed brilliantly as the breweries were looking to camouflage their profits from the Monopolies Commission and were chucking cash at the problem. Drunkenly snogging a woman not my mother on the roof of a golfcart careering down a hill in Switzerland on a family holiday. Calling his sister while she was alone at a friend’s place and saying he was from the pools company, and could she pass on a message to the lady of the house..? To be fair, he did leave enough clues in what he said for her to rumble the truth. But it was a surprisingly long time before they spoke after that.

And then there were the books that he passed on to me. I was given a set of encyclopedias that he’d read as a child, sturdy volumes with tales of Empire, and illustrations accompanying legends from Greek, Roman, and Norse mythology. Fantastic stuff, which fed my liking for the books of Henry Treece, and collections of heroic tales from different cultures. I’ve never got round to your actual Iliad and Odyssey, but I enjoyed the kids’ versions just fine.

And, thanks to my dad, I got a good education in films from an early age. I was haunted by The Red Balloon each and every time I watched it, which was lots. I followed my dad’s own childhood liking for Sabu, and it led me to The Thief of Baghdad which in turn opened up the world of 1001 Nights, which enthralls me to this day.

Later, in my teens, he took me to see Kagemusha, my first experience of Kurosawa. He’d caught the director’s samurai films as they appeared, at what were probably their only screenings in Birmingham in the days before arthouse cinema. We’ve talked film lots since then, part of the way we relate, and that continues to this day. He’s spent his retirement in fine style, watching a few decades’ worth of films he missed out on first time round, emphasising European and world cinema in the choices that drop through the mailbox once a week.

And now? My father’s story is coming to an end. Those are hard words to write. Harder to accept. But that’s how it is. Ray has led a better life than most, touched the lives of others in the process. Mine especially. And I hope I’m writing in a week that he’s making a good recovery, and will be with us for another twenty years. But that sounds a bit Hollywood to me, and that’s really not my dad’s style.

Pick a film. One with guns and knives in it. What are the chances that the first of a group of characters to die — whether from an army platoon or a street gang — will be black? It happens often enough that it’s frankly embarrassing: exactly what is it about non-white characters that makes it easier to dispense with them quickly rather than write them convincingly into the story?

Part of the answer is that filmmaking is overwhelmingly a white male business. There are few enough credible roles for women (especially those over 40): why would there be good ones for non-white actors? Depressing, huh? It doesn’t get much better when you think about the black characters that white writers come up with. Witness the phenonomenon of the magical negro…

Even the name makes my flesh creep…the magical negro is a character seemingly in touch with mystical powers, which he’s willing to put at the service of a white protagonist for whom he will sacrifice his own life. Stephen King has perpetrated more than his fair share of this stereotype — look at The Green Mile, The Shawshank Redemption, The Shining and The Stand for filmed examples.

Magical negroes aren’t exclusively male — the Whoopi Goldberg character in Star Trek: The Next Generation is never short of a homily when she serves drinks in the ship bar. Oracle is another insightful black mama, in The Matrix, which also features Morpheus being black and portentuous. Were such characters three dimensional, there’d not be a problem here — the issue is that they’re formed with the same cookie cutter. If Morgan Freeman is to be believed, God Himself is a magical negro, at least if Bruce Almighty and Evan Almighty are anything to go by

Much the same charge can be levelled at the martial arts masters and priests portrayed in western films. Whereas white guys over 50 can be adulterers, assassins, husbands and heroes, if your ancestry is Asian it’s inevitable that you’ll sprout a beard and spout wisdom. Nice work if you can get it, if you’re an actor…but the perpetuation of stereotypes helps nobody. Sure: there really are wise old heads of martial arts schools, but I’d lay money they’re outnumbered by mortgage advisors and civil servants and other people whose stories I’d love to see.

How do we change the racial cliches that tv and film perpetuate? I’ve taught writing classes to maybe 200 people, less than 10% of them non-white. But among their number have been some of the sharpest writers I’ve come across — one Asian woman has gone on to write a fairly well-received novel, a Caribbean woman and two Asian men have made short films, and I’m working with a non-caucasian filmmaker on a feature project.

I have mixed feelings about positive discrimination, but am all in favour of the BBC’s plans to increase the numbers of non-white writers working for the corporation. There’s more to it than that though: the whole culture of drinks-based networking is something that suits white males more than it does other people. If your religion prevents you from drinking, or you’ve got childcare to think about, a lot of industry events aren’t as welcoming as you might imagine.

It’s the 21st century. But I find that hard to believe when I go to a cinema to see a popcorn blockbuster in the form of Transformers and am presented with alien robots who have unaccountably acquired a taste for behaving like something from the bad old days of Black & White Minstrels. If you don’t get the wrongness of that characterisation, the problem of race and media is even bigger than I thought.

A little while back, I looked at the theological aspects of how Ashes to Ashes, Lost, and Battlestar Galactica wrapped up. Now, with the conclusion of Matt Smith’s first season as the Gallifreyan gadabout, it’s worth having a look at how Dr Who functions — and its resonance with one of my favourite films, Donnie Darko.

Under Stephen Moffat’s stewardship, Dr Who has been a more successfully integrated series than it was under the guidance of Russell T Davies. Where Russell unified the show was in its themes, and particularly its vision of a future in which polychromatic polymorphous perversity would hold sway over the universe like a camp tentacled version of a Benetton ad. Evil was narrow minded, fearful of diversity, and good would triumph through the power of love.

All lovely stuff, but it got a bit repetitious, and there was rather a lot of handwaving at the expense of credible story detail. Which is what makes Moffat’s approach so interesting, and different. Admittedly, some of the individual episodes — Moffat’s in particular — weren’t as strong as they could have been. But the threads connecting them have really demonstrated the time and space spanning nature of the Doctor’s adventures in a way that the series hasn’t seen before.

As with RTD’s use of Rose Tyler, Moffat’s championing of new companion Amy Pond has been at the heart of the show. More than was the case in days of old, companions provide the critical human dimension to stories that could otherwise be abstract, especially for a show that is — let us remember — rightly aimed at a family audience.

Interesting that there’s been a tonal shift too: under RTD, there was quite a bit of playing to the gallery in the form of farting monsters and other playground-friendly stuff. With Moffat, the connection with children is at the heart of the series in a fundamentally serious way, through the business of why exactly young Amy Pond was living in a house on her own when the Doctor first encountered her. And ultimately it’s through the imagination, memory, and stubbornness of Amy that the series reaches its triumphant conclusion.

What connects Donnie Darko with this series of Dr Who is none other than Jesus Christ. All three sacrifice their lives that we may progress in our own. Which is pretty big stuff for stories aimed at young people, and appropriately so. Kids have a natural fascination with matters of philosophy, and when they’re captured in story form the effect can be very powerful indeed.

There’s even more similarity between Donnie and the Doctor at first glance, when you realise that both intend to sacrifice themselves with the world being none the wiser. Both are more than willing to make that sacrifice, but the distinction between the two is that while Donnie fills that Christ template pretty well, the Doctor has more than a little of the trickster about his make-up.

That trickster element is why the Doctor’s enemies line up to have him incarcerated in the Pandorica — the Doctor not recognising in the description of its captive as the most dangerous being in the universe a description of himself. And it’s that same trickster pluck which gives him the solution to the apocalyptic conundrum that results: he knows that Amy has the capacity to will him back into existence through the elaborate thread that he weaves through her life.

And really, that’s the difference between Donnie and the Doctor — the teenager has humility, where the old man from Gallifrey has the desire to see even more of space and time as he adventures another day, setting off in the TARDIS on another madcap quest like nothing has happened as he whisks Amy and her beau away from their wedding and into the beyond…

I’m so impressionable. A few weeks ago, I saw an excellent Australian comedian called Steve Hughes supporting the just as excellent American comic Reginald D Hunter. They share an edgy approach to contentious material about race, sex, and gender that was liberating to hear, both voicing thoughts that challenged my flabby thinking — revealed under scrutiny to be little more than the received wisdom accrued by an essentially liberal reader.

I was challenged, provoked, excited. And took particular delight in the contention proposed by Mr Hughes that ‘no one has the right not to be offended’. Damn straight, I thought, and filed the thought away along with other half-digested nuggets. And, you know, Steve has a point. When it comes down to it, what’s the difference between someone offended by obscene language, and me taking offence at Oasis for aping The Beatles without the bits that made the Fab Four fab in the first place?

More than that, Steve has a follow-up to his free speech stance…taking offence doesn’t damage your liver, or cause anyone to lose money, so exactly what is it that’s at stake? And I parroted that too, as an impressionable full grown man does when taken with a comedian who seems to have the answers to life. I should have spotted the mancrush for what it was — a recognition that someone is doing something cool that I’d like to do, but frankly lack the nuts for.

Just as Reginald D Hunter doesn’t go through life dealing with bullshit in a pithy baritone without encountering some resistance, nor can I reasonably expect to conduct my business in a frank and vulgar manner without getting feedback that my directness is unwarranted. There are consequences for everything we do, and saying that speaking freely has no side-effects is disingenuous. I choose not to remind my size-conscious female friends about that, knowing that the bad feelings they will experience are as real as the ones suffered by the mother of a Downs’ Syndrome child when Frankie Boyle made jokes about same. Where Mr Boyle is concerned, I feel nothing but contempt: humour used against worthy targets is a fine thing. Kids with Downs’ are pretty much at the bottom of society’s ladder — exactly what is achieved by making them the butt of crude humour?

And yet…and yet…I admire the work of William Burroughs for breaking boundaries in its depiction of sexuality and drugs, and for fucking with language itself. I salute Chris Rock for the bravery and honesty of some of his race-based humour. I can see the beauty in the Serrano photo Piss Christ.

Years ago, I came across a gentleman who called himself Rodney Orpheus. He was in a band called The Cassandra Complex, and one of their songs was called — honest — ‘Pagans are the Niggers of the World’. Which just seemed to me to be trying too hard. The title alludes, as you may be aware, to a John Lennon song where women are ascribed that status…and where women are concerned there’s something to consider when the comparison is made. But pagans? Who the fuck even knows what a pagan is in the modern era? Aspiring to being denigrated on the level that black people have been — on the basis of something they have no control over — when paganism is a lifestyle choice…well, it’s a very special kind of ridiculous.

There’s little more I can say, and there is no one clear point to get across where these matters are concerned. Sorry, but that’s how it is with some things. I find myself caught in a dance between poles, one captured in this clip which splices together performances from Richard Pryor and George Carlin, where both are talking about Mr Orpheus’s favourite N word.

I first encountered Frank Sidebottom when I bought his science fiction themed EP twenty odd years ago as a student in Sheffield. The felt tip drawn cover, the Casio keyboard versions of everything from the Star Trek theme to Laurie Anderson’s ‘O Superman’, the Timperley-centric mythology running through the EP and everything else Sidebottom did…it all added up to a package that fascinated me. Besides, who wouldn’t love a man who performed in a papier mache head, with a handpuppet version of himself called Little Frank, and did unaccountably hilarious versions of everything from Queen to Joy Division?

A couple of years later I was working in Hertford, with a fellow Sidebottom devotee called Ben, when we heard that Frank would be playing at London’s legendary Marquee Club. Famed for gigs by Jimi Hendrix and other rock icons, it seemed a curious venue for a slightly macabre childrens’ performer — but exactly where would Sidebottom be at home? Later gigs in museums and galleries confirmed the breadth and depth of his appeal.

I can’t remember details of that Marquee evening, except that it was a thoroughly entertaining show, and that Ben distinguished himself by fainting and breaking his glasses. Oh the fun we had driving back to Hertford, Ben at the wheel and me directing him from the passenger seat as the only person in the car with vision beyond ten feet. I caught Sidebottom live again some years later, but nothing could live up to that special night, where I first encountered catchphrases and props that had me smiling all over again as I watched clips from Frank’s shows on YouTube.

The reason for these reminiscences? Frank Sidebottom, or the man who created him, is dead. I won’t name the person behind the bulbous paper head, and I mean no disrespect by that. Sidebottom will live on in the memories of those, of all ages, who encountered him as a tv show guest, a football pundit, or the world’s least likely purveyor of Smiths covers.

Last year, my friend Niki was arranging a family festivity day for the company she works for. The idea was to have something for everyone, and she asked if I had any ideas. Hmm. I always have ideas, and this one was fun. Niki is an online acquaintance of Independent IT columnist Rhodri Marsden, who as well as being a journalist played keyboards — for Scritti Politti and…Frank Sidebottom.

I suggested Niki use her connection with Rhodri to get Frank to appear as the headliner of the event. What could be better for a day of family fun? Niki loved the idea, and ran it past her boss, who apparently collapsed laughing at the prospect…but pointed out the salient fact that a significant percentage of his business’s employees are from Eastern Europe, and might not get the subtle nuances involved in a bulbous headed Lancastrian doing amateurish renditions of The Beatles repertoire.

In the end, they opted for a petting zoo instead of booking Frank. I can see the sense of that decision, but personally I’d have chosen Sidebottom in the confidence that his dressing up box charisma could win over any audience given the opportunity. Why risk little children being bitten by exotic spiders when the whole family could be entertained by a singalong of ‘Mull of Kintyre’? And I wouldn’t put it past Frank to be familiar with equivalent repertoire from the Macedonian charts, or Bulgarian light entertainment shows, and engage the Eastern Europeans on their own territory.

But hey, that’s all in the land of make-believe, and meanwhile there are people out there who never had the privilege of seeing Frank Sidebottom for real. Here he is doing an unikely take on Love Will Tear Us Apart. Here, a Queen medley. And here, a discussion of his run-in with The Beatles back in the day.

Interesting, isn’t it, that three established dramas have come to muddled conclusions by veering into spirituality that wasn’t necessarily part of the ride that viewers signed up for at the outset of those series. I’m talking here of Lost, Ashes to Ashes, and Battlestar Galactica, all of which took a turn for the religious as the end post came in sight.

There are a few ways to look at this phenomenon. Easiest is to suggest that they’re all a slightly (but not much) more grown-up version of the hastily scribbled ‘…and I woke up and it was all a dream’ that school kids can be relied on for when the teacher has set an essay at the start of class and the bell has just sounded. Which is to say, it’s a cop-out.

But even if it is a cop-out, why that particular one? Hmm. Well, in the case of Lost the series title is probably an accurate description of how the writers felt when they’d got several seasons in and had detail upon detail of accumulated mythology to explain away somehow. You can understand the temptation. Exactly how do you explain away the myriad layers of nonsense that happened on that mysterious island without resorting to the supernatural? And if you’re going to head in that direction, you might as well embrace it wholeheartedly, even if it leaves a lot of peoples’ heads unsatisfied.

You could say that this in turn is evidence of the puddingheadedness of the general public, a good number of whom despite the best efforts of Mr Dawkins and his fellow rationalists continue to consult their stars while having their palms read and auras fluffed. With so many people letting the side down, it’s easy to cynically give them what they want in the form of some vague spiritual pablum that handwaves everything from Hurley’s hair to the invisible monster, which I now assume to be nothing less than the Holy Spirit.

As for Battlestar Galactica, there always was a Mormon subtext to the original series I understand. Show creator Glan Larson was a Mormon, and with characters called Cain, Adama and Lucifer it doesn’t take a Sherlock Holmes to pick up some of the show’s subtext. Having God intervene at the finale may have been a shot from left field to viewers interested in the show’s convincing political intrigues, but let’s remember that there are people including recent American Presidents who believe that the Middle East will be a focal point for the fulfilment of Biblical prophecy.

At least with Ashes to Ashes the denouement is in line with what went before. Ever since it started with Life on Mars there’s been an element of karma to what’s going on with Gene Hunt and crew, so it’s only fitting that the series be wrapped up with that aspect to the fore. Besides, how else are you going to resolve the show’s mysteries? In this case at least, getting all spiritual was a fitting finale.

Back to where we came in though: what does all this say about the contemporary viewer? A few years ago X-Files tapped into the then zeitgeist with a series that promised mystery and conspiracy but no resolution. Running from 1993 to 2002, there seemed to be something very millennial about Chris Carter’s series, and the way it pitted a sceptic against a believer, held together only by prolonged sexual tension. Now…what?

Perhaps the 21st century is all about incorporating sprituality into the mix. If robots and Mormonism can go together, a tropical island offer a chance of redemption, and a 70s cop can be a guardian angel, what tv shows will emerge in an era where all-encompassing fundamentalism of various sorts from free market atheism to militant Islam rubs shoulders with the very individual salvation offered by the personal growth movement?

I got a message earlier from someone I met recently. She’s worked in tv abroad, and is now based in the UK, and is finding her way in the film community in these parts. Somewhere in the process, she came across a director who asked if she’d be interested in producing his low/no budget film. She was interested, and we talked about getting me involved to look at the script. Only, the director has gone ahead and shot some scenes already. Without discussing it with her. And even less without talking to me about the script.

William Goldman’s famous aphorism about the film industry is ‘noone knows anything’. As a generalisation it’s hard to argue with, but I’d be willing to put money on someone knowing something: that films rushed into production before the director and producer have established their working relationship are unlikely to be troubling film festivals for awards. OK, maybe not the benchmark that matters to this particular director — but at the rate he’s headed I think it’s reasonable to predict a downward spiral that will, at best, result in a film that doesn’t get seen by anyone even if it’s completed. The producer is already edging her way out of the situation, and frankly I don’t blame her, in much the same way that I’d have reservations if the first thing I saw after being asked to strap on a seatbelt is an approaching juggernaut. Life in the fast lane can swiftly turn into a way of becoming another highway casualty.

Anyway, the producer is now returning to her original plan, which involves me working with her to develop and sharpen a script for a short film she’s wanting to make. I was offered the chance to script it, but have plenty on my writing plate already and would prefer in this situation to do what I can to help her do her best. Her concept is fascinating, drawing on personal experience and perceptions that I can’t wait to see her put into film form.

All of which stresses the collaborative nature of the medium. Auteur theory is the creation of academics who’ve never for the most part had anything to do with the making of actual films. It’s an extension of the notion that a single creator is responsible for other artworks, such as paintings. Which itself overlooks the extent to which the grand masters of art frequently had studios whose members had input into the finished product. Sure, the maestro may have had a signature style — but that’s just as true of much classic pottery, where designs were painted by hired hands.

Personal experience tells me that collaboration pays off. I’ve been working with one particular filmmaker for over a year, first on a short film and then on the feature script he’s developing from the same premise. It’s been a fascinating experience for both of us, and one that’s paid off: the short film was singled out by — well, let’s just say a Very Big Cheese — as being the best drama at a festival where it was shown, and VBC expressed interest not only in the director, but in me. The filmmaker’s generosity is characteristic of his attitude, and though neither of us can say what the outcome will be of VBC’s attention his largesse is as welcome as it is uncommon.

These things are what make the days go better. I watched a superb series of filmed interviews with writer Alan Moore, and among other gems was him postulating that we should behave as if our actions will resonate through eternity since, mathematically speaking, that may very well be the case. OK, not the sort of arithmetic I remember from my own school days…but a truly beautiful sentiment from a man who consistently acts from the heart, and in doing so has created work of enduring worth.