There are people whose influence transcends their work. In the case of Dwayne McDuffie, I’ve not actually seen that much of the comics and animation episodes he’s written. But he’s an influence nonetheless, for the way he lived his life, as I got to discover it through interviews, internet forum posts, and a brief email exchange.

Regular readers will have come across my allusions to a multi-platform project for animation and computer games that illustrator Andy Tudor and I have been working on for 18 months. It’s at a critical stage, in the form of a 70 page project bible that a few people have seen, and has received unanimous praise from those who’ve read it. That tiny audience includes people with real track records in the film, animation, and entertainment world, and we want to translate that enthusiasm into a sustainable concept that, sooner or later, you’ll get to experience in the real world.

That project wouldn’t exist without the influence of several people — Dwayne McDuffie is one of them. And Dwayne McDuffie is dead, just a day after the launch of his animated DVD version of All Star Superman, the Grant Morrison/Frank Quitely classic. I’ve not seen it, but I’m sure it’ll stand alongside the work he did on Justice League and Ben 10.

Those of you thinking “but they’re just kids’ cartoons” are right, and so so wrong. Dawyne McDuffie wrote cartoons, yes. He wrote cartoons that were respectful of the bright young minds watching them. And he created Milestone, a line of comics for DC in which black heroes like Static and Hardware were front and centre, and became massively popular in animated form with young black audiences. Just a cartoon? Yes. But even a cartoon character can be a role model, and that matters. It’s important.

A highly intelligent African American with a scientific background and a passion for stories, Dwayne’s integrity has been praised by all those who knew him. He stood up for what was right, even when he knew he was going to lose whatever fight he was caught up in. One of those fights was for creators to own their work, and his commitment to that cause was and is an inspiration to me.

What Dwayne did — along with creators like Joe Casey and Steve Seagle — convinced me that there is no better future for a creator than to originate and own stories, and profit from that ownership. Their success — seen most clearly in the ubiquity of Ben 10 merchandise in supermarkets and toy stores — is proof that creators can put out work that’s an intelligent contribution to mainstream culture. Proof too, that comics creators can engage with the business world and succeed on their own terms, rather than in the somewhat cranky style of an Alan Moore or Dave Sim.

That vision inspires me infinitely more than the idea of churning medical drama out for the BBC. I’m glad I had that experience in writing for Doctors — it was interesting and educational — but it really isn’t the future I want. Sure, the animation/game/whatnot project is a longshot…but what isn’t? There are some goals worth pursuing, both for the potential payoff and also for the adventure along the way and the doors that are opened in the process, and this is one of them.

Tonight, I’m going to watch some of the animated shows Dwayne was involved in. I’m sure I’ll enjoy them, and I’m equally sure I’ll learn from them, and as I do I’ll remember the stories he shared about the arguments he got into with Marvel and DC. And I’ll look forward to the battles that Andy and I have ahead of us, and hope we can face them with the quiet resolve of Dwayne McDuffie.

“All art is at once surface and symbol,” said Oscar Wilde, and by golly I think he was onto something. The intertwining of the two is what gives art its power, whether the alchemical transformation of a fairly trite song in the form of My Favourite Things into the thing of beauty it becomes as performed by genius sax player John Coltrane, the echo of minority oppression that lingers in the background of some much-loved X-Men stories, or the heartrending use of colour in Pleasantville.

But how do you know what a symbol represents when you come across one? There’s no doubt in my mind that a pivotal scene in the Coen Brothers take on True Grit is when the young girl seeking to avenge her father looses a shot at his killer, and is propelled backwards into a hole where she encounters a corpse that’s home to a pair of venomous rattlesnakes. That’d be a trip to the underworld then, from which she’s brought back by Rooster Cogburn, a man who in his ability to deal death has proven his ability to travel unscathed in “two worlds and inbetween” as the Sisters of Mercy put it.

Only…what makes me leap to that assumption? The gothic/heavy metal iconography of the snakes, the corpse, the pit? Well, yes — but those images have power, however watered down by trite angsty music and trite angsty music videos. And stripped of the aforementioned, and placed in a seemingly naturalistic narrative, such moments are all the more striking.

Hmm, that still doesn’t answer the question though. But it does point to something of note: one of the reasons symbolic imagery loses its power is when its overused. I was at a cafe frequented by goths recently, and there was nothing remotely evocative about a gang of youngsters wearing too much purple, with Egyptian-inflected eyeliner and supping lattes as they surfed the web. Anything that might have been potent about such a fashion statement has been worn down by overexposure. Maybe the Mexicans have it right with their Day of the Dead — a carnival in which Death stalks the streets…but, you’ll note, on one day of the year. Death never becomes overfamiliar, someone we run into at Starbucks.

So, a symbol gains power in the context of the narrative and visual landscape it inhabits. The more mundane the setting, the more striking the elements which stand out. Is that true, or at least useful? Well, think of the contrast between Tim Burton’s two animated films, A Nightmare Before Christmas and The Corpse Bride. The first is bursting at the seams with weirdness, so much so that I find it hard to follow. The second gains strength through setting its exotic elements against a socially plausible — albeit caricatured — milieu.

Like it or not, this is where we talk about Jung. He’s the go-to thinker where archetypes are concerned, and can quite rightly point to their presence in art that existed centuries before he did. And that’s the thing. Some motifs crop up time and again, across cultures. The notion of Mars being associated with war is one that belongs not just to the Greeks and Romans, but the Chinese. Rites of passage to signify transition from one status in society to another — child to adult, single to married — are universal.

Something in us is hardwired to respond to such rituals and symbols. Just what, I have no idea. But I do know that acknowledging their potency can give a script, and the film it results in, an added layer of richness and complexity that — done right — will result in a story that resonates with viewers long after the credits have rolled. And one of the best examples I know is in another Coen Brothers film, No Country For Old Men, which begins seemingly as a thriller and gains momentum as it becomes clear that the subject of the story is death, in the form of a Mexican with a boltgun and a dodgy haircut.

The stranger comes into town. He’s well-built, impassive, doesn’t pay much attention to his clothes. And there’s a sense of barely contained power about him. He doesn’t say much, but the locals like to get to know newcomers, and that’s when he comes across the Hooleys. Brothers born on the wrong side of the tracks, their idea of a good time involves a few drinks and a roustabout fight. Bad news for them that they pick on the stranger. They mistake his silence for weakness, and after a couple of insults directed his way that he brushes off, one of them knocks his drink on the floor. It all happens in an instant, the stranger knocking one brother to the floor with a broken nose, and taking a knife to the other’s throat. There is no doubt in their minds that he can and will kill them, and they slink away into the night.

It’s a scene we’ve been exposed to in hundreds of films, and it works just fine. A lot of men would like to be that stranger, the taciturn warrior. A man who can look after himself, and those around him. And he’s a figure who has the lead role in thousands of films. If you’re lucky he’ll have been played by Clint Eastwood or Mifune. If not, maybe it was Steven Seagal doing his variation on the theme. At any rate, you know the guy I’m talking about. Or do you?

Think about it: what sort of person wanders around leaving a trail of bodies in his wake? The term you’re looking for is serial killer. And frankly, they’re not nice people. All this time you’ve been picturing The Man With No Name, when at heart he’s not far removed from Fred West. And it’s that dichotomy that The Mechanic explores.

The titular hardman is Jason Statham, the go-to Cockney actor for these kind of roles, and who does them very well. The title indicates the kind of man he is: he sorts problems out, using tools to do so. Feelings don’t come into it. And this is addressed directly: the closest he has to being close to someone is in his relationship with his handler, a man he’s ordered to kill. And in dealing with that man’s son, we get to see how Statham became the man he is — an emotionally dead killing machine.

The dead man’s son is a loser, still adrift in his 30s. Taken under Statham’s wing, he too becomes a killer, if only because he wants revenge on the man who took his dad from him (yes, you can see where this is going). The two men have a wonderfully dysfunctional relationship that’s all about the mechanics of killing. Sometimes, that entails pretending to be a normal human being, as when the son is asked to hang around at a cafe with a chihuaha. But that’s only to attract the attention of a guy they want to off.

We like characters like this when they stand up for what’s right, and in line with genre convention that’s what they do, taking out the trash in the form of drug cartel leaders and corrupt evangelists, people who no right-thinking audience would object to being removed from the gene pool. But that’s the only thing that makes them different from a Fred West. That, and the fact that when they go about their deadly business it’s dressed in black, and after scaling the outside of a building, rather than gimpsuited in a damp cellar.

A remake of an earlier Charles Bronson film I’d like to see, The Mechanic ultimately falls between two stools. It provides an efficient action hit, but the undercurrents are never fully explored. Maybe that’s inevitable, as to do so would have been to weaken its box office potential: the answer may lie in the relationship between writers Richard Wenk and Lewis John Carlino, director Simon West, and the film’s producers. Still, it’s a more interesting film than its publicity might have you imagine, and worth checking out.

It’s interesting, seeing the choices that a writer makes, and the ones they overlook. Sometimes, whole new stories can be unearthed in the traces that a particular script leaves. They can be ones that have more appeal to you than the original writer maybe, and if that’s the case why not take the bull by the horns and create something of your own? Whether what you’re doing is a tribute to your inspiration, or a counterblast to it, that’s one way to come up with a story.

I’ve been watching The Unit lately. It’s a show I’ve caught a few episodes of and enjoyed to some extent, while also feeling that it doesn’t give me the full throttle drama that I know series creator David Mamet is capable of when he lets rip. It also fails to live up to The Shield, exec producer Shawn Ryan’s previous show. But maybe that’s not fair. The Unit has a different approach, a more mainstream feel, so it’s unlikely to have the raw edge that The Shield did. Besides, why look to replicate what you’ve done before?

That said, there was one particular episode that struck me as a major lost opportunity. The story has our heroes in Spain, where they’ve just assassinated some badass or other. The job now is to get the hell out of the country, more so since sanction for the hit was withdrawn just before it was actually enacted, and there wasn’t time to get the message through to the shooters. So, it’s all systems go, the special forces guys scurrying round to remove traces of their presence and get out of the country and back to America.

While most team members aren’t followed in the story, one of them is. He is arrested quite quickly, but escapes from the car where he’s been locked. On the run, he comes across a woman drug smuggler, and after some time spent on their interaction, abandons her to flee Spain in the company of a boat owner. A gay boat owner.

The boat owner is a stereotypical queen, and he’s having an argument with his boyfriend. The police are closing in, and our special forces guy sees his opportunity, outbutching the boyfriend and offering himself in his place. And then escapes on the boat with its camp captain. Nothing more is seen until our hero turns up back in America, when he’s back with the guys and they all share a joke about their Spanish experiences.

All very well, but also disappointing. What better opportunity to explore what the character is about than to spend time with him on a sea journey, having offered himself up as the travelling companion of a lascivious boat owner? Are we really that straightlaced in the 21st century that a story in which a soldier explores his sexuality is verbotten on tv?

Of course, the question is provocative. But face it, in a world where ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ has been grabbing the headlines, and rights for gays in the military have come to the fore under Obama, isn’t there room for one character in one episode of one tv show to confront whatever issues he may have with his sexuality? That doesn’t have to mean a story of gay love on the high seas — but why not? Are you seriously telling me that there never is and never has been a homosexual member of special forces? Even if you weren’t to go in that direction, then at the very least there’s an opportunity for the camp caricature of the boat owner to be replaced by a more nuanced portrait of a three dimensional human being. The protagonist spending time with an actual homosexual and realising that they’re just another guy, like the ones he knows back at base, could itself be a powerful story. Instead, what we got was a reinforcement of conventional sneering machismo that’s served to put The Unit down in my estimation.

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’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…

You can’t beat the end of the world as a subject if you want to get your audience really engrossed. Norse myth has tales of Ragnarok, all world serpents and giants and calamity. It’s there in the Bible, tucked away at the end as a reward for getting through all the stuff about temple building and who you shalt lie down with. And — no surprise — it’s a subject Hollywood has returned to a few times.

As it happens, two apocalyptic films have run on tv on recent nights. Armageddon the other day, and I Am Legend this evening. Both feature protagonists who really do merit the term hero, sacrificing themselves so others may live. In the first, Bruce Willis stays stranded on an asteroid with the detonator in his hand, blowing the Texas sized rock apart before it can impact Earth. And Will Smith gives up his life so that a woman with a vision can share the cure for zombie-ism that he’s found.

This is epic stuff, and no wonder that filmmakers return to the subject of apocalypse on a regular basis. Michael Bay, the man behind Armageddon, has got a season ticket. Well, get it right and it’s surefire box office gold. So, how do they do it? In I Am Legend, the keynote is hubris. A scientist has created what she says is a cure for cancer. And really, you do not want to make a claim like that, even after however many successful medical trials.

Sure as a sure thing, there’s a backlash, which may or may not be divine retribution: there’s an unavoidably religious aspect to apocalyptic stories, and the story is about a man who becomes a legend by coming up with a way to reverse zombie-ism. To do so, he has to travel through the valley of evil (confront the zombies), lose all hope (kill the faithful dog who’s his sole companion), and come out the other side reborn (learn to trust another human being again).

Where I Am Legend has spiritual elements, Armageddon takes a more secular route to salvation. Bruce Willis leads a team of roughnecks who are, inevitably, the best damn team of drillers there’s ever been. They can drill through any rock in pursuit of oil, and that maverick brilliance naturally means they’re a bunch of loveable misfits yadda yadda. Who better to be rocketed to a meteor that’s set to wipe the planet out in the hope of planting a humungous bomb at its core? The message here is that sheer tenacity and individuality is what gets things done, and damn the suits — military, governmental, or other — who seek to cramp their style.

Both heroes are also motivated by selfless love. Will Smith is driven by memories of his wife and daughter, and Bruce Willis too turns out to have a soft centre where a daughter is concerned. Interesting that it’s familial and not romantic love that helps win the day in situations like these. And it may make sense if you go along, as the Greeks did, with the distinction between true love, agape, and attraction, or eros. The Greeks were pretty astute with the mythic stuff after all, so perhaps it’s no surprise that Hollywood follows in their footsteps. It maps on too, of course, to the Christ myth, which is the ur-story of self-sacrifice and deeply embedded within Western culture and consciousness.

Richard Wiseman references some research in his fascinating book 59 Seconds concerning the distinction between treating yourself and treating others. All kinds of psychological experiments demonstrate that giving to others has the effect of making the giver feel better too. And watching or hearing about someone else make a sacrificial gesture engages the mirror neurons that are involved in empathy. So, when Bruce or Will lay down their lives for us, we the audience are getting an endorphin rush from doing it with them. Not only that, but instead of being turned to ashes, we then get to see what happens afterwards, when the sacrifice of those heroes pays off and they’re rewarded with ticker tape, champagne toasts, and the other paraphernalia of the saviour.

Christmas is normally a time I spend with my father. But Ray having died earlier this year, I knew things would be different this time around. I’m particularly conscious of dad at this point, and one way to remember him is through our shared love of The Phil Silvers Show, generally referred to as Bilko after the roguish army sergeant of that name whose misdeeds are chronicled in the show.

Growing up, it was hard to tell where Bilko ended and dad began. Both tell fanciful stories of their war record. It took quite a while to twig that the stories dad told of fighting off Nazis and doing more than his bit to win World War Two were pure fantasy: he was a child during that conflict. But those stories captivated my brother and I as children.

As I grew older, I got to hear some of the truth. And that made him even closer to Bilko. As a canny member of the RASC (Royal Army Service Corps, informally ‘Run Away, Somebody’s Coming’), one of dad’s duties was to issue rail warrants to the soldiers, so that they could get home and see their families and girlfriends. These rail warrants were valuable currency on the base, and as a result I’m not sure Ray ever had to do a night duty or any of the more onerous tasks involved in National Service.

I picked up the first season of The Phil Silvers Show to watch over Christmas precisely to bring back some of those memories of dad. Plus, it’s one of my all-time favourite comedies. Silvers is immaculate in the role as the fast-talking sergeant, who fleeces the men in his platoon, and would be a truly dreadful man if it weren’t for the troublesome character defect that makes him loyal to those in his charge. Which was dad all over — Friday night was cards night at home when I was young, various of Ray’s friends coming over to shoot the breeze and drink whisky over a game of poker. Some of the same faces were round the breakfast table Saturday morning, only this time they’d be planning to buy houses and renovate them, my dad the ringleader with no craft skills to his name, but always with plans to raise money and make things happen.

Dad had no young army recruits to lead astray. But he did have students. And they weren’t just young, they were foreign, fresh to the UK and ripe for the plucking — but like Bilko, dad’s rascal tendencies were swayed by his kindness to others. Instead of hornswoggling them, his cons were used to borrow vans so that we’d take groups of students from Malaysia, Nigeria, Hong Kong and elsewhere for trips into the countryside. Once a month, maybe more, we’d bundle off somewhere and troop through the Cotswolds or the Malvern hills, stopping off at country pubs where the locals would be stunned by the multi-coloured presence in their midst. I didn’t notice that so much: for me, this was just Saturday out with family friends, who formed a much more interesting bunch of aunts and uncles than the ones who fulfilled those roles biologically.

The lead writer on The Phil Silvers Show was Nat Hiken, and he was assisted by a platoon of hungry up-and-comers including Neil Simon, who produced consistently sharp, tight, and hilarious stories about the scheming sergeant and his typically fruitless efforts to get one over on people. Oh, he’d always be one up when it mattered, but purely in terms of being right — he never actually pulled off the big deal, and wouldn’t have known what to do if he did. For Bilko, like my dad, it was all about the adventure, and having a great story to tell about it afterwards.

I’ve alluded before to a period of illness, following which I got all fired up again about writing. Never mind about the details — I’m not a fan of the misery memoir. But there were things which kept me going during that time. One of them was The Shield. I watched three seasons back to back and started on the fourth before…I don’t know. Maybe that’s when I began to recover in full.

Since then, I’ve steadily picked up the other four seasons of The Shield, determined to find out what happens to Vic Mackey, one of the most skilfully depicted characters I’ve ever come across. But for one reason and another I’ve not watched those DVDs: mostly, I’ve just been too busy. I’ve been saving them for the right time. And that seems to be now.

Watching the first episode of Season 4 brought it all back. It’s weird what you notice sometimes. In this case, one of the first things I picked up on was the brilliance of the show’s sound design — something that’s more apparent with the surround sound system I now have than it would have been through the tv’s speakers back when I first encountered the series. It’s true though — with The Shield more than any show I can think of, the sense of place created through sound is incredible, the mix of street ambience and music played by the characters as vivid as the often shocking things those characters are up to.

Most important though, are the characters. The cops in The Shield circle round one another like sharks. One sign of weakness and the others will be on them. No tactic is off limits when it comes to getting suspects to confess — some might draw a line at the physical brutality that Vic indulges in, but their psychological probing is just as agonising. And, knowing how to operate in that manner — results above everything — it’s how they deal with each other. It’s only a matter of time before each of them will do something they wouldn’t have countenanced at the start of their careers.

All that distinguishes Vic, it seems, is that he did something more heinous, and earlier, than his colleagues. But even Vic has someone he looks down on. In this case, former Strike Team member Shane Vendrell, who — away from Vic’s influence — has gone further down the path of corruption than Vic would like to think he has himself. He’s wrong, but that doesn’t stop Shane being a twisted weasel of a man, who treats criminals as nothing more than roadkill.

It’s good to be back again. I immersed myself in The Shield during that period of recovery. And something else happened in that time, as I got better. I started this blog, on December 31st 2007. And this is the 500th piece I’ve written since then. Which is, I suppose, a milestone of sorts.

The end of the year is near. And 2011 promises to be a very exciting time for me. One particular project I’ve mentioned before, a multi-platform entertainment concept for children that lends itself to animation, games, and more, is at a critical juncture. Co-creator Andy Tudor and I have a very credible party interested in what we’re doing, and we’ve worked long and hard to come up with a substantial project bible — complete in two sections, like the actual Bible — that we’ll soon be circulating to potential partners and backers.

There’ll also hopefully be good news about me and blogging about film. If it comes off, I’ll have a new vehicle for doing this kind of thing, though I’m planning to hang on to this place. After 500 installments, it’d be a shame to end on a cliffhanger.