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.

There’s no such thing as things staying the same. They’re either getting better or getting worse. The illusion of consistency is possibly a sign that you’re missing signs of stagnation. In which case, best get off your arse and start making stuff happen. When all’s said and done, making stuff happen is one of the key skills needed to ensure writing becomes a paying vocation rather than a pleasant hobby.

Yesterday, I made stuff happen. I had three meetings in the afternoon, and returned home buzzing with the energy they gave me. First meeting was regarding a project that I haven’t mentioned in these parts before, but that you’ll hopefully be hearing about in the months ahead. It’s to do with an aid to creativity I’ve come up with, and would like to see sold in the popular psychology or business sections of bookshops. And the meeting was with an outfit who should be able to sort me out with some modest but very welcome funding to help create a prototype. All of which sounds rather mysterious, for which I apologise — but watch this space.

Lesson: being a writer gives you insights into creative processes which people will pay for in the right circumstances. I received a four figure sum for delivering one day of creativity training for one outfit. Money like that can buy a lot of writing time.

Next up, I went to check out an organisation doing brilliant work with drug users about ways we might be able to work together. The meeting went like a dream, getting to know a couple of new people as well as reacquainting myself with the guy who’d invited me. By the end of the session we’d cooked up a plan for a substantial drama project to involve and empower the project’s service users. It’d involve putting in a bid for arts funding, since we’d be doing something above and beyond their usual remit, something we’re all keen to make happen.

Lesson: the more irons you have in the fire, the greater chance there is of some of them working out. I always have more projects than I could possibly deal with if they all came to fruition, knowing the chances of that are so small. Plus, a project that doesn’t spark at one time can be reignited at a later date.

To round off the afternoon, I met up with Andy, my artistic collaborator on a multi-platform concept that’s excited everyone who’s seen it. This has been a slow burn, since we both have many other demands on our lives, but it’s been worth it. Everyone who’s seen the work has been blown away by it, and we’ve already attracted one investor impressed by our vision and the quality of what we’ve done. This time round, Andy brought along another brilliant batch of character designs that totally captured two key characters in such a way that I’ll be able to write them more easily. And we nailed the package concept for the project bible, which has moved on in significant and positive ways since our initial thoughts.

Lesson: an old one, sometimes expressed as ‘the journey of a hundred miles begins with a single step’. Some projects demand a lot of input over time with no reward before they’re ready to share with the world. Also: choose your collaborators with care. Andy and I have worked together for years and we’re a good double act. Other joint endeavours have not always worked as successfully.

Other thoughts? All of these achievements helped me move forward a few spaces yesterday. But I barely wrote a word. Just sorted out some cover text for the project bible Andy and I are developing and send it to him late last night. The thing being, writing is only one of the skills a writer needs to make stuff happen. If you’re ambitious about where you’re headed, you’ll acquire the others needed along the way.

Who’s making the decisions about your future? And if it isn’t you, what are you going to do about that? Big stuff to think about, but it needs to be addressed. Especially if writing is going to be anything more than a pleasant hobby.

Way back when, I had a full time job at a London ad agency. And it didn’t satisfy me. I was paid not nearly enough to tolerate people who said they wanted creative ideas but wouldn’t recognise such if they trooped in wearing clown shoes and set fire to their trousers. Ultimately, I realised that even the thing about being paid more money wouldn’t help: I flat out did not want to be around some of those people any longer. Only, what to do about it?

The decision was made for me when a third of the agency’s staff were made redundant on the same day. Most people were understandably devastated — there were some decent human beings among them whose lives were ruined. Me? I was happy. I was free. And I realised that what I wanted to do with my freedom was write. Not the stuff I’d been underpaid to peddle on behalf of my employers, but whatever I wanted to create.

Only, what was that? Newly jobless, one of the first things I did was write a short story that got me a prize from the Bridport Festival. That seemed like a good omen. And when I moved out of London to Nottingham, I kept writing. Prose at first, but was then lucky enough to come across a community arts project where I attended some good classes on scriptwriting. Bing: I realised that this was the kind of writing I really enjoyed. Not only did it make the most of whatever knack I had for dialogue, it got me interacting with actors who wanted to work with me. Which led to me writing a short play that itself became the basis of a competition entry when The Times ran a search for film treatments. My success there — my submission was the first treatment I’d written — got me a meeting with Tim Bevan, the man behind Four Weddings And A Funeral. Another good omen.

And then it all kind of fell apart. I hooked up with a filmmaker and made a short with him that was a great learning experience, but made the mistake of hanging around with the same guy for a long time after that, during which I came up with no end of ideas, and got nowhere with them. Well, a good learning experience, but not one to be repeated.

Somewhere in there, I wrote a couple of episodes for Doctors. Again, a great experience, but in many ways it took me back to my ad agency days: I was coming up with ideas for someone else, and not developing my own vision. And yes, I do mean vision. It’s a word that might strike some as pretentious, but think about it: do you have a clear sense of what you want to write and where you want it to take you?

For me to find my vision I had to go through mental illness. This is not a path I would recommend. But since experiencing two psychotic episodes that got me sectioned, and recovering from them, I have been remarkably clear and consistent about what I want in life. And increasingly successful in achieving it.

The key for me is about creating work that I’m passionate about. So that’s what I do. If you can be happy writing episodes of medical drama or soap opera then good luck: I wish you well. But that doesn’t work for me, other than as part of a learning process. I want to create projects for film and other media that I can have true pride in. It’s something I’ve felt with my theatre work, but have yet to experience in any of my screen adventures. And I’d rather pursue that goal than accept the compromise of being just another hired hand on an ongoing series that I don’t really believe in.

The story of gay characters in comics is an unhappy one, mostly because of messy assumptions about comics being read by young boys I suspect. Well, for one thing that’s a bogus claim if you look into actual ages of contemporary comics readers. And for another it’s irrelevant. The active question here is: do we want our comics to be representative of society at large or not? And if the answer to that is yes, then you can’t really get away without depicting gay characters.

I’m less interested in the underground/small press scene — which has always provided voices for dissent and difference — than with mainstream comics. As in, the stuff pumped out by Marvel and DC. And the sad truth is, that though the seventies were a time of ‘relevance’ for comics, in the work of creators like Don McGregor and Doug Moench, that tag extended to race and drugs but did not really address matters of gender and sexuality. Which may or may not be a comment on the difficulty of gay creators working in the mainstream — I don’t know enough to hazard a guess.

Such a shame — the whole issue of teens struggling with powers and having a secret identity seems to provide plenty of scope for gay characters. But they’re few and far between. Marvel made some effort with a character called Northstar, but of course as the only gay hero in town he had to experience a superhero version of AIDS written in florid style.

Fortunately, help was at hand. In reinventing some of Wildstorm’s properties in the hope that they would sell, Warren Ellis devised the heroic team The Authority, which featured amongst its ranks gay analogs for the well known crimefighters Batman and Superman. Written by Ellis at least, their relationship was just one aspect of the whole, and didn’t receive undue or salacious attention: it simply was what it was. Sad to say, the same couldn’t be said for some of the writers who followed Ellis in recounting the adventures of Apollo and Midnighter.

But now Wildstorm has ceased to exist, or at any rate parent company DC has taken the brand away and not yet announced what will be done with the various titles it spawned, though something will doubtless happen in due course. So where can eager readers be sure of finding stirring manly action that realises the homoerotic potential of pulp fiction?

Step forward Devlin Waugh. Written by John Smith, and capably illustrated by artists ranging from Sean Phillips to Steve Yowell, Devlin is a big pink kiss on the stern helmet of all that Judge Dredd represents. It works because there’s something perfectly British about Devlin, who in his capacity as a paranormal troubleshooter for the Vatican is well on his way to being a pulp hero. Add a bodybuilder’s frame and Terry Thomas moustache, and he looks quite the picture. And he’s queer, whether you like it or not. Unapologetic in his taste for pretty young men, Devlin — a champion flower arranger and cat breeder — is an aesthete above all else. He holds fights up while he’s choosing which cravat to wear, insists on travelling with fine bone china and inspirational art even in the desert heat, and has a sizzling line in biting putdowns for every occasion.

Devlin Waugh works as a character because he’s just as ludicrous as Judge Dredd, whose world he shares. But where Dredd’s reference points are bikes and boots and bullets, Devlin’s are those of the fop, the dandy, the in your face queer who isn’t going to go away because he makes you uncomfortable. He’s fast become one of my favourite characters, and it was good to hear that 2000AD readers are big fans of the camp Catholic — Devlin Waugh is second only to Dredd in their affections.

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…