There are some things you’ve just got to be prepared to take on board as a fan of particular genres. Like, if you’re into science fiction, you’re going to run across a lot of world governments, either in the purported future of this planet or the governance of otherworldly societies. Or, also from science fiction, in any story set in the future that features a list of American presidents from the past, there’ll be a few familiar ones plus a couple of others thrown in to suggest greater ethnic and gender opportunity as time goes on. Some of those tropes are harmless enough, but there’s one that really does bug me: the notion within too many also-ran thrillers that serial killing is some kind of artform.

As seen in Se7en and Silence of the Lambs I have no particular problem with this meme. It works for those stories because they’re well crafted and original, and both of them brought something new to the party for the time they were made: Se7en was operatic in its styling, and grandiose murders fit into that world just perfectly. And Hannibal Lecter is such a wonderful character than his sheer improbability is irrelevant: he’s a delightful monster. If only the same could be said of the killers that have appeared in his wake in any number of films, books, and tv programmes.

How many times have you now been presented with a killer who has a theme to his murders? Maybe he sews up his victims’ mouths with yachting thread. Perhaps he arranges them into the form of classical sculptures. Or offs them according to a schema laid out in an obscure holy text. Whatever, the basic idea is to elevate death from something random that happens to us all to an act of twisted creativity performed by a sick genius somewhere. And guess what: I’m fed up of it.

There’s something pretentious about the way that murder is presented in stories like those, and I’m wondering what it says about our society that such tales are as popular as they are. Perhaps it’s related to serial killer chic - the kind of bullshit that results in sad nerds writing to notorious prisoners and buying their sketches online. And there is something genuinely concerning about that: apparently the Austrian father who imprisoned his kids underground and sexually abused them has received hundreds of letters from women claiming that they love and understand him. Shudder.

Truth is, murder is sad and stupid, and most likely to be committed either by a family member, or a random idiot with a knife or gun, according to what age you are. That’s it. No cryptic crossword style machinations, no elegant artistry, just brute thuggery and conventional mammalian power games taken to their ultimate extreme. Why the need to make murder something fascinating and ornate when the reality is, almost always, crass and idiotic?

There’s a kind of pornographic aspect to suffering for some readers and viewers, a relishing of the misfortunes of others. And the worse the suffering, I’m guessing, the greater the payoff for the person who enjoys that kind of thing. Hence Saw having three sequels by now, and the dismal range of memoirs based on formulaic angst so popular in publishing these days. Clearly the actual news isn’t enough for fans of torture: for the real detail, you need the heightened effect of fiction. I’m half wondering when people will start writing books about what it’s like in Darfur, and curious if there’s anything out there on that theme already…But why wouldn’t there be, in a world where people still relish reading about Nazis, and there are tv programmes devoted purely to showing people experiencing road rage?

Somewhere along the line, as creators, we’re responsible for what gets produced. And you’ve got to work out what’s acceptable for you to be involved in. Is what you’re doing contributing to the worst instincts of audiences, or does it have something to say that allows for a flicker of light in whatever darkness you believe surrounds you?

There’s a particular feature script I’ve wanted to write for about three years now. Only, I’ve never found the right way into it. And then, earlier this evening, I cracked it - at any rate, it certainly feels that way. About time too, especially since a small but perfectly formed production company are interested in paying me to write said script.

The solution came as several other writing solutions have come to me over the years: by utilising an element from another story. In this case, a scene that’s a piece of visual storytelling I’m proud of, part of a grim and unfinished thriller. In its original context, it was a flashback that served an important purpose in that story. But it works just as well in its own right, and now seen as an early scene in the other story, witnessed by the protagonist, it helps explain why that protagonist embarks on his particular journey. Perfect.

I’m also confident that I’ve got an ending for it, too, which was something I struggled with before. So now, I have a first and third act, should those be useful labels for this script. Meaning I ‘just’ have that pesky second act to tackle, with its ups and downs, red herrings and blind alleys. Oh, the fun. Fortunately, I have a setting that’s pretty…unusual, and which I can write about with authority. That alone will give the script something to interest the casual reader. Then, it’s just a matter of layering several plot strands, to do with the incident at the start, and something that comes later, and how they affect the protagonist and his plans, and it’ll all come out fine in the wash.

Well, that’s the plan. And one I’m pretty confident about, right now. All I have to do next…is everything. Which in this case means embarking on what I know will be a complex script, a psychological thriller that will appeal to people who like Memento or Insomnia. If only I could find a title as snappy as those…the best one I’ve come up with so far was used by a film a couple of years ago, and I want it to have a good title. Titles are important.

It’s an interesting challenge, living up to your own expectations of a screenplay you’ve been hyping in your own mind and to others for years. Now it’s time to get beyond that hype and write the thing, once some funding has been secured. Curiously, I’m much more matter of fact about another feature script I’m planning to write before I start on this one. That’s just, you know, this funny personal drama I’m doing. The other is, like, The Big One: my psychological thriller I’ve talked about without writing for far too long now.

In practice, the wait has been good for me. I’ve written other scripts in the interim which have taught me a whole bunch of tricks. I’ve learned more about some of the technical stuff I need to know. And moved on from the personal issues that underpin the story for me. So, by the time some money does appear to crack on with the script, I’ll be raring to go. It’s just nice to know that, after all this time not writing it, and thinking about it, I’m now confident that I can do it justice.

There’s a kind of writing which I find grates, and that I can best describe as too neat. And the kind of neatness I’m thinking about sits at odds with my experience of life itself, which doesn’t conform to regular patterns and easy conclusions. As an example, ‘Brotherhood’, episode 7 of the first series of Six Feet Under, a generally excellent series that I’ve been catching on DVD after, as ever, failing to see it when it was broadcast on tv.

The brotherhood referred to captures the relationship of brothers Nate and David, and in particular Nate’s declaration that he loves David, an instance of ‘hugs ‘n’ learning’ that sits at odds with the generally distanced emotions of the Fisher family. And in this specific episode it also refers to the brotherhood experienced by a young soldier whose funeral the Fishers are arranging. For good measure, it serves triple duty when it comes to exploring the politics of the church that Dave is a deacon of.

The dead soldier’s funeral is arranged by his brusque older brother, who wants it to be a military-free zone. Only, Nate believes that the deceased really would have wanted his army buddies present, and arranges for that to happen. He does so, and the service is conducted against the brother’s wishes - only for him to turn up and concede that it really is what he’d have wanted after all. I found it unconvincing that he changed his mind in the short time devoted to the storyline: in other words, the dramatic reversal was unearned, and felt false because of it. In tandem with the story being about Gulf war veterans, it felt tokenistic to me, and what could have been a powerful story was diluted by an unearned payoff: confronted by uniforms, the brother just changed his mind.

The other overly neat aspect to this story was Dave’s rejection of a new senior figure in the church, whose crusading style would likely have brought up uncomfortable issues to do with his closeted homosexuality. It may be that the storyline develops new wrinkles in future episodes, but for now at least it felt like the dead serviceman story: just too neat to really convince.

So, if those are examples of neat writing, what’s the contrary to that? Messiness, I guess. The kind of messiness that feels more like life than it does the geometrically precise laying down of story beats that rise and fall and are mirrored over time. It’s also something I have an issue about when I see tv shows that have clearly delineated A, B, C storylines where the people involved in one never get involved in the others, and to all intents and purposes are involved in their own 12 minute hermetically sealed story rather than one that’s a living breathing part of an organic script.

That kind of messiness is harder to write, I know from my own experience. And it’s also much more rewarding, and effective when it’s achieved. The Shield features writing along the lines I’m talking about, and is achieved by a table of writers hammering out stories as a team. I believe I’ve achieved it in a pilot episode for a series I’ve devised, and one of the technical elements I learned from that which leads to quality messiness on the page works like this:

Get characters involved in each other’s storylines, for instance by having scenes in which a character’s actions create beats for two or more stories. In doing so, see if you can also get those actions to highlight different, even contrary, aspects of character to those established earlier.

Sound tricky? Well, it can be. But it’s a lot of fun getting it right, and feels a lot more like life than the A, B, C way of doing things…

I popped out earlier, and passed the corner shop at the end of my street. Among the various cards in the window was one from someone wanting spare HRT patches. And it made me think: we’re living in a science fiction world now. Which begs the question: what do you do if you want to write science fiction in today’s world?

Science fiction was my genre of choice when I was growing up. I devoured Asimov, Heinlein, Silverberg from the local library, quite often reading three books at the same time. Later, I encountered Philip K Dick, and thinking about it, I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see one of his stories kicking off with HRT patches being offered in a local shop window. Only, the ones in a Dick story would initially seem to transform people into aliens, before the realisation kicked in that they were actually keeping you human, and it was everyone else changing into something non-terrestrial.

An underground movement of people trying to stay human in a world populated by aliens posing as human: I’d read or watch that story, at least to discover how well executed it was. Coronation Street mixed with Alien Nation. Now there’s a pitch! Norris Cole putting up the cards in the window of the newsagent, a lizard’s tongue flicking out the corner of his mouth. Sally Webster, thinking it’s time of life that’s got her unsettled, when actually it’s aliens tampering with her DNA causing the upset. No wonder she gets stroppy with Kevin: and what will she do when she discovers he’s one of the saurians?

OK, forget the aliens: what else in our present world is evidence that we’re living in a science fiction world?

CCTV everywhere, fulfilling the promise of Alan Moore’s V for Vendetta that we’re living in a police state.

Plastic surgery: men getting implants that feel like muscle to go where a sixpack would go if you had one.

The Dalai Lama: I was at a party last night where a good few of the guests had been to see him speak at an ice stadium where I saw Arcade Fire play last year. There were even merchandise stalls.

I was looking at a website earlier for an artist I got talking to in a cafe recently. She says her work in inspired by angels, and now she paints them and reproduces the pictures in different forms, all of which she’s making a decent living from. Bet your art teacher never mentioned that as an option when you were messing about with poster paints at school.

With all of this going on, it makes science fiction and satire two forms that become more difficult to write. We’re already living in a surrealist film: what can you write to draw peoples’ attention to that fact in useful ways?

On the face of it, ‘write what you know’ has to be the most restrictive adage to confront the would-be writer. For a start, it rules out most genre writing, assuming you’ve not been involved in a space battle, been hired to find a missing child, or swung your sword against an ogre. And given the amount of dross in genre fiction, maybe that’s not bad advice.

Only, what are we left with at that point? Dreary novels about adultery imagined and not acted on? Definitive accounts of the working lives of architects, suntan technicians and tarmac specialists with a hankering to write a novel? Stories that elevate the mundane into something not really like art? That way lies madness, or at least an endless round of Nick Hornby imitators and tales of dismal childhood…hmm, pretty much what you’ll find an abundance of in book stores.

‘Write what you know’ is not much use taken at face value then. But treated as an endorsement to write what you know about through your emotional life, it releases endless possibilities for writing. I’ve never had an archenemy, but there are a few people in my life I’d have gladly tossed off a waterfall at one point or another. I’ve never colonised an alien planet, but I’ve spent months living in another culture, one where the fact that the language was shared didn’t mean that many assumptions were. I’ve never performed on the main stage at Glastonbury with a band, but I’ve performed poetry as an amateur alongside professionals and been as well received as they were.

Very rarely do the scripts I’ve written correspond with the facts of my life. But more often than not, there are ideas that I’m passionate about, emotions I feel, concepts that matter to me. Those are as much a part of ‘what I know’ as the mere details of my life, and are much more important when it comes to writing.

I’m currently researching a tv drama set in a 1980s counterculture I’ve seen precious little drama about, let alone any that has the right feel when I compare it to my own experiences of that world and the people who inhabited it. My personal experience will be useful as a benchmark, but where the script will come alive is when I combine it with research and a compelling - fictional - story. Sure, there’s a strong element of reality to what I’m writing about, but I’m not devising a documentary and feel no obligation to be restricted to the facts as they’ve been recorded (…and in this instance, some of the relevant information has been expunged from the records of contemporary newspapers with help from security services).

Veracity without drama is lifeless. Drama without emotional veracity is empty. Tread a path where your own emotions inform the choices you make in a story, and you have the capacity to create something interesting. This, by the way, doesn’t mean wallowing in your emotions and using them as an opportunity to lament the end of your relationship with the heartless so-and-so who left you high and dry when you had a fleeting affair with their best friend. That way lies self-indulgence.

The trick here, and I’d recommend meditation classes if it doesn’t come naturally, is to shift between feeling and listening to your emotions as they were at the time, and viewing what happened with empathy for all involved. Approached in that manner, you can create rounded characters for all the parts required, rather than creating an improbably angelic version of yourself and mere puppets for anyone else.

Bloody hell, this writing lark gets pretty complicated, and into some rich psychological and philosophical territory. Well, yes. Enjoy the journey though, and please try to distinguish between a bit of necessary navel gazing and disappearing up your arse.

Irony in screenwriting isn’t about the characters wisecracking in a dry and knowing way. Knowing is part of it, sure, but the knowing in question is the relationship between what the character knows and what the audience know. It’s a dance, and controlling it enables the writer to control pace and tension in the film effectively.

Thrillers in particular work according to who knows what, when. If an audience knows in advance that the sheriff the protagonist opens up to is allied with the bad guys, then everything the sheriff says and does will be loaded with that knowledge. In turn, that creates empathy for the protagonist’s predicament when the sheriff, say, offers to put the hero up in a cell for the night, to save him from his pursuers.

Writing in this manner calls for control of point of view at all times. Always seeing a story from the perspective of one character is one valid choice - others add fascinating complications. In the example just used, if the hero discovers the truth about the sheriff when, the morning after he accepts the offer to stay in the cell, the bad guys turn up, that’s one perfectly valid way of telling the story.

But imagine how much more tension can be wrung out of the situation if you know that the sheriff is in contact with the bad guys, acts sympathetically to the hero, and realises the financial payoff he can make by selling him to the villains. It turns the sheriff from a fairly bland character into one making important choices affecting the hero’s destiny, all the while as the hero accepts the sheriff’s friendship. You can twist it further still: what if the sheriff ultimately decides to side with the hero, even after he’s arranged to sell him to the bad guys? The story options multiply, as the hero is faced with the potential of eluding his pursuers, and he and the sheriff have to concoct a way of him getting away that leaves the sheriff looking as if he still sides with the bad guys.

And so on…The point here is that allowing your story to have several viewpoints allows you to increase the jeapordy of what’s happening in all kinds of interesting ways. And it doesn’t just apply to thrillers. How about a romcom? Let’s say the guy with the hots for the woman is told seconds before they converse for the first time that she despises men of his profession…That gives the scene a frisson it would otherwise have lacked, and reveals something about his character according to the way he responds to this news (does he lie about his job, or defend himself in a way that seems excessive?), just by adding a little piece of dialogue from a third party.

Or horror: a character has been bitten by a vampire, but thinks she won’t become one herself because there was just the one bite. Cut to another scene in which a priest says that vampire victims only become vampires themselves if the bite happened on a full moon, at which point the viewer remembers that the attack did indeed happen when the moon was full in the night sky. In that instance, the audience had the information all along, and it becomes knowledge only in the context of a later revelation.

Alfred Hitchcock was a master at parcelling out information to the audience to hook them into stories and empathise with or change their allegiances to different characters as the film went on. It’s a vital part of the screenwriter’s toolbox, and one which I believe is best learned by experimenting with different ways of approaching the same story. And if you can find a way of doing so that works with Hitchcock’s mastery, then I want to see your script reach the screen.

A lot of people think of character and plot as separate categories. That’s never a view that’s made much sense to me. We know people by their actions, the choices they make, and it’s those actions that create a sense of what kind of people they are.

The pilot episode of Six Feet Under features the death of the family’s undertaker father. The death itself is a revelation of character: he throws a cigarette out of the vehicle window after being chastised by his wife over the phone for smoking, then almost instantly lights another one. As he bends to ignite it, he misses the bus that’s headed towards his hearse, which sends it spinning and him dead. Character is incident.

Next, we get to see his family and their response to this catastrophic event. One son is having sex with a stranger in an airport when he hears the news, and his obvious sorrow leads to a significant story development as the woman he’s banging, who up until now wouldn’t even share her name, agrees to drive him home. The other son is stoic as he takes the news on board, but then lits rip at someone when it all gets too much for him, causing upset. The daughter has just smoked crystal meth for the first time, making it even more difficult to process what’s going on. All choices that reveal character.

People don’t have a consistent character. We change according to context: who we’re with, what we’re doing. Some things may remain consistent, but other facets will become apparent over time. I make full use of this obvious observation in the pilot episode I’ve written for a tv series I’ve devised: one particular character is shown and talked about in a way that suggests she’s ineffective, but it’s just the same character who — barely stopping to think about it — defuses a dangerous situation spontaneously when she’s seen later. Is she a flake? Is she capable? Or does she exhibit different traits at different times?

As well as his LSD exploits, psychologist Timothy Leary devised a very interesting way of looking at people through a model that he described as ‘neurological circuits’. He proposed that there are 8 such circuits, each of which can be distinctively imprinted by formative experiences through our lives. The first governs our perception of the world as safe or dangerous. The second, our relative degree of submission or dominance. The third, our capacity to process logical and symbolic thinking. The fourth, our morality and sexuality. The remaining four circuits are associated with experiences that not everyone recognises, including relationship with time, and capacity to override the ’settings’ of previous circuits.

I find the 8 circuit model a fascinating way of exploring what makes people tick, devoid of the simplistic assumptions of Freudian thinking, overly concerned as they are with sexuality. It’s not ‘true’, but it’s certainly useful, and Leary’s collaborator Robert Anton Wilson writes interestingly — and with practical exercises to bring the model to life — in books including Quantum Psychology and Prometheus Rising.

The beauty of the 8 circuit model is it is a model of character based on behaviour, and not theory. Never mind that your mother took the spoon away, that teacher made you stand outside the staff room: what are you doing and what does that suggest about the interaction of your neurological circuitry? It’s a model that is refreshingly free of value judgment, unlike many other psychological frameworks. As such, I believe it to be a great asset to writers: it’s our job to create convincing characters, not moralise about them…as far as I’m concerned anyway. (A lot more interesting to present a character and their actions in a rounded and honest way, than to paint a halo or horns on them from the word go, I believe: I like characters it’s not easy to pin down, not obvious cyphers for the writer’s preferred worldview.)

Go to a cafe, a bar, or somewhere else you can watch people. What do you see and hear them doing that fits with previous things they’ve done? What does that say about them? What do you see and hear them doing that confounds your expectations? How do you have to update your model to take this new data into account, and what does it suggest about them? It’s in this relationship with your perceptions and models of how people operate that you can see characterisation at work, and the better you get at experiencing people in this way, the more interesting your characters will become, to write and to watch.

Another day, another fascinating thriller with a lot going on. This time it’s Sexy Beast, which I saw tonight for the first time since recognising its homoerotic aspects, and this time came across as a rich dark study of male power and sexuality.

Ray Winstone is Gal, a criminal who’s retired to Spain. Thinks he’s retired, that is. Don Logan, played by Ben Kingsley, has other ideas. Yes, we’re in a ‘one last job’ story, but superbly scripted by Louis Mellis and David Scinto, one which gets inside the minds of some beautifully and convincingly twisted characters.

It all kicks off with Ray Winstone sunning himself outside his hacienda when a boulder comes crashing down the hill and into his pool. It foreshadows Ben Kingsley’s entrance: he’s a psychotic gangster determined to get Ray to take part in a job in London. Only, there’s more to it than that. Before Kingsley sets eyes on Winstone he sees Winstone’s pool boy, the pool itself being symbolic of the love that exists between Gal and his partner Dee (it features a tiled heart design at the bottom). And as the pool’s guardian, the teenager later tries to defend Gal from Don, as well as being the subject of Don’s envy. All subtly painted, but undeniably there.

Don is a gloriously deranged creation, equal parts vile and violent, and wonderfully conflicted about his feelings for Gal. At the very least he resents that Gal has left his mates in the lurch and has no contact with them any more. And there’s plenty more to it, as there is more generally within the underworld that Gal thought he’d left behind. Some of the characters, including Ian McShane, the Mr Big behind the robbery that Don wants Gal to be part of, are bisexual. And when the heist itself takes place, the screen is awash with near-naked men swimming underwater to get the booty they crave.

Sexy Beast is head and shoulders above the empty posturing of the other Brit gangster films that were so prevalent for a while, an incisive and elegant dissection of the intersection of criminality and masculinity. And lest that sound too pompous, it’s also wonderfully directed (by Jonathan Glazer), superbly acted, very funny, and well scored. More than anything, it shows the capacity of genre material to work as a way of exploring big ideas - especially ones that were implicit in older, more naive, takes on storytelling in the same genre.

I’m thinking of thrillers at the moment. Not regulation thrillers where the action purrs like the engine of a high performance car to an inevitable conclusion, but the sort where you’re not quite sure what’s going on at times, and maybe the writer or director have an agenda beyond the base requirements of the genre. Insomnia and Memento would be good examples, and the one I’ve just watched is Inside Man.

Spike Lee is a director I’ve admired without loving for some time, and Inside Man does nothing to consummate our relationship. It starts simply enough with a bank heist masterminded by Clive Owen and investigated by Denzel Washington, and adds layers of complexity as it goes. First, there’s the requisite tricksiness of the heist itself, which leads the crooks to take the bank staff and customers hostage and dress them in identical outfits. That’s interesting, but even more so is the motivation of the bad guys; just what is it they’re up to?

The fact that the cast also includes Jodie Foster tells you that the answers the audience are after probably go above and beyond the bare necessities of a thriller; that is, to thrill the audience. And Spike Lee being the director means that there’s sure to be a larger game afoot, and so it proves. We discover that the bank itself was started with Nazi booty looted from Jews, something that its founder Christopher Plummer would not like made public.

So, there’s the expected stuff around the mechanics of a heist, augmented with some neat business around the crooks bugging the cops, faking the death of a hostage, and so forth. All good fun that keeps you on the edge of your seat. And as the story develops, there is a sense of a bigger game being played. New York’s cultural melting pot is part of the fabric of the story. Racist attitudes to Denzel Washington’s character from a white cop, and to a Sikh hostage whose turban is forcibly removed and is disparagingly called an Arab, form part of a credible social world that Bruce Willis never has to navigate in the Die Hard films.

That element of politics and ethnicity becomes more important as the Nazi aspect of the story is made clear. It’s done with a fairly light touch, and Lee’s own status as an African American director comes into play. How many times have you seen two black cops work together? In almost any other situation, a black cop would be partnered with a white cop, but here Denzel’s character is paired with Chiwetel Ejiofor: it’s no accident.

Inside Man is not brilliant - I sense that the actors are sometimes bringing more to the characters than can be found in the script - but as an intelligent heist movie edging out of the mainstream it’s to be applauded. A brave failure is always more interesting than a mediocre success, and to call it a failure is to exaggerate its weaker points anyway.

Whatever became of the big politically-charged drama? There was a whole agitprop tradition in eighties theatre, and you can look at Boys from the Blackstuff as the humanist continuation of that spirit on television. But where did that current go next?

Bleasdale’s anger, channeled through the searing Blackstuff scripts, was directly provoked by the actions of Margaret Hilda Thatcher. With her out of the way, a lot of that ire went - but where to? The sad truth is that subsequent Labour governments have been an embarrassment to many voters on the left, as the party that created the welfare state has embraced market values and become in many ways indistinguishable from its old opponents. In the process, the Labour party has learned a lot about the media, and as it’s become more savvy about spin, the notion of sincere committed drama seems as old hat and irrelevant as standing up for free school milk.

It’s in that growth of a sophisticated media culture that answers to the question of where political writing has gone can be found. Politics and media have become ever more intertwined, and it’s impossible to treat media with the straight-faced sincerity that led to shows such as When The Boat Comes In, say. A drama about people struggling to get by in the depression as traditional industry declines…can you imagine that on tv now? And on what channel?

So, instead of drama wearing its heart on its sleeve, we have scripts that are inevitably satirical in nature since it’s impossible to do media about media without becoming aware of the ironies involved. The most striking example has got to be The Thick Of It, a dissection of the mechanics of spin and the personalities who practice it that is second to none.

Two names stand out as being able to hold a mirror to the nose of the establishment: Chris Morris and Armando Ianniuci. And it’s the fact that the mirror is held to the nose, for snorting purposes, that creates a problem: this is satire so accurate that it’s indistinguishable from the real thing, and is praised by those it parodies. It also excludes a big chunk of the audience who are not as media-literate as its creators: so how can we get a modern audience to sit through a drama with a political element that isn’t some kind of meta-response to the circus it examines?

The best answer to that comes in the work of Jimmy McGovern and Paul Abbott. Both have a knack for writing drama with a strong social element that is emotionally engaging, clever without being up its arse. McGovern’s been at it longer, and back in his run on Cracker there are some excellent episodes examining the state of the nation while still providing a compelling protagonist and crime hooks. Abbott’s politics started to show through in Clocking Off, a means of exploring the different social worlds orbiting a factory in the north. It was also a sneaky way of bringing back the single play to television, and McGovern has done much the same with the more recent The Street. Scratch Abbott’s Shameless, and you’ll find rich social themes underpinning the comedy-drama, and ones that don’t pay simplistic allegiance to the left: the Gallaghers look after themselves and those around them, and if that means milking the state because it’s systems are so slow and cumbersome, then so be it. You can be feckless, and give a feck.

All of this interests me because I’m about to develop a treatment for a tv drama set around a bit of fairly recent British social history that I find fascinating, and believe has a lot of relevance and resonance for the way we live now. And I’m searching for a way to write it that will allow me to include a whole bunch of necessary research and bring it alive for a modern audience, one that probably didn’t watch Our Friends In The North, but likes Spooks, that’s sort of concerned about CCTV but even more about hoodies, and is just as likely to read The Mail as The Mirror. I know it can be done: the task is to find my way through it to reach that audience and share with them my concerns about the time the story will be set, and how that relates to the world we now inhabit.