I really like thrillers. And I’m finding that there are less and less thrillers I really like. Good news is, I’m working out why that is, and hoping what I learn enables me to come up with one that audiences respond to for reasons more involved than getting off on the action sequences.

Two recent stories are indicative of a wider trend in the field. One was the ITV two-parter Case Sensitive, the other a recent Vertigo Crime graphic novel, Rat Catcher. And what concerns me is the extent to which they’re reliant on the audience being into the genre in the first place to have any connection with them. Both exist largely in relation to other crime thrillers out there in the world — which is to say, the world of fiction and existing stories, rather than the world that we the audience live in.

Case Sensitive started out in really promising fashion, a detective new to her team having slept with a colleague she’ll be working with on her first case, and neither of them sure how to deal with it. Their relationship turned out to be the strongest part of the whole, sensitively written and performed with just the right hint of awkwardness on both parts. The sweetest part of the resolution was how the woman got the guy to stop twirling paper round, which he only did because of his anxiety around her.

The rest was an overcomplicated concoction that in trying to second guess the viewer got too intricate for its own good. An architect’s wife has been murdered, and we suspect him primarily because he lives in one of those modernist houses that’s all straight lines and no warmth and the audience are used to that being a metaphor for someone who’s a soulless compulsive killer. In fact, the villain of the piece is…the criminologist. A choice presumably made because the writer liked the idea that a stock character in these situations is in fact the perp. Well, he was, but…so what? By which I indicate the lack of emotional connection anywhere in the crime part of the story. There were two cases of someone posing as someone else and a backstory I had no interest in because fundamentally I didn’t care. And if you don’t care, the pyrotechnic aspects of what’s happening onscreen are meaningless.

There’s a similar problem afflicting Rat Catcher, which is a real shame as I’ve very much enjoyed some of Andy Diggle’s other writing. Though it comes in the form of a hardback black and white graphic novel it’s a film pitch through and through, and suffers for that. Oh, it’s an efficient enough piece of writing, in much the same way that Coldplay are competent musicians. Like them, it leaves no lasting impression on me. Maybe with decent actors playing the leads, and more work on the story, the film Diggle is gagging for would be better than the source material. He’s left potential adapters very few places to slip up. But then he probably thought that about The Losers, which I loved in comic form but fizzled out as a film.

The Losers is referred to in the notes on the author as a major motion picture. Is there any other sort? In the same way that every U2 album is a significant release, any film with Hollywood involvement is a major motion picture. Really, both Case Sensitive and Rat Catcher are precision-engineered product. There’s a lot of skill involved in their manufacture, but traces of individuality and personal commitment are as unlikely as a Pizza Hut cook growing the tomatoes she makes for the sauce to slap on the pizza bases she defrosts from the truck they turn up in.

And it all looked so promising. Exile could have been something special, and the BBC clearly thinks it is. ‘Created’ by Paul Abbott, scripted by Danny Brocklehurst, and starring John Simm, it’s the story of a high flying journalist who returns north to have a crash course with his past, in the form of his senile father, a campaigning reporter in his prime.

It started well enough, with Simm leaving London in his expensive car and clearly full of self-hatred as he turns his back on the associate editorship of a high profile magazine. And then…well, nothing really. Nothing unexpected that is. He heads to the family home, which he fled 18 years ago after being beaten by his dad, now being looked after by his sister. The one surprising moment in the episode is when she commandeers her brother’s car to hightail it away for a much needed break, leaving him in charge of their dad.

Beautifully shot, as these flagship dramas are, and with sensitively deployed music, it has all the hallmarks of a quality production — but utterly fails to engage except on the simplest level. Simm does what he can with the script, but there’s not a whole lot to get to grips with. Father/son tension is a dramatically well trodden path at the best of times, and Brocklehurst brings nothing new to illuminate their relationship.

The key to it all is in the document that Simm looked at and which provoked his dad to assault him. The rest of the series will be devoted to uncovering the truth of that incident, which is heading in the direction of local council corruption. And — wouldn’t you know it — an old school chum of Simm’s is well connected in those circles. And, for added fun, Simm has shagged his missus, in one of those blindlingly obvious scenes where eyes lock over a pint one minute, and they’re at it like rabbits the next.

Oh for something to liven it all up. It’s all competent enough, but competence does not get the heart racing and compel my eyes to return to the screen for a second episode. If this is the BBC’s idea of setting the bar high, it helps explain why they believe they’re getting away with middle of the road when they serve up real trash.

Compare Exile to the standard that quality American shows such as Six Feet Under, Mad Men, and The Sopranos maintain…

Better yet, don’t. It’s a depressing thought. But look at the evidence. There’s a quality to the writing of those and other shows that’s rarely seen in drama generated in Britain. Subtext. Symbolism. Emotion. All the elements that go into making a truly great drama, I see much more of in American television than I do here from British broadcasters.

I know there are exceptions — Unforgiven and Apparitions come to mind immediately — but more and more I’m drawn to the differences between the way that American and British shows come about. In America, writers are taken seriously, and acquire power as producers if they’re seen to be doing well. That’s what’s taken from Alan Ball from film success with American Beauty to the ability to get Six Feet Under and True Blood off the ground.

Sure, you could look at Paul Abbott as a British equivalent. But it doesn’t take much imagination to see that in devising a story about a washed up writer connecting to his roots he’s not on the finest of forms with Exile, which may be why it’s written by Brocklehurst. A shame. When Abbott is good, he’s very good — and guess what, he’s forged an essentially American career path for himself within the UK by moving from scriptwriting to producing, rather than doing what you’re supposed to do and being a pet writer for the BBC. Here’s to others emulating his tough route, rather than going for the approach presented by the Writers Academy of serving an apprenticeship on shows that, more often than not, are poorly written and — because of the power structure of script editors and producers — don’t give writers the freedom or power they need to excel.

There was a Radio 4 program about a childrens’ writer called Ursula Moray Williams earlier. She wrote 60-70 stories for young people, and was very much in favour of the self-contained yarn rather than the series. Commercially speaking, that was a choice that cost her: returning characters are popular with audiences of all ages, and having an audience eager to read more of their adventures can also open the door to merchandising money.

Ursula was full of stories though, and stayed true to her particular path, and children will be able to enjoy books like Adventures of the Little Wooden Horse and Gobbolino the Witch’s Cat for generations to come. There’s something about a self-contained story that lends itself to greater emotional intensity. The stakes can be higher when you’re not going to meet a hero ever again.

For all that, there’s something about licenced properties that continues to pull me back in to them from time to time. Ed Brubaker’s take on Captain America, Warren Ellis on Iron Man, Grant Morrison writing Batman — these are writers whose sensibilities mesh with the character brilliantly. For Brubaker it’s an appreciation of espionage thrillers and pulp fiction that makes his Cap stories soar. Ellis’s fascination with journalism and technology informs a superlative exploration of Tony Stark. Morrison’s mythic approach seems to strike gold consistently.

The return of Dr Who confirms that Stephen Moffat’s perception of the errant alien is up there with Alan Moore’s reinvention of Swamp Thing. Like Moore, he has thought about the character at some length, and found the darkness at the heart of the Gallifreyan. His relationship with River Song captures this perfectly, the two approaching their time together from different ends. The longer she knows him, the more she loves him — and the less he knows her. It started with him encountering River in her youth and her life has not been the same since. The knowledge that they will become strangers to one another could be the death of her.

That relationship has tragedy at its core, but we feel it as audience members because it contains a truth about our own lives. Those we love can fade in our hearts, and we in theirs. It’s that ability to use a device that would only be possible in a story about a time traveller and which has wider resonance with human experience that marks Moffat out as a truly gifted writer. Coming up with clever time paradoxes is difficult in a cerebral manner, and appeals at the same level. Stories that touch the heart are another matter entirely.

Something similar is at work in the baddies that Moffat comes up with. Before now we’ve had the Stone Angels, which were amazing first time round in Blink, even if their second appearance is less memorable. They tapped into something primal that was perfectly suited to a young audience: the idea that something is creeping up on you when you’re not looking. This time round we have creepy critturs in Blues Brothers suits who we forget as soon as we look away from them. Worse than that, they’ve been on Earth for centuries, and the Doctor’s line about this not being fighting an alien invasion, but an occupation, sets the next installment up brilliantly.

None of this detracts from the intermittent brilliance of Russell T Davies’s take on the Doctor. His excitable utopian Timelord demonstrates that Dr Who is an archetype that’s malleable in the right hands, as it has been through the actors who’ve portrayed him. All of which makes me even more excited about the prospect of a Neil Gaiman episode, one of the treats lined up for later in this new season.

Nottingham’s Broadway Cinema hosted an event organised by BAFTA the other evening, with two of Getting On’s three creators going into the story of how they created the series and brought it to the screen. The most well known of the triumverate is Jo Brand, but in her absence we instead got to know Vicki Pepperdine and Joanna Scanlan, who like Jo are also actors in the show, a darkly credible look at life and death on a moribund NHS ward.

The origins of the series are in the fact that the three women live close by to one another in London. Some will see this as evidence of the primacy of the capital in the nation’s media, but it’s equally possible to view it as indicative of the need to make the most of the people in your network. At any rate, the show is the result of the trio’s particular skillset and chemistry. It’s also a beautiful demonstration that the BBC can and does let work emerge that doesn’t fit into its general methodology of commissioning shows and supervising them closely.

The core of the threesome seems to be Joanna Scanlan, who worked as a drama lecturer and tv scriptwriter before finding her feet as a performer with Getting On. It’s Joanna’s experience of writing that ensures the story receives the attention it’s due, and which is apparent in the tightly plotted episodes, typically setting character issues alongside a central patient-related narrative. The other women are involved in this process too, but what came across is that Joanna is the guardian of the story, and is scrupulous about the need to edit out good gags and moments if they don’t adhere to that core.

Drawing on drama workshopping skills to come up with their characters, influenced by considerable research with members of hospital staff teams, it was a surprise to all involved when Jo Brand — asked as part of her hotseating what her character was called — blurted out that she was Kim Wilde. As it happens, Jo knows the singer of the same name, and perhaps in the confusion of the improvisation leapt at the first name that came into her mind. At any rate, the coincidence of the name becomes part of the character’s charm, and is a good example of using what comes up in the moment to inform the process.

Though a lot of thought goes into coming up with the stories, the BBC seemed to think that there was a lot more improvisation going on. The creators were happy to let them believe that since it kept them free from the attentions of script editors and others with a tendency to impose changes whether or not they’re needed in an attempt to put their stamp on the corporation’s output.

Still, the trio needed allies to take the project forward, and when they got the go-ahead to do a filmed pilot were able to call on the services of Peter Capaldi, who Joanna had known for years, and worked with in The Thick Of It. Less known as a director, Capaldi’s input is critical to the show’s look and feel. Compared to the gloss of the BBC’s flagship medical dramas, Getting On has a washed-out and faded look appropriate to the institution it’s set in. He was also able to bring in visual touches influenced by Dogme filmmaking. That said, part of the reality of the show’s distinctive look is a function of what happens when you shoot a 30 minute programme with two cameras for 2.5 days.

It’s interesting that Getting On, like The Office before it, has developed such a distinctive identity. And there are systemic reasons for that: both shows came from what amounts to the BBC’s R&D department. To me, that points to the importance of nurturing creators and concepts through that fairly organic route rather than the more regulated processes that too often result in identikit programme making.

I don’t intentionally listen to The Archers for the same reason that I don’t intentionally poke myself in the eye with a pencil. It just happens sometimes. I catch random bits of Radio 4 while I’m in the kitchen, and that sometimes happens with the latest update from the folk of Ambridge. The one encounter that I relish even less is when I catch some of Gardener’s Question Time. So you can imagine my delight when, as I chop a courgette to go into dinner, I cotton onto the fact that one of the current storylines in The Archers is the possibility of Gardener’s Question Time being broadcast from Ambridge. Be still, my aching sides.

This sort of thing doesn’t happen by accident. It occurs when self-important people with oversized salaries sit around a table thinking they’re creative when they use phrases like ‘leveraging brand potentiality’. Something similar happened in Masterchef last week when the contestants had to cook for the cast of Merlin. And guess what? All of the shows mentioned so far are made by the BBC. They’re spending the money that you and I give them to celebrate their own output, in what could charitably be described as hyperreal but is perhaps more accurately termed opportunist crap. The idea presumably being that fans of a rural soap may be into a gardening show, and that if you like food, you’ll love wizards.

Annoying though this is, it is as nothing compared to the self-referential nature of superhero comics. You’ve heard of The Hulk, yeah? And probably Captain America. They’re two of Marvel’s big iconic characters, with plenty of merchandising dollars wrapped up in putting their images out there in the world. They’ve been around a long time, and when Marvel was gaining in popularity in the sixties they had the bright idea of putting some of their well known heroes in the same comic. Good idea: give readers the chance to follow the adventures of existing heroes, and introduce them to new ones who could potentially get comics of their own if readers responded to them. That was the idea behind The Avengers, which went on to be a team comic of variable quality under its many creative teams, some issues of which I have fond memories of.

That was then, this is now. The convoluted pseudo-history that’s created by decades of Marvel comics supposedly happening over just a few years — essentially to avoid the dynamic young heroes being older than the readers’ parents — is crumbling under the weight of attempts to rationalise its obvious paradoxes. The solution? Create a whole new universe for Marvel characters to have adventures in. And sure enough, that involves the creation of a new set of Avengers, only this time round they’re called The Ultimates. Same principle though: put together the big hitters with some second division characters, see if any of them take off with fans.

Only, once The Ultimates have been going for a while and engaging with the rest of the Ultimate Universe, it too starts to collapse under the weight of its own nonsense. Oh, and there’s an Avengers film on the way, so Marvel want as much product with that name on as they can fit on the shelves. Which is what leads us to — and you might want to take a breath before you read this next bit — a series called Ultimate Avengers Vs New Ultimates. Because obviously, the Avengers are so cool that they need to be split into two teams, each of them an alternate world spin-off of the tried-and-tested Avengers brand.

If your head isn’t spinning enough, I urge you to check out what’s happened to the Avengers that avenge stuff in the original Marvel Universe, as opposed to the one where the Ultimates hang out. And there, Marvel have opted for what’s called brand extension. You know how you can get a lite version of some beers? Well, Avengers now come in several flavours too: New, Secret, Mighty and Dark. There might have been something like Avengers: The Initiative in there as well, but you know what? I’m past caring. Next time I want to see costumed poseurs upsetting one another, I’m watching Dancing On Ice.

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.

How do you wrap up a show like The Shield, in which over seven seasons cop Vic Mackey turns every relationship in his life bad through his determination to be the most alpha of males? He lies, he bullies, he plants evidence, he tortures, he kills — and he fascinates. That simple juxtaposition, the same one seen in women who like bad boys, a conundrum which compels, drives tens of hours of screen drama with Mackey portrayed at a level far beyond mere skill by actor Michael Chiklis.

In the process, the show’s writers, guided by series creator Shawn Ryan, come up with the finest sustained tv drama I have yet seen. British television has produced work of incredible quality, but I can’t think of an example of a prolonged narrative with anything like the power of The Shield. More than that, British tv is institutionally not geared to produce such a thing: power rests in the hands of commissioners who come and go, and who always have one eye on this week’s ratings. Sure, commercial considerations drive American tv, but structurally the system is very different, with writers able to attain power through creating and running shows. The sort of singular vision required to drive a show like Deadwood, MadMen or The Sopranos is not encouraged in British tv.

Anyway, The Shield wraps up beautifully. The big question is what would happen to Mackey. One of his trusted lieutenants has already been driven to kill himself and his family as a result of being involved with Vic. And he betrays the one who still swears loyalty in an attempt to secure a deal that will protect his family. Restitution is needed. Only, prison just wouldn’t work for Mackey: his methods would probably make him the kingpin there, just as he is on the streets of Los Angeles. The solution that’s arrived at is perfect: a very personal kind of hell for Vic, who gets to see the world he’s been king of, but not participate in it. And the longer he’s away from the action, the more his ghosts will come to haunt him.

Along the way, the other characters get some kind of resolution to their journeys, often with the lightest of touches. A cop tormented by his sexuality gets to see gay men happy with their lives. Another for whom approaching women has been an issue finds that he makes an impression without even trying to. And so on, one character after another being highlighted for a moment in a way that acknowledges where they’ve been and suggests where they might be heading. It could only work in the context of characters played brilliantly by just the right actors for a sustained period, and it’s a wonderful thing to behold.

Shawn Ryan moved on from The Shield to be an executive producer on The Unit, a series created by David Mamet based on a book by a former Special Forces member he’d met in putting Spartan together. With the clout he’d got from The Shield, it was easier to bring The Unit to the screen. The two shows share some DNA in that they’re about tough men in a tough job, whose relationships with women are central to the story.

Stylistically, they’re very different. Where The Shield is all handheld camera and street noise, The Unit is more conventionally shot, and uses a synthesised soundtrack. It might look more traditional, but with Mamet scripting the pilot episode the dialogue has a cadence you won’t get elsewhere, and a way of exploring gender that gets beneath the surface and raises some interesting questions. I’m not convinced it has the power of The Shield, but only time will tell — I bought the first season yesterday and there are another dozen episodes to go before I decide whether I want any more.

So, half way through the final season of The Shield, and protagonist Vic Mackey hands in his gun and badge and goes rogue to…well, never mind the details. What’s interesting is how he got there, and what that says about the nature of serial fiction. After all, lawmen turning bad is hardly a new theme, so what makes this rendition of it resonant in a way that, say, The Bill never got a sniff of?

It all starts at the start. When, in the opening episode of the series, Vic commits an unforgivable act. Seven seasons later, and he’s reaping the karma that he sowed all the way back then. That’s around 80 episodes in which he twists this way and that on the spear that’s run through him by his own choices. Something like 60 hours of beautifully crafted drama showing how an unquestionably bad man can still possess his own kind of sick nobility, even as his actions demonstrate time and again that he’s truly no different from those he seeks to mete justice to.

The sheer momentum generated by that amount of screentime gives audiences a relationship with characters that no feature film could hope to emulate. We’ve seen Mackey the family man, the team player, the leader of the pack, the violent sociopath, the master manipulator, the heroic risk taker, the adulterer, the egotist alpha male, the vengeful friend, all those aspects of Vic and more, portrayed with stunning power by Michael Chiklis.

This far into the series, and knowing how things have played out before, we know there’s no way but down for Vic. He holds his head high, but the odds are against him more than ever before, and every new action he undertakes adds to the impossibility of his predicament. Skilled improviser as he is, he cannot possibly dodge the consequence of his actions, which have led him to become one of the major causes of crime in Los Angeles, as well as giving him the impressive clean-up rate he clings on to.

The station Vic’s strike team is based at used to be a church, and that’s no accident. The show’s creators knew exactly what they were doing putting the police in a building that retains its pews and stained glass windows, and where some of the key scenes are confessions in the form of interrogations. Pretty much every episode shows different cops using guile, insinuation, threats, a light touch, whatever works, to extract some or other version of the truth from a variety of criminals. And as the cops conduct their investigations, they are watched on closed-circuit tv from another room, where their peers can monitor their performance, and judge how far from the path their colleagues have strayed.

So, when episode 8 of season 7 featured a miscreant priest, I was particularly interested to see what would happen to him. Things seemed simple enough at first, the priest taking money from drug dealers in the area — clearly a case of wrongdoing, albeit complicated by the murky motives of those wanting the priest removed from the scene. Where it got interesting was in Vic’s discovery that the drug dealers had a hold over the priest because they knew he’d fathered a child, and that mother and baby were effectively captives of a truly monstrous man.

Vic of course sorts the situation out in inimitable style, wading into the thick of things and rescuing the situation so that wrongs are righted. All familiar stuff, kind of. Only, on this occasion — so late in Vic’s own journey and with a grim future unquestionably ahead — it was evident (though never stated) that in saving the priest, a good man who had strayed, as Mackey believes himself to be, Vic was saving himself too. Again, not a radical storytelling technique — but the timing of it, in the context of a substantial work of television drama — made it click into place in a way that drama rarely achieves in any form.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.