So, Peep Show is back, which means there’s a watchable British sitcom on the air again for the first time in a while. It’s glorious stuff, and just when you think it can’t go any further in exploring the intersection of personal selfishness and public life, it takes one more clodhopping step into the awkward, the repellent, the unsayable.

Writers Jesse Armstrong and Sam Bain are immersed in the characters and world they’ve created, and combine flawless plotting with deep insight into motivation, and - where Jez is concerned - lack of motivation. But for all the failings of Jez and Mark, they’re still recognisably human characters: this isn’t fullblown misanthropy, more an accurate dissection of yer actual human condition.

The show makes full use of its post-watershed status, the latest episode featuring episodes of oral sex, frottage, homosexuality and drug abuse. It’s all in the tradition of Joe Orton, who if he was alive now might lose some of his reputation for scandalousness, but would at least hopefully be employed by Channel 4 or BBC3 to write scabrous sitcoms, a fate he could never have imagined in his lifetime.

The fact that Jez and Mark are played by the inherently likeable Mitchell and Webb (who I’m not much fussed about in their own shows) helps defuse the danger of the scripts: there’s something about their cleancut common room look that mellows out the sheer obscenity of what goes on in Peep Show.

Earlier in the evening, a leading character in British tv had a daughter, and so concerned are the custodians of his reputation that no hint of sexuality sullied this turn of events. The character was Dr Who, and daughter Jenny’s conception, gestation, and birth took all of 2 minutes, after which she sprang into life as a fully-formed adult, with all the vitality and eagerness of a childrens’ tv presenter. And don’t be surprised if that’s where Jenny ends up: this whole episode seemed to be geared up to providing a franchise-spinning opportunity out of an otherwise lacklustre story.

The problem was that what happened was all too familiar to longer term fans of the show: the Doctor arrives on a planet to encounter warring factions and unites them through discovering something they have in common. Perfectly good format as it goes, but there was no sign that the team responsible for this episode had done their groundwork in terms of checking out old episodes or reading good science fiction novels. So instead of an exciting new take on an old theme that would give younger viewers a thrill, we got a fairly tired tale that wouldn’t satisfy any of the children I know or the adults either. A pity: Dr Who can be a remarkable show when everything’s working, as I’m sure it’ll be again later in the series.

I’d never heard of sitcom Teenage Kicks before last night, but its theme music was not promising. It featured a watered-down version of the Undertones classic from which the show gets its title, only without the passion, and with a ‘nice’ acoustic bit added so as not to shock anyone who might be unduly energised by the rawness of the original. I should have taken that as an omen and not proceeded any further.

The show’s premise is that, following a divorce, dad Vernon (Adrian Edmonson) moves in with his son and daughter, now students. He’s an ex punk, and is looking to relive his youth in the company of his teenage children and their flatmate David, whose main purpose, beyond representing Chinese youth on ITV, is to bankroll Vernon’s madcap schemes.

So, in other words, what we’ve got is a potential twist on The Young Ones, even more so because Edmonson is scripting as well as being the lead character in Teenage Kicks. And that’s not such a bad idea, as they go. What’s on offer is the conservatism of contemporary students versus the radicalism of Vernon’s earlier days, which he’s now trying to relive from the broom cupboard under the stairs where he now lives in his kids’ flat.

What happens in practice is that the kids are woefully undeveloped, with very little to distinguish Daughter A from Son B, other perhaps than Son B is a little more worldly wise than his sister. In other respects - and stop me if you’ve guessed where I’m headed here - Vernon’s children are now acting as his parents, urging caution and wanting to put the brakes on his madcap schemes.

Did I mention madcap schemes? If only the plot lived up to that billing. Instead, what we get is a limp tale that has Vernon rehearsing a backing band to tour Eastern Europe with the leader of his old punk rivals, who had a ‘punk’ name so embarrassing I’ve erased it from my memory. Anyway, the nearer the actual tour gets, the less likely it turns out to be likely to happen. And the band leader turns out to be a conman. Who was tricking Vernon into getting David (the Chinese guy, remember?) into paying for a van for the tour, which he then steals. Or something along those lines. At any rate, hilarity failed to ensue.

Yes, I know sitcoms are hard to write, and ITV seems to have a problem getting them right. But they had a decent stab at it with Moving Wallpaper, a thoroughly enjoyable show. Is it so difficult to bring some of the edge of a programme like that into the family comedy, or is there something about the family sitcom that propels British writers into cosiness instead of humour? Please God, there has to be room at the table for something other than pisspoor riffs on My Family, which is what Teenage Kicks aspires to be.

So, here it is. Portishead’s new album is finally here, and it’s a stunner. They’ve done something technically brilliant that not all of their long term fans will appreciate. Identified with the triphop sound they helped to pioneer way back when, they’ve come back having reinvented their approach to music. Everything is different when you pay close attention, still creating the same kind of emotional impact they’ve always excelled at, prompting melancholy and regret through conjuring memories that, while listening, you fail to realise aren’t your own.

The soundscape of the new album, Third, is comprised of elements unlike anything you’ll have heard from them up to this point. No lazy beats and John Barry-isms here; instead you’ll find acoustic guitar, bassoon, clarinet and hurdy gurdy, as well as a range of blue-grey moods conveyed with more conventional instruments. It’s bravura stuff, as convincing as it is compelling, an object lesson in reinvention for practitioners of any art form.

Which brings us on to Holby City. I’ve become pretty partial to this show in the last couple of years, and for me it’s a far more enticing prospect than Casualty. A hairdresser I visited ably described Casualty’s problem when she described a typical episode as ‘Someone gives birth, someone gets married, and someone pops their clogs’. That transparent A/B/C storylining is not nearly as obvious in its sister show, and Holby City is all the better for it.

Last night’s episode, written by Matthew Evans, was a good example of how to write quality medical drama. The big story was the reappearance of contentious character Abra Durant, returned from Africa via a Holby bar with a bloodied head and picking up his grievances with colleague Ric Griffin where they’d left them months before. Adeptly done, and with a lightness of touch that sidestepped on-the-nose confrontation in favour of more nuanced scenes.

Overall, the ongoing elements of the show were stronger than the two self-contained storylines. One concerned a harried church worker who was being overworked by a vicar, or at least that’s the way it looked until it turned out the vicar knew exactly what buttons to press to get his assistant to take a break away from God’s affairs and pay attention to her own. The other featured a squabbling couple who were brought together again when it looked like one of them might not live. And, err, that was it.

The other, more interesting, storyline featured Jane Asher as Lady Byrne, the hospital’s in-house aristo, arranging a photo-shoot for a charity she was a patron of. Cue a fun filmic sequence in which various female nurses auditioned for the gig before some stitching up was done to secure it for Daisha, who really did need the money from the photo shoot to give to her mother.

All good stuff, basically, and because it was well written and directed it was easy to forget we were cycling between the same few characters and stories: when you’re immersed in the story and not noticing the technical aspects, then one or more people are doing the right thing. Which is something that Portishead and Holby City, both born in Bristol, have in common.

How do you bring new life to a theme or genre that’s tired? One answer is to bring new influences in, the tack that the makers of the Daniel Craig version of Casino Royale took when they wheeled out the James Bond franchise for its latest iteration. The speed and action of the film that resulted clearly owed something to the massive success of The Bourne Identity and its sequels, films which successfully redefined what a spy franchise can do in the post-Berlin Wall and post-Twin Towers era.

Horror films have been faced with a similar dilemma. There’s a danger that werewolves and vampires and other monster staples can feel hackneyed, so what else can be brought to the table? One route is to explicitly explore the horrors that people are capable of inflicting on one another, which was handled with pathos and credibility in Wolf Creek but unfortunately also led to a host of crappy torture porn films such as Hostel and Saw.

But what if you’re still attracted to the old style monsters? Ginger Snaps demonstrated that intelligent ideas about female adolescence could be brought to a werewolf film, in a story that in its own way did for the werewolf what comics writer Alan Moore did for a whole host of horrors in his socially aware run on Swamp Thing.

And now, writer Brandon Seifert and artist Lukas Ketner have reinvigorated the horror comic anew with their title WitchDoctor. In essence, it’s House in a horror setting; the rare conditions explored by the magical medical specialist are vampirism and other forms of monstrosity, framed in a quasi-scientific way that’s a lot of fun to read. The creators have put their demo episode up at www.witchdoctorcomic.com in the hope of attracting publishers, and I wish them luck: it’s a sparky and well-executed concept that’s got the potential to inhabit its own very particular niche with style.

As for how to go about reinvigorating your own concept with the energy of fresher ideas, first look at your core story and decide whether it really does merit the time you’re going to spend on it. If it does, and it’s a new take you’re interested in, check out possible role models by exploring their style and structure: what can you borrow from, say, the new take on Dr Who that will help you to write your proposed security guard drama serial? If it’s family-friendliness, then how exactly does Dr Who manage to attract an audience of whole families, and what of that approach can you emulate in your own script?

This method isn’t, hopefully, about copying: if you learn well from a role model you can incorporate elements of their own success into yours in a way that transcends ripping off. And if not, then so be it; just bear in mind Tom Lehrer’s words: ‘Plagiarise/Let noone else’s work evade your eyes’.

Interesting, the way one programme can be so insightful about some things and clueless about others. Mad Men last night featured two strands, one that left me frustrated at its clumsiness, the other in awe at its insight.

The clunky scene was all about Don Draper encountering his lover’s beatnik friends when he tries to whisk her off to Paris for a week. They reminded me of the hepcat stereotypes found in John Waters’ Hairspray. In that film they were at least intended to have comedy value, which I guess was part of the purpose in Mad Men, but they didn’t register with the same roundedness as Don and the other ad agency characters. I cringed when one of them said, putting on Miles Davis’s Sketches of Spain, “Lets get high and listen to Miles”, but in retrospect maybe that was because it reminded me of a period of my life when I’d do much the same. Please let me not have actually said those words…

Anyway, the beatnik material just didn’t convince me. The clash between daddi-o Don Draper the ad agency square and the hipsters was just too heightened to be credible. Maybe if they’d done it over a longer period of time it would have worked: his counterculture lover is certainly real enough. But the addition of her friends moved the show into using broad brush strokes that didn’t convince this ex-adman and former pot smoking Miles listener.

That was all made up for in a beautifully portrayed sequence with Salvatore, the gay art director. I’ve not caught all of the episodes to know exactly what’s been happening with him, but we know that he’s gay and – clearly in 1960 America – closeted. What I didn’t know was whether he had any kind of love life. To which the answer is, sadly, no.

Salvatore ends up meeting a guy in an after work drinking venue, and they go for a meal together. Nothing unusual about that, and that’s exactly the point: the way for two men to get together in a culture that frowns on homosexuality is to normalise what they’re doing. So while the surface is all about two regular guys chewing the fat, the power of the writing and performance was in the undercurrents.

The longer they were together, the more clear the attraction became, though the talk was still fantastically elliptical. And Salvatore was comfortable with things being that way – in the world of possibility, of fantasies as sure as the ones he helps craft at the ad agency – until his dining partner makes the briefest physical contact with him, touching his hand and drinking from his glass. He makes it clear – or at least clear enough to the viewer, there’s still no direct mention of what’s on offer here – that Salvatore and he could be an item. And Salvatore just can’t cope with it: confronted by the reality of the situation he longs for, he crumples.

For me, the effect was heartbreaking. But maybe for an older gay viewer, the scene was just as clichéd as the beatnik stuff was for me. I think not though: there was a level of emotional conviction about this scene that worked beautifully (if tragically) quite possibly because that same interaction is still being played out somewhere in the world countless times every day nearly fifty years later, despite homosexuality being something that’s a lot more open now.

Getting the right title makes all the difference. No Country For Old Men tells you that this is going to be about more than a killer with an unusual modus operandi: no, this is a film that has a worldview. There Will Be Blood is a stark title that prefigures not just the blood within a film about the early days of the oil industry, but all the blood that has been spilled since in the pursuit for oil. Close Encounters Of The Third Kind refers to a classification of the type of UFO sighting that the film is about, and conjures up an air of mystery even before the poster is seen.

And then there are other titles, that don’t say or do a whole lot, even though they’re sometimes attached to good films. Michael Clayton could be a VAT inspector or a vet: lucky for all of us he turned out to be played by George Clooney in an excellent thriller. Trainspotting was a brave choice of title for the film it was attached to, and worked because when you did encounter it, it was on an iconic poster that clearly didn’t refer to Intercity 125s.

I’ve come up with some good and some less good titles for projects over the years. Recently I was developing a story that I really wanted to call Pad Thai for reasons that make all kind of sense, and because I like the sound. Only, naming your film after a foreign dish, when that film is low budget and probably won’t get much marketing if it gets made, is probably an unwise move. The alternative I came up with is workable, but not nearly as memorable.

Perhaps the canniest title I’ve come up with is for my series about drug workers, The Sharp End. That references the edgy world in which the drug workers operate, while also alluding to injections, and some people will also pick up a reference to ‘sharps’. Spot on, I think. And the pilot script is titled Blue Tuesday, which is half a skit on the song Blue Monday, and also a real term used by some drug workers (Tuesday is when heavy ecstasy-users will feel at their worst after a weekend of partying).

For some reason, writers of television shows often reference song titles in the episodes they’re writing. But what I find really annoying is the pernicious habit of sitcoms being named after hackneyed phrases. Hence In Sickness And In Health, Pushing Up The Daisies, Man About The House: if they can’t come up with a title that shows any signs of originality, it doesn’t bode well for the actual show.

If you’ve got the name right, then you’ve done an important part of branding your film or tv show. Some people get sniffy about the intrusion of a word like branding into the world of screenwriting, but I’m using it for its accuracy. Good writing of any kind has a lot in common with branding: it’s about getting across a core message succinctly, and that’s a skillset that applies both to advertising and scriptwriting. Plus, I like winding people up, so if you feel that way, maybe you shouldn’t have such obvious handles for me to pull.

Last night’s episode of The Bill was even more go-go-go than usual. It was the concluding episode of a two-parter, and the lads and lasses from Sun Hill station were charged with busting an internet paedophile ring before the bad guys could do a live broadcast of an 8 year old boy being abused.

Where The Bill distinguishes itself from other emergency service dramas is in being committed to telling one story at a time. Sure, they often use B stories, but that’s as far as it goes, and B and A stories often dovetail in some fashion. This isn’t like Holby City, where five or so plots jostle for position: what The Bill excels at is mapping out the procedures that the police would use in working on a particular crime.

What you’re getting then, is an under-the-hood look at police operations that, though fictionalised, have at least some basis in reality. This particular storyline was a chance to showcase a unit of police using computers to track down crime – not regular cast members, but relevant specialists whose work was an important part of getting the case closed.

We could get into the realm of whether stories about paedophilia are suitable for pre-watershed viewing, but given the subject is all over newspapers and kids are aware of it, the issue is, I believe, more to do with the way that it’s handled. And on that front, it was all very carefully thought through. The 8 year old victim was of course in serious jeapordy, but at no point did we see anything untoward happen to him, and the story ended with a happy resolution, kiddy reunited with family and evidence enough to bang up a national network of nonces.

Less important than the destination was the journey however, which featured some very strong writing, particularly in the excellent interview scenes. These are a Bill staple, and were particularly well done on this occasion, as a cool customer was broken down with the threat of what would happen to his own children in the event of his non-cooperation. That led the team to an allegedly recovered paedophile, a slippery customer who led the cops on a merry dance and did his best to shake them off his trail. He didn’t bank on the persistence of stalwart Terry, who realised that the man was goading him with the intention of putting him off the trail of a clue, and worked out what it was.

That was where things went wrong for me in an otherwise strong episode: the bad guy had an internet alias drawn from Greek mythology, and what he was trying to keep from Terry’s attention was his Big Book of Mythology. On the entry concerning his namesake, he had ringed a sequence of letters that served as his password for the computer server where all the filth was kept. Hmm.

That device of the password felt a bit clunky, but the pace of the episode was so fast that it wasn’t long before it was forgotten. That meant the audience could instead get the vicarious thrill of the heroes battering down the doors of the house where the live paedo broadcast was coming from, and bringing down a few scumbags in the process.

That makes the story sounds simpler than it was though. There were some interesting stuff featuring the victim’s mother and his hapless junkie uncle, and the dance between Terry and his antagonist was well realised and drew on Terry’s own experience of abuse in an understated way. Very nicely done, and a reminder that The Bill delivers crime drama from a police perspective to a high standard on a regular basis.

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Congratulations to regular reader Griff Phillips on his contribution to BBC7 show Tilt last night. This comes just a while after being a semi-finalist in The Sitcom Trials with his script Art for Art’s Sake, which I did a report on.

So, let’s test a creativity model. Specifically, something known as the SCAMPER grid, which is an evolution of the work of Osborn, who I referred to on a previous occasion. Basically, the idea is to transform whatever your input is by putting it through a process…specifically one that begins with one of the seven letters in the word SCAMPER. Simple, huh?

As our raw material, let’s take last night’s episode of The Fixer. In it, our protagonists were charged with protecting Jude, a drug dealer who doubles as a racist murderer. Only, one of them, wideboy Calum, ended up lamping the thug with an iron when Jude was abusive towards him, and knocked him dead. Whoops. The rest of the episode was spent dealing with the consequences of this mishap, and did so skilfully with some artfully plotted and well scripted twists. For no particular reason, I’m attracted to R, and that can stand for a number of things. The one that I like the sound of is Reverse.

Hmm, where can we take that? Well, how about we reverse the relationship of murderer and victim. That way, a new tale begins to emerge. Our protagonist becomes Jude…only, he ends up killing one of his hosts. Immediately, we’re into interesting territory here. And even though the guy is a racist drug dealing psychopath, there’s the possibility of creating something like empathy for him. How can we increase that connection?

Well, maybe he’s taken this path in life because Jude also has mental health problems – an inability to understand other people and the world combined with a hair-trigger temper helps explain how he killed someone in the first place. And if we have Calum taunting Jude over something he’s sensitive about, that’ll explain how he comes to kill him. At which point a second Reversal comes into play – in the episode, Calum killed Jude in response to being taunted about the only photo Calum has of himself with his mother. We can do something similar – Calum teases Jude about his family, all of them crims, and that causes him to flip and kill Calum.

OK, I’m liking the sound of this. Violent psycho Jude is put under protection for political reasons, and in the process ends up killing one of his protectors. Only, the reason he’s under protection in the first place is because he’s a pawn in a bigger game. And now he’s pissed off the people who were looking after him as well as whoever he’d annoyed enough to need protection in the first place.

Anyway, you can see where this is heading: there’s plenty of meat here for a drama inspired by last night’s episode of The Fixer, but that can work in its own right – and title. All from using the process R for Reverse from the SCAMPER grid. There are lots of possibilities for what the other letters can stand for, and here are some to get you started: Substitute, Combine, Adapt, Modify, Put To Another Use, and Eliminate. But that just makes a column: it becomes a grid when there are several possibilities for each letter. And since this is about creativity, I’ll leave it to you to come up with some of your own.

So, let’s make that two recent shows with sociopaths as protagonists. First, we had Dexter, with a serial killer trying to pass as regular human. And now we have John Mercer, who’s killed his aunt and uncle. But don’t worry, he did it with good intent because they were abusing his sister. Welcome to the morally confused world of The Fixer.

That moral confusion goes all the way round in ITV’s new Monday night thriller series. John is sprung from jail early to do a hit on behalf of a shady ex senior cop who needs someone to do wetwork as part of his anti-crime initiative. He’s partnered in this endeavour by Calum, his cheery chavvy former cellmate, who can get you anything from dodgy computer games to East European firearms. Oh, and Rose, who was there mainly to provide someone for John to sleep with when he thought he was going to escape his new employers, mostly to show how amoral this little crew is. Their leader is an older guy called Lenny who reminded me a bit of Gordon Jackson, and that’s when all this fell into place for me: The Fixer is a noughties version of The Professionals.

Way back when, The Professionals ran with the police, and did manly things together to fight crime. Only, we’re living in a different world now. At any rate, the Daily Mail would have us believe that’s the case. And The Fixer is proof positive of my theory that one way to develop primetime ITV drama is to pretend that the Mail is true, and write programmes that respond to its agenda. Hence, last night, we had a checklist of Mail reader fascinations. Crime getting out of hand so the police can’t control it. Check. East European migrants. Check. The need for capital punishment, in the form of gun squads controlled by rogue senior cops. Hmm, not sure that’s Mail editorial yet, but check anyway. Young men in need of ASBOs to control them. Check. A soupcon of child abuse. Check. Women behaving like ladettes. Check.

Thankfully, the element of formula is only there on second investigation. When you’re actually watching it, The Fixer feels fresh because it’s very well written, and astutely cast. The dialogue in particular is a delight, particularly the banter from wideboy Calum, who can’t understand why John isn’t pleased to be out of choky and behaving like a member of a South American death squad. There was a lovely exchange to establish that John is a bright guy, which actually managed to touch on Schrodinger’s Cat without making me cringe, since it’s usually a case of the writer showing off and not understanding it. Here, it actually worked, and sounded in character, and that deserves a prize of some kind.

The story hit all the beats you’d expect it to in the circumstances. After doing his hit, on a nasty piece of work who thinks he’s above the law but didn’t bank on being assassinated in a toilet, John tries to get out of the situation he’s in. He makes a bolt for it, via sleeping with Rose and nicking her money and bank card, and thinks he’s got away with it, until it transpires that Rose is working for Lenny too, who was three moves ahead the whole time. Back to square one, and episode two. I’ll be watching again, because if the scripts are as refreshing as this first one was, The Fixer is shaping up to be a contender for ITV’s best new thriller for a while, with enough lethal vigilante action to keep Mail readers happy, and sufficient moral ambiguity and smart dialogue for those of us who like to think we’re above summary justice.

I watched Breaking Into Tesco thinking I was going to learn something about supermarkets, and realised I was actually watching a documentary that was relevant to writers pitching for television and film. And the more I watched, the unfunnier that comparison got, though there were some fascinating moments along the way.

The show followed a group of people who reckoned they’d got the culinary chops to get their home devised recipes onto supermarket shelves, and it traced their progress over a few weeks as they went from having a dream to pitching their product.

Starting with four people, by the end only one was standing, and I’m pleased to say I was with her all the way. First casualty was a woman who’d developed something she called, if I recall correctly, a hotpot foot, which was a Lancashire hotpot that for some reason was entombed in pastry so that it was half-pastie. An unclear concept in other words, and she was the first of the contenders to leave the field.

That left three players. A man who was pitching all his hopes on cherry ravioli. A woman who reckoned she’d come up with a superhealthy muffin that absolutely everyone could eat. And a Malaysian woman who wanted Brits to pick up a pot of her curry noodles for lunch instead of a sandwich.

Cherry ravioli. It doesn’t even sound right, does it? I have experimented with sweet pasta on a menu, a chocolate one, and wasn’t particularly impressed. And the guy couldn’t even make decent pasta until he was coached into tripling the number of eggs he put in to give it a decent silky texture and golden colour. Anyway, he struck me as a bit of a chancer – he was a theatre director looking for something that would make him some money while he was resting. And he was the next one to be gone, still reckoning he’d got the best idea.

And then there were two. Face it, someone who’s trying to make something that’s not only good for you, but can be eaten by their freakish nephew who’s allergic to everything, is not going to win you over as much as the person who puts you at the top of their list. Which is why the muffin was never going to bowl anyone over unless it was indeed used to topple wickets etc, which frankly it looked like it could be. Meaning the nice Malaysian woman, the only one who was cooking anything that looked like food, got to win – or at least get through to the next round, when her home cooking will become factoryfied.

Remember what I was saying about the metaphor though? Or maybe learnings transferable to another context would be putting it more accurately. Because it struck me that what the cooks were learning was just as appropriate to anyone who reckons they’ve got something that the public should be watching. That would include me, and a good few of you too.

Let’s look at the losers first. And you know, there’s still something about a hotpot foot that doesn’t feel right to me. An object lesson in having a concept that you can actually describe, and a reminder that if you’re going to create a hybrid, for god’s sake give it a tasty sounding name. As for cherry ravioli, there probably is a place for it. Somewhere. But it’s always going to be a minority market, in which case you want to be looking at BBC3 to put it out rather than expecting it to replace Eastenders in the Radio Times.

Which brings us to the final two. A healthy muffin is alright in principle, but altogether too earnest: perfect for a documentary slot on BBC2 or Channel 4 then. Whereas what won the spicy Malaysian dish through was not just its distinct difference, but the fact that its creator was wanting to share something of herself that she was passionate about, that she knew wasn’t out there already, and which will still be there for her even if she doesn’t hit the big time.  Interesting.