There was a news item I snagged for my research files a few years back about a Japanese trend for older people to hire actors to pretend to be family members and come and visit them. Interestingly, having paid all this money for the faux-family experience, typically the grandparents used the time on the meter to berate their pretend kids for not coming to visit them often enough.

That’s a lovely example of what happens when social changes crystallise around a particular group with economic freedoms but not the emotional experience they believe they’re due from family obligations. Societies change, in Japan and beyond, and some fascinating developments are outlined in the book Microtrends by Mark J. Penn with E. Kinney Zalesne.

The book is utterly fascinating, and if you’re at all interested in writing drama you can’t help but see the potential for stories to come out of the wealth of research that’s between its covers. Drama stems from conflict, and this book provides plenty of insight into the lifestyles that some of us are now leading. Cougars are a phenomenon I’d already heard of - successful career women in their 40s seeking younger playmates on their own terms - and this is the book that outlines the social and economic reasons for their existence. As I was reading the chapter on them, I realised that one key character in a story I’m working on could well be defined as a cougar, and the piece on them here usefully helped shape my thinking about who she is and what she does.

What about other subgroups though? Did you know that in America, more than 3.5 million couples are living apart much of the time thanks to having jobs far enough apart that the sensible thing is to maintain separate households? Think of the potential for stories that emerge straight from that fact. How do you keep a relationship alive when you’re spending so much time apart? Does absence make the heart grow fonder, or are evenings away a temptation to stray?

Further afield, 14% of marriages in South Korea were to foreigners in 2005, compared to 4% in 2000. A little poking around into that statistic, and you’ve got the makings of a film: you could feasibly have 2 marriages to foreigners within one family, and the upsets and surprises of being wedded to a European or American could provide plenty of story fodder.

A third of American cosmetic surgeons are dealing with requests to do work on both partners in couples, and the number of mother and daughter combos wanting assistance is increasing. And while Asia in general is anti plastic surgery, Korea has 1200 plastic surgeons, 300 more than California. Clearly something interesting is happening in Korea at the intersection of marrying foreigners and getting cosmetic surgery, and film is a good way to tell the story.

The above examples are just a few pulled out of a fascinating book. I’m all in favour of circulating widely to get experience of different social worlds, and Microtrends is a way of supporting that attitude with research breaking down trends around the globe into statistically significant social groups. If you’re at all interested in telling stories about the world we live in now, and the one that’s round the corner, I highly recommend that you pick up a copy of this book.

If The Visitor is the best that liberal filmmaking has to offer, the right wing populism implicit in so many Hollywood features has nothing to fear. It’s a shame, because Tom McCarthy’s new film (he also directed the sweet and subtle The Station Agent) seemingly has a lot to recommend it, on paper at least.

It’s the tale of an uptight academic widower, a specialist in international affairs, whose life is transformed when he encounters a Muslim couple. Were this a Tony Scott film, the transformation would be because they get him to swear allegiance to Allah after tying him up and dunking him in oil (politics, see?). But no, this is all about the slow alchemy that occurs when the academic is brought out of his shell by the erotic rhythms of a djembe drum.

The djembe is played by the male Syrian half of the Muslim couple, who are in America illegally as far as the authorities are concerned, and who turn up just at the moment you expect them to in the film. Which is one of its problems: I was a minute or five ahead of all of the film’s turning points, except the bit when a hovercraft full of liberal mavericks turned up to bust the Muslims out of their corporately owned detention centre. Turns out that was the ten minutes of the film I was asleep for, but damn if it wasn’t the most exciting part of the whole thing.

Actually, the corporately owned detention centre had cropped up before I nodded off, and it was one of the more effective aspects of the film. Sadly though, this is a film that has its heart in the right place, but thinks too small. An ageing academic is loosened up by his contact with a brown skinned percussionist, and the American government intervene to spare him the problem of having a houseguest outstay his welcome. That’s pretty much it. OK, at least we’re spared the big budget version of the story, where he quits his academic post and goes on the road with a Santana cover band populated by quirky seniors (The Bucket List meets School of Rock: I can see it happening, what with the lure of the grey dollar…). But it seriously would have helped the script (also written by McCarthy) for some more imagination and a sense of the epic to be brought into play.

What ultimately failed to convince me about The Visitor was its commitment to liberal politics instead of messy human realities. The academic is not attracted to the djembe player’s wife. The Muslim couple do not exploit his friendship. The academic’s field of study is international affairs, which far too neatly mirrors the film’s concerns. And so on. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with the choices made, just that together they’re too obvious a selection. Result? A film that will only ever preach to the converted. Great for making white liberals feel better about themselves, and that they too might one day play drums with an exotic refugee, but in every other respect a film that consistently pulls short of really engaging your emotions because of the safety of the choices made at every step of the filmmaking process.

There are creators in all fields who prefer creativity itself to be something unexamined, for fear that looking under the hood of what they get up to will disturb their ability to actually do it.  Not a theory I subscribe to: I’m very much of the opposite inclination, happy to look at the processes which may underpin my ability to write.

I like to see my attitude as part of a lineage which includes seminal creators such as Miles Davis and Brian Eno (and no, that doesn’t mean I believe I’m as ‘good as’ them).  Miles started off as a sideman in the bop era, before pretty much inventing cool jazz, and then reinventing himself a few other times.  He did so out of a desire to keep moving forward, not getting stuck in his or anyone else’s cliches.  As a result, it’s hard to hear the connections between, say, Kind Of Blue and On The Corner.  The former sounds accessible enough, a masterpiece of melodic group interplay.  The latter baffled people on its release, and only in recent years has it been reappraised in the light of its twin influences: experimental composer Stockhausen and funk maestro Sly Stone.  Personally, I love both disks, but even if you don’t it’s hard not to be impressed by Davis’s determination to keep his sound fresh.

Brian Eno takes that determination to experiment one step further with the Oblique Strategies cards he co-developed with Peter Schmidt.  They’re designed to keep the recording process alive when things get stale, giving gnomic instructions such as ‘What would your best friend do?’ and ‘Honour the error as a hidden intention’.  OK, maybe hard to imagine such processes being employed now that Eno is working with Coldplay, but listen further back to his solo albums or collaborations with Robert Fripp and David Byrne and you can hear a restless intelligence at work, navigating uncharted territories that would later be marked out as whole new genres of music.

What this has to do with writing is my conviction that writers should look in any and every possible direction when seeking inspiration and guidance.  Read Steven Pinker on language and thought.  Study Tarot for interesting ways to look at character and structure.  Pore over graphic novels for new possibilities in visual storytelling.  Talk to people outside of whatever social circles you usually move in to keep your antennae alert to difference.  Your job is to output writing, and its uniqueness will be determined by the range of your input.  There’s no shortage of writers out there who’ve studied with Robert McKee: how about instead soaking up all you can about hypnosis, anthropology, scuba diving, the tattoo business? 

I’ve not done a screenwriting MA and am perhaps stubbornly proud of the fact that whatever I’ve learned and accomplished I’ve done by doing it my way.  Perverse maybe, but it makes a difference.  OK, it’s taken me longer to make some connections than it otherwise would, but the particular path I’ve taken has been fascinating and absorbing, even on its darkest days, and I wouldn’t swap it for anything.  For me, perhaps the biggest lesson I’d pass on about writing is simply captured in the phrase ‘be where the difference is’.  By which I mean stay restless, tune in to what is most likely to take you off your own map and into the bit that reads ‘Here be dragons’.  History tells us that dragons are unlikely to have existed, but the pursuit of them - well, that’s a grand tale…

The premise of Bonekickers - that archaeologists discover evidence that seriously unsettles the accepted version of the past - is one I was perfectly happy to accept. And that fact that it was brought to us by the people who devised Life on Mars was potentially promising. I was never as ardent a fan of the latter as many: I thoroughly enjoyed the Gene Hunt bits, but frankly they could have come out of Viz.

Anyway, what really annoyed me about the Bonekickers pilot episode was being told what to think about the characters. One expert introduced another as ‘Google with a beerbelly’ and that was supposed to pass for characterisation. Only, in my book at least, characterisation is based on behaviour that leaves a conclusion in the viewer’s head, not a summation of that person delivered by another character. So that annoyed me. Then it happened again, and I realised this was no accident, but an intentional attempt to give ersatz characterisation that was unearned by what I was actually seeing. And that bugged me.

Which isn’t to say there wasn’t any characterisation going on. There were a few stereotypes in evidence, mostly in the form of a media academic who wrote books about sex in history that were adapted for Channel 5, and that clearly made the author an enemy. The heroes were our boys and girls in the trenches, with trowels and, err, spectrographic analysis machines. And if they weren’t larger than life enough, there are also some descendants of the Knights Templar running around, and I have a horrible idea that the whole thing is going to develop into some kind of Da Vinci Code scenario. Which is fine: once I sussed that, and had tired of wincing at the sub-CSIisms and clunky dialogue, I stopped watching and instead put on a DVD of some sublime live music and had a fantastic evening.

So, what to make of all that? Well, I’m pleased that the BBC is spending money on something that isn’t an emergency service drama. That’s definitely a good thing. I’m less pleased that they went to the purveyors of one left field hit to find another, when there are any number of writers and production companies out there who could have come up with something else. Or maybe they did go that route, and weren’t happy with what they came up with. I’d be fascinated to read the brief for what became Bonekickers anyway, and see if anyone else came up with anything for it.

Overall then, 10/10 for trying, 3/10 for execution. I seriously doubt that I will be watching future episodes of Bonekickers. And I do hope that someone, somewhere, hits the bullseye in terms of delivering a post-watershed hit for a large audience: I appreciate it’s not an easy task.

So, what makes you scared? Venturing into the dark? Noises that you can’t explain? Zealots? Fucking enormous monsters with sucking tentacles? All of these and more are to be found in The Mist, Frank Darabont’s third outing with a Stephen King adaptation after The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile, and his first on the author’s home ground, horror.

It’s refreshing to see a horror film with a moral centre to it, and that’s what raises The Mist above most horror features you’re likely to see. A bunch of random Americans are trapped in a supermarket in the mist, and something is out there. More than one something in fact. And the longer they stay in the supermarket, the greater the tensions within the group. Consistently, it’s what people do that provides the real scares within the story: there are creatures sure enough, but it’s easy to claim that they’re acting by instinct. We’re supposed to be the ones with the capacity for reason, and that’s the first thing to go when people are under pressure.

We’ve all been in situations where things have got tense with the people around us. But we’re usually able to leave those situations, claiming other engagements or priorities. Part of King’s simple genius in this story is that there is nowhere to go…except into the unknown, about which the one thing that is known is that it’s highly dangerous out there. Imagine a dinner party with a high complement of arseholes, and the only way you can leave is to face a pack of werewolves while you’re armed with just a fire extinguisher. That’s pretty much what the characters in this story are faced with.

What with the setting being a supermarket, and there being a cross section of people there, it can’t help but feel like a microcosm of America itself under threat. And, true to life, the scariest part is when a good chunk of the people there fall under the spell of a deranged evangelist who perceives what’s happening as the realisation of all the really messed up Ray Harryhausen/Michael Bay style stuff that the Bible promises at the End of Days.

The protagonist and a few of the saner people there escape the supermarket rather than be stuck there with the zealot, driving through the mist and the monsters it contains, hoping to find an end or an answer. They come across neither. And what happens instead has to be one of the bleakest conclusions to a film I’ve seen in a long time. Which perhaps explains why the film is showing just twice a day at the cinema where I saw it, and was only selected at all because of the persistence of the film programmer at the cinema.

If that’s the case, that makes things bleaker still: are we so desperate for screenings of the film version of Sex and the City and Kung Fu Panda that we can’t stomach a film with some real intelligence and an unpopular viewpoint? Hopefully not: the recent success of No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood demonstrates that there is a taste for grown up films with bleak conclusions, but maybe in the summer months we’re expected to subsist on a diet of vacuous blockbusters. And that really is a horrific thought…

Tonight’s episode of Dr Who, the season finale, was a joyous confirmation of Russell T Davies’s status as the show’s reinventor. The key is in his regeneration of an old franchise that had gone to seed in the hands of people embarrassed to be charged with running a science fiction show for all the family, and the way it’s now positioned front and centre at the heart of BBC1’s role as a national and international broadcaster.

Make no mistake, in these days of shows tailored to demographics, and a BBC determined to establish a foothold in every conceivable social grouping, Dr Who is a hugely important series. While everyone else is talking narrowcasting, Russell has managed to reaffirm the importance of television as an experience shared across generations and subcultures.

Not only is Dr Who a show with a mission, it’s one with a message. It’s a series about the future of our species, and at a time when we’re bombarded with bulletins about global warming, economic downturn, intolerance and the rest, Dr Who is pointing to a multi-ethnic polysexual future in which difference is accepted and every individual can make a difference. A bit Pollyanna-ish perhaps, but I’d rather the next generation were growing up with that as a vision than whatever they’re gleaning from a diet of Resident Evil and Happy Meals.

OK, so every episode has not been one of unalloyed success, and some of Russell’s scripts have been among the clunkiest since the show has reappeared. But when he does well, he does better than well, and this evening’s barnstormer was an example of why Russell T Davies deserves whatever accolades can be sent his way.

In 65 fabulous minutes, the series finale managed to combine a thwarting of a(nother) Dalek plan to defeat the Doctor and destroy the universe with a whole bunch of subplots relating to the extended family of companions and chums that he has accumulated since coming back to our screens. Everyone got their moment, from swashbuckling bisexual Captain Jack to Bernard Cribbins, in his role as Donna Noble’s grandfather. And Donna got the biggest moment of all, which fully justified her surname: Everywoman became Wonder Woman, if only for a short while, before the cosmic clock was reset and all returned to normal. There’s nothing more noble than a sacrifice like that, and sacrifice is what Dr Who runs on.

Oh, and Rose came back, had to return to her parallel world, and did so in the company of the Doctor, or at least a half-human iteration of The Doctor, who’ll be able to settle down and live and love and die with her as a mortal. What more could you ask for? You can’t accuse Davies of skimping on emotional scenes, and he relished every opportunity to shoehorn them in: anyone who watched the show without a tear coming to their eyes at some point is a Cyberman, for sure.

Juggling those emotional pay-offs with the structural demands of the plot was a hell of a feat, and demonstrated Davies’s abundant skill as a writer at the same time as getting across his underlying belief that quality drama can be life-affirming…too many people mistake misery for seriousness, and if Davies demonstrates anything it’s the power of truly popular drama to touch the lives of its audience.

Where the dynamic of art and society is concerned, I’m very much of the belief that art can have social value. Not that all art should seek to have social merit, but that it can absolutely be a valid part of the debates that society has with itself about issues affecting some or all of its members. Today’s Guardian features two stories where art and politics have intersected with interesting results…

Over in America, Indiana teacher Connie Heermann has been using the book The Freedom Writers Diary, filmed recently with Hilary Swank, to inspire a class of underperforming teenagers. The stories it contains are written by young people from the inner city, whose lives have been turned round partly as a result of their creativity. And, guess what, it contains some swearing. Despite getting the assent of 150 parents to using the book, one of the school’s board members objected to some of the more potty-mouthed content, with the result that Connie has been suspended from her job without pay for 18 months, and the book effectively banned from the school.

I was lucky enough to have had an English teacher with Connie’s vision. We were bored to tears by the first few pages of Stevenson’s The Master of Ballantrae, and responding to our agonies he went and got us Kes instead. It was a breath of fresh air, and reading something concerning the life of a boy our own age living in what was recognisably our own world was a liberation. I’m pretty sure there was a bit of swearing in there too, but thankfully the school board never intervened. That same teacher was passionate about the work of George Orwell, and it’s maybe because of that baptism in socially engaged prose by a committed and articulate advocate that I became fascinated by the interaction of the world and the writer.

It’s always interesting when an interest group claims to be unfairly represented by a work of fiction, and this week it’s the turn of that underprivileged bunch, barristers. Their bone of contention is the excellent series Criminal Justice, which unfortunately for them is written by one of their number, Peter Moffatt, who could be fairly said to know a thing or two about the horsetrading that goes on in the legal system.

Timothy Dutton, the head of the bar (which itself is an interesting choice of language to describe what is in effect a cartel for bewigged justice dispensers) claims that Criminal Justice in no way, shape or form resembles the way that yer actual barristers conduct yer actual law. And you’d like to think he’s right, what with the tactics used by the show’s barrister to stall, to persuade, and bamboozle its youthful protagonist.

Unfortunately, there’s a wealth of evidence to suggest that this portrait is in fact highly representative of what goes on in Britain’s legal system, and that Dutton is flipping his wig about someone with inside knowledge writing about it in a show that’s attracted respect in part for the authenticity of its detail. Funnily enough, there have been no complaints from jailbirds about the portrayal of the brutal anthropology of incarceration. Sure, as Moffatt acknowledges, he’s writing a piece of television drama that is enthralling and entertaining, but there’s no denying the research that’s gone into it.

Where these two stories are concerned, I’m hoping there’ll be more to come. It’d be lovely to think that public outrage could help Connie Heermann get her job back from the knuckle-draggers who took it from her. And I’m sure further elegantly worded asides will be exchanged between Peter Moffatt and his former lords and masters about Criminal Justice, which continues until the end of the week.

So, I got round to seeing Wanted, with a writer friend who I have occasional ‘man dates’ with where we go and see films together that no self-respecting woman would be seen at. And so far we’ve picked on films that have their origins in comics, what with the pair of us being comics geeks. Only, after Wanted I’m left wondering why studios persist in going for the big whizzbang kind of comics, when the medium has so much more to offer that could bring something fresh to the screen…

I’ve not actually read the series that Wanted is based on, having very mixed feelings about its author, Mark Millar. He did a pretty fine job on The Ultimates for Marvel, reinventing some of the company’s core characters for a new cine-literate generation, but I find his grandstanding hype and mixed-up politics put me off much of his other work. Plus, there’s the feeling that he’s better at the big shocking concept than the actual delivery.

The idea behind Wanted is simple enough: what if you found out you weren’t just an average citizen, but had amazing abilities, and could use your powers to shape the destiny of the world? Classic adolescent powertrip stuff in other words, and that’s pretty much the film in a nutshell. Beyond that, it’s spectacle piled on top of spectacle, connected by some frankly ludicrous ideas. Trains crashing into canyons while people fight on board. Secret mind powers that allow you to bend bullets round corners. A lorryload of rats wired up to explode the baddy’s base. The baddy’s base itself, to all intents and purposes a castle in a previously overlooked medieval quarter of New York. Riffs from Fight Club and The Matrix recycled blandly like the soundtrack’s generic guitar attack. It’s all kind of fun at the most superficial level, but five minutes after it had finished we were discussing something else entirely, since the whole was utterly devoid of content.

All is not lost though. There are some fabulous comics out there coming to the screen sooner or later, and the one I’m particularly keen to see is Y: The Last Man. Brian K Vaughan’s series for Vertigo is now available in full as ten trade paperbacks, and there are more ideas of consequence in there than have troubled Millar for his whole life.

The core concept is that one man and his pet monkey somehow survive an apocalypse which wipes out all other males of every species. It’s a big dumb B-movie conceit, and Vaughan knows how to write action-packed stories with cracking cliffhangers. But he also knows how to populate them with characters you care about, and ideas that drive stories which zig when you think they’re going to zag, and consistently pulse with intelligence regarding issues of gender, politics, and the practicalities of living in a post-apocalyptic world.

Don’t get me wrong. I have nothing against action blockbusters and in particular ones based on comics. I absolutely loved Iron Man, and am really looking forward to Christopher Nolan’s next Batman film. But there’s an awful lot of chaff out there that could be replaced if studios forgot about looking at the big names in comics and searched around some more for quirkier talent.

And maybe that’s starting to happen: Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely’s stunning animal action escapade We3 is coming to a cinema soon enough, with Morrison himself writing a script that’s received considerable acclaim from those who’ve read it. Andy Diggle and Jock’s excellent political thriller Losers is on the way too, or was when I last heard anything. Let’s hope those films do their source material justice, and maybe even send people from the cinemas to book shops or comics stores to pick up the stories that inspired the films.

Writer Robert Anton Wilson once posed an interesting question along these lines: what does it say about our society that we have so much drama about the police on television, and so little about landlords? Given the plethora of crime drama on our screens, it’s a valid question to raise, and much of it is anodyne stuff indeed, holding out the promise that the boys and girls in blue will keep us safe from harm, and giving vicarious immersion in supposedly dangerous subcultures.

All well and good for what it’s worth…but then something different crops up and forces you to look at crime drama anew. American shows The Wire and The Shield have done a fine job at exploring crime and punishment in more complex ways, and now BBC1’s all-week special Criminal Justice is performing a similar function.

Interesting that the series is written by a former barrister, Peter Moffat: his immersion in the actual legal world, rather than genre television, was very apparent. The wealth of compelling detail, about how people conduct themselves in and around a criminal case, had a feel of absolute authenticity that’s lacking in shows like The Bill, keen as it is to put a rosy smile on the face of police operations. Here, instead, we saw cynical cops and can’t-be-bothered-cops, and the script felt that much more alive and credible for them.

At the heart of the story is a young man, Ben, who may or may not have killed a young woman, Melanie, who waltzes into the cab that he’s borrowed from his dad to go and see a mate, and which they then travel to the seaside in. Melanie is very much the dominant figure, and it’s her house they end up at, and specifically her bed, after an evening of ecstasy, tequila shots, and knifeplay. It simply shows the effect one charismatic person can have on another less sure of themselves, and on this occasion it ends in tragedy.

It was a joy to watch a piece of intelligent drama that drew from reality and presented it simply and honestly. Agendas were apparent, and everyone’s perspective was valid and comprehensible: no cardboard baddies here. The nearest the script got to clunkiness was when the superintendent in charge of the case had a row with his boss about resources. I don’t doubt the facts and tenor of what was said, but it stood out as potted argument for the audience’s benefit in a script that was otherwise free of exposition.

This wasn’t crime drama that relied on forensic detail and esoterically motivated killers: no need for such attention-grabbing tactics. Instead, it was a story about human beings getting caught up in something messy and ugly, and trying to sort it out as best they can. It all made for a refreshing and fascinating hour of television, and I’ll be doing my best to catch the forthcoming installments.

It was getting stuck with a feature treatment the other day that made me realise I needed to be bringing more to it. I was happy with the general feel of the story, very happy with the ending, and happy that I’d devised an opening to it that set the whole story up nicely. Happy happy happy. Only, something was missing. And that something was a particular kind of depth that would enable me to piece together the elements of the story that I was having trouble figuring out. At which point one of the things I’ve learned to do is turn to mythology. Which is not something I have any special expertise in, so I sometimes ask friends who I believe may be able to help out. And that’s when someone came up with the realisation that the story I’m telling has its roots in the story of the Minotaur.

Now, what with myths being told and retold over the centuries, they tend to have several versions available, which can help you pick out what’s particularly relevant to your story, and what’s not so important. And one consistent element of the stories that resonated with me was the character of Ariadne, who gives the hero Theseus a ball of thread so that he can find his way through the labyrinth that the Minotaur lives in. Hmm. In my story, a psychological thriller, the Minotaur is a good way to think about the protagonist’s internal conflict rather than a real beast he has to confront. But the notion that a woman helps him deal with that conflict makes a lot of sense, and was already implicit in the story in the form of a character he meets when he’s at a low ebb. Expanding her role makes all kinds of sense, and for her to present him with a ball of thread works too. And I realised, that too was already present in the story I was working with. She doesn’t give him an actual ball of thread, but she leaves him with something seemingly whimsical that becomes a valuable clue at a later point in the story. Bingo.

Interesting that in looking into the legend, I realised that some of the key elements were already there in the story I was working on. Which if there are indeed only so many stories, is no great surprise. Personally, I don’t believe that there are just so many stories…but I do believe that there are particular patterns of interaction that are ripe for development as stories, and which the ancients got to first.

The other part of the Minotaur story that interests me is what happens later on, which is wonderfully tragic and human and messed up. On the way home, the ship Theseus travels in loses its white sails in a storm, and instead has its black ones raised when the ship comes in to dock. His dad, seeing the black sails, believes them to be a message that his son is dead, and leaps off a cliff, grief-stricken. Powerful stuff. And I’d like to find a way of weaving some of that, somehow, into the tale I’m telling, which has no ships, storms, or sails, but does feature people who, like all of us, misread messages with sometimes catastrophic consequences.