The Inbetweeners - it's all great, apart from the second film

The second movie based on the cult TV classic The Inbetweeners was available on All 4 over last weekend, as such me and my girlfriend in our hungover states settled down to a very weird double bill - the first of which was David Lynch's much-lauded Mulholland Drive.  Quite a double bill indeed.

The Inbetweeners is a cult classic for good reason.  It hit the popular zeitgeist back in the mid 2000s when it attained popularity for its cringingly realistic portrayal of teenage boys and their disgusting foul mouths, foul minds and even fouler behaviour.  Nothing was considered taboo.  The show even invented its own swear word that somehow manages to be even more wince-inducing than any actual profanity.

Of course any successful TV show needs a film, and so it was that in 2011 the original writers of the show penned a feature length episode in which the lads go wild on a classic 'lads on tour' holiday to a Mediterranean island.  The second film followed in 2014, this time in Australia.

The transition from small screen to large is hard to pull off, and where the first film managed it quite well the second struggles hugely.  The point is that you need to have a story to tell, and your characters have to go on a journey.  In 25 minutes of television you can restrict yourself to a short gribly tale of teenage poo and vomit.  However to sit through 90 minutes you need a lot more.  The first movie manages this by having its characters come of age.  They spend their time being themselves and carrying on as they always have, but each end up with the girl they didn't originally lust over, learning along the way that sex and relationships in real life are a million miles from the screwed up fantasy land of their hitherto teenage experiences.  It's called an arc innit.

The second film doesn't seem to even attempt to tick this box of script-writing 101.  Instead we head off to Australia and have crude visual gags about poo and nobs and pissing.  Then each of our characters ends up in the same place as they started at the first film.  The funniest part of the film is a series of digs at fake new-age traveller types who have gone abroad to 'find themselves', but are in fact on a gap year paid for by wealthy parents in Surrey.  Aside from that, the poo-gags you can either take or leave.

It's a classic tale: popular TV series goes on to the big screen to make some money and fucks it up.  Just so happens that in the case of The Inbetweeners got the first film right, and so we had to wait for the second one before they fell back on toilet humour and forgot to tell a story.  The appeal of The Inbetweeners is fairly universal, my Dad enjoyed it when I showed it to him and as far as I can tell there are people between the ages of 20 and 30 who cannot watch it as it's too cringingly close to the realities of their teenage years.  It is a genuinely funny cult classic of its era that I would recommend to anyone who can abide the relentless smut.  Just don't bother watching the second film.

Mad Men

Mad Men is a strange case of a television programme.  When I was first told about it and read reviews I was sure that this was not a television programme for me.  After all, I'm the guy who grew up on a diet of ST:TNG and Red Dwarf, I'm a 1990s X-Files fanboy who enjoys debating the existential nature of Mulder's sister, which Star Trek captain was best and how Buffy the Vampire Slayer should has finished at the end of Season 5. There's literally no reason why a drama series set in a Manhattan advertising agency in the 1960s should appeal to me in any way whatsoever.

Well, it does.  And it's great.  Perhaps because of great storytelling and brilliantly observed characters?  Perhaps it's the way that Mad Men takes us on a journey through some of the biggest social and political upheavals of modern times?  Perhaps because it does this without ever forcing politics on its audience, instead dropping hints and clues through the actions and dialogue of those on screen?  Perhaps it's all these things.  We see people living through momentous events in world history such as the Cuban missile crisis or the assassination of JFK, and though these events are important, the grind of daily life continued much as did at any point in history.

There's a lot in Mad Men for people who want to find it, lots more than just a drama about the life and times of an attractive womaniser in 1960s Manhattan.  It's a drama series that recognises that the lives of people, you know - the stuff we all do day in and day out, are the fundamental building blocks of an interesting story.  Just some of the many themes in Mad Men include sexual equality in the workplace, sexual liberation, changing attitudes towards traditional minority groups, the usurping of an older more conservative generation by a new more liberal one, the advent of mass consumerism... I could go on.

All of it would be a bit boring though without some outstanding characters and people to play them.  The series' main character is ostensibly Don Draper (played by John Hamm), an impossibly well-dressed advertising executive in his late-30s who's mere presence in the room is enough to melt the heart of all but the most hardened of 1960s Manhattan socialites.  He is an incredibly complex character with a hidden past who is idolised by all around him - quite literally all men want to be him, all women want to be with him.  For me though the series is really about women, the liberalisation of sex in society in the 1960s and the generation of the first cracks in the corporate glass ceiling.  In this sense, one could argue that the series' main character is really Peggy Olsen (played by Elizabeth Moss - who was president Bartlet's daughter in The West Wing).  Olsen starts out in the advertising firm as a humble secretary, but as the series pan out she changes considerably as she tries more and more to be like Draper.  She is baffled, angered and entranced in equal measures by the world around her, spending half her time trying to fit into this man's world and the other half raging against the conservatism still inherent in it.

Mostly Mad Men is an excellently observed character drama that's about a society that once was and has now passed - but it was only 50 years ago.  It's an amazing television show that shows once again how Hollywood's best writers all work in TV these days.  Yes - people really did used to drink copious quantities of hard liquor in business meetings and take their clients to brothels.  Only 50 years ago!

And if you're wondering, the best captain in Star Trek was clearly Picard.

Black Mirror - disturbingly brilliant

On Monday evening Black Mirror returned to Channel 4 for a second series of three stand-alone episodes.  The new series follows on from last year's critically acclaimed triptych, which explored ideas about the alienation of humanity through technology, and the self-aggrandisation of traditional and social media.  The series is notable for being darkly comic in places, and just plain dark in others.  The opening episode last year raised the bar extremely high, by creating a wacky story in which a terrorist group kidnap a member of the royal family, and promise to release her only if the British PM performs an act of bestiality live on TV.  Yep, that's right.

Now though it takes someone with the darkly labyrinthine mind of Charlie Brooker to come up with this stuff, it isn't there just for the shock value.  The opening episode is a layered commentary on the nature of 24 hour news, on how the issue of the day is built up to be the be all and end all of news by the dedicated news channels - but is forgotten quickly afterwards.  Though to the people involved, its impacts last for years to come.  It's also about the fickle nature of public opinion, and how the public are as complicit as producers in all the shit that ends up on our TV screens these days.

The second episode of last year's series was my favourite.  It imagined a post-modern version of 'The Machine Stops' in which people live in virtual isolation from one another, interacting through online avatars and working long hours pedalling bikes or playing computer games to an unknown end earning credits to spend on facile entertainment.  The epitome of success in this society is to earn enough credits to appear on an X-Factor style show in which the panel - aka the Twittersphere - judge your act / worth.  To succeed here is to succeed in life, to fail here is to consign yourself back to the treadmill.  It's a wry look at modern popular culture extrapolated to an extreme.  But also it's a warning about a nightmare future where the entirely of culture has been sold out to Simon Cowell and the value of human labour has been diminished to almost nothing.

Monday night's episode was startlingly simple yet extraordinarily powerful.  It felt like a 21st century version of the Twilight Zone as it detailed the story of Martha (played by Hayley Atwell), a woman who loses her husband and seeks solace in the remnants of his life that exist out there in his now-dormant twitter and Facebook accounts.  It's drama and science fiction rolled into one, looking at the potential for technology to help us while at the same time making us less human.

It was bloody brilliant.  I'm looking forwards to next week's episode, something about a woman waking up and finding out she's being hunted by people.  Sounds mental.

South Park - Blame Canada!

South Park came out just as I was first going to university. Since that's almost 15 years ago now I am amazed to discover that it's still going. The other night though I was over at my sister's place and they were watching the new episodes. I had kind of assumed that it had gone off the boil ages ago, but I was informed that the opposite is true - South Park is still going as strong as ever.

South Park is on the surface about crudity, fart jokes and being as un-politically-correct as possible. Dig even slightly below the surface though and you quickly find it's a riotously funny satire. It still has crappily-drawn children doing fart and poo jokes though, which is of course quite a lot of its charm. We watched an episode on Friday that was ostensibly about laughing at people pissing in swimming pools. Beyond the crude hilarity of that though, the episode was a subtle satire on pseudoscience as well as poking fun at the elements of middle America who fear the ingress of 'minorities'.

Eric Cartman sings a song lamenting the minorities in 'his' swimming pool, a song that sent my mind back to South park's greatest achievement - south Park: Bigger Longer and Uncut. To you and me - South Park the movie. The plot of the film revolves around a smutty Canadian cartoon that gets blamed for encouraging children to swear and behave badly. The authorities and parents' groups overreact to the film, declare war on Canada and kick off Armageddon. It's a film that some might struggle to take seriously since it features Satan and Saddam Hussein as a cohabiting couple in hell - but it's satirical gold. The film cleverly lampoons its own potential critics and attitudes towards censorship. At the same time it's a musical - with musical numbers and songs that are pure Broadway. Not least of which is the fantastic 'Blame Canada':



"We must blame them and cause a fuss/before somebody thinks of blaming uuuuuuus" - great lyric. All the songs are on Youtube. In fact, all the episodes of South Park are freely available on the internet. Nice to see that Parker and Stone (the South Park creators) have stayed true to their anarchist roots and shunned the draw of big dollars. Maybe that's why they've retained their creative edge after all these years?

Brings back good memories all this. Has it really been that long since I first went to university?

Dr Who

Saturday was an odd day for me. I got up very late and very hung over after a work night out on Friday. After watching my mates play some football I watched the FA Cup final and decided to watch the Eurovision Song Contest with my friends. Top night in eh? Seriously though, the Eurovision can be quite entertaining once you accept that the music will be dross and put away all the patriotic bullshit. Laughing at Europop with your chums is no bad way to spend an unplanned Saturday night.

Trouble was though, with the cup finishing at ~5:30 and the Eurovision starting at 8, what to do in the interim? Well, turns out that my friends watch Dr Who - so I joined them. It's a long time since I watched Dr Who, even longer since I watched any kind of mainstream Saturday night TV. As a huge SciFi fan I loved the old Dr Who, but was largely unmoved by the 2004 reboot in which Christopher Eccleston took on the role. I watched the first series, but then gave up and never saw any of the series stuff with David Tennant and now Matt Smith.

Saturday night was a revelation.

The episode I watched was titled 'The Dr's Wife' - a stand-alone episode in which the TARDIS exits the universe and for reasons it would be pointless to go into here has its matrix (soul) transferred into the body of a dying woman. Suzanne Jones plays the role of the woman-now- TARDIS, a role which required the meshing of a number of science fiction themes (the machine that's suddenly human, the being that can perceive all time as present, the alien that can't understand humanity) as she portrayed this machine able to speak for the first time. Matt Smith portrays the doctor is an unhinged genius - which of course all actors have tried to do. Smith looked like he was in control of the role though, like the way that Tom Baker always was.

The programme was a love story between a man and his machine - now a woman in the flesh. A story nearly 50 years in the making which incorporated humour, love and horror into a brilliant steam punk setting which (I'm reliably told) moved the series plot arc on at the same time. This is not the stuff of the bad old days of rubber monster suits and female companions screaming, this is the stuff of the modern age of superbly-plotted television drama a la HBO. It probably helps that the BBC have allowed the writer to reign supreme here, Neil Gaiman (yep - the Neil Gaiman) wrote the episode.

Whatever the BBC have done in the intervening years between the Ecclestone reboot and 2011, they've done it right. For anyone out there who thinks like I did, that either Dr Who is a kids show or that the new stuff just isn't as good as what came before, I implore you to think again. That 40 minutes of television on Saturday night was probably the best BBC production I've seen in years. I've seen the light and am converted - bring on the DVDs!

Game of Thrones - At Bloody Last!

I could barely contain my excitement last night as I waited for 9pm to roll around. Once again being a satellite TV subscriber was about to pay off, because last night was the night when after some years of anticipation the HBO adaptation of George R R Martin's 'Song of Ice and Fire' series was going to start.

Book one of the series - Game of Thrones - has been made into a 10 part HBO TV series and is being screened on Sky Atlantic over the next few months. 'A Song of Ice and Fire' is an epic fantasy series set in a medieval European world in which characters whose motivations lie somewhere between the Borgias and the Sopranos scheme and betray each other for control of the Iron Throne - the seat of power for the realm of Westeros. I am hesitant to describe the series as belonging in the fantasy genre, since to do so evokes expectations of Elves and Hobbits and orcs running amok. Not a bit of it. The fantasy elements in 'A Song of Fire and Ice' are almost always alluded to or described by the characters therein as part of ancient myths that have no impact on the real world. Battles are fought without wizards or fantastic creatures, the cut-throat world of political machinations is fought over with words, blades and poisons rather than magic rings and spells. The characters in this world don't believe that the fantastical creatures of the Tolkien cannon exist - so when something otherworldly does finally happen, it has a huge impact.

What all this means is that the stories told are closer to what happens in The Wire than anything that would normally sit on the fantasy shelves as a book store. With a huge ensemble cast, plots that carry over multiple books and a healthy disregard of the lives of any and all characters, when reading the books you never know when a main characters is for the chop or when something said in an aside 500 pages ago is going to came back and be significant. Which makes it perfect material for HBO.

Last night's opening episode was dark and did as good a job as I could have hoped at introducing the characters that - with luck - will put the whole series up on the small screen (assuming George RR Martin ever gets around to finishing it - book 5 of 7 is out in July). Sean Bean and Michelle Fairley look every bit like the tortured souls Ned and Cat Stark should be given the strife and violence they've lived through. Lena Headey did a great job of not appearing to be the power-hungry schemer that fans of the book know Cersei Lannister to be, a few nice surprises coming up for anyone new to the series. Not just the casting, but also the sets, costumes and pacing were just about spot on - nothing cheesy, nothing that looks like it'll be dumbing the plot down for TV.

Maybe I'm too much of a fanboy to have a sensible opinion of this series (when Sean Bean first said "Winter is Coming" I gave an internal cheer - such is my fanboy-ness), but I thought this first episode was bloody great. I don't see why the series wont continue to be true to the book and bring its Machiavellian characters to a new audience. Hopefully I'll be able to post loads more about it as it progresses.

Glenn Beck

I don't know if many people over here in the UK have heard of Glenn Beck. He is a nutcase right wing conspiracy-obsessed Fox news presenter who has recently been given the sack. Thank Christ for that. Here is John Stewart on the Daily Show (sadly no longer available on More4) royally taking the piss out of Beck's overly-dramatic buddy buddy presenting style and generally applauding his departure from the network.

Indeed. Here for good measure is a clip from Charlie Brooker's Newswipe in which (from ~6:30 mins) he deconstructs Beck's messianic style.



Good riddance.

Monetarist Propaganda

I watched the last 30 minutes of this last night and after I gathered my jaw off the floor I struggled to comprehend the lunatic propaganda that I had just witnessed on the normally-progressive Channel 4. The documentary was a one-sided polemic in which the presenter blamed the latest financial crisis on 'big state' and 'big government'. He held Hong Kong up as a paragon of monetarism, shining a light on everything that works about that tiny city state as an example of the Asian tigers and avoiding all mention of the other Asian tigers who's economies have failed.

He suggested that Hong Kong is a beacon of prosperity and that Britain needs to emulate it if the nation is to return to the 'glory' years of the 18th and 19th centuries. One presumes that by Britain's 'glory years' the presenter isn't talking about when there was no NHS, no right to vote, no women's suffrage, no state pension, child labour, endless wars on the continent, rotten boroughs in parliament, disease, back-breaking hard work and short life-expectancies. I guess he means some kind of rose-tinted view of buccaneering British conquistadors forcing trade agreements on Indian and Chinese natives, waving a Union Jack around on the battlefield and rolling in pound notes in some kind of Jane Austin upper-middle-class fantasy. Just what I don't need.

The documentary produced a long line of vox-pops (exclusively city types and people sitting on right-wing think tanks) who told us that the ONLY way to repay the debt was to reduce taxes, release controls on business and downside government. This brazen hypocrisy on the part of those who created the financial meltdown is so ridiculous and it astounds me how few have challenged it. The program talks of a 4.8 trillion pound national debt in terms of a household debt, the presenter uses the same disingenuous arguments as the government and deliberately misconstrues the truth by equating a national economy to one of a family budgeting its incomes and outgoings. He parrots the government's line about treating this debt as something that has to be paid off by managing outgoings, rather than something that is dealt with by investing in Britain's economic future.

I was heartened to discover this morning that the presenter of "Britain's Trillion Pound Horror Story" is the same guy who recently has produced similar documentaries denouncing environmentalism and fear mongering about genetic engineering. Not a man who's grasp of science is the finest then. But I wonder how many of those who watched this program will go out of their way to discover the presenter's history of misinformation and lies. Few I suspect. However, while programs like this can find a place on a serious television channel during prime time the government's lies about its 'necessary' cuts will continue to be the mainstream.

Boys from the Black Stuff

There's a lot of interest in watching tv series on DVD these days. The trouble with this is that people seem to favour watching the next big thing over watching old classic television. Strangely this is the opposite to films, where the explosion of DVD rental has meant that a whole wealth of classic films are suddenly available to a modern audience. So here's a recommendation to you: go and watch some of the classic BBC television series, and start with Boys from the Black Stuff.

Written by Alan Bleasedale - Boys from the Black Stuff is both a gripping drama and a historical document. It tells the stories of the lives of 5 pavement construction workers ('Black Stuff' refers to asphalt) who are made redundant in Thatcher's Britain of the early 1980s and have to survive the dole queues and social upheavals of the day. The first episode is a feature-length one that sets the scene, the 5 other episodes focus on one of the main characters, looking at how they deal with life after their redundancy.

The series is firmly entrenched in a left wing view of events of the time, but rather than beating the drum about politics it focuses on the lives wreaked by economic policies and invites viewers to draw their own conclusions. Only one character in the whole series is an overt Marxist, and his views are derided as coming from ivory towers by the other characters who - despite largely agreeing with him - insist that he's living in a dream world thinking he change anything.

Instead of focussing on the politics, the series holds a microscope up to the mental anguish of being told that you're 'redundant', of being told that your job (and by extension life) has no further purpose. The men from the Blackstuff are forced into taking low-paid moonlighting work while claiming benefits in order to provide for their families. Several sides of this equation are shown; alienation of employees within the benefits agency is just as rife as those standing on the other side of the desk in the dole queue. The lives of entire communities are torn apart as neighbours fear each other as spies and families break apart under the intense stress of making ends meet.

The series isn't just memorable for its story; there are several outstanding performances including Julie Waters and Michael Angelis in one episode that shows how a loving marriage creaks under financial pressures. Perhaps the iconic image of the series is that of Bernhard Hill's Yosser Hughes imploring people to "... gizza job." It's easy to see why the character of Yosser carries so much weight; Yosser's second mantra is a simple "I'm Yosser Hughes", which he repeats to almost everyone he meets and in the episode focussing on him builds to a crescendo as he finally loses his mind. This desperate expression of individual humanity is so saddening, this was the 1980s, an age in which people were supposed to be expressing individuality through materialistic gain - the reality of which was a suppression of humanity through economic squalor.

It is the final episode of Boys from the Black Stuff which haunts me still even as I write this, in which a character is driven to an inevitable death by the state's uncaring attitude to his inability to work. The people around him know that his death approaches, they make his peace with him and help him to see his beloved Liverpool one final time. The character talks about his work on the docks and how strong and proud he was in the past as fought for what he believed - and his death represents a death of that way of life in the modern world. His funeral is a powerful scene, one in which the guiding hand of the catholic church is rejected by people who see not a caring priest, but someone trying to manipulate people in an emotional nadir. The final scenes of the last episode of Boys from the Black Stuff may appear confusing, but I think that they hint at a working class willingly losing its own power through indulgence and resignation to a position of underclass.

Boys from the Black Stuff now seems more important than ever, what with our new lizard overlords promising us an 'age of austerity'. At the moment it's an dramatisation of one of the toughest periods in the recent social history of Britain, it might not be long before we realise that it was also a portent for the future.

The Prisoner remake

I don’t know if anyone’s seen this, but a trailer for the US remake of ‘The Prisoner’ on ITV last night (I was watching ITV for the football by the way) has got me annoyed. I can think of very few times in which a remake was better or even comparable to the original. Off the top of my head I’ve come up with Battlestar Gallactica – and the original was rubbish anyway.

This new one might have Ian McKellen in it, but it’s not needed. I can’t imagine how this will get anywhere near to capturing the psychedelic spy-ridden angst of the 1960s original. They could try to focus on the fact that number 6 was being held against his will and without trial after resigning his post as a kind of modern parable about Guantanamo and state v individual freedom of choice etc – but the things that made the Prisoner memorable (the big white balloon, the pastel shades, the psychotic dream sequences) will end up looking hokey in the modern era. If they leave those elements out then why call this series ‘The Prisoner’ at all?

Silly people trying to hang on to the coat tails of a classic to make a bit of money. They’d better not mess with the opening titles either, great music.

Spaced - US remake my arse

The Guardian upset me last Thursday by running a piece in its TV blog about the long-dreaded US remake of Spaced. Just watch it, it's awful. No surprise really when you discover that it is the creation of the ridiculously-named self-styled moron of cinema - "McG". Just sod off and die.

Anyway, this started me off watching a couple of YouTube clips of the original Spaced series to cleanse my soul. In case you don't know, Spaced is the genre-defying sitcom that ran for only 2 series (12 episodes) in 1999 and 2000 on Channel 4. It follows the trials and tribulations of Tim and Daisy, a pair of 20-something work-shy miscreants who pretend to be a couple in order to get a flat and try to exist while dodging doing anything that might be interpreted as useful or productive.

Rather than being a series of well-intentioned sketches about losers (as the US series seems to be turning out), Spaced was a razor-sharp sitcom about modern life, about how friendship is becoming more important than family, about fear of growing up and having to grow more responsible. Spaced was also famed for its signature directorial style, which used oddly-timed cuts to provide a somewhat anarchistic feel to the whole thing. Series director Edgar Wright has since gone on to direct 'Shaun of the Dead' and 'Hot Fuzz'.

Spaced defied conventions and showed the contemporary generation X that someone actually understood what it meant to be a 20-something in Britain in the late 1990s. This is a series that is so quintessentially 'British' and of its era that I am always surprised to find that it has exported at all to other parts of the world, a series that managed to explore the ennui of being a person stuck between youth and adulthood as well as looking at the difficulty of building relationships in a modern world where pop-culture is just as important as real life.

Spaced took the concept of paying homage to a new and scary level, the first episode is so densely packed with oblique and obscure references to popular films, books and music that often the actual plot risks getting bogged down in a mire. Thankfully the writers are cleverer than me, and manage to piece all the references and gags together in a way that seamlessly meshes into the plot. Indeed the characters themselves are so obsessed by popular culture that they can see their own lives through it (this seems especially obvious of Tim and his sci-fi obsession).

For me, 'Spaced' is a landmark in British comedy history. It is riotously funny and one of my favourite television programmes. I even created a website dedicated to it while I was doing my PhD. Once again, another reason to stay a student for as long as possible.

Damages - my current favourite TV series

It's quite fashionable these days to watch boxed sets of American television drama. I became a fan of West Wing and The Wire by watching them long after the release of the original few seasons on DVD rental. I generally like to follow the new televisual releases from the states in the hope of stumbling across a new gem. It was therefore with trepidation that I embarked upon watching a new US series - Damages. After all, I had never heard of this before unwrapping the paper on my birthday - how could a series that none of the literati at the Guardian website had ever told me I needed to watch ever be any good?

The first season of Damages is a story told almost entirely in flashback. The opening scene of the series presents us with a tentative glimpse at the present, of a woman running dazed with blood on her hands is being picked up by the police. We cut to 6 months in the past and are thrown into the life of this woman - Ellen Parsons played by Ross Byrne - as she embarks upon her legal career in New York City working under the ruthlessly efficient prosecution lawyer Patty Hughes (Glenn Close). Ellen is immediately put to work on Hughes' biggest case, a prosecution against the super-rich business mogul Arthur Frobisher (Ted Danson). She stars out starry-eyed but soon realises that she is being used by those around her and needs to harden up and play their game.

Far from being a straight drama about a law firm, this is a twisting psychological thriller in which people are used up and spat out by a legal system that cares not for the law, rather it caters to the strengths of the personalities and ruthlessnesses of those who apply it. As the series progresses, small snippets of the 'present' are revealed as the main story edges closer to the time when we know that Ellen's boyfriend will be dead and she will have blood on her hands. What causes these terrible events to happen? How and why is Patty Hughes involved in Ellen's personal life? All questions that are slowly and tantalisingly answered.

Glenn Close is awesome as Patty Hughes, the vicious lawyer and ruthless boss of her own law firm who schemes out the lives of those around her and yet shows moments of weakness when presented with things she knows she cannot control. The first season (all I have seen so far) wraps up most of the necessary loose ends while gathering up those that remain into into an exciting teaser for the next. Clearly the format and plot of the second series is going to be dramatically different, but if the writers of the show manage to tap into the depth of the characters they spent the first season creating I don't see how it can be anything but another astonishing 12 episodes of television.

Watch this space then. If it carries on being as good as this it might be worth an update.

The X Files

In order to be truly great a television series needs great writing, a great cast and great stories; but there's something more that a series having all these things needs to really stand out - timing. When a television series is aired which captures the mood of the moment it can, for good or worse, become a cultural phenomenon. It becomes more than a sum of its parts, it becomes something that embodies an era, something that expands beyond what its creator originally thought possible. There is no better example of this than the X-Files, arriving after the end of the Cold War at a time when international fears of nuclear war were receding, it tapped into a phenomenon of fear of the unknown within, of finding conspiracies within our own governments rather than those perpetrated by enemies abroad. The X Files benefitted hugely from tapping into a cultural phenomenon, how much this phenomenon was fuelled by the show and how much it existed aside from it is hard to say.

The X Files' main plot arc revolved around a huge international conspiracy to cover up the US government's knowledge of the existence of alien life forms. Each week Mulder and Scully would uncover some unexplained phenomenon which would lead them somewhere on the trail to uncovering the plot, but ultimately would be left in the dark with more questions than answers. Alien conspiracies were hardly the only paranormal events that they had to deal with; genetic mutations, ghosts, Artificial Intelligence, monsters, ESP, telekinesis and many more were all part of the show at one point or another. In fact, many of the best episodes were those that dealt with a stand-alone monster of the week rather than the often tedious conspiracy arc.

The X Files was a programme which broke new ground in television. The concept of an episodic drama with a story arc - standard these days - was extremely rare at the time. Television programmes which told a story were often in the form of short mini series (think 'Boys from the Black Stuff') or soaps. Long-running series like the X Files almost always existed on a show by show basis, with the characters existing for the purpose of telling this week's story (for example 'The Avengers'). The first series of the X Files has a lot of stand-alone episodes (and in fact there are many throughout), but as the series matured there was always a feeling that there was a plot moving along in the background.

The series benefited from some excellent acting and a willingness to trust in the intelligence of its audience. Certain episodes dealt with difficult concepts, often with very little explanation, other episodes moved the plot along rapidly, assuming that the audience would fill in the blanks without needing to be spoon-fed. This all meant that quite intricate stories could at times be told, without losing an emotional connection to the main characters.

The end of the X Files was long overdue when the final episode was eventually transmitted. David Duchovny (Fox Mulder) had long left the show, his character has been distilled into two new ones and the chemistry of the final two seasons simply wasn't there. In fact, most of what they did after the 5th series was fairly poor (with one or two notable exceptions). The end of the series in a cultural sense happened with the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centre in 2001, with a new - all too real - enemy to fear, the world seemed less interested in conspiracies at home. Suddenly the X Files made no sense and was doomed to the annals of television history.

This limp ending was a shame, but the first 3 series of the show are still outstanding even for the modern viewer. There's nothing quite like seeing Mulder pick up a newspaper report of something weird happening and then zooming off to investigate while Scully tries to reign him in and stop him getting killed / fired / eaten / abducted by aliens. It's a series which had a place in the 1990s but which is still fantastically engaging, jaw-dropping science fiction.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Buffy the Vampire Slayer is easily the best Science Fiction television programme ever made, and should be high on an all time list of great television of any genre. With a name like that though, and on the surface being about an extra from Beverly Hills 90210 who fights demons, it doesn't sound like it has a lot going for it. So what makes it so special that people have written entire theses about it? What is it that makes me re-watch my DVDs over and over again.

Buffy is science fiction as metaphor taken to the extreme. The best science fiction works as a metaphor for real life, Buffy took that as a basis for everything that happens in the show - and expanded to such an extent that almost every story has a resonance with reality. Some examples. In Buffy, the school (and later work) are literally hells on earth. Buffy worries about what will happen if she sleeps with her boyfriend, so he turns into an actual monster. Vampirism is a metaphor for burgeoning lust and desire, as early as episode 1 a previously nerdy character becomes a sauve, dark and desirable hunk simply by becoming one with the undead.

Such metaphors aren't just played out on a small scale. Entire seasons of the show are taken up by it. The third season (surely the best) is one long bubbling story about hidden identities and inner demons. A character is introduced who is effectively Buffy's alter-ego, other characters come face to face with their own inner demons (sometimes in a quite literal sense) and survive, thus proving to themselves that the teenage fears of inadequacy they harbour are unfounded. Each of the seasons are like this, with hidden depths like a novel, but each containing episodes which stand up by themselves.

Now if all this sounds a little twee or smug, I'm probably telling it wrong, because the story telling on Buffy the Vampire Slayer is almost always in the context of the over-arching plot and it never feels like a 'message' is being forced upon the audience. The trick to doing this appears to be in a liberal use of humour and mixing / breaking genres. Action scenes are sometimes undercut by a great evil being defeated easily while moments which should be portentous with doom are commonly played for silliness rather than gravity. Ultimately the series is more about the characters than the events, and when events are important, it's the impact that they have upon the lives of the characters that we care about the most.

Although the series is well-known for being 'teen', only the first three seasons are set in a school. The fourth and fifth revolve around a university while in the sixth Buffy has a job and in the seventh she takes on the responsibility of a mother. The entire series is effectively a story about growing up, with all the trials that this process entails being explored through the science fiction metaphor.

As if the stories weren't enough in itself, the series is extremely courageous in the way that these stories are told. One episode contains 25 minutes without dialogue, another is a musical, a third deals a character's inner struggle to prove himself - resulting in all the near-apocalyptic 'action' happening in scenes we never see. At the end of the fourth series the 'big finish' episode in which the bad guys are defeated is the penultimate show of the season, the final episode is an introspective dream sequence in which the main characters surreally reflect upon the journey they have taken over the last year - imagine them doing that in 24!

So anyway. Buffy the Vampire Slayer is the best Science Fiction television programme of all time - fact. If you know me and you want to watch it I will eagerly lend you my DVDs.

The West Wing - perfect television

One of the most intelligent television series ever, The West Wing must have been a very difficult concept to sell to the TV executives when creator Aaron Sorkin was first seeking support for the idea. In a world dominated by canned laughter comedies and crime-of-the-week cop shows, a drama which follows the lives of the staff of the White House must have seemed like a ridiculous idea which could never have got off the ground. Sorkin was and remains a fantastic scriptwriter; those who have seen 'A Few Good Men' or 'The American President' know what great dialogue he writes. Clearly someone decided to take a chance on his new idea, let's all be grateful they did.

The West Wing ostensibly follows the life of the US president - a politically middle of the road yet undoubtedly statesmanlike democrat played by Martin Sheen - and his staff as they muddle through a full two terms of governance in contemporary USA. From that description it is obvious that this is a TV series in which one needs their wits. All too often television hand feeds material and plot signposts to the audience; this is never done in the West Wing - something that I found immensely satisfying and kept me coming back for more. Many episodes revolve around a series of loosely connected events with a common theme; the main characters will generally each deal with a number of sub-plots while the main plot (often an arc stretching over several episodes or series) bubbles along influencing what goes on. In a given episode the plots will be thematically connected; and although this can sometimes be cringingly pro-USA, it is almost always done in a way to provide a depth which viewers can find if they want to think about it.

The series gets through a large number of characters, although for the majority of the run there are about 8 main characters who we see in almost every episode - each of which are played by a fine actor who is obviously enjoying the opportunity to act as if in theatre. The West Wing is famous for its long scenes in which actors and extras are expected to hit marks exactly on time as the camera moves through the halls of the White House. This technique - rare elsewhere and never done on such a scale in television - provides the setting with a real sense of gravitas and the characters therein with an air of importance. It also gives the writers a chance to fill the air with huge portions of dialogue; this is not normal dialogue, this is Aaron Sorkin dialogue - a rapid-fire mixture of witticisms and serious debate which could never be possible in real life but which makes you stare at the screen marvelling at the capacity for anyone to speak like that while running down a corridor trying not to look at the camera. It engrosses you and by the end you sit staring at your screen, not sure if you understood everything but absolutely sure that you loved every second of it.

As with real life presidencies, the series doesn't deal too well with the knowledge that it is coming to an end. The 6th and 7th series largely revolve around the campaign to elect a new president (a man based on Barack Obama would you believe). Just like in real life this seems to go on forever and re-examines much of the material covered in the Bartlett election campaign without saying much new. The old characters get sidelined and the introduction of a whole host of new ones cannot compensate. Thankfully the series retains its best non-presidential character (Deputy Chief of Staff Josh Lyman) throughout, but it doesn't stop the plot largely running out of steam long before the final episode.

This aside though, the early seasons of the West Wing are some of the most engaging television ever created. The second half of season 2 for example are driven by a drama which comes to a head in the season finale, even now I struggle to re-watch this without getting a lump in my throat. It's a programme which manages to be funny, romantic, dramatic, interesting, intelligent and crucially never pulls any punches when it comes to estimating the capacity of its audience to understand it. Eventually I'm going to make time to watch the whole lot again from start to finish as I'm sure that there are depths I missed first time around.