Andrew Collins's Blog, page 59

Ooh, you are awkward!

Two new films that might broadly be grouped together as British comedies of manners: Submarine, the much-praised debut of Richard Ayoade (released yesterday), and Archipelago, the second film by Joanna Hogg (out since March 4, if you live near an arthouse). The former actually supplies laughs that are framed in awkwardness; the latter dares you to laugh at the awkwardness on show. Neither could be made about foreigners, nor set in a foreign country, and yet each has a stylistic European sensibility.

Right, that's enough of trying to find threads between them. But I saw them both this week, and they struck me as rooted in similar observational territory. Submarine first, as it arrives on a wave of hype that's gratifying but cannot be lived up to. I have met Richard Ayoade on a number of occasions – and greatly admire his work – and although I'm not going to claim him as a close showbiz friend, he was gracious enough to stop and chat to me when I bumped into him the week he appeared on the cover of Sight & Sound in October, an honour that had caught him offguard and clearly made him feel slightly odd. (Lee Mack and I used to meet up with him in the kitchenette of a soulless office building when we were writing the first series of Not Going Out and he and Matt Holness were writing Man To Man With Dean Lerner; I interviewed him onstage last year at a Bafta event heralding the return of The IT Crowd, where his discomfort at being interviewed became all too apparent.)

His achievement with Submarine, an adaptation of a 2008 novel nobody seems to have read about a Swansea geek losing his virginity by Joe Dunthorne, is immense. From this obscure raw material Ayoade (I'd better use his surname for distancing critical effect) has fashioned a debut that instantly announces him as a talent. It is singular and ambitious and stylised, and draws as much upon the nouvelle vague as it does Gregory's Girl and Adrian Mole. It is well cast and sympathetically scored by Alex Turner, a mate of Ayoade's following his work with the Arctic Monkeys. Comparisons to Wes Anderson have been made, and the remote, episodic, storybook presentation certainly reminds you of the Texan's work.

Craig Roberts and Yasmin Paige are screen-filling young performers, and their gawky, matter-of-fact love affair dominates the story. His expressionless demeanour – an echo of his character Oliver's coldly calculating, self-mythologising inner voice – is an arresting visual, but as a result a chasm opens up between the protagonist and the audience. This is clearly deliberate on Ayoade's part, but it does mean it's hard to become emotionally involved. Sally Hawkins and Noal Taylor do great work with the mum and dad, but, again, it's super-stylised acting, and they verge on caricature. Paddy Considine, whose presence is never anything but welcome in any film, makes his ridiculous self-help guru the broadest of cartoons, and puts you at further remove from the story's heart.

The tricks – the constant allusions to 400 Blows, the camera moves and cine footage actually mentioned in the narration, the fireworks literal and technical – speak of a director whose confidence is sky high, and there are some great gags in the writing and the framing, but if someone saw Submarine and said they felt it was a clinical experience and didn't enjoy it, I wouldn't argue them down. I happened to like it for those reasons, and admired it for its lack of schmaltz or cutesiness, but it won't be for everyone.

Nor will Achipelago, in which a family gather on one of the Scilly Isles (we only know this because they arrive by helicopter with Isles of Scilly written on the side) as the son Edward (Tom Hiddleston) is going away to Africa to in effect do missionary work. Well, it's quite a send off. It's a beautiful setting, but bleak and barely populated, and Joanna Hogg is very keen to show us the difference between the bright light of the natural environment and the darkness of this family's inner life: the cottage they have rented is like a tomb, a gloomy, low-ceilinged place where the table lamps cast only a queasy orange smudge in the corner of a room, even when characters are supposed to be reading by them. (While having a photo taken, Edward is told off for having sunlight on his face. "Sorry," he deadpans.)

It's a quietly audacious trick on Hogg's part, as when we're inside the house with the neurotic mum (Kate Fahy) and bossy, passive-aggressive, also neurotic sister Cynthia (Lydia Leonard), we are desperate to get out. As, seemingly, are they. It's not at the Mike Leigh level of farce, but the tension is palpable. This is not a happy family. The father, who is supposed to be joining them, becomes the Godot for whom they are all waiting. Meanwhile, the benign and calming presence of Rose the cook and Christopher the painting tutor (both played by non-actors – a cook and a painter!) can only alleviate the agony briefly.

It's hell in there. And it's hell because, like all good middle class English people, they don't say what they mean. It's all bottled up so that the resentment can curdle into cancers for later life. You don't blame the dad for staying away. The performances by Hiddleston, Fahy and Leonard, none of whom I recognised, are spotless: authentic, controlled and affecting and if comic, only mordantly so. I've not seen Joanna Hogg's first film, Unrelated - which I understand is also about a holiday – but I must, now. While Mike Leigh plays awkwardness and tension for grim pantomime, Hogg seems content to let the misery and doubt simmer, like lobsters in a pot, slowly dying and perhaps already in a coma. (I didn't invent the lobster analogy, she actually shows lobsters in a pot.)

It seem significant that a) the family choose to convene on a remote island – nominally somewhere foreign, and b) the reason they are here is that one of them is going somewhere far, far away, a place where people are dying of AIDS and might as well be on another planet. These are people who seem uncomfortable in their own skin, in their own social class, and their own country. Is this what the English have become? We who once ran half the world (the father is caricatured as a huntin' and fishin' type, a relic from the age of Empire?) are now condemned to sit around dinner tables, not saying what we mean, burying inconvenient truths, or hinting impotently around them, and building up a head of rage that might go off at any minute. (Edward seems to brighten in the presence of the cook, Rose, but he is also unable to make a connection with her, and sparks a dinner table row when he suggests she should eat with them, while his mother and sister insist she should not, as she's paid to cook for them.)

I found Archipelago grimly spellbinding. Horrible, but hypnotic. And there are no easy answers here either, so don't go looking for them. In, say, Secrets And Lies, the climactic family barbecue is a flashpoint, at which everything comes out, like a boil being burst. Nothing like that here.

So, one's about the Welsh rather than the English, but both Submarine and Archipelago trade on social awkwardness that seems to be one of the few exports we have left in this country. What kind of films would we make if we were French? Oh yeah, French films.

Some product

No, not a blog entry about the new exfoliator I have been using this week – which has turned my face into a lady's – a different kind of product. My first ever and possibly only ever DVD. Available today from Go Faster Stripe at a hopefully affordable price of £12, Secret Dancing is the souvenir of my 2010 Edinburgh show, filmed at Cardiff's Masonic Hall on November 3 last year before an enthusiastic sellout audience of podcast fans who had to put up with my one-man show in support of the actual Collings & Herrin headliner. You can watch two short clips FOR FREE on the Go Faster Stripe website, which is also the only place you can buy the disc itself. I haven't actually held one in my hands yet, but I love the simple way it's been designed and packaged. It's weird for me to watch it, especially in the unforgiving glare of the house lights required for filming, and to see the sweat build up around my brow, and the occasional nervous jiggle of my leg.

I know I am an impostor in the world of stand-up, but I hope this brief flirtation with my favourite form of entertainment has been if nothing else, self-aware and appreciative. I loved doing Edinburgh on my own last August, as you know, and it is testament to the idiosyncratic, cottage-industrial autonomy of Chris Evans at Go Faster Stripe that this lovely document of that adventure can even exist. I hope you like it. The extras are rather sweet: Richard's glowing introduction and career retrospective; a poor-quality bootleg of the Edinburgh show at Bannerman's, made by fellow Free Fringer Frog Morris; some iPhone footage of Richard and I preparing for our now-decommissioned 6 Music show in Caffe Nero and in the 6 Music office; and a terrific video by Nathan Jay for one of the tracks he allowed us to use for the Secret Dancing demonstration. (Tough luck, Mark Ronson, BAD, the Wiseguys, PM Dawn and the Sugababes: we chose not to use your music!)

The two free clips are here:

Serial killers

Masterchef

Gods, monsters

To the Curzon in Mayfair for our second go at NT Live, where the National Theatre in London beams one of its productions, live, or as-live, around the whole world. This time: the much-discussed rendition of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein by writer Nick Dear and director Danny Boyle. Having already seen and been enthralled by Rory Kinnear's Hamlet in this format in December, I can honestly say that this experience topped it. Not only was the production something to behold, but Hamlet was in the smaller Screen 2 at the Mayfair – we were moved there to accommodate the gala opening of some new film called The King's Speech, which sank without a trace as far as I can tell. Anyway, Frankenstein was in the massive Screen 1. Much better. (You can read about how much I enjoyed Hamlet here.)

Here's the deal: people at the National Theatre on the South Bank watch actors do a play. People not at the theatre but in cinemas around the country, and the world, also watch actors do a play, at the same time. It's a brilliant initiative, and even better if you're a member of the Curzon and your tickets are discounted. But it's particularly brilliant if you don't live in London. I know because people were chattering excitedly about it on Twitter yesterday that it was showing at the mighty Duke Of York's in Brighton, for instance. Find out more about NT Live here. So, that's the background. What about the play? After all, the play's the thing.

Well, Frankingstein has been running for a month at the National and has been showered with positive notices. (Emma Freud, who stands in the NT auditorium and introduces the live link-up while confused theatregoers take their seats behind her and gawp vacantly into the camera, informed us that people are queuing up for tickets at 1am. I must admit, we booked our tickets for the Curzon showing before Christmas, sensing a sellout, which it was. Imagine a play that not only sells out the theatre it is in, but auditoriums it is not in.) You have to see these things for yourself sometimes. I am not an inveterate theatregoer, as we have established. I've seen some plays. Living in London is a bit of a privilege in that sense, but I've always felt a little bit ripped off when I've seen some men and ladies standing around talking to each other. If I'm going to pay West End prices, I want to see men and ladies dancing and singing. So, bear that in mind when I review this, as I am only comparing it to a handful of other plays I have seen. In many ways, I'm an easy lay, as I am just excited to be watching a play.

Danny Boyle is known as a filmmaker, but he started out in the theatre, as everyone will tell you. Well, that's as may be, but he brought a cinematic eye and sense of occasion to Frankenstein. Beginning with the creature's birth and following his infantile development – he walks! he talks! he reads Milton! – most of the first act is wordless. It's just Benedict Cumberbatch (or Jonny Lee Miller – the pair alternate the main roles of Creature and Frankstein) crawling and hobbling around the vast, bare stage, and grunting his way to coherence. Ironically, although this section is a tour de force, it's made more cinematic when you watch it in the cinema, as you get close-ups and pans, and – something really special for the non-theatre audiences – aerial shots! So, what we saw in the Curzon is not what they saw at the National. They will say theirs was better, because they were in the same hall as Benedict Cumberbatch and Jonny Lee Miller off of the telly and the films, but I will say that ours was better. Funnily enough, the theatre crowd were still rudely talking when the play started. We were really quiet in the cinema. A huge bell sounds to signal the play has started, and yet, there they were, the big London theatre ponces, still muttering as Cumberbatch's hand started feeling around inside the womb of his creation.

Unless you can afford to go twice in succession, you're going to have to play the Cumberbatch/Lee Miller Lottery like the rest of us. Who will it be? It's like a theatrical Kinder Egg – literally, as the creature bursts out of his membranous shell. Having experienced the full two hours, with no interval (Danny Boyle the bad boy rule-breaker!), I'm going to stick my neck out and say that I'm glad we got the Cumberbatch monster. It is a performance to leave your head spinning with its sheer physicality, nuanced grostequery and well balanced pathos/bathos. Lee Miller has less to do as the professor, less stagetime, and he had an audible sore throat last night, so heaven knows how he'll cope as the grunting and squealing monster tonight. Vocalzone to the rescue, one hopes.

It's actually scary, which is no mean feat for a stage play. The design and the lighting were spare and epic at the same time, with a stunning ceiling light made of hundreds of tiny individual bulbs that could undulate or burst into a retina-searing dazzle, and a revolving circular stage that occasionally gave birth to bits of scenery, and also coped with rain, snow and a roaring fire from below, not to mention a strip of what looked like actual grass that seemed to grow from nowhere. The design and the music – by Underworld – combined to create a fabulously Gothic setting, against which a fine cast could do their best with a script that at times was over-ripe, but on the whole managed to balance the philosophical and the portentous with bawdy and silly humour. You might find, say, the broad Scottish accents of the graverobbing crofter and his son a bit Fraser-from-Dad's-Army, but it's a period piece, and you have to take that onboard. There is no trendy modernisation here. It's all industrial machinery and gaslight and rabbit stew cooked over a hearth. Naomie Harris off of the telly and the films, had a thankless part as Frankenstein's intended, Elizabeth, until the grisly denouement, but Karl Johnson was fantastic as the old blind man who "sees" past the creature's ugliness and identifies his soul.

I wonder if Cumberbatch and Lee Miller will share the theatre awards next year? They sort of should. Many critics said that Lee Miller's monster was better than Cumberbatch's. But they saw both.

I tried to read Shelley's novel in my early twenties and gave up, defeated. Maybe I'll give it another crack. They played a short making-of documentary before the play – risking letting light in upon magic, although the footage was from rehearsals and not the production itself – and Frankenstein was described by some academic or other as a creation myth for the age of science. This is a fascinating idea, and one that's not fully explored in, say, the classic 1931 film of Frankenstein, which, as Boyle notes, took away the creature's voice. His version gives it back.

Oh, and despite a full house, the two seats in front of us were empty. RESULT!

Who killed Woody Allen?

Woody Allen became my favourite filmmaker in 1982 when I saw Take The Money And Run on TV, followed, thanks to a short BBC season, by Bananas, Sleeper and, if memory serves, Love and Death, after which I devoured every one of his films that was available to rent or buy. Each time I saw a new one, it would become my favourite: Manhattan, Annie Hall, Broadway Danny Rose, Stardust Memories. Come the mid-90s, I had caught up, having paid good money for what had built into my Woody Allen video library. (In 1988 I wrote a play called Play It Again, Woody, in which a Londoner obsessed by Woody Allen tries to work out his becalmed love life with the help of an apparition of Woody Allen. It was performed twice in front of a paying audience. I played Woody Allen.)

I bought books on him. And I mean, every book I could find. I considered Husbands and Wives and Manhattan Murder Mystery, and even Bullets Over Broadway – in which my hero did not appear, his surrogate being John Cusack – if not quite as good as his 1970s classics, certainly worthy and more mature additions to the canon. Everyone Says I Love You was not brilliant, but it had Woody in it, and it was, at least, a brave experiment with the musical form, and Sweet And Lowdown, a confident period piece, seemed to suggest he still had something unique to offer. As the 20th century drew to a close, I was still glad that Woody Allen made a film a year. I know.

In 2001, when I finally got to meet and interview Woody for Radio 4, he remained my hero and it was a 40-minute experience, in a room at the Dorchester, I will never forget, pretty much the high point of my time interviewing filmmakers and actors for Back Row. The film upon which this interview hung was The Curse Of The Jade Scorpion, which wasn't his best work and I knew it. But this was immaterial, as it didn't get released in the UK, so we ran the interview anyway, as a free-standing treat. After this, I'm afraid things went downhill very rapidly.

Woody Allen lost his mojo, and I mean completely lost it, around 1999, and I fear we may never see it again. In one sense, this doesn't matter, as he has left us with a legacy of at least a dozen works of towering, unforgettable, peerless genius, plus around eight or nine further great, entertaining films. (Incidentally, I don't prefer his earlier, funny films, I prefer his mid-period existential ones.) But in another sense, his decline does matter, as each dud he produces damages the string of glories he once produced. On a much smaller scale, Ben Elton did this.

Woody remains an American auteur, a prolific and vanity-free forger of cinema, and an enthusiastic Europhile; he has carved his own unique niche in Hollywood.

But he should stop now.

Or at least take a long break until he's got a script that's really worth making into a film. Because his latest, released this week (unlike his 2006 work Scoop, which wasn't released in the UK at all), You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger is even worse than Match Point and Cassandra's Dream, and I didn't think that possible. It's his fourth set in London, and if anyone, or anything, killed Woody Allen, I fear it is the city I have lived in for 27 years. It may be an urban, multicultural, English-speaking cultural hub, just like Woody's own New York City, but he doesn't understand it. And he certainly doesn't understand Londoners. Or hear how they speak. (Gemma Jones, in his new film, keeps asking for something to "sip on." She means a drink. Who uses the phrase "sip on"?)

All you really need to know about Tall Dark Stranger, other than don't go and see it, is that it's one of those compendiums in which a series of domestic stories is told concurrently, gently linked, and loosely gathered around a theme, or motif. In this, it's faith, sort of. Or that's what Woody says. (Mind you, in the current Sight and Sound, he claims that Match Point is as good as Annie Hall, which, may God strike me down, actually suggests dementia.) What you also need to know about Tall Dark Stranger is that it is so bad I found myself clutching my own head by the final act. The man in front of me at the screening sank down into his seat in agony, his head lolling to one side. The woman next to me laughed, once, but at the film and not with it. Although Woody does not appear in it, he has no surrogate, in that the token expat American, Josh Brolin's failed novelist (about time Woody had one of those, eh?), is a boorish, unattractive, unfunny idiot, there, it seems, simply to offer medically-trained opposition to the thread involving Gemma Jones' visits to Pauline Collins' psychic.

If the spirit of Woody is here, it's in Anthony Hopkins' elderly Lothario, who, after a late-mid-life-crisis divorce from Jones, moves into a bachelor pad and marries Lucy Punch's seemingly stupid, certainly one-note prostitute/actress. (Unlike Mira Sorvino's prostitute/actress in Mighty Aphrodite, she doesn't win anyone round with her force of personality, merely by her push-up bra and short skirt and youthful age.) I'm not going to go into any more plot; the film doesn't deserve it, hinged as it is on unlikely male fantasies such as a beautiful woman stripping down to her underwear in a flat, even though it looks out onto other flats, including the one belonging to a man she has already spoken to through the window. (Later, the scene is mirrored when another woman strips down to her underwear in another flat opposite. Thank heavens attractive women are this dim, eh lads?)

This film is painful not just because of the flimsy story – hey, I never used to mind the fact that Woody's films tend to be about couples having affairs, but it's amazing how quickly that palls when the going is this rough – it's painful because it's a waste of such great screen actors, who collectively fail to rescue Woody Allen's appalling, lazy dialogue.

Brolin is poor – and his hair is preposterous. But Naomi Watts, Antonio Banderas, Jones and Hopkins give it their best shot, and are defeated. There is such a paucity of jokes, you wonder if it's actually a comedy at all. But if it's not a comedy, it's certainly no drama. A roll-call of fabulous British and Indian actors – none of who you can blame for agreeing to be in a Woody Allen film – spout written bollocks: Philip Glenister, Christian McKay (who has about two lines), Ewen Bremner, Anna Friel, Roger Ashton-Griffiths, Anupam Kher, Frieda Pinto. It reminds me of Harrison Ford's fabled remark to George Lucas while making Star Wars: "George, you can type this shit, but you sure as hell can't say it." (Johnny Harris, so magnificent in London To Brighton and This Is England '86, gets a small part as a man in a gym – even he can't do anything real with it.)

I fear that Woody is now so cocooned by yes-people, nobody would dare to criticise. And if I were an actor, I daresay I'd keep my mouth shut too. Honestly, on the evidence of Tall Dark Stranger, I think I'm now a better writer than Woody Allen.

And if the words don't strike you as lazy, what about the glaring mistakes in the action? We see a character open their fridge in the kitchen and take out a cool beer, but the fridge, in the foreground, has no light on inside it, which rather suggests it's a prop fridge and not plugged in. Did nobody see this? At a casino, Anthony Hopkins is seen peeling off £50 notes and handing them to his stupid girlfriend, who promptly lays them down on a roulette table, mid-game. I'm no gambling expert, but aren't you supposed to pay for, and use, chips? Brolin's writer has his second book with a publisher and keeps ringing up the publisher to see what he thinks. Does he not have a literary agent? A male character gets so drunk on Irish coffees he almost makes a pass at a female character, having just driven her home!

It's bloody awful. If it was the first film of a new filmmaker who'd managed to convince a cast of prominent actors to appear in a low-budget film set in London, you'd just about let him off. But this is Woody Allen. Woody Allen!

The cover story in Sight and Sound, intelligently researched and written, and even eloquently argued, by Brad Stevens, is headlined In Defence Of Woody Allen, and finds "intriguing patterns" in his latter European films. The one intriguing pattern he doesn't find is the one where Woody Allen goes all shit.

At the screening yesterday, at Warner Bros, the nice PR made a joke in her introduction about the assembled critics' mauling of last week's big Warner Bros release Hall Pass: "I hope you're all in a better mood this morning!" Well, if we were, my guess is that You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger put paid to that.

Thrills, believe it or not

Two modern thrillers, one based on a true story, the other on a short story by Philip K. Dick, both in cinemas, both sold on the prospect of an attractive man and lady in trouble – which, having just watched Alfred Hitchcock's Saboteur on one of the classic movie channels, made in 1942 and in which Robert Cummings and Priscilla Lane got in trouble, was ever thus.

In Fair Game, a much-used title although in this case it means something, Naomi Watts and Sean Penn play the poster couple of liberal dinner-party optimists everywhere, Valerie Plame and Joe Wilson – she the CIA agent exposed by backroom staff at the Bush White House when he, a retired diplomat, went public with inconvenient truths during the build-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

In The Adjustment Bureau, Matt Damon plays a fictional Democrat Senatorial candidate and possible future president who finds himself on the wrong side of the curtain in a parallel present where our destinies are controlled by angels in trilbies, and Emily Blunt is the expat English dancer who threatens to reroute his destiny by kissing him in the bathroom of the Waldorf Hotel. In both movies, which are being filed together here because I've just seen them both, the man and the lady come up against dark forces more powerful than themselves and their relationships are jeopardised as a result. In the former, they sit around at laptops and in parks, getting cross. In the latter, they do a lot of running.

I found stuff to enjoy in both, but preferred Fair Game, as I am its target audience: someone who despised the Bush administration and everything it stood for, and still consider what happened after 9/11 to be one of the greatest political and ideological crimes of my lifetime. (Bearing in mind I wasn't alive when the Holocaust happened.) I followed the story with great interest at the time, and remember my satisfaction when Dick Cheney's Chief of Staff "Scooter" Libby was jailed in 2007 for obstruction, perjury and false statements – but not for the leak itself. (Bush had his sentence commuted on the way out of office.) You might say it's old news, and that dramatising events of eight years ago is a fool's errand, especially when the situation in Iraq has hardly concluded. Me? I'm happy every time we are reminded that the invasion of Iraq was founded upon lies. This deadly confidence trick is the real legacy of Bush and Blair and should never be forgotten. That said, I think director Doug Liman, and screenwriters Jez and John Butterworth, have done a smart job of bringing an essentially actionless story to the screen as a thriller. There is no real jeopardy invested in the outcome – Iraq was invaded, WMD were not found, Libby went to jail, Plame and Wilson wrote books, exonerated – but the film still rattles along.

Peter Bradshaw, a critic I admire in print and like in real life, gave Fair Game a right old kicking in his Guardian review, which you can read here. He took against it for sound enough geo-political reasons, but I disagree that it's ripely acted, smug and "ridiculous". He's entitled to this opinion, although a one-star review struck me as slightly hysterical. I found it well acted and at worse, self-righteous. Sure enough, Penn plays Wilson as a slightly older, fatter version of his own good self but he's no hero and a bit of a boorish sociopath; Watts not only looks like Plame (her good looks and blonde hair – eek! – worked against her at the hands of a venal, misogynist media), she dares to play her as vulnerable and powerless. She is not a hero either, certainly not outside of her dangerous field work, she is a victim of forces bigger than the CIA. She is still sympathetic.

Hey, maybe I am a sucker for liberal porn, and way too interested in Beltway politics and the intricacies of the US media and military-political context, having read too many books about the Bush government and read too many New Yorker articles about the same, but I can't help it. I thoroughly enjoyed Fair Game.

Meanwhile, I was up for The Adjustment Bureau, which is essentially apolitical, but let down by it. It is the directorial debut of George Nolfi, one of the writers of The Bourne Ultimatum, which presumably helped him get Matt Damon for the lead. It's based on The Adjustment Team, a 1954 short story by Philip K Dick, which I've not read, but I know has been very freely adapted. Well, it's a short story, with the usual high sci-fi concept, so it had to be, really. I am no Dick conoisseur. I have only read The Man In The High Castle (1962) – that's it. But I have seen all his films! This one seems ultimately to have failed. It's a nice set-up, with Damon's political rise and his chance meetings with Blunt's dancer well staged in contemporary New York. The netherworld policed by Roger Sterling's trilby men (alright, John Slattery, but he seems to have been cast in his actual Mad Men clothes) is similarly well realised. But once we've had this alternative reality explained to us – and, at one point, explained to us as if perhaps we might be idiots, by the character played by Terence Stamp because Englishmen are by nature more evil than American ones to Americans – there's nowhere for it to go, and we're left with our two heroes running. Just as we are in most sci-fi thrillers. The more faceless or omniscient our imagined foes, the faster we run, right?

I'm not going into any more plot, clearly, but it's a shame that The Adjustment Bureau didn't pay us back for our investment. I love Matt Damon, he really is one of my favourite modern leading men, and Blunt has a natural, unforced, approachable charm onscreen, but if it wasn't for their chemistry, there would be nothing here.

That said, Saboteur started much better than it ended, too. And that had the look of a 1942 film on its side. Which is one I prefer to the look of a 2011 film, if I'm honest.

Incidentally, can someone explain to me why Jennifer Ehle, most famously Elizabeth Bennett in the BBC's classic Andrew Davies Pride & Prejudice and star of The Camomile Lawn, plays a bartender in The Adjustment Bureau: a part with two lines, both of which are things a bartender might say ("What can I get you gentlemen?" that sort of line), and no further significance to the plot. This is a criminal waste of a fine actress who, although American born, trained over here and found fame here. Did she go back to Hollywood for this?

Permission to be unfunny

The sun is shining in the sky. There doesn't appear to be a cloud in sight. (Not that we'd notice, locked in a recording studio.) It's happening. At last. It took 14 years for me to get here, but on Monday, I arrived at the West London offices of production company Avalon for the first rehearsal of my first ever solo sitcom, commissioned by Radio 4 in September. We are now at the end of the week, with all four episodes pretty much in the can and with an air date of Monday May 16, so I think it's OK to name it and talk about it, without superstitious fear of disaster. (I have been holding back, calling it "my sitcom" and "the Radio 4 sitcom", for fear of jinxing its delicate progress to fruition, and besides, it's impolitic to reveal the cast until the actors' contracts are dry, as the possibility of last-minute drop-out is very real – as I have learned – and that kind of thing does not send out good vibes. You'll have to forgive my caginess. I still can't quite believe this is happening, even though the hard part has now happened.)

The sitcom is named Mr Blue Sky, although the very name "sitcom" sends out misleading messages, as it's not the type recorded in front of a studio audience. Rather, it has been recorded in a studio, as a drama with funny bits in. A risky strategy but after five years of working on Not Going Out, this is what I have been yearning to do. Without going into the plot too much, it's about Harvey Easter, a 46-year old optimist living in North Surrey whose life throws at him many reasons to be miserable or pessimistic, but whose pathological ability to see the bright side pulls him through while all around is falling apart. Yes, there is a bit of me in Harvey, and always has been. Having stated that it is essentially a comedy drama, we must consult the Radio 4 Comedy Guidelines, which remind us that recording without a studio audience does not give me "permission to be unfunny." It does, however, give me certain liberties, and allows me to step outside of the tyranny of punchlines.

I would say this, and I know that every writer says it about every cast, but we have an amazing cast. I've been involved, at a remove, with casting before, on Grass and Not Going Out, but I've never been consulted on every actor as I have been with Mr Blue Sky, so this one matters. When you consider the vagaries and variables of assembling a cast with eight principals and one supporting player, each one subject to taste and preference and to availability and contracts, to achieve one with no apparent weak links is a wonder indeed. The mighty Mark Benton, alumnus of too much to mention but let's throw in Mike Leigh's Career Girls, Catterick, The Street and Early Doors, plays Harvey Easter; comedy goddess Rebecca Front his wife Jax; the estimable and also The Thick Of It-linked Justin Edwards his best mate Ray the oncologist; Antonia Campbell-Hughes from Lead Balloon and When Harvey Met Bob the Easters' daughter Charlie; Joe Tracini (The Great Outdoors, best thing in Coming Of Age) as son Robbie; Javone Prince (PhoneShop) as boyfriend Kill-R; up-and-coming actor a certain Michael Legge as Harvey's assistant Sean; Navin Chowdhry (Teachers) as Rakesh the builder; and last but never least, Simon Day in two cameo parts, because it would have seemed all wrong not to have him.

Casting is fraught – as the jigsaw is assembled, you dare not get your hopes up about anybody, and we had to move the recording back a week, so that threw a further cat among the pigeons – but on Monday, with those amazing people sat around the conference table at Avalon, scripts in front of them, it all started to feel real. The first read was fun. I was more nervous beforehand than I have ever been before actually performing. This is my script. If it's no good, I have nowhere to hide. I have worked very closely on it with my producer and script editor, Anna, and she's been brutal at times, but you need that. I've had this story in my head for a long time, and though it's been through many changes, Mr Blue Sky is still basically the same as when I first conceived it in … wait for it … 1997, when Mal Young, then series-producing Family Affairs for Channel Five, my first ever scriptwriting job, encouraged me to come up with something of my own. So I did. Harvey was a greetings card salesman at that stage, and he had three kids. Now he's an assistant manager in a piano shop and he has two kids. But if his optimism once chimed with a broader optimism at the cusp of the Blair era, it's become more and more misplaced as this country's politics have decayed and corrupted. I like Harvey even more now than I did then. The bright side is harder to come by in 2011, so he's even more out of step.

Because Mr Blue Sky hasn't been recorded in front of an audience, we have been physically able to record it out of sequence, which is useful if certain actors are not required the whole way through, but that said, the plan was always to record it as close to chronologically as we could, starting with Ep1 on Tuesday, and finishing with Ep4 today. (As it's turned out, we quickly got ahead of schedule, and were able to nip ahead to get scenes in the can early, allowing some castmembers to have the occasional early finish or late start – except Mark and Rebecca, who are in most of the scenes. Acting, like rock'n'roll, is a lot of waiting around.)

Because it's a comedy, as a writer, you're hoping for smiles at least, and laughs at the most, and we had enough of those at the first read to reassure me that I've not been writing a drama for the last five months. (Navin, in particular, found comedy where I wasn't even aware that I'd written it! And Joe was such a bundle of energy – he's actually 22, but plays 16 brilliantly – he kept the room lit up.) By the time we all rocked up at the recording studio in an industrial estate in Shepherd's Bush on Tuesday morning (our nearest neighbour is the Innocent smoothie factory!), we'd broken the ice and felt confident about the task ahead.

That was Day 1. We had four days to get it in the can. There is a certain amount of boredom built in, at least for the actors, and they spend a lot of their days in the green room, but the studio complex is bijou and comfortable, with plentiful coffee, tea and biscuits, and most actors either know the other actors, or have a director, producer or other actor in common from previous jobs, and quickly find common ground for anecdotes and scurrilous gossip. I'd love to sit with them all day and hear their tales, but I am required in the control room, with Anna, co-director and co-producer John, runner/foley artist Calum, and studio director Wilfredo, a man whose laconic, dry sense of humour takes some getting used to, but what a hero he is, re-flooring the studio for different effects and blocking the actors so that they sound like they are coming down the stairs and entering the kitchen when that is precisely what the script requires.

I love the technicality of all this: the pick-ups and the retakes; the microphone effects; the actual rustling of a duvet to create the mood of two characters being in bed together; the startling variety of sound effects available digitally at the click of Wilfredo's mouse; the soothing diplomacy over the talkback when actors are invited to try it a different way ("That was perfect, but …"); the dramatic shorthand created by simple proximity of actor to mics; the exaggerated noise of a door handle to suggest a door handle; the way you can hear every conversation the actors have in the studio between takes which is not exactly eavesdropping as they know you can hear them, but an insight nonetheless into their trade as they swap observations about which Sondheim musicals they've done. It is, needless to say, exhausting. With an hour off for lunch, you're at it all day, and although – to pre-empt – it's not as hard as being a miner, it's amazing how tiring and emotionally draining it is. That's not a complaint. I've been sleeping like a baby all week. Oh, and waking up at 5.30am and unable to get back to sleep as Mr Blue Sky bangs round in my head.

We had fun on Wednesday, which was Simon Day's one day with us, as both of his scenes the intrepid Wilfredo decided to record outside, so that they sounded authentic. I won't spoil the scenes by telling you what characters Simon was playing, or explaining why he and Antonia are standing by the bins in these photos (you can also see Joe – glasses – in the bottom pic), but it was a rare excursion outside of the stifling, windowless intensity of the studio and control room, and welcome for that. Yesterday, Thursday, Day 3, I noticed a certain hysteria setting in with the cast – more foul-mouthed swearing when mistakes were made, more silly voices, more uncontrollable laughter – this is understandable and expected. Cabin fever.

Certain traits and oddities and bits of trivia have arisen from our time together: Javone has given up alcohol and carbs until Lent; Joe can't eat biscuits as they make him gag (he ate his first in ten years at the read-through and regretted it); Michael rubs his hands together before a scene; Mark wants to present a heavy metal show on 6 Music; Navin has a very good recipe for flapjacks; Antonia sounds American in real life but is from Northern Ireland; Wilfredo is so professional and dedicated he opts for a decaff tea; John wears a coat indoors; and pretty much every member of our multi-tasking cast is writing something currently or involved in pitching an idea to BBC3. Navin finished all of his scenes yesterday, and we bid our fond farewells to this nice man. The rest of the main cast soldier on until the end of today.

I guess I shouldn't write too much. I'm going to do a diary of the production for Radio Times. Needless to say, it's been one of the most intense and rewarding weeks of my stupid career. Whether the finished result will be worth all the heartache is up to you when you hear it in two months' time. (Anna and John will take charge of the edit over the next couple of weeks. I will probably stay away. It could drive me mad.) Oh, and none other than Jim Bob has recorded ELO's Mr Blue Sky as our theme song, which will play out under the closing credits. Maybe he will be able to make it available in full as a download? Either way, it's another thrill to have his name attached to "my Radio 4 sitcom." The siege mentality that defines these things got us all through it without any tantrums or friction.

Oh, and a big shout-out to Freddy, Julie and Annabel who run the studio, and brought us tremendous cake every day just when we needed a burst of sugar in the afternoon.

It's stopped raining. Everybody's in the play. And don't you know, it's a beautiful new day. (More pics coming soon.)

Promise I made

I know I write a lot and rave a lot about imported US drama. But we can still do this stuff over here. Peter Kosminsky is the living proof. He's bold, he's ambitious, he's awkward and yet, he is indulged by British broadcasters – specifically Channel 4, it seems, who have thus far commissioned Daybreak Pictures to make The Government Inspector, Britz and The Promise, all of which he wrote and directed. (Kosminsky was trained by the BBC, and the work that established his name was Warriors, on BBC2, so without them etc.) I love it when a terrestrial broadcaster commits to a major new series, especially when it isn't designed as a star vehicle. Oh, don't you worry, I'll be tuning in to ITV's Monroe on Friday, Peter Bowker's latest showcase for the skills and charisma of James Nesbitt, but when something like The Promise comes along, heavily marketed by C4 but clearly designed to appeal on the strength of its subject matter alone, it goes straight to the front of the queue.

I'm late writing about The Promise, which finished its four-part run last Sunday, because I have been busy writing my own script – the Radio 4 sitcom which starts its transition from page to broadcast today – and I realise that my own experiences as a writer for TV colour my appreciation of the things that I watch, especially the British-made dramas and comedies. I watch primarily as a viewer, of course, but consciously and subconsciously I'm living out the process, and usually wondering where on earth the writer starts with something as ambitious as The Promise. Like any writer, I aspire. Having written for two long-running soaps, I have benefitted from a sturdy and practical apprenticeship in drama, although I've spent the years since EastEnders writing, or co-writing comedy. Similar rules apply, and what I learned on EastEnders never leaves me, but the chasm that gapes between what I've achieved and what, say, Peter Bowker or Peter Kosminsky have achieved, leaves me shellshocked. I am in awe of the big British TV writers, past and present. To quote Liz Lemon: I want to go there. (Hey, it's healthy to aim high.)

The Promise promised the impossible: to distill the eternal Arab-Israeli conflict into a human story for a British audience. (Clearly, it will be seen in other parts of the world, but when your twin protagonists are British, it's clear where the story is aimed. It makes no bones about this country's part in the mess, and if you don't already despise Britain's imperial past, The Promise should help nail it. Having said that, as noted before, it sent me to my copy of Martin Gilbert's Israel, to help fill in the backstory. And what a backstory it is.) Having read reviews at all four stages of its broadcast, I get the feeling that some critics had a problem with Kosminsky's heavy-handedness, but even with luxurious 80-minute episodes – and a 100-minute opener – you have to use the occasional broad stroke, and the author's decision to use actual newsreel footage from the liberation of Bergen Belsen in Ep1 was one such. This, for me, was justified by the fictional story Kosminsky had chosen to tell – that of disinterested, apolitical English granddaughter Erin (Little Dorrit's Claire Foy) travelling to modern-day Israel to stay with a Jewish friend's wealthy parents while she does her National Service, intercut with the experiences between 1945-48 of her grandfather, Len (Christian Cooke), a British soldier now on his deathbed, whose diary proves Erin's touchstone with a past with which she had previously had no connection. Len was among the soldiers who liberated Belsen.

Now, the use of this footage, which haunts everyone who sees it, and which I remember vividly from The World At War at Sunday teatime when I was about eight or nine, is narratively justified but still potentially problematic, in that it sets up the Jewish plight 20 years into the British Mandate fairly unequivocally and forces us into a position of empathy and partisanship. However, Kosminsky – Jewish but as far as he's concerned, first and foremost a Briton – is cleverly using surely the most emotive event of the last century as a way of putting us inside the mind of Len, and by association Erin. Len didn't watch the newsreel, he was the newsreel.

Because of his experiences, when Len arrives in Palestine, where Jewish refugees are being interned and mistreated by their apparent liberators, his sympathies lie with them. But the British are in the middle, as they always seem to be in leftover chunks of the Empire, and are soon hated by both sides. (And called "Nazis" by the Zionists. Irony alert.) Len falls in love, unknowingly, with a militant Israeli fighter and finds greater sympathy for the Arabs, befriending the family of a tea vendor and eventually changing sides, just as the British are pulling out in 1948. Len is as perplexed by the violence meted out by Jewish settlers – specifically by underground terror group the Irgun – as many were in the postwar period, when Palestine was partitioned to neither side's satisfaction and the never-ending war began.

Meanwhile, Erin is on an unlikely journey of discovery, drawn into the conflict first by experiencing the suicide bombing of a Jewish cafe and being influenced by a disillusioned Israeli soldier turned peace activist. She falls in love with an Arab and, influenced by her grandfather's diary, becomes determined to finish what he started. I won't go into any more plot, in case you haven't seen The Promise, and wish to. Much of the drama hinges on Erin's hunger for truth, which couldn't be more subtly played than the way Claire Foy did it – her Erin was moody, stubborn, naive, headstrong and seemingly fearless/stupid – but you have to take a few of her insane excursions, including one into Gaza, at face value. She's exploring where we, passive armchair consumers of newsreel, fear to tread. It brings the history and the deadly, lingering resentments and injustices to life.

The series was entirely shot on location – Kosminksy's first visit to the region – and it benefits at every turn, even when the credibility of the drama is stretched to breaking point. (It's amazing how many liberties with realism you can take by making your central character a bit of a stroppy idiot, walking into war zones and barging her sweet way into trouble. It was harder to buy into the dramatic conversion of Len, especially after he is held captive for weeks in a hole in the ground, which might break a man.)

Clever to blend contemporary drama with a period piece, and to play the fictional story against non-fictional backdrops, such as the bombing of the King David Hotel in 1946, and the "Sergeants affair" kidnapping in 1947, and of course the aforementioned Bergen Belsen. The Promise was not played for facile demonisation of the Jewish occupiers, or the glorification of the Palestinians – in fact, it strained for balance. You couldn't help but dislike the rich family Erin was staying with, with their swimming pool and their liberal values, and you couldn't help but like Haaz Sleiman's Omar, Erin's gentle guide, but it was never a case of black hats and white hats.

So, some fine acting, made more real by the locations (let us not forget that Kosminsky is the director, too), and a dizzying piece of writing that, for all its lapses into incredulity, never lapsed into finger-wagging or side-taking. The comment by a pro-Jewish soldier that the Palestinians had lived in Palestine for hundreds of years and it was still a desert, whereas the Zionists had been there for 50 years and had turned parts of it into a fertile, verdant oasis was key – the more I read Gilbert's relentless doorstop Israel (I'm currently experiencing 1947, having almost caught up with The Promise), the more I understand that the Jews' claim on what they consider their biblical homeland was, in the late 19th and early 20th century, built on sheer hard work, tilling the recalcitrant soil until it eventually bore fruit, literal and figurative. It's dangerous to take sides, and I hesitate to revert to leftist stereotype, but if we don't seek to understand the situation, I don't believe we are entitled to make judgment upon either side. I am attempting to rectify that. And I have Peter Kosminsky and C4 to thanks. It's not all My Big Fat Racist Wedding.

As ever, the British failed to successfully manage the situation after Palestine was carved up in 1923 (the fact that the French got neighbouring Syria after WWI is not insignificant), with subsequent administrations pushing and pulling about how many Jews were allowed in, and audaciously pulling up the drawbridge during the Second World War when, you could argue, the Jews needed a safe exile more than ever before. It's a horrific story, whichever side you come at it from. So bravo to one writer for at least facing up to the job. Much easier to make a police drama about a serial killer.

Hen's teeth

A rare chance this year to see me and Richard Herring live. I have, as you know, retired from stand-up, but I am happy to podcast live with Richard should the opportunity arise, and it has. Here's how it has come about: Go Faster Stripe will be filming Richard's current, one-Christian-boycott-per-every-two-towns show Christ On A Bike at the trusty Leicester Square Theatre on Wednesday May 18. Directly after the show, at 10pm, we will be doing a live podcast as an exclusive, filmed extra for the eventual COAB DVD. This will not be released as a regular, audio podcast, so you'll have to come along, or buy the DVD, to see it.

You can buy a double ticket to both shows for £25, or for either of the individual shows for £15 (buy COAB tickets here; and podcast tickets here). I think this is a good deal. Your money will help pay for the filming costs. It's a bit like being a Marillion fan. The image above shows how many nerds – in grey – have already bought tickets for the podcast show, over two months in advance. So get in now. Because it will be a non-topical podcast, we'll be canvasing the audience for subjects and questions to talk rubbish about. In other words, you'll be a part of the show. It should be a memorable and very long night. (Less long if you only buy a single ticket.)

See you there. Hens do not have teeth.

Oh, and Secret Dancing DVD coming soon. Advertisement ends.

In our face

As you'll all know, the belated, and long-awaited return to 6 Music of Adam and Joe was announced yesterday. The details are here. This is terrific news for fans of Adam and Joe, which includes me and Richard Herring. Although we applaud and welcome Joe's success in filmmaking – the reason they took their sabbatical – it has been tough without their antics and chemistry and songmanship on Saturday mornings, one of the jewels in 6 Music's crown, and one sorely missing during last year's "troubles" (although Adam was a powerhouse of creative support).

The tickertape parades and hugging of strangers in the street is, however, tinged with sadness and unemployment. For the return of Adam and Joe spells the end of Collins and Herring. This radio station ain't big enough for the four of us!

Richard and I were asked to fill in for Adam and Joe in February last year, when Danny Wallace, who had been filling in throughout January, went to America. At the time, as I recall, we were booked for six weeks. This was a thrill. We had, let's be honest, always felt we might be a good fit for their show, and we were honoured to replace them. We cooked up some ropey feature ideas, clearly based on theirs – the Nerd Army task, Text The Station, Diary Wars – which somehow managed to sustain us for far more than six weeks! (I think someone on the Guardian message boards berated us for the derivative nature of our features. Well done for spotting that.) These features were our way of paying tribute to Adam and Joe, whose shoes were hard to fill.

How we'd laugh when the computer automatically fanfared the show with the announcement, "Right now … Adam and Joe!", or when, a full year into our tenure, it still said we were "sitting in" on the readout of a digital radio. We never fooled ourselves that we were Adam and Joe (we categorically aren't), but it was fun evolving our podcast relationship in more restricted, family-friendly circumstances, and having the freedom to play a record, or two records, to allow listeners a break, and to give us a chance to recharge. It has also been gratifying having two weekly podcasts for around 56 weeks: one, one clean, one unclean; one BBC-authorised, one Orange Mark-authorised.

As Richard is now off on tour, Michael Legge will be with me for the next four Saturdays, so I hope you will tune in and continue to supply us with the reliable material we have come to expect from a particularly in-tune and creative fanbase. There would be no show without your anecdotes. I know I speak for both of us when I say that we will miss this Saturday morning routine, from downstairs at Caffe Nero to the sometimes Mike Leigh-esque repartee between Richard and Liz Kershaw.

So, in your face, 6 Music. It seems that Collins & Herring are off the air. For now? I mean, we haven't finished our 100 Objects, have we?

And then we were sick.

You're history

Comparisons across 40 years are especially odious. But two history strands, on current on BBCHD and one recent on BBC4, tell us much about the history of the art history series: Civilisation, presented by Kenneth Clark, and Romancing The Stone: The Golden Ages Of British Sculpture, presented by Alistair Sooke. (The latter, a three-parter, has finished airing, and I'm catching up on Sky+. Civilisation's most recent episode is available on iPlayer, although they're only keeping the most recent one up for a week.)

I grew up knowing about Civilisation, though I never saw it. I was too young when it aired on BBC2 in 1969, but when I grew up, it was already legend. Clark was mentioned in a couple of Monty Python sketches (and maybe even pictured in one of the books?), and the moment the BBC started making documentaries about itself – my guess, starting around the 70s and early 80s, when the Corporation's 50th and 60th birthdays were marked – I became aware of a man in a tweed suit standing in front of churches and declaiming, fruitily, to camera. (Around the same time, I became aware of a man called Jacob Bronowski and The Ascent Of Man, another BBC 13-parter which I've still never seen.) When Alan Clark MP rose to prominence in the 80s, I made the father-son connection, and probably allowed the son's rather nauseating fancy for Margaret Thatcher and all-round rogueish manner to put me off his dad. Well, it turns out his dad is as much of a Marxist-hunting Tory as his son. But what a teacher he makes!

Sooke – a search for whose name is probably always destined to elicit the response, "Did you mean: Alistair Cooke?" – is the deputy art critic at the Telegraph, and, it says, started there as an assistant in 2003, which I guess ages him at very early thirties. At any rate, he's around half the age of Kenneth Clark when he wrote, produced and presented Civilisation in 1969, who was 66. Which is not to do Sooke down – he's one of those young or comparatively young, boyishly and girlishly enthusiast academics in their thirties and forties that modern TV loves: Tristram Hunt, Dan Snow, Bettany Hughes, Neil Oliver. I'm not tilting at ageism here – my beloved Andrew Graham-Dixon is 50, Matthew Collings and Tim Marlow are already well into their fifties, and even Professor Amanda Vickery is in her late forties (a figure belied by her cherishable, youthful energy), and they still send Michael Wood off, and he's 62 – but my guess is that in 1969 the idea of a history programme being presented by a thirtysomething would have been unconscionable. I mean, where would our instant respect spring from?

Thanks to a seriously mind-blowing clean-up job on the original film footage, Civilisation is back, basically to advertise the BBC's HD service. It's a crying shame it's not showing on BBC4 concurrently, but there you are; it's doing its job, because the pictures, almost as old as me, are stunning. Clark reminds me of those old photos taken in the late 60s and early 70s of my grandparents on the beach, in which my granddad is wearing trousers, shirt and tie. On the beach. Similarly, Clark treads the highways and byways of Europe, in clement weather, trussed up in tweed, the button of his jacket not even unbuttoned for ventilation. He's even wearing a cardy underneath the jacket. In Florence. What's most strikingly different about the way Civilisation is presented and the presentation of Romancing The Stone, or to pluck another recent example: Neil Oliver's chunky and windswept A History Of Ancient Britain (just finishing on BBC2 but all four eps still on iPlayer for a few more days), is that Clark's is flagged up in the credits as a "Personal View", whereas these days a personal view is the least we'd expect. Oh, and by the way – Romancing The Stone? What a fucking dreadful and meaningless title. It seems that BBC4 has caught the bug from its neighbours at BBC3 and fears we won't watch a programme about sculpture unless it's sexed up.

I guess that in 1969 a history strand that was "personal" needed explaining, or even disclaiming. Now, if it's not personalised, it's not on the telly. Personality is everything. The irony is, Clark helped define personality presenting of academic programmes. Without him, perhaps no Life On Earth? (David Attenborough was actually head of BBC2 when Civilisation was commissioned.) He is our guide: knowledgeable, inspired, eloquent, intellectually equipped and authoritative, but at the same time personal. If he'd taught history at my school, I might not have got a "U" at O-Level. In 1969 it was enough to set up the shot of a church or a fresco or a library and have Clark stand or sit in front of it, or, if the director was feeling especially cavalier, have him walk into shot. There are no camera tricks. The camera never comes off its tripod or rostrum. Clark does not speak to anybody but us; unlike Sooke, or Oliver, who are duty bound to consult micro-experts or help cast something in bronze in protective gear, Clark looks but does not touch. He often gazes in awe, but he does not say, "Wow!", which modern presenters must do. Watching Civilisation, you are the one saying, "Wow!"

I enjoy history programmes on TV. The best ones send me to my bookshelf or the Internet to find out more. The enthusiasm and articulacy of presenters like Sooke and Oliver definitely inspire. But all have Clark to beat. What these presenters all have in common is locked-in knowledge. None appears to be reading from an Autocue or cards. Clark declaims as if giving a lecture, once or twice stumbling over words, stopping to suck down the spit he's worked up – and there is an assumption you will be paying attention; Sooke and Oliver make more effort to engage and connect, they huddle right in with the camera, and technology allows us to go into caves with them, or peer into crypts. Civilisation is built largely from still shots of art and architecture and sculpture; the camera lingers as we might in a gallery or cathedral. The camera today probes and ducks and dives.

I don't wish to come across as a grumpy old man here; I embrace the modern style, and understand why it dominates. But thank God Civilisation survives, and in remastered form, too. It is The Wire of history programmes: dense and demanding, almost foreign in its language, and when one episode finishes, you want to watch the next one straight away. Get the box set.