I believe in America

OK, it's time to round up the television that's currently not just occupying my evenings and weekends, but owning me. And when I say television, I mean drama, and when I say drama I mean American drama, as American drama is all that matters. (For balance, and to prove that I am not being racist, I watched a double-episode of Silent Witness last night, and it was excellent in every way, written by Andrew Holden and directed by Sue Tully, so let's bear that in mind.)

Sons Of Anarchy has just started on FiveUSA. (I sometimes wonder where I'd be without FiveUSA, FX, Sky1, More4, E4 and Hallmark. Oh, occasionally the BBC will buy something in, but they usually mistreat it, and us.) I had this recommended to me way in advance - it's two seasons in, on FX, over there, with a third already booked - and I must say it's filled the horrible vaccuum left by Breaking Bad: yet another British actor, this time Queer As Folk's Charlie Hunnam, essaying what sounds to my ears like an impeccable American accent as the heir apparent of a rough, tough Hell's Angels chapter operating out of the Californian town of Charming. The pilot episode pushed all the right buttons, setting up the Sopranos-like business, run by ailing old bear Ron Perlman. It's a soap opera that allows a peek in on another world, in this case, hairy bikers fighting internecine battles with other gangs, running guns, keeping meth off their patch (oh yes!) and being secretly sweet to their wives and in one case, being an Elvis impersonator. Created by Kurt Sutter, who did The Shield, it's hard as nails and yet its underbelly is soft. ("Soft", in fact, is what the gang think Hunnam's character, Jackson, is - and "soft" is what got his legendary dad killed.) So, just one episode in, and I'm in.

House continues to be my current favourite. Although we're up to date with Season Six on Sky1, FiveUSA have shown Season One and are now almost through Season Two, which is handy, as Season Three is on Hallmark (we're saving it up until Two is finished, for fear of losing the plot.) In many ways, I'm blessed to have discovered it so late, and to have so much back catalogue to enjoy. Yes, yes, every episode is the same, but only in the sense that House and his mutating team have to solve a medical mystery and along the way make it worse, then make it better, then make it even worse, then make it better, running up what must be an extortionate bill with all those tests and treatments that don't work, and yes they always discount lupus, but that's part of the fun. The hook is not the mystery, it's the relationships - between House and Wilson, House and Cuddy, House and Cameron, Chase and Cameron, Wilson and whoever his girlfriend/wife is, and so on. In the ep we watched last night, House vs. God, it was House and God. Brilliant stuff. Dazzling. One episode is never enough in one sitting. Always the mark of a truly magnificent drama (see: The Wire, The Sopranos, Battlestar Galactica, West Wing, Breaking Bad). I can't believe I watched the first episode when it first aired, years ago, and didn't like it. I didn't buy Hugh Laurie's accent. How ironic is that? Mind you, I didn't like Curb on first viewing either, so I can't be trusted. And let's face it, Laurie has improved so much with time. In the current run, he's skyscraping.

Is Nurse Jackie a drama or a comedy? It's half an hour long, which in network TV terms means it is a comedy, and yet there's no laughter. I say it's best viewed as a drama, just like Up In The Air, was was mis-sold as a comedy, I think. Jackie seems to be the first big commission for creators Liz Brixius, Linda Wallem and Evan Dunsky, which makes its ease and sass and grit even more astonishing. Edie Falco is, of course, strong in the title role, and the action revolves around her double life and nursey skills, but once again, and this is a recurring aspect of great US drama, the supporting characters obviously receive an equal amount of attention in the writing and the casting and the directing. (I saw some of a quite lame-looking, and very squealy, romantic comedy called Bride Wars yesterday and it was clear that once they'd case Kate Hudson and Anne Hathaway, with a bit of Sex & The City cameo heft from Candice Bergen, they'd almost deliberately cast forgettable actors in the other parts, as if to highlight the talent of the two leads. You don't get that feeling from great TV drama.) I won't list the actors who bring so much to Jackie, but Merritt Weaver, who plays a flappy student, can steal a scene just by walking into a room and walking out again. Oh, and Eve Best, a British stage actress, actually plays a British doctor. That's a novelty. What a shame BBC2 felt so excited about their new acquisition they ran it every night for the first week, and are now running it every Monday night. Isn't that a form of sadistic cruelty?

And Glee, airing on E4 - even though it's created by Ryan Murphy, who gave the world the gloriously preposterous Nip/Tuck (currently showing on FX), I had my doubts that this would tickle me. I was wrong to have those doubts. It's arch and clever and camp and deeper than I expected, and manages to be sneery about the high school caste system while at the same time finding actual joy in the corridors. It's not the pisstake I mistakenly took it to be. And there's nothing ironic about the musical numbers - which are actually deftly staged - unless modern high school kids singing old songs that the grown-ups who write it remember from their childhoods is ironic. I sort of don't give a fuck that it's spawning hits in America - that's something for the Fox accountants to rub their hands together about. Thanks to Jane Lynch, who is fast becoming the most reliable actress in anything, I fell for this pretty quickly, and if it really did hate High School Musical, it probably wouldn't work. But it doesn't. And it does.

For the record, I'm also watching Season Two of Prison Break on box set and still enjoying that. It's not as if it's any more ridiculous than Season One. Looking forward to the return of Hung. Gave the new season of Heroes a go, on pretty much the sole proviso that T-Bag from Prison Break is now in it, but there simply aren't the hours in the day to get back into it, so that's been shelved after one episode. I fear I may have to give the final season of Lost a crack, too, even though, as I've stated, there aren't the hours in the day. Taped The Good Wife last night. High hopes for that. Uh-oh!

Oh, and I like Law & Order UK, unfashionably. And that's, like, British. Yuck!

Oh, and if you think I'm not supernaturally excited about True Blood, returning soon to the mighty FX, you'd be wrong. I have been sent the first two episodes of Season Two, but I don't want to watch them yet, for fear of being all frustrated at having to wait for the third, and the fourth, and the fifth. I may have to stop working and go bankrupt in order to fit all this in. Oh, and don't moan at me for prioritising US drama over British drama, especially when I work in British TV and have written British drama and would love to write some more: I know we get the cream of their telly, and it's not all The Sopranos and Breaking Bad, but enough of it is to make us feel ashamed of ourselves.

And I forgot to mention Mad Men in all the excitment, which has a lot to beat with Season Three this week on BBC4, as Season Two was sublime. *sighs*

New blog

Today we officially launch the Collings & Herrin blog. Please bookmark it and sign up to the feed, as it will from now on become the indulgent home of all C&H news, and I can post up as many pics as I like without testing the patience of people who visit this blog but get fed up of all the C&H plugs and news. I may occasionally post things on both, but by and large, if you follow us, go here.

Radio Zelig

It's been a fun run of 6 Music shows. I am back in the Nemone slot, 1-4pm, on Monday, after my three day Cardiff jaunt, and that will be my last week before she returns from maternity leave. (I have notched up something like 20 shows. It's been like having a job.)

Anyway, These are my holiday snaps so far. In the first, I am trying to look grumpy and misanthropic for Luke Haines, who wasn't grumpy or misanthropic at all, of course, even though his publisher had failed to get his book into the shops for Christmas. In the second, I am unable to be as grumpy-looking as Henry Rollins, so I have plumped for beaming happily (also, Fleet Foxes are playing, and Henry doesn't like the sound of them at all). And finally, Damo Suzuki from Can is putting an arm around me and making me super proud. Interestingly, both Rollins and Suzuki objected to me playing a vintage track of theirs while they were on - for Rollins, Rise Above from Black Flag's classic 1981 debut Damaged; for Suzuki, the unlikely hit Spoon from Can's 1971 album Ege Bamyasi - Rollins went into a rant about dismissing all the work he's ever done since 1981 by playing it and I let him get it out of his system before pressing the button; Suzuki was more languid but said that he only looks forward as the eyes are at the front of the head. He wasn't going to fight me over it. Neither had a new record to promote or play, incidentally; both were plugging gigs.

Most days we don't have famous guests in - it's just as much fun talking to Martin White or the Pajama Men or Dave Hill the comedian or Rhodri Marsden or Alex Heminsley. But it's cool to get some snaps for the family album.

Dead as a Dido

So, Richard is back from Mauritius, jet-lagged, with a small put poignant avian gift for me (pictured) and the rich tan of a vain Giorgio Armani footballer. Having been apart for two weeks, during which Richard developed an unhealthy hatred for a nine-year-old girl in his hotel and saw four films on a plane, and I worked really hard, in our 98th podcast we have plenty to catch up on, including: the snow, Peter Kay's autobiography, Richard's autobiography and the Ronnie Corbett Scandal. We also find time to discuss what Beyonce will do for money, whether Wales counts as a proper country or not, the rubbish threats of Daffy from N-Dubz, the solecisms of poorly educated people and Lenny Henry's big hands.

Les nerks

"Film of the year", says one newspaper's quote at the top of the praise-plastered posters for Un Prophete, or A Prophet. It's released next Friday, January 22. Can it be the film of the year yet? I suspect the critic was hailing the film as such after seeing it at a festival last year. Certainly, Sight & Sound's collected critics named Un Prophete as their film of 2009. For those of us who don't attend festivals, however, it's going to have to be film of 2010, and it has a long way to go. Mind you, I've seen it now, and it is astonishingly good. Film of the month, for sure.

It's the French prison movie. Directed by Jacques Audiard, who made The Beat That My Heart Skipped, it is not strictly a prison movie, rather a tale of manhood (or "self-education" to use Audiard's words), forced upon a young offender who spends six years in jail. It is also a film about ethnic tribalism, in this case, to reduce it down: Arabs versus Corsicans, the main groups in this French clink, with the Muslim contingent growing all the time. Malik El Djebena (Tahar Rahim) hopes to keep himself to himself and his nose clean, but is sucked into the prison's subculture of racial violence in a truly shocking first-act incident that will cause even the most immunised to wince and instinctively cover their eyes when it happens. Needless to say, we see an immediate change in Malik and over the six years that unfold over the film's two and a half hours, it's not just facial hair that marks out the passage of time and the maturing of a young man. Audiard is fascinated by the rituals and routines of prison life, and the way that men are when left with other men; he's also adept at running a workable thriller element into a more meditative, even impressionistic whole - when Malik eventually earns 12-hour passes for good behaviour, you'll be amazed at what he gets up to!

All hail Niels Aristrup, who was in The Beat That My Heart Skipped, and plays the banged-up Corsican Godfather Cesar Luciani with the perfect blend of Genial Harry Grout and Frank Booth (although he looks disconcertingly like Anthony Worrall Thompson). The actual cons who take on roles as extras in the film - and the seemingly authentic setting - root the occasional esoteric touches and fantasy elements in cold, hard reality. There are rare moments of beauty in this prison, as there were in Steve McQueen's Maze in Hunger (both, interestingly, have snowflakes coming down outside a barred window). If you can handle the occasional bursts of unyielding violence and the inevitable atmosphere of threat and menace, Un Prophete is a film that's really worth seeing. You will learn certain techniques of defence and offence that you didn't know you'd ever need. Keep that [removed due to accidental spoiler].

Abdication crisis: latest

The people have spoken: I should not take over from Jonathan Ross on Film 2010. Fair enough. (I understand the BBC will be basing their decision on the results of this mail-order DVD rental shop poll.)

Icon go for that

Even though Rich is on holiday in Mauritius and I am hard at work on the radio, we present a special 97th Podcast Review Of The Decade. Using only the Guardian's Icons Of The Decade supplement as a guide, we look back over the last ten years and try to make sense of it all, by not making sense at all, which seems appropriate. There's talk of 9/11 conspiracy theories, David Beckham's vanity or lack thereof, and a bit about Tony Blairs. It's a bit like Newsnight, really. We hope to be back, in person, before the end of next week, when Richard gets back all tanned and tropical and full of insects.

New Old Faces 2010

The following copy was commissioned by and submitted to the Times over Christmas, for a piece gathering together nominations for New Old Faces for 2010. I never saw the piece, but I know my contributions weren't in it, due to ... hey, people being on holiday and seasonal confusion. So I reprint them here, as I was rather pleased with them. Actually, I don't reprint them, I print them.*














JIM BOB
Born James Morrison in 1960 - which makes 2010 a self-evidently landmark year for him - the singer-songwriter I know and love as Jim Bob has never achieved the giddy iconic heights of his reckless Doors namesake, but neither has he overdosed in a Paris bathtub.

To ageing disciples of the early-90s indie boom and its accidental South London heroes Carter The Unstoppable Sex Machine, purveyors of pun-filled social comment, exposed knees, punk rock electric guitar and the machine-gun rattle of a furious drum machine, Jim Bob and co-conspirator Fruitbat own a small piece of history. (Witness their now annual reunion gigs if you don’t believe me.) As an NME journalist I bonded with Carter in Brixton, Prague, New York and Philadelphia.

Since their amicable split in 1997, Jim has carved a quiet but prolific and sure-footed solo career out of the same urban angst and lyrical dexterity. He had a good 2009, releasing his fifth solo album Goffam and ending the year framed by a full orchestra, wearing a white suit, essaying 2004 anthem Angelstrike! onstage at London’s Hammersmith Odeon as part of comedian Robin Ince’s Lessons and Carols for Godless People variety bill. Thoughtful eccentrics Robyn Hitchcock and John Otway were on the same bill, and you could almost join the dots.

A have-guitar-will-travel cult troubadour and an accomplished author - following his 2004 account of the Carter years, Goodnight Jim Bob, his debut novel Storage Stories is published in May - Jim ought to be as beloved as a Costello or a Dury or a Davies, with slices of life as tuneful, arch, dramatic and unapologetic as Teenage Body Count, Cartoon Dad and The Golden Years Of Lonely Old Dears. I mean, who else is writing songs about the plight of forgotten pensioners?



















LUKE HAINES
If ever a songwriter came with a reading list attached, it's 42-year-old professional misanthrope and self-anointed "Albert Speer of Britpop" Luke Haines. To appreciate his ever-expanding 18-year oeuvre - increased by two in 2009 with the impressive 21st Century Man and its evil twin Achtung Mutha - it's best to come armed with a working knowledge of 1970s British politics, Van Der Graaf Generator, serial killers, German cinema, the Mitfords, BritArt, Russian Futurism and the train from Woking to Waterloo. He's like Lloyd Cole's antisocial cousin.

Latterly dressed in white with a panama hat and the face fuzz of a member of ELO, he looks more like a novelist or the Man from Del Monte gone to seed; certainly nothing like an indie musician whose first brush with fame came during the pomp of Blur and Oasis. His age is key: born, one assumes grudgingly, in the year of the summer of love and raised amid power cuts in the 70s, the music he makes, whether operating at the megalomaniacal centre of The Auteurs or Black Box Recorder, under typically mordant alias Baader Meinhof, or as himself, is informed by the glam rock he grew up on, but conceals greater depth.

His voice is actually rather beautiful - plaintively sneery? - and his musical armoury considerable. Lucky he's so self-sufficient, as he never seemed happy in a beat combo. In his bilious Britpop gospel, Bad Vibes - one of my favourite books of 2009 - he refuses even to name one particular bandmember, such is his post-rationalised contempt. He plays to the gallery.

In a year of underwhelming albums, 21st Century Man was one of its few complete pleasures, and Haines deserves wider recognition. He's actually quite sweet when you meet him, although he wouldn't thank me for saying so.


PS: Would have been nice to read these two gentlemen hymned in the Times, but hey.
PPS: Jim Bob pic by Mitch Holloway, borrowed from Jim's website. (Hope that's OK.)
PPS: STOP PRESS! Even though I wasn't in the newspaper, they've kindly added the Jim Bob piece to the online version here.

Four

... which is what Nine should really be called, as it's the film of the Broadway stage musical version of the theatre adaptation of Fellini's movie Eight and a Half, which was so called because it was, according to Fellini, his eighth-and-a-half film (it's complicated, but as well as a handful of features he'd made a couple of shorts and done a collaboration and he added the "halves" up), and this is the fourth feature film directed by Rob Marshall, after a TV movie of Annie, the Oscar-hoovering Chicago and Memoirs Of A Geisha. Phew. I must admit, I enjoyed Marshall's Chicago, I'm a fan of the great Hollywood musicals of the 40s and 50s, and if I go to the theatre it's usually to see a musical, as I find them tremendously good value. So it felt quite natural to go and see Nine at the cinema. It's already gathered quite a hand of Golden Globe nominations, and I daresay Oscar will come calling, but it's really handicapped by that title. It's rubbish. It says nothing. It's just a number. It even looks dull written down as a word. I wonder if the title will have actually prevented people from seeing it? After all, the poster image gives nothing away but the main cast, and the tagline, "Be Italian", is not helpful. Do we have to "be Italian" to enjoy it? Is it about people "being Italian"? Well, it is about Italians, so I suppose they have no choice.

If you like musicals, I say give it a whirl. You won't know any of the songs. I've seen it, and I can't whistle any of them. But it's well staged, the cast are pretty good, and if you like Italian cinema of the 50s and 60s, there is plenty to enjoy, as Daniel Day-Lewis takes on the Fellini/Mastroianni role, a middle-aged director unable to make a film due to a midlife crisis of confidence and, frankly, a complicated love life imploding around him in Rome, and the musical numbers sort of spring up around him. If you like Rome, you'll enjoy the sightseeing, and the direct references to La Dolce Vita, Anita Ekberg, the prototype paparazzi and various other period signifiers. The girls - that is, Penelope Cruz, Nicole Kidman, Marion Cotillard, Fergie (ha ha, not the Duchess one), Kate Hudson, Judi Dench and Sophia Loren (who doesn't have to move much) - are superb, and I speak as someone who can't usually bear to be in the same cinema as Nicole Kidman. Luckily, she only has a marginal part; she swans in, and after one number, swans out again. The bulk of the responsibility falls at the capable feet of Cotillard - how nice to see her with something to do after the false start of her first Hollywood movie, the useless Public Enemies. If anyone steals the film from this formidable chorus, it's Judi Dench, actually, although you have to admire the way Day-Lewis inhabits a part, carrying himself in such a convincing way, even in silhouette.

So, after the disappointment of Sherlock Holmes, it was good to see something that held my attention and did not insult me. It's not a classic, but it's full of artistic merit. And I saw it in a small cinema, the HMV Curzon, where people seem happy to pay their money, turn their phones off and watch the film. Radical.

Sherlock. Home

I don't walk out of films much. In fact, hardly ever. I can count them on one hand. I gave up with Showgirls. I walked out of Duplicity. I voted with my feet when the lady's breasts got shot in Crank 2*. And now, I have done the same with Sherlock Holmes. This was at the Empire in Leicester Square, a really excellent screen (albeit a cinema whose foyer seems designed after a cattle market), and surely the perfect setting for the post-Christmas blockbuster romp. It was full, which means, by the law of averages, there were people talking and texting either side of us, but frankly, I didn't blame them. What a terrible film. Unengaging, overly fond of itself, miscast, and actually rather dull - and this is a Sherlock Holmes film! We lasted about 45 minutes, at which point the escape was coordinated and executed. (Sorry for treading on the toes of the young man to our left who had actually taken a call on his mobile during the film, without even leaving his seat!)

I won't pick it to pieces. I take no pleasure in that - nor do I take pleasure in paying for a film and not seeing it through to the end. Indeed, I remain a huge admirer of Guy Ritchie's early work - ie. Lock, Stock and Snatch - but as time marches on, it seems he had his creative moment and that creative moment has now passed. I seriously wondered why Warner Bros let him spend all this money on a supposedly iconoclastic "reimagining" of the famous detective (cor, he's a bare knuckle fighter!) - but hey, they were right to take that punt, as it's taken almost $150m in the States, where only Avatar kept it off the number one box office slot in Christmas week. But I just didn't buy into it. Robert Downey Jr, whose comeback fills me with cheer (and who hugged me at the Baftas last year), seems to have opted to keep him mouth shut as he talks, in order to preserve his English accent; as a result, you really can't quite hear what he's saying. Jude Law is just Jude Law with a moustache - I guess you either love him or you don't - and Rachel McAdams doesn't convince at all. I don't need the question "Why is the female lead an American?" answering, as I realise her character Irene Adler did actually appear in one Holmes story (A Scandal In Bohemia: I've seen the excellent Jeremy Brett adaptation), but this isn't that story. So why is she?

I feel locked out of the love-in, here, as many have enjoyed the film and word-of-mouth has kept it afloat at the box office. But I went along in good faith, hoping to enjoy it, so the fact that I didn't seems to be largely rooted in what I thought of the film. Ah well, at least I got an hour and a quarter of my life back.

*I forgot about Crank 2 and added this in after the first draft of this blog entry, hence the comments below reminding me. Well reminded!

Bromine Barium

On the first day of 2010, I watched the final episode of the second season of Breaking Bad, which I now declare to be the finest new TV series of 2009. (It began on AMC in the States and here on FX in 2008, but I picked up on it in 2009.) It was so good and so satisfying, this final episode, I was moved to immediately begin to watch season one again from the start. It is the mark of a truly great TV show that you can watch it again, without a cooling-off period. Breaking Bad, created by Vince Gilligan, is one such show.

I wasn't sufficiently drawn in by the trailers to catch it when it premiered on FX at the end of last year; maybe the timing was wrong, or maybe it just seemed too fond of itself in those trailers. When it was snapped up and re-aired by FiveUSA, I actually missed the opening episode, by mistake, and was forced to come in at episode two, by which time Walt White (Bryan Cranston) and Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul) had already embarked upon their get-rich-quick scheme in the New Mexico desert. In fact, Ep2 of S1 begins with its own flashback, further tantalising us about what actually occured in Ep1. To be honest, the trailers, and a couple of rave reviews, filled in the basic narrative gap: that chemistry teacher Walt has been diagnosed with lung cancer and opts to pay for the treatment and look after his family by cooking up crystal meth with an ex-pupil dealer.

It's a dark piece of work, cleverly set in Albuquerque where they have bright sunshine 300 days a year, thus always hammering home its bleak message under blue skies. It's not the first time the suburbs have revealed dark secrets, but this is no American Beauty. The White family are not well off. They can't afford health insurance. Their boiler doesn't work. Their pool is not an indicator of wealth or comfort. Indeed, the pool itself will come to contain its own grim portents as S2 unfolds, and an emptied pool at another location will bring death. The trailers presented a sort of self-consciously wacky comedy, but Breaking Bad is anything but - there is humour in the writing, certainly, but it comes from the juxtaposition of dialogue, the clash between a 50-year-old man and an ill-educated, jive-talking twentysomething hip hop kid: in Ep1 Jesse tells Walt in the desert that he can see "a cow house"; when Walt tries to dictate to him what to do, he comes out with, "Heil Hitler, bitch!"; and when Walt educates him in how to fashion a makeshift car battery and, like his teacher again, tries to get him to name the element copper, Jesse triumphantly calls out, "Wire!" If Aaron Paul's characterisation of Jesse seems one-note and comedic from my summary, you ain't seen nothing yet, beeyach.

Walt is a clever, learned, philosophical man who missed his chance to make money and cannot connect with his students, despite being a very good, and very illuminating, teacher. He loves his wife, and his wife loves him, and there's a baby on the way, but the sense of having missed the boat is etched into Walt's brow. He does not "deserve" inoperable lung cancer on his 50th birthday ("Why me?"), and yet, absurdly, it is the making of him. It changes his life. Certain death releases the inner Walt, which is generally bad news for everyone else.

The only real lightness comes from Walt's son, Walt Jr, who has mild cerebral palsy and yet provides the story with its heart: brilliantly played by RJ Mitte, who also has palsy, he is anything but defined by his condition, and usually cuts through the breakfast table tension between his parents with the honest, unsugared view of a teenage boy who's finding his own personality (he starts demanding to be called "Flynn", without much explanation, because his friends do, thus hacking at the family ties of his unimaginative and narcissistic given name). Here is a character who's living with a debilitating physical condition, hopping around on crutches, unable to use the pedals of a car effectively, but he deals with it stoically and bravely, and does not demand praise or special privileges for doing so. I've no idea why Gilligan gave the son palsy, but it was a genius move. (If a kid appeared on crutches in a British drama, you'd immediately think, "box-ticking." But then, as Breaking Bad confirms, we may as well stop making TV drama in this country and just let the Americans do it.)

Skyler (Anna Gunn, previously seen in The Practice and Deadwood) is the long-suffering wife, but no need to reach for the cliche-scanner - she's long-suffering in the sense that she effectively has two male children to cope with, and seems to have subjugated her instinct to write to the needs of being a homemaker (we occasionally hear of her short stories, but they remain mostly buried). Like Walt, she has sacrificed something at the altar of family, and look what her reward is: a lying husband. Because Sky is visibly pregnant from the start of Ep1, the bulky belly and the bad back define her to us - she is carrying the future around inside her. Meanwhile, inside her husband, the breadmaker, is an inoperable tumour, something far less hopeful. I won't ruin it for anyone, but in S2, Skyler sheds her innocence and loses the trust that kept her going - although even as far back as Ep2 in S1, she played detective and confronted Jesse in his own front yard, so she was never a victim.

The character who surprised me the most over the course of the two seasons was Hank (Dean Norris), Walt's brother-in-law and seeming polar oppostite, the hardass, ball-busting, pistol-packing, bulletproof DEA supervisor, buoyed by the innate bigotry and smart mouth that get him through his day job, but much more complex once you get to know him. Again, I won't go into any story detail, but even Hank is not a God; he, too, can be reduced to a mere mortal by events. The skill of Breaking Bad is to drip-feed details about the supporting characters gradually over the course of the two series, with even Marie (Betsy Brandt), Sky's sister and Hank's wife, fleshed out beyond early tics. (What's fascinating to me is how different the second viewing is - I watched Ep2 and Ep3 from S1 again last night, and Marie is a great example of a character who feels more real now; the scene in the shoe shop seemed almost random on first viewing; now it is loaded with portent. Can you imagine the guts it takes to make a drama so rich and so subtle that stuff is almost designed to bypass the first-time viewer? TV drama writing is all about immediate impact, usually. Not here.)

A word about the direction. You watch a great film, you can credit the writer and the director. With an ongoing TV series, you must credit a team of writers, and a string of different directors. And yet, Breaking Bad, like all the very best TV dramas, has an overarching visual feel. I guess the real skill of the TV director is to bring personal touch and individual vision without unbalancing the whole. In many ways, the landscape and the New Mexico climate give Breaking Bad its "look." Of the individual directors across the two seasons, I think I have counted 16 - including, incidentally, Bryan Cranston, John Dahl, Charles Haid and Peter Medak, who once worked here and directed The Krays and Let Him Have It - but their skill is to create something cumulative. There are some amazing early stylistic touches, such as the way the first episode begins with a pair of trousers noiselessly floating to the ground (that was Gilligan), or the way Ep3 (Gilligan again) opens looking up through the acid-dismembered goo of a copse in a bathtub as Walt and Jesse mop it up. And the recurring flashforward in S2 with the pink teddy bear in the pool is not just a stylistic flourish, but a narrative one, too - not that I'll be giving any clues about that. (Hey, apparently there are clues in the episode titles of S2, but unless you want to ruin the ending, don't look for them. I was happier not knowing.)

I never watched Malcolm In The Middle, so I'm only aware theoretically that Bryan Cranston is making a bonfire of his most famous screen characterisation here. I envy those who know and love him as Hal, the Dad in that popular show; it must make Walt and Breaking Bad seem all the more revolutionary. All I know is, Cranston deserved his Emmy for this - it's a tightly-wound, small-brushstrokes performance that defies the precepts of so much returning-series TV in the sense that Walt changes throughout. The lead character's job is usually to provide a constant, a pivot around which the action revolves. Sure, a character can get married, have a baby, move house, change job, but his or her personality must remain steady. Not here. Which is why Breaking Bad is more like a film.

Season Three airs in the States in March. Let's hope Five have bought it. Breaking Bad has been a revelation: simple concept, brilliant execution, subtle depths. Life, death, birth, sun, sky: it is, to risk a pun based on Walt's beloved Periodic Table, elemental. And, as I say, it merits an immediate second viewing, upon which it reveals further genius. If you haven't seen it yet - and S1 is on DVD - you're going to have to get over the fact that the main protagonist coughs, violently and painfully, all the time; that death stalks the show constantly; that by the end of Ep3, two bodies will have been clumsily and graphically disposed of; and that even if you think you're immunised to insanely violent drug dealers thanks to their ubiquity since Quentin Tarantino changed the face of crime movies, there's an even more insanely violent one, called Tuco, you have yet to meet, and he will scare the living daylights out of you.

I did. And I'm glad. Vince Gilligan is two years younger than me.