Close Up (BBC 2, Tuesday) D-Watch RTE 1, Monday) John Peel's Sounds of the Suburbs (C4, Saturday) Charmed (TV 3, Tuesday) News at Ten (ITV, Monday to Friday)
Miles Millar says his job is to find "new and interesting ways to kill people". Chuckling, he recalled that one of his really Zippo ideas involved connecting a garden sprinkler to a supply of petrol before introducing a cigarette lighter. Cool, Miles . . . charming! But Miles is no psycho. Douse the thought. In fact, he's an educated, maybe even a cultured man - Eng Lit degree from Cambridge and postgraduate study at the University of Southern California Film School, no less. Now he's a Hollywood script writer.
Close Up: LA Stories examined the working lives of four British scriptwriters, who, like Miles, clearly burn with ambition to write for Hollywood. Along with hot-shot Miles, we met Sacha Gervasi, Tina Jenkins and Simon Kelton. The opening scene showed languid cricketers at play under the Hollywood sign. It has probably already been used in a movie or a TV drama - Tinseltown is, after all, the world capital of navel-gazing and it likes its onanistic semiotics blaring.
The LA studios receive an estimated 45,000 scripts every year. Fewer than 200 reach the screen. The writers and studio sharpies (known as "executives") babble in monstrous dollops of inflated guff about "creativity" and "freshness" and "high-concept movies". In practice, "high concept" simply means that the title and images selected for a poster must tell you exactly what the movie is all about. "Simple concept" is, in fact, the concept, but there's no razzmatazz about that. Try pitching Hamlet to a dude in Armani shades and suit beside a heart-shaped swimming pool.
As for the creativity and the freshness - wow! Sacha Gervasi (a bloke, in case you're wondering) pitched his script Je m'appelle Crawford, about a gay Scottish hairdresser making it to the finals of the World Hairdressing Championships in LA, as a high-concept movie. "It's Rocky with curlers," Sac told a suit and duly had his script accepted and his film made. Some other suit or suits decided that the title should be changed to The Big Tease. Creative or what? And fresh? Yeah . . . right! Rocky with curlers!
Indeed for all the nonsense about freshness, the Hollywood studios are stolidly conservative. It's about megabucks, of course, and that's why films that make a profit are sequelled (it's OK, it's an LA verb) or repackaged. Hence Rocky 55 or a rash of sci-fi threats to Earth. Pitching (yes, yes, beside a swimming pool to a dude with matching shades and suit) Miles described his latest romantic thriller Yesterday as "Somewhere in Time meets Ghost", adding that it contains "Field of Dreams aspects". Originality, eh? Creativity? Move over God - Miles and Mammon are the main men!
But that's the business, and it's probably churlish and old-hat to knock American know-how. Hollywood keeps producing films - all right, most of them are horse dung - and the industry stays huge. Scriptwriters are insects, vegetables even, in the food-chain. Even though Miles got $1 million for his first accepted script, he had to crawl to get into the premiere of Lethal Weapon 4, on which he has a credit. Tina Jenkins gave up her job as a TV producer and has written a script titled Nine Lives. It's about a man who turns into a cat. (Look, don't ask . . . that information is quite enough.) Tina reckons that the British can't handle fantasy - make your own comments on that one, Black Rob! So she needs Hollywood to appreciate her creativity. In fairness, it probably is possible to write a worthwhile yarn about a man becoming a cat. But just imagine what will happen if the high-concept suits get their claws into it.
Perhaps the most telling scene was the one which showed us a screenwriting class at UCLA in action. "Creativity comes from the subconscious . . . the mind just gets in the way and f***s things up," said the teacher. He's probably right but you had to wonder why, in the golden land of sun, swimming pools and smog, the collective Hollywood subconscious seems to be constantly shrinking. There's an almost unlimited number of worthwhile stories in the world, even if we acknowledge that worthwhile ways of telling them are limited.
But what we mostly seem to get from Hollywood are "high-concept" treatments of low-rent ideas, too often about high society with low morals. Either that or formulaic fantasies designed to showcase what, in fairness, are spectacular new technologies in film-making. Sure, some of it is entertaining, occasionally even thrilling - but you'd really want to be burning with ambition to take your laptop and your subconscious off to this bonfire of the banalities. Rocky with curlers! What next? Shampoo in boxing gloves?
The men of D-Watch would not be impressed with Miles Millar's pyromania. As firefighters based in Dublin's Phibsborough, they know the reality, not the fantasy, of infernos. In this week's first of six episodes of a pacy, observational documentary series, we were introduced to the team: Liam Clarke, John Cullen, Gerry O'Rourke, Fran Moore, Shay Rowe, Rory Mooney and Michael Gray. Ordinary, likeable blokes all; the work they do gives them a heroic quality.
It's not that their working lives are crammed with high drama. On the contrary, much of their time - to judge from the opening programme - is spent dealing with the wreckage of drugs, drink and suicide attempts. It's much more grim than glamorous. The first emergency we saw focused on a suspected suicide by hanging. Outside a derelict, city-centre house a young woman was screaming that she believed her boyfriend had gone into the building to kill himself. He hadn't and, unlike Hollywood, you had to be glad for the anti-climax.
This, in itself, of course, raised questions about this type of television. Visual and emotional spectaculars make compelling programmes. Fighting conflagrations is more gripping than comforting collapsed drunks. Still, the possibility of sensation is stitched into the series by the form if not the content: shot with a lightweight, digital video camera, the immediacy of emergencies is conveyed. There's a jerkiness and an edginess to it all - but by definition, fatigue at mounting anti-climaxes accelerates as tension dissipates.
Some of the more engaging scenes featured the relationships between the firemen. Sure, the presence of a camera always affects such exchanges and, of course, the crew members can't always get along like a house on fire. But even allowing for that and realising that even firemen cannot fire-proof themselves against personality clashes, there was a warmth and respect in evidence. "It's a fool who ignores the advice of a senior man," said one bloke. He didn't say it as a doormat or as a Creeping Jesus careerist. There are fewer fires nowadays than there used to be in Dublin - smoke alarms, better designed buildings and fewer open fires have seen to that. But there remains, as one of the men said, the awful possibility that "the next Stardust" could be the next callout. "You expect anything until you get there. You hope it's not the worst scenario," said another. These lads would never cut it as Hollywood scriptwriters.
The burning issues in John Peel's Sounds of the Suburbs were rather more mundane. He, too, was in search of elusive "creativity" - the fount which has energised Britain's indie bands. For this first episode of eight he drove to Lanarkshire, Scotland. En route, he told us that he was seeking "the social, cultural and economic influences" which shape Lanarkshire's musical muse. He said "bollocks" a lot (he spoke it too) and the awful impression left was of an ageing man trying to be cool with people 30 and even 40 years younger than himself.
Sean Dixon "from the Soup Dragons" was Peel's first contact. Sean took the former BBC Radio 1 DJ on a tour of his teenage haunts. Sean from the Soup Dragons's Dad accompanied the pair. Sean and his Dad seemed fair enough - gritty Scots. "We were brought up tough," said the Dad. But Peel, wearing an absurd powder blue woolly hat, sought to be even grittier. So, he said the B-word again and empathised with the pair about the difficulties of living in high-rise, unemployment-blighted wastelands. They all laughed at Sheena Easton jokes. True grit or what?
In Motherwell (or was it East Kilbride?) Peel visited a chipper and ordered a deep-fried Mars bar. He was so taken with this local delicacy that he gave almost all of it away. The BBC canteen doesn't include such megamulch on the menu. And so it went. Buckfast tonic wine is also popular with the local teens, so Peel had to have a sip. Grit-man wasn't impressed with that either. Finally he ended up at Glenbuck in Ayrshire, the birthplace of the late Liverpool football manager Bill Shankly.
At a memorial stone, tears came to Peel's eyes. "I'm lost for words," he said (fat chance!). "People might say it's just a middle-class twerp droning on about the working class or some bollocks like that. But I find this very moving, I must say," he said. Shankly would surely have nutted him there and then.
Anyway, from grit back to fantasy. Charmed began this week on TV3. It's a supernatural series - elements of Bewitched, Touched by an Angel and Buffy the Vampire Slayer as Miles might pitch it. It features three babe sisters - Prue, Piper and Phoebe (no kidding!) - who possess supernatural powers. They are the most powerful good witches in history . . . each with a unique power. Need I continue? It's from Aaron Spelling's Spelling TV, and TV3 needs it to succeed. It's glossy, slick and idiotic - so, if Hollywood criteria are anything to go by, it stands a reasonable chance.
Finally . . . and finally . . . the Big Ben bongs bonged for the last time last night for News at Ten. ITN's flagship news programme is being moved to 6.30 p.m. It is the end of an era which began in 1967, but the bulletin has lost its way for years now. All that simpering, unctuous, sycophantic drivel about minor royal yarns long ago became intolerable. But it had its day: two presenters, the bongs, the reporters' sign-offs, the late Reggie Bosanquet wearing the most famous toupee in television. High concepts, how are ye!