West is west

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With incredible contrivances, the Brit-Paki plot is neither full comedy nor coming-of-age drama, neither culture-bridging nor racially sensitive.

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West is West, released in 2011, was a belated sequel to 1999's East is East, a semi-autobiographical comedy featuring the dysfunctional family of a mixed marriage in the north of English (Salford) in the late 1960s.

Punjabi-born Indian actor Om Puri returned in the role of Pakistani George Khan, grumpy owner of a chippy shop and husband of English Ella (Angela Bassett). It was his 205th credited film role in a 35-year career, her 54th, and their inter-racial love is still credible. Another Indian actor, Rajasthani Ila Arun, provides a strong third adult character as Khan's first wife.

The screenplay's central figures are the family's two half-English sons. The weak-willed elder brother can't find a wife back in his father's home village, while the teenager has coped with racism at school and divided loyalties outside by becoming a truant shoplifter. The father takes him back to Pakistan to force him to accept a Pakistani heritage.

Very much a storyboard construction with incredible coincidences and contrivances, the plot is neither full comedy nor coming-of-age drama, neither culture-bridging nor racially sensitive. There's a stereotypical wry English-speaking sage with no apparent livelihood and a smiling acolyte who becomes the teenager's pal, daughters who have no roles to play, and a nephew who on-screen purpose is never revealed. Loose ends are left loose, except for the older son being married off to a sassy village girl from Rochdale whom he'd never noticed.

Racial characteristics are not explored with wit or insights, and religious factors are ignored completely. Even in the plot's time setting (1976) it is not possible to believe that none of the characters would have thought and talked about Islam, Western materialism and ancestors. Such a world of semi-comic make-believe can just about be imagined in rural Indian Punjab (where the film was made) but not across the border in rural Pakistan.

[Retired UK TV series actor Ayub Khan-din, born in Salford, wrote East is East as an award-winning play, which was staged in London in 1997. It was soon filmed, winning more awards and many for Irish director Damien O'Donnell. Maybe it was better fun.]

Tinker, tailor, soldier, spy

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Le Carre's plot was more of a period overview, a socio-political portrait, than a straightforward spy thriller.

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Viewing the original BBC TV serialisation (1979) of John Le Carre's Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy before watching its 2011 movie version ensures that one knows who the mole is. This has two advantages.

Undistracted by red herrings, one can better assess the screenplay's ability to compress almost five TV hours of dense, albeit slow-paced, drama into two hours of cinema. And compare two generations of British actors (and cameos by two actresses).

After 32 years, the TV serial was a mixed blessing on its BBC DVD. Good value is given by a one-hour documentary extra, The Secret Centre, made in 2000. It includes an interesting set of autobiographical comments by Le Carre, excerpts from the Smiley films, interviews with relevant figures (his ex-wife, college mentor, KGB and East German spymasters), and readings from the books (by Le Carre himself, aka in the real world as David Cornwell). If only more money had been spent on re-mastering the seven TV episodes' fluctuating sound and murky lighting. Their award-winning direction (James Irvin) and cinematography were diminished by the antique film qualities.

Although the serial looked its age, its dialogue rarely sounded dated. It'll be interesting to hear how the 2011 version presents bitter anti-materialist opinions that match those of the current Occupy movement.

It's easy to see how almost redundant characters in Le Carre's plot could have been dropped for the modern movie, including Smiley's nymphomaniac wife (Sian Griffiths), an exasperated schoolmaster (John Wells), a sacked research maestro (Beryl Reid), exasperating ex-spies (Nigel Stock and Joss Ackland) and an eight-year-old schoolboy who's a retired agent's protege (credited as "Duncan Jones", and already looking like the adult film director son of David Bowie, even though Jones's PR reps or IMDb haven't yet wanted to put two and two together).

The discredited spy (Hywel Bennett) who provides information leading to the mole plays a bigger role in the storyboard, too big, seemingly being an excuse both for some overseas location filming in Lisbon and the appearance of a female agent and sexual side-attraction in Le Carre's novel. Le Carre's key KGB maestro, Karla, is seen only as a non-speaking role in a flashback showing Smiley's feeble efforts to turn him (an unrecognisable bearded Patrick Stewart).

Such gratuitous roles were sharp reminders that Le Carre's plot was more of a period overview, a socio-political portrait, than a straightforward spy thriller. The identity of Russia's mole in the British secret service is signposted very early, simply because he's the only one of four possible traitors shown to have relationships with other people. All members of the quartet are stereotypical figures of post-War Britain, the upper class providing a glib bisexual cynic, a pompous fool and an embittered poseur, while the working class was mined for a Communist thug's son holding a technical role in the corridor of power.

Many of them smoked and puffed pipes heavily; that will have to be revised in 2011? And the homosexual overtones (Le Carre's acknowledgment of the characters of two among the "Cambridge Five" spies) might need spelling out even more clearly for modern audiences? If so, the preparatory school setting for another character may well be abandoned for the film to better fit into mainstream US audiences' comfort zone.

The lead characters in the 1979 serial must be the same in 2011. Chief investigator and forcibly retired spymaster Smiley (deadpan Alec Guinness) wasn't as cunning as my memory had expected, while the betrayed spy (close to emotive Ian Bannen) played a larger role than it recalled. The only active brain in the intelligence "Circus" (Ian Richardson) brought his saucer-lidded cup of tea into meetings in a giveaway fashion, just like a disaffected outsider would, and Smiley's aide (Michael Jayston) was too clever and loyal by half to have been allowed to remain in the service.

Although Smiley and his team, and the top civil servant empowering him unofficially, mention concerns about the mole being aware of their activities, his apparent total failure to do so is hard to credit (but may well illustrate the Oxbridge amateurishness of British espionage during the Cold War).

Is the 2011 version a deeper study of intelligence masters at work? Its task is easier, in my eyes, after the relative flatness of the 1979 original.

Alive and kicking

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Pioneer stirring of every known feature of the dance and AIDS genres into a very acceptable emotional stew.

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Originally entitled Indian Summer, the 1996 British feature Alive and Kicking was an early tale of gay love and AIDS written by UK-based American playwright Martin Sherman (best known for Bent and Mrs Henderson Presents). Stage director Nancy Meckler directed the dance drama starring Jason Flemyng as an H-positive ballet star who rejects AIDS treatments in order to continue his career, his real life.

Antony Sher is the AIDS psychotherapy specialist who successfully woos the dancer; every other character is in the dancer's world (including Bill Nighy as the sympathetic company manager and Dorothy Tutin as its Alzheimer's-suffering founding choreographer).

Sherman achieves a screenwriting mission impossible, stirring every known feature of the dance and AIDS genres into a very acceptable emotional stew. The dancers are insecure posturing egotists with big hearts, the lead dancer has a black dyke best friend with a working-class accent, handsome young people get lesions and die, cameras pirouette around agonised faces, gay sexual activity is photographed with cunning lighting schemes, and the whole movie feels as clearly marked for emotional moments as a ballet floor is with spots.

The movie overcomes its screenplay's painstaking contrivances largely due to the credible facial reactions and body language from Flemyng and Sher. Their characters bond in an unlikely pairing, and Sherman's dialogue has memorable moments raging about AIDS. More noticeably, there's a tedious over-dependence on ironic American-accented cliches (which were possibly all de rigeur in London dance circles in the 1990s).

At first sighting, this well-acted mainstream treatment of AIDS and homosexuality should have become a global festival favourite and potential award-winner. It wasn't, maybe because it cast its dramatic net too wide to appeal strongly enough to dancers or the gay market.

Johnny English reborn

Sometimes a pastiche imitates its source too lovingly to be as funny as it could be. That's the case for Johnny English Reborn, a 2011 re-appearance for Rowan Atkinson's bumbling Bond-ish Brit spy. Looking as good for his age as Connery and Moore did at the end of their 007 stints, 56-year-old Atkinson is still a good actor with a gurning face, bulging eyes, squirming physique and unique screen presence.

The writing team knew what they were doing. Lead co-writer William Davies, for whom Arnie's Twins was a happy first feature, had co-written the original Johnny English (2003). Second-credited writer Hamish McColl had joined Atkinson and his long-time comic associate Richard Curtis on Mr Bean's Holiday (2007). Neal Purvis and Robert Wade (both given "characters" credits) worked on the first English film and co-wrote the last four real Bond films. They're together as usual for "Bond 23" too, now being directed by Sam Mendes.

Which might explain why much of JE2 comprises concepts and scenes derived from the JB franchise. Viewers who tire of watching Atkinson can amuse their memories instead, recalling when JB went into high-speed action in the Alps, at sea, in souped-up Rollers, etc.

All the usual characters are in action, played by an assortment of British acting talent: Johnny's female espionage boss (honorary Brit Gillian Anderson), MI7's suave Eton-educated double-dealing Agent 1 (Dominic West), a severely-disabled gadget boffin (Tim McInnerny), a beautiful MI7 behaviourist destined to save and love Johnny (Rosamund Pike, whose first big-screen major role was in JB's Die Another Day) and a naif 20-year-old black Brit assistant agent (talented and handsome Daniel Chatroom Kaluuya).

Remarkably, JE2 manages to look like a lavishly-produced update of an early Bond film, and director Oliver Parker should gain kudos for making a $27 million budget fill a wide screen so handsomely.

What matters most is spoofs, send-ups and sly variations that both display Atkinson's comic skills and the writers' creativity. Early on, hopes are raised high by a lengthy sequence of ingenious comic ploys enabling the ageing JE to chase and outwit a lithe Chinese gangster over Kowloon roofs and Hong Kong harbour. It's a typical Bond conceit, well-paced and musically thunderous, which maintains a tricky balance of silliness and smartness for the JE character. Maybe that set the bar too high too quickly, and the film's comic volume became muted when JE went into action in Switzerland (protecting China's premier from an assassin).

The Chinese angle played well for a key market, and Atkinson and his producers again shrewdly screened their movie widely in overseas markets months before they let it open in either the UK or North America, where critics could be expected to pooh-pooh it. Once again, the move paid off: JE knows where Mr Bean's most loyal fans live. They know that Atkinson will deliver above-average comic entertainment, and he does.

Jane Eyre

Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, published in 1847, has been adapted for the screen in several languages umpteen times; the latest UK version (2011) looks and sounds good enough to explain why such a melodramatic, Gothic and proto-feminist love story should have retained popular appeal for so long.

Partly financed by BBC Films, the production benefits from shrewd choices for its director and leading roles. Fresh from his multi-award-winning 2009 debut feature as a writer-director (docudrama Sin Nombre), the young US director, Cary Fukunaga (Japanese-Swedish parentage), approached the Eng-Lit period-piece with the outsider's eye (in a similar eye-opening fashion as Ang Lee's Sense and Sensibility).

Italian Oscar winner (Atonement) and nominee (Pride and Prejudice) Dario Marianelli, in danger of being type-cast as the go-to Masterpiece Theatre composer, wrote the finely-muted background music. Prolific young Irish-British playwright Moira Buffini, who'd adapted Tamara Drewe for Stephen Frears the previous year, transformed Bronte's romance for the screen. She hadn't tied up Bronte's many loose ends, which is proper, but leaves various abrupt events far from fully explained, such as the mad wife's attack on her unidentified brother, Jane's cousins, and two French-speakers' fate.

Irish-German Brit actor Michael (Hunger, Fish Tank, X-Men) Fassbender was an obvious choice for imperious Rochester, Polish-Australian Mia (Alice in Wonderland, In Treatment, The Kids are All Right) Wasikowska a wise one for the young governess with heart, soul and many opinions. The key supporting cameos were played well enough by Jamie Bell, as Jane's pious suitor, and Judi Dench as Rochester's caring housekeeper.

Fassbender had several tough shoes to fill (Orson Welles, William Hurt and Timothy Dalton) and did so creditably, with moments of facial expressiveness a la Olivier and Day-Lewis at their best. Wasikowska is an ideal plain Jane of the 19th century, displaying the charming moral qualities and repressed teenage ambitions that were way ahead of her time and gender role. The cast's northern English accents might distress Lancastrians, but to an outsider they come across as acceptable middle-class regional characters.

This Jane gazes wistfully at her claustrophobic cloudy landscape with an intensity channeling a new Jodie Foster. The production embedded her convincingly in well-detailed production and costume designs, often illuminated strikingly by candles, with the surrounding starkness left deliberately silent and menacing. Fukunaga was lucky to be given this gem for his sophomore performance, and he rewarded his producers' trust.

Archipelago

Think Woody Allen and Ingmar Bergman; imagine them having lobotomies and going for R&R in the Scilly Islands with a upper-middle-class-Brit family which is, stereotypically, a non-communicative set of repressed and bruised psyches. Does anyone need to see writer-director Joanna Hogg's 2010 soph movie Archipelago?

Its improvised scenes self-consciously filmed in chronological order (a la Ken Roach's reality-seeking school of auteurs), the movie wends through wind-swept insular scenery and solitary souls in little gusts of conversational non-action. They are punctuated purposelessly by little-varied vistas of clouds.

A middle-aged mother (Kate Fahy) has rented an island house as a two-week holiday home for her family: a reserved angst-filled son going on voluntary service in Africa for a year (Tom Hiddleston), a shrewish daughter (UK TV actress Lydia Leonard), and her husband, who never joins them, indicating family relationship problems via phone calls. The mother employed a young housekeeper to cook their meals and a painter (Christopher Baker) to give her art lessons. The latter can eat with them; the cook can't.

Static framing of stilted group conversations emphasises the gathering's frigidity, false niceties and basic pointlessness. The three family members are such self-obsessed neurotics that one tends to understand the absent father's unwillingness to join the mournful charade.

Hogg may need a change of inspiration: her first movie feature Unrelated (2007) also portrayed a family on holiday in Tuscany and was critically acclaimed in the UK. Hiddleston and his sister Emma had supporting parts. She has no other screen credit, but Tom (a double-first in Classics at Cambridge and RADA-trained) had already leapt from Brit TV to Hollywood, as close-to-camp Loki, the jealous brother of Thor (and Marvel's forthcoming New Avengers product).

He's worth watching, but not as much as the two lead women: both Irish-born Fahy, the wife of Jonathan Pryce, and Leonard convey inner rage and despair tellingly. They'd have been even better with a real script. So might wooden Baker, a movie first-timer muttering moodily about art and self-confidence; the equally nicely-accented cook chats with Hiddleston about food and self-confidence.

The film's scorecard in Rotten Tomatoes logs 16 favourable reviews from 16 Brit critics, some of whom may be undeclared chauvinists, feminists or upper-middle-class snobs. One non-logged top US critic is rightly scathing. The film is unforgivably boring, to look at and listen to.

Neds

Scottish actor/writer/director Peter Mullan has reportedly said that "Nine out of 10 delinquents are frustrated actors" and he illustrated it well in his third full-length feature, Neds (2010). His first award-winning self-directed screenplay was Orphans (1998), followed by The Magdalene Sisters (a Venice Festival winner in 2002).

The Marxist Glaswegian, a familiar face in independent movies and British TV, won the Best Actor award at Cannes in 1998 for his title role as a recovering alcoholic in Ken Loach's My Name is Joe. He'd also been a supporting actor for Loach's Riff Raff (1991), Danny Boyle's Shallow Grave and Trainspotting, and Mel Gibson's Braveheart. He's co-starred in many other movies (including Mike Figgis's Miss Julie (1999) and Michael Winterbottom's The Claim).

Although his craggy face can express sensitivity well (Boy A), it's best suited to surliness (Young Adam), and he cast himself as the menacing father of his latest film's anti-hero, John McGill, first seen as a plump school swot with promise. In 1974, at secondary school, his family history and genetics, abetted by his environment and peers, he matures into a typical bullying thug, a Non-Educated Delinquent, played with frightening sweet'n'sour realism by thick-set newcomer Conor McCarron.

Mullan's semi-autobiographical docudrama is a damning two-hour portrait of gang-ridden housing estates in Catholic Glasgow districts, where fathers are mean-spirited drunks, mothers are put-upon worn-out nonentities, and sons can only imagine becoming criminals, bouncers or dock workers (or policemen and soldiers). A few escape, as Mullan did (via university).

His Neds are a convincing bunch of non-professional youngsters, set amid the look and feel of the Seventies (from long leather jackets to Kubrick movies, TV's Monty Python to women's perms). All the Scottish supporting cast perform well, notably as no-nonsense schoolteachers and policemen coping with suppressed social unrest.

Towards the end, in an effort to explain his anti-hero's mental conflict, Mullan created a sequence of far-fetched serio-comic fantasies in which the confused, belligerent teenager has a knife fight with a Jesus statue, plans to kill his father, and guides one of his mentally-disabled victims through a pride of lions.

The youngster's angsts are thickly signposted, but his character changes are unconvincing plot developments. During one short summer break, the polite swot becomes a sassy rebel, and then transforms himself into a gang leader, insane anarchist and murderous homeless wretch before going back dutifully to school. Many scenes ring true, compellingly, but the whole movie doesn't.

Route Irish

Movies on DVD have to overwhelm their viewers, compel them to sit like an obedient dog, panting, unwilling to let their gaze wander. Route Irish did that with an intensely intriguing 10-minute first "act" showing a man of Irish-accented mystery in Liverpool coping with the bombing death of his best friend in Iraq. Then, mercifully it feels, director Ken Loach and his regular screenwriting associate, Paul Laverty, give their audience a breather, cutting to a crowded pub setting.

Unfortunately it's a cut not to the quick but the cliched, in yet another of the creative pair's polemical docudramatics. Their very unlikeable foul-mouthed anti-hero (Mark Womack) is a retired soldier who became a mercenary "contractor" in Iraq and invited his best childhood friend to join him there. The pal sees a manic colleague shoot up a taxi, killing a family of four and a couple of kids, and then the pal and his team members die when an IED explodes on "Route Irish", the dangerous road linking Baghdad's Green Zone and airport. The anti-hero and his pal's widow join vengeful forces (and unhappy bodies) to find truth and justice.

Loach, who's retained his socialist beliefs during more than four decades of movie-making, hired other favourite veteran talents including cameraman Chris Menges and composer George Fenton. As usual, the Loach-Laverty team employed little-known local actors to add the required air of cine-reality (and consequent amateur theatricals) and wove archive newsreel and emotional dialogue to illustrate blood-thirstiness by Allied forces and insurgents alike. There are some striking camera shots, telling narrative moments and effective editing, but the overall effect is yawnfully uninvolving. The promise of the initial setting evaporates.

Submarine

UK movie audiences have always welcomed home-made films sporting horror, gangsters, troubled youngsters and madcap social comedy. Ambitious producers try to satisfy all markets simultaneously. First-time feature-film writer-directors find it wisest to test their talents with no more than two genres, as Norwegian-Nigerian Brit TV comedy writer-actor-director Richard (The IT Crowd) Ayoade did in 2010 with Submarine, an exceptional coming-of-age social comedy.

He adapted the quirky 2008 novel by young Welsh author Joe Dunthorne, telling the tales of Oliver Tate (Craig Roberts), an egocentric 15-year-old schoolboy who wants to have sex and get his parents' relationship out of a bad spell. Instead, to his angst-ridden adolescent dismay, his successfully seduced girl drops him. And his mother (Mike Leigh regular Sally Hawkins, a multi-awardee and Golden Globe winner for Happy-Go-Lucky) appears to have started an affair with an old fling and trendy New Age psychic (Paddy Dead Man's Shoes Considine).

The self-consciously self-obsessed boy, through wry off-screen commentaries, establishes the characters' backgrounds in the seaside South Wales community while revealing his own naivete and teenage arrogance. Throughout, from him and the other characters, there's a dazzling display of insightful moments of zany comedy, schoolyard bitchiness and family melodrama. The zombie-like depressed father (Noah Shine Taylor) provides a taped collection of happy and sad love songs to help his son cope with first romance, which has cheered his primly efficient wife who's been worried about her son's mental state and sexual inclinations.

Oliver loses his virginity to a fiendishly manipulative and self-protective girl, Jordana (Yasmin Paige), whose mother's got a brain tumour. The casting of the pair of edgy youngsters was crucial for Ayoade's old-fashioned "New Wave" style, in which close-ups of their acne and awkward body language is contrasted artfully with the mystical natural beauty and man-made industrial townscapes in which their dramas play out. Both Roberts (Welsh born) and Paige (a Londoner) are experienced TV child actors (Young Dracula and The Mysti Show respectively, among other series). They are enchanting as ironic, plain-faced star-crossed lovers.

Oliver's parents are underplayed handsomely, and Considine relishes his role as an actor-turned-shyster (whose faux-natural 15-minute promotional video is a highlight among the above-average set of DVD extras). Good cinematography, authentic-feeling production designs, and an unusually cerebral dialogue were blended well by Ayoade, providing a distinctive sense of humour, LOL at times, with a sense of emotional depth and psychological acumen.

When a movie has nothing to fault, and feels as it's achieved all its ambitions, it would be wrong to deny it a top rating just because it's a lightweight confection. So were many New Wave award-winners, and Submarine can be viewed as a classic of its kind too.

Christopher and his kind

Are there too many "gay" films being made? Will familiarity breed contempt? Could gaiety become a genre as outmoded as musical operettas, cowboys'n'Indians or the Perils of Pauline? There's probably an ever-lasting market for gay romantic comedies, and definitely one for hard-porn, but I wonder how long normal (ie non-GLBT) TV viewers can be expected to face ever more gay-focused movies made for their living-room screen?

Christopher and His Kind is another BBC TV movie presenting gays as fascinating dramatic characters. On a PC scale, it also ticks a lot of boxes coincidentally, for a dramatisation of Christopher Isherwood's autobiographical memoir of life in 1930s Berlin also documents the rise of the Nazis and increased persecution of Jews.

Not that Isherwood was bothered by politics, and apparently planned to do some writing in Berlin for an Oswald Mosley magazine. He'd been urged to go there ("for the boys") by his public-school friend (and undeclared lover) W.H Auden, to delight in a divine decadence that included many rent boys. Several eccentric people who lived in or visited his boarding house became fictional characters in his fictional tale of Sally Bowles (who became a larger-than-life lead role for Lisa Minelli in Cabaret).

The movie shows us that her real-life inspiration was a socialist Englishwoman, Jean Ross, who survived in Berlin through prostitution and singing in a cheap nightclub. She's a juicy role for Imogen Potts, a young British actress who's already had good supporting parts in Hollywood. She manages the tough task of talking posh while sounding down-to-earth, being sluttish and politically aware.

That wasn't Isherwood's style, judging by the way he's portrayed by Matt (Dr Who) Smith: he speaks very poshly, almost painfully so, and stares at life with supercilious glances, lecherous twinkles or emotionally dead eyes. It's possible to sense a continuity of character between Smith's egotistic observer and Colin Firth's troubled gay lecturer in Tom Ford's adaptation of Isherwood's A Single Man, but Smith's is a much less likeable character. Isherwood probably was too, as his memoir revealed with an honesty that disgusted his former Berlin lover (as an end caption notes).

The memoir was adapted by Kevin Elyot, a former UK TV actor who switched to writing in the mid-90s, winning the 1995 Olivier award for his stage play, My Night with Reg (about four intimate friends of a man with AIDS). It was filmed by Roger Michell for the BBC. Elyot has also written a quartet of Miss Marple movies and a couple of Poirot screenplays for TV, and another gay drama, Clapham Junction, screened on Channel Four. His Riot at the Rite, also for the BBC, focused on bisexual dancer Nijinsky, and he's cultivated a rewarding patch of gay docudrama.

Director Geoffrey Sax, a TV veteran since 1979, created well-decorated period settings marred only by too many over-composed pretty shots through windows. One extra is given full-frontery (none of the lead actors are), Jean Ross's American boyfriend is shown in full-rear nudity, and there's enough kissing and simulated buggery to delight Gay Libbers.

The excellent supporting cast of characters includes Toby Jones (Capote in Infamous) as an English masochist spied through keyholes, Tony-winning Lindsay Duncan (Rome on TV) as the writer's miserable snobbish mother, and former Burberry model Douglas (Boy George on TV) Booth as Isherwood's young German sweet-sweeper lover. It's easy to see why he won the title role in the current version of Romeo and Juliet.

To give Elyot well-earned credit, although this gay docudrama may appear to excuse, almost promote, male homosexuality, it also depicts its gay protagonist as a mean-spirited, selfish writer who'd joke about Nazis killing yodellers. I'd like to have seen Firth play this role too, if only because Matt Smith's eyes and expression are not attractive, to me.

Brighton rock

To re-make a classic movie is likely to be a lose-lose proposition for a novice feature film director, yet BBC Films gave the go-ahead to Rowan Joffe for a 2009 adaptation of Brighton Rock. He'd won awards for his TV feature, The Shooting of Thomas Hurndall (2008) and co-writing of 28 Weeks Later, was working on the adaptation of Martin Booth's The American (an Anton Corbijn project starring George Clooney), and had good genes (mother, actress Jane Laportaire; Oscar-nominated father, director Roland Joffe).

The original B&W 1947 Ealing film, directed by the Boulting brothers, starred Richard Attenborough, reprising his breakthrough West End theatre role as Pinkie, a murderous young gangster who seduces a key witness. The plot was adapted by Graham Greene and playwright Terence Rattigan from Greene's 1938 novel about Roman Catholic consciences at work in a sordid gang-infested southern English resort town. Joffe shifted Greene's story to the end-1960s, incorporating the period's real street violence between Mods and rockers (and PC-ly changed a hoodlum into a role for a black actor).

Joffe's production included a stellar Brit cast. Pinkie was played by Sam Riley, a young TV actor who'd gained big-screen acclaim in the lead role for Control in 2007 (directed by Corbijn). Fast-rising Andrea Riseborough (Margaret Thatcher and The Devil's Whore on TV) self-effaced herself as Rose, the naive waitress who needs to be kept quiet. Backing them up with muted star cameos were Helen Mirren (teashop manager and Pinkie's nemesis), John Hurt (bookie client) and Andy Serkis (flashy rival gang-leader).

Greene's novella is a brief and brutal morality tale, and its success hinged on readers' images of the doomed youngsters and their rancid home town. In B&W, with Attenborough's little-boy-lost evil look, the movie was noir cinema at its Brit best. Joffe's richly-coloured TV film does capture a period feeling, but can't recreate the true look and mood of the 60s. Riley may have been mis-cast: he seems too mature to be a teenager, too suave, his features too chiselled, his face suggesting a heartless sneer provoked by an unpleasant smell.

Largely due to that unappealing focal anti-hero, Joffe's version looks to be a glossy charade, a re-make that serves best to prompt a re-viewing of the original. Did it sport a sly "miracle" to create the semi-happy ending Joffe presents? Did it dare to clarify, as Greene did, Catholic-raised Pinkie's psychopathic anti-sex anti-woman personality? Did the old-timers end up in cliched contentment? Was it less of a choir-ridden melodrama filled with picture-postcard shots of Brighton landmarks?

Shakespeare retold

Maybe because the BBC reportedly over-pays its senior executives, they sometimes approve hefty funding for great, cute or memorable TV movie productions. Sometimes, those try to be all three, like the Shakespeare Retold 2005 mini-series of four made-for-TV contemporary versions of the bard's plots. One imagined Macbeth set in a Glasgow restaurant's kitchen. The other three were comic efforts, one of which envisaged The Taming of the Shrew as a modern-day rom-com.

Bizarre casting paired short and very shrewish Scottish actress Shirley Henderson, as Kate, a viperous virgin uber-Thatchery MP, and big-framed bumptious Rufus Sewell as Petruchio, a penniless earl wagered into wooing her. Her marriage is required too by party supporters if the spiteful spinster is to get chosen as Leader of the Opposition.

Screen-playwright Sally Wainwright had already been a BAFTA nominee for her work on Yorkshire Television's four-season comedy series At Home with the Braithwaites (200o-2003) and her version of one of Canterbury Tales (The Wife of Bath, 2003) for the BBC. She'd had what must have seemed an amusing idea for her re-working, which was directed attractively by David (Hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper) Richards.

The worthy supporting cast included comedian David Mitchell (as Kate's long-suffering PPS), Jaime (Hustle) Murray as Bianca, a beautiful model sister head over heels for a beautiful Italian teenager, and Twiggy as their mother; Stephen (Drop the Dead Monkey) Tompkinson plays Bianca's manager, harbouring long-unrequited love for her.

The very incredible updated plotline has Petruchio, recently returned from Australia, falling into instant real love for Kate, who agrees within a week to a church wedding, at which her fiancee comes out as a macho transvestite who likes wearing high heels, make-up and a kilt. Not even coolly surreal, and too far from the realities of modern life and politics, the unfunny comedy framework collapses before the pair reach their honeymoon villa and Kate's taming in Italy.

***

Peter Bowker, a multiple BAFTA TV award nominee, and winner for Occupation and Eric & Ernie, had the trickier task of placing A Midsummer's Night Dream in a modern setting. His imaginative interpretation works better. The lovers' wooded fairyland, still ruled by Oberon (Lennie Jericho James) and Titania (Sharon Inspector Linley Small), assisted by unreliable Puck (Dean Lennox Shameless Kelly), is found in Dream Park, a lakeside holiday resort where Theo (Bill Paterson) and Polly (Imelda Staunton) are hosting their daughter's engagement party. Its special highlight is to be a revue organised by camp manager Quince (Simon The Fast Show Day) performed by camp staff, including oafish Norman Bottom (Johnny Benidorm Vegas)

The bride-to-be's best friend and secret lover are Shakespeare's second pair of love victims to be served inattentive Puck's mistaken applications of eyedrops of love juice. Director Ed Fraiman has quick-cut fun illustrating the potion's effect, but repeats the device too many times; the production also adds pop song tracks whose lyrics are over-obvious noisy accompaniments to plot developments.

All ends well enough and sweetly, though the comic revue and audience participation were a lot funnier in the original 16th-Century theatrical romp.

***

Brian Percival's direction of Much Ado About Nothing won him a BAFTA TV award in 2006. He'd won the BAFTA Short Film award for his 2001 About a Girl, and collected another BAFTA TV award in 2011 for his work on ITV's Downton Abbey.

David Nicholls wrote the snappy TV version of Shakespeare's rom-com, in which Beatrice (Sarah Blackpool Parish) and Benedick (Damian Band of Brothers Lewis) are sparring co-anchors on Wessex TV news programme. Hero (Billie Dr Who Piper), its bubbly bright weather girl and daughter of station manager Leonard (Martin By Jeeves Jarvis), is to be married to sportscaster Claude (Tom Eastenders Ellis), but the jealous former visual effects designer Don (Derek No Angels, Ugly Betty Riddell) plots their falling-out.

The delightfully credible lead pair of actors clearly enjoy their frolic, especially an apropos deconstruction and recital of a Shakespearean poem extolling love and marriage. The play's tittle-tattle tale of hate-love passions has been artfully re-hashed by Nicholls, whose non-TV work includes adaptations of his own novels: Starter for Ten (2006, starring James McAvoy) and One Day (2011, with Anne Hathaway and Jim Sturgess). It's clear why the BBC chose to run this story first in the four-week mini-series: this is Shakespeare rendered with comic and televisual flair.

***

James McAvoy landed the tile role in the re-working of Macbeth, who's been transformed into the young impassioned sous chef in a top Glasgow restaurant in the noir screenplay devised by Peter (Cambridge Spies) mini-series) Moffat, a multi-award nominee and BAFTA winner for his Criminal Justice mini-series. Joe Macbeth's ambitious wife, Ella (Keeley Spooks Hawes), is the maitre d' for the three-star restaurant, whose absentee owner is a TV celebrity chef, Duncan (Vincent - 300, The Street - Regan). His son, Malcolm, is a long-haired would-be poet and apprentice chef (Toby Dead Man's Shoes, The Street Kebbell.

The Scottish tragic melodrama was given a treatment reminiscent of Peter Greenaway's epic tale of a egocentric chef and his retinue, and director Mark Brozel (award-winning Holy Cross TV movie) followed suit with an artful array of dramatic lighting, raw meat, kitchen knives, gore, garbage and self-consciously well-composed close-ups of Mr and Mrs Macbeth emoting madly.

The one conceit that worked surprisingly well was the transformation of the three witches into a chorus of refuse-disposal bin-men, consoling Macbeth with the thought that his murder of Duncan will only be trouble "when pigs fly", which they do eventually. What didn't work was the concept that the Ghost could be replaced by a macabre Michelin quality inspector.

Another silly idea was corrected before the series was published as a BBC DVD. The original portmanteau title was rightly ditched: ShakespeaRe Told. Will must have groaned in his grave.

Conspiracy

In 2001, HBO and the BBC co-produced a docudrama, Conspiracy, that won Emmys for lead actor Kenneth Branagh and writer Loring Mandel, who also won the Writers Guild of America top TV award. Supporting actor Stanley Tucci won the year's Golden Globe for TV movie work, and director Frank Pierson collected the Directors Guild award for TV movies. It should have been nominated for Business Management awards too: it's a shockingly illuminating demonstration of how to really run a conference.

In the film, as in reality, the January 1942 "Wannsee Conference" lasted 85 minutes, during which 13 leaders of the German Reich's relevant government departments and military forces reviewed proposals for a solution to the Jewish "question". They had been summoned, in line with instructions from Hitler, by SS chief Reinhard Heydrich, who reported to Gestapo chief Heinrich Himmler. Heydrich's right-hand man and "recording secretary" for the secret meeting was Col Adolf Eichmann, who officially reported to another attendee, Heinrich Muller, a Gestapo officer who reported to Heydrich.

Other attendees controlled armies in the troubled "Occupied Eastern Territories", or administered German government ministries (foreign, justice, four-year planning, chancellery). Their common problem was deciding what to do about the impending incorporation into the Reich of millions of Jews from the east, particularly the 5 million in Russia.

With deliberate irony, the opening chit-chat between attendees tells us that the exquisite Wannsee lakeland mansion used for the conference (and now a museum) had belonged to a Jew. Later, further chit-chat repeats contemporary gossip about Eichmann's possible Jewish blood. The biggest irony not noted in the screenplay would cover the Reich's failure to realise that Poles, Slavs, Russians, Gypsies, gays and many other undesirables would also need to be eliminated. Heydrich obviously took his instruction to deal with the Jewish Question first, as the priority issue distracting Germany from its war efforts; he wisely kept the conferees' attention focused on it alone.

The way the dialogue, director and Branagh present Heydrich, it would appear that he was a remarkably shrewd, skilled commander. His death soon after resulted from the after-effects of an assassination attempt conducted by two specially trained Czechs. They were "dropped from a British bomber", as one of the end captions further notes, advising the post-war situation of each attendee. Eichmann, we are told, assumed responsibility for his dead superior's work, "regarding it as matter of honour", but one wonders what might have happened in the Reich if Heydrich had survived.

Only one of the 30 copies of the official conference minutes was discovered after WW2, in the 1950s; its contents were amplified during Israel's questioning of Eichmann following his capture in Argentina in 1960. The screenplay apparently invents additional conversational asides and character quirks, and incorporates crude political and racist jokes. The overall impact of the attendees' remarks and conclusions is astonishing.

Only a couple of the assembled leaders display any qualms about the plans to mass-murder millions of people with ruthless efficiency. Precise calculations of transportation loads, potential ghetto prisoners' work skills, death-gas strength and comparative costs (bullets being too expensive to waste) are outlined with matter-of-fact crispness in the SS folder handed to each attendee at the conference table.

More of them acknowledge the impossibility (and the waste of valuable military resources) of relying on German soldiers to carry out the desired daily death tolls (around 20,000). After fast-tracked overviews of sterilisation options and the legal tangle prompted by consideration of mixed-race German Jews, the meeting is railroaded by Heydrich into acceptance of gassing all Jews who aren't temporarily useful as a needed labour force (which will also build its own gas chambers and furnaces).

Heydrich, played with superb smiling menace by Branagh, is ruthlessly effective as the conference convener. He'd ordained that it last less than two hours and it did, partly due to well-organised stage management from Eichmann, given an almost admirable image of tense bureaucratic efficiency by Tucci. The rest of the cast (British) deliver cameos that rarely exhibit cliched characters, especially Colin Firth (the Interior Ministry's legalistic purist and creator of the anti-Jew "Nuremberg Laws") and David Threlfall (a morally distressed senior civil servant).

Short, sharp, shocking and finely edited, with drama in facial close-ups and character confrontations, this TV movie earns favourable comparison with any feature film set in a jury room or wherever talking heads discuss big issues. MBA academics would do well (and be pilloried for so doing) to screen it for their students as an exemplar of conference control techniques and how to create unanimity for a carefully defined common goal.

Scissor sisters

Movie presentations of pop groups' live shows are occasionally cinematic delights per se, and not just when Martin Scorsese directs them. If a group is confident enough, it will let a talented director frame and edit their performances, on and off stage, to create the movie equivalent of a parade of visually exciting floats conveying their music to fresh heights of thrills or meanings. Were the arch-gay NY-formed UK-resident Scissor Sisters glam-rock and honky-tonk fivesome that self-confident?

In 2004, their live concert at the Brighton Dome was recorded for their first DVD, We Are Scissor Sisters ... And So Are You. It also included a bio-documentary, Return to Oz. Both were directed by Julien Temple. Three years later in London, an O2 live show was captured in A Year of Ta-Dah, a debut direction for an unknown Benjamin Hoffman (the same family name as one of the group's founding members, NY-born Scot Hoffman aka Babydaddy).

He's the somewhat Teddy Bear-ish bearded guitarist whose stage persona is Nervousness. His be-suited lead guitar counterpoint, "Del Marquis", personifies Aloofness. There's a non-gay drummer in between them (originally "Paddy Boom"), personifying nothing special, while the group's primary foci are slim ultra-exhibitionist Jake Shears and plumpish butchy Ana "Matronic". Her to-camera remarks provide the thread for Temple's neatly-edited 26-minute documentary, showing how the group formed, starting with Hoffman and Shears sharing a bed.

Mikado

There's much to laugh at, for good and bad reasons, in The Mikado, the first (1939) movie version of a Gilbert and Sullivan musical. The only totally negative feature is the stagey OTT make-up, visible proof that swatches of theatrical mascara and other facial paint look awful in close-ups. The gaudy costumes and lavish stage designs are more acceptably outre, as they suit the mock-Japanese setting and the Oscar-nominated Technicolor cinematography.

Although the movie was filmed at England's Pinewood studios and used many stars and choristers from the Savoy Theatre's D'Oyly Carte Company, it was a Hollywood co-production. To maximise its appeal to non-British audiences, it hired an American radio pop star (Kenny Baker) to take the role of wishy-washy Nanki-Poo, the Mikado's son and "second trombone", and an Australia-based D'Oyly Carte veteran (John Barclay) to giggle manically as the ludicrously logical Mikado.

A well-chosen Hollywood veteran talent took the director's chair. Trained as a violist and a composer, Victor Schertzinger had been Oscar-nominated for One Night of Love in 1934, and went on to make the first two Hope and Crosby Road movies. His last film, The Fleet's In, included four of his own songs, with lyrics by Johnny Mercer: Tangerine and I Remember You remain popular, explaining why the film's soundtrack (and sound recording) won Oscars in 1942. Schertzinger, at the age of 53, had died from a heart attack the previous October after completing the film (his 89th).

He worked with the then leading D'Oyly Carte stage director to add cinematic elements to a tradition-bound production that dared not stray too far from the beloved Gilbert's original 1885 staging. An explanatory prologue and a throng of extras were added, ornate costumes and sets were created, and various songs were cut (including two of baleful man-hungry Katisha's ballads). The Criterion DVD (published by its second-tier Janus division) includes one deleted scene: the Lord High Executioner's famous ditty about his "little list" of abhorred people, which included "nigger minstrels". In 1941, the producers hadn't seen the need to revise that, and also included a topical comic cut-away to an extra with a Hitlerian moustache.

English director Mike Leigh (whose Topsy Turvy focused on The Mikado and the G&S/D'Oyly Carte working relationships) provides an illuminating to-camera commentary in another DVD item. Similarly, two American academics comment in useful detail, their remarks amplified by short clips from the movie. As so often, Criterion's packet transforms a pleasant movie into a worthy cinema relic.

Mr Nice

The land that produced Lloyd George, Anthony Hopkins and a lot of good singers has used its local film promotion budget to present PR-savvy drug-dealing ex-con Howard Marks as an awfully nice chap. Not even Welshman Rhys Ifan in the title role can achieve such a mission impossible. There is no way that such an anti-hero can have lived up to his stolen identity as Mr Nice.

Writer-director Bernard Rose, best known for his multi-awarded 1992 Candyman, adapted Marks' best-selling autobiography and did his own (unexceptional) cinematography. As the man is still alive, Rose obviously couldn't employ any writer's licence to make Marks' stories ring truer. He was apparently a gifted Welsh lad who won an Oxford scholarship, was a typical grass-smoking student, and became an overnight marijuana kingpin with an ill-defined second wife (Chloe Sevigny), smuggling pals in Pakistan and Afghanistan and a simple-minded link (Crispin Glover) in the USA.

Eventually trapped and convicted there, Marks was given an astonishing early release maybe because he was in secret partnership with an IRA gun-and-drug-running madman. David Thewlis emotes wildly as Jim McCann, whose end fate is not made clear in the film or reality, and will eventually inspire a biopic no Sinn Fein politician would want any Irish movie promotion outfit to fund. He's 72 and last heard of, according to Wikipedia, as an official 2002 Republic of Belarus delegate to a climate change convention.

Marks ended up back in the UK as a touring one-man chat show, apparently revered by toking students. It is never indicated why Marks, self-confessedly at the top of his world for almost a decade, failed to attract the thieving attention of real murderous gangsters in London, South Asia or the States. Did fear of the Provisional IRA extend that far? An outsider can only suspect that there's a lot more to Marks' life story than he chose to divulge semi-comically: his screen character's shallow facade is therefore ideally personified by Ifans, always a slouchy actor without depth. Likable but louche.

Made in Dagenham

British film-makers have clearly decided that modern British political history can best be seen as a joke, in which all concerned are to be smiled at patronisingly. Maybe the influence of satirical sitcoms during the film-makers' youth rendered them incapable of taking anyone seriously, even Margaret Thatcher and Ted Heath. The latest victims of this production syndrome (damning with faint comic praise) are working-class women - the striking sewing machinists who brought Ford to a halt in 1968 and form the cliched heroines of Made in Dagenham.

The movie's French distributors gave it a titillating yet relevant title, We Want Sex Equality. In Germany and Italy, that was re-translated as We Want Sex, which gives one a hint about those countries' marketing men.

Director Nigel Cole (Saving Grace, Calendar Girls) was handed a banal screenplay by William Ivory, whose award-winning TV work includes Common as Muck and The Sins. The real-life tale of working-class women who struck for equal pay and rights had great potential, though interview comments by some of the women concerned indicate why Ivory needed to fabricate a sassy, politically-aware strike leader, Rita O'Grady. She's a natural role for Sally Hawkins, one of Mike Leigh's few cheerful lead actresses.

A galaxy of well-known names and faces flickers fitfully on the sets (factory floor and exterior). Geraldine James is the weary shop steward with an unemployable war-damaged husband, Bob Hoskins the rebellious local union man whose single mum raised her family on unequal pay, and there's a mini-skirted doll who thinks the strike is an entree to modelling. Add Ford's ludicrously oppressive American negotiator, the union leadership's chauvinist Ford collaborators, and the elegantly bolshie-minded uni-educated wife (Rosamund Pike) of Ford's UK boss (Rupert Graves) and the PM of the time, Harold Wilson (John Sessions) sucking a pipe judiciously.

Then Labour minister Barbara Castle (Miranda Richardson in a role that should be hers to play in a real drama) swallows a whisky and stomps to the rescue of the women, inspired by Rita and three acolytes, we are expected to believed, to dare Ford to do its worst. Within a couple of years (a short political period even in Wilsonian terms), the UK (and Ford) have led the world to statutory rights of equal pay.

This is modern political history written for comic-book readers, who deserve - and would probably appreciate - a more intelligent introduction to key events in 20th-Century Britain.

Another year

Mike Leigh can perhaps be compared to Woody Allen. The two veteran writer-director auteurs have been prolific commentators on family relationships. Allen concentrated on nervous intellectuals and New York Jewish sensitivities, Leigh on English working-class mores. Allen used star actors and personalities to dress up his dialogue, Leigh worked only with a repertory group of dedicated actors, improvising sketched scenes into portraits of repressed passions. Leigh's latest morality tale is an admirable cinematic miniature, Another Year. An admirable, but unlovable, display of Leigh's skill in capturing mean spirits and sad lives.

Tom (Jim Broadbent) and Gerri (Ruth Sheen) are a sweetly, happily-married late-middle-aged professional couple (civil engineer and psychiatric counsellor) with a well-adjusted sole child (Oliver Maltman) who's found a bubbly, steady girlfriend (Karina Fernandez). The older couple enjoy a simple loving relationship in humble semi-detached housing, potter around their vegetable allotment, cook ambitiously and are kind to friends and family members.

At four mealtimes during the course of a year, the constant and sometimes unwelcome presence is a hyper-tense needy secretary from Gerri's clinic, Mary (Leslie Manville). Her panic attacks over buying and trying to drive a second-hand car provide a comic storyline. The year's other major event is the death of Tom's sister-in-law and the family's trip up north to attend her funeral, console the miserable brother and cope with his alienated son. There's also a laid-back black female colleague of Gerri's and an over-the-hill university pal of Tom's who makes a messy pass for Mary, who's making messy friend-craving passes of her own to Tom's son and brother.

That's it, and it earned Leigh a Best Original Screenplay Oscar nomination in 2011. Why this particular slice of kitchen-sink posturing did so is a mystery. Its a microcosmic study of typical, almost cliched, working-class English misfits and the remarkably patient couple who let them moan and drift year by year through their own uneventful lives. The acting is immaculate, of its kind, particularly by Broadbent as an avuncular chuckler and Manville as a nervous wreck. The bonus is Imelda Staunton dead-pan cameo of a bitterly maudlin client of Gerri's.

Tom and Gerri are almost too good to be true characters, surely too sensible to have allowed their social annual round to be so hostage to other people's woes.

Burke & Hare

Old wine, old bottles, old brewers do not a vintage make. England's Ealing Studios (founded 1896) and American director John (Animal House) Landis used to be masters of the comic movie genre. In theory, any movie they created together should be a happy romp. More so if it was written by Nick Moorcroft and Piers Ashworth (who together had crafted Ealing's profitable revival of the St Trinian's franchise), and if its cast was headed by busy Simon (Mission Impossible, Star Trek) Pegg, who'd worked for and in Ealing on Shaun of the Dead.

Add a fashionable co-star, Andy Serkis (LOTR's Gollum, Little Dorrit, Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll) and give them plum black-comic roles as Burke and Hare, the historical purveyors of cadavers to Scotland's leading teacher of surgery, Dr Knox. Have him played by ubiquitous genius of British character acting, Tom Wilkinson.

What more could you want for a blood-and-thundering farce and 1820s period piece? More than you'd ever imagined, including comedian Bill Bailey as a droll on-screen commentator, Tim Curry as the rival surgeon, and Ronnie Corbett as a bumbling military officer of the law, all assuming so-bad-it's-almost-amusing Scottish accents.

Enough? Nah, not when you can stud your cast list with cameos from Christopher Lee, Jenny Agutter, Michael Winner, 90-year-old Ray Harryhausen (Hollywood SFX maestro), Stephen Merchant and Allan Corduner, to name just some of the wasted talents involved.

Ealing, Pegg et al must be asking themselves why they opted to bring Landis out of cinematic retirement and give him the director's chair. Kindly, it's assumed they assumed he had the Hollywood expertise they'd need to create an international success: he'd made An American Werewolf in London (1981, as a 30-year-old), Michael Jackson's videos for Thriller and Black or White, Trading Places and more award-winning movie and cable successes.

But, in 1992, he was nominated for his first Worst Director Razzie (most embarrassingly, for Oscar). He earned the undesirable moment of Hollywood infamy twice more, for Beverly Hills Cop III (1995) and The Stupids (1997). Susan's Plan (1998) was his disastrous last big-screen effort at writing-directing; he shifted to TV for 12 years. Then he went to Ealing, and has reportedly kept a base in London, attached to a projected screen adaptation of Sheridan's The Rivals.

His presentation of the Burke and Hare saga, a fabulous tale of primitive market forces at work, is well-paced and competent in all technical aspects. It isn't funny, though, or comically horrific. So I'll re-watch Tim Burton's Sweeney Todd, probably with enhanced respect.

Sherlock

Robert Downey Jr and Jude Law (following the leads of their director, Guy Ritchie) may have thought they'd redefined the roles of Sherlock Holmes and Dr John Watson in modern buddy-movie terms. Not for long. A 2010 BBC TV series redefined the duo in truly modern terms, Sherlock, and cast it well with Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman. The first series of three 90-minute adventures, costing a fraction of one SFX-ed Ritchie movie, is an entertaining set of TV detective thrillers.

Major credits go to creator-writers Mark Gattis and Steven Moffat, who'd worked together on the revived BBC TV franchise, Dr Who. Each had a successful track record, Gattis more publicly as a member of the offbeat comic League of Gentlemen quartet.

Their simple concept was to relocate Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's classic pedantic arrogant genius-detective and his stocky bumbling medico sidekick from 19th to 21st-century London. Hey presto, they had an odd couple of sleuths using IT (Watson's blog, Holmes' texting, mobile phone cameras), state-of-the art magnifying glasses and forensic science to solve devilish serial killings for Scotland Yard's baffled D.I. Lestrade (Rupert Graves) from old-fashioned bachelor lodgings in Baker Street.

The one-hour pilot episode was never screened, and the BBC and the production team shrewdly included it on their DVD for the first 3-episode "season". That ensured that the DVD could be cost-justified as a 2-disc set, a bigger earner visibly justifying the expensive decision to re-shoot most of the pilot after extending its plot by 50%. A particular consolation for Gattis must have been the chance to write himself a juicy role as Holmes' Home Office brother, Mycroft, in the first and third episodes.

In the short version of the first drama, A Study in Pink, the killer's identity was identified too quickly and Holmes' powers of logic were under-illustrated. A more detailed examination of each death, combined with a merry stew of red herrings and Holmesian references, enriched the plot and characters. Most important was extra directorial panache, tenser pacing and a more confident sense of humour from a fresh director, Paul (Gangster No.1, Lucky Slevin) McGuigan, a Scot with an award-winning film and TV track record since his debut with The Acid House.

Cumberbatch, a young Brit TV veteran (Hawking, Forty Something, The Last Enemy) and occasional movie actor (Amazing Grace), could be looking forward to a decade of potential seasonal fun with this franchise. His asexual, overly brainy, mildly psychopathic Holmes character is neatly balanced by Martin (The Office, Hitchhiker's Guide, Fuzz) Freeman's robuster, less dim-witted version of Dr Watson, who was quickly given a medical lady friend. Just as quickly, other characters' non-judgmental acceptance of their possible gay relationship was highlighted in order to be cast aside. Another self-consciously gratuitous PC touch was the deliberate inclusion of black actors as policewomen and victims; there are Chinese in the third tale, but they are playing real Chinese villains, so that's all right. The modern Moriarty is also mod: a mock-camp self-consciously cute and clever Celt who's a fun-filled challenge for Holmes.

Holmes devotees and history buffs can have extra fun looking out for updated period details. Comparing the two versions of the first episode, the deliberate down-playing of the character of Mrs Hudson, the duo's landlady (Una Stubbs), in her costume and manner made her less stereotypical, less Sweeney Toddish. I'm not sure why the production increased the size of the three nicotine patches that are the modern Holmes' meditational drug of choice (shared by Lestrade, so that's PC all right too). Maybe the first trio might have been overlooked by visually challenged viewers.

The good news for the two under-employed young male lead actors from the Harry Potter series is that they could audition for the Holmes franchise in the future. Rupert Grint can only hope to be as good an actor as Freeman, his older lookalike, is; Radcliffe will regret that HP didn't give him enough free time to follow Cumberbatch at Harrow.