The game's up

I'm very sad. You probably knew that. I'm actually sad tonight, on reading that The Bill is to receive the death sentence for crimes against acting.

In case you're not familiar with this show (and let's face it, only Brits and Australians are), it's a police drama which faded into soapdom. A successor to ground-breaking realist shows like Z Cars, its strengths were tight scripting, a refusal to end with neat conclusions and a clear-eyed view of policing: the characters were complex and often unsympathetic. There were usually many sides to each story, and the producers were extremely quick to pick up on big news from the real world.

Those were the glory days - it gradually became a home for actors whose characters in other soaps had been killed off, and so it became filled with beefcake and totty who wouldn't (or couldn't) do moral complexity: bent coppers don't look great on the CVs of buffed narcissists looking for charidee work.

I'll miss The Bill. Perhaps it will get time off for good behaviour and inhabit the twilight world of repeats channels. You naysayers: leave it aht.

Confession Conundrum

None of us are cool. There's no such thing, to paraphrase Barthes again - we just all exist in a constantly shifting lake of codes. However, there are things we all do which don't fit our self-images, or the image we'd like others to have of us. Guilty pleasures, I guess. So now's your chance to 'fess up.

Cynical Ben is banned. He has three trillion opinions, and specialises in being contrary anyway. He expresses contempt for my music, my clothes (especially my woolly hat and my favourite DM shoes: 'amazing what you can get on the NHS' was his latest witticism) and pretty much anything else, even though we know that he'll change his mind in a week. He's also banned because he bought a copy of Space Jam. That's the kind of contrariness in which he specialises. Tease him and he'll get even more aggressive in his defence. That said, he does have magnificent taste in literature and cheese. OK, he's not banned. Just don't take him too seriously, that's all I'm saying.

My confession. Despite my well-documented objections to policing methods, and to soap operas, and my love of high-concept drama, I also love watching The Bill. I know it's often very poor, and little better than any number of cheap soaps, but there's still something compelling about it. They react to current stories very quickly and rarely take the easy dramatic or narrative option. It depends on the writers in any particular week of course, and it's definitely less political than when it started, but it's still more than a rest home for ex-soap actors. I particularly enjoyed the special episodes done jointly with SOKO Leipzig, the German equivalent, though it was embarrassing that all the Germans had flawless English while the UK actors couldn't manage a word of German.

So there we are. I'm not nearly so suave and sophisticated as you might have thought (if you've had a lobotomy recently). Your turn!

Darlings, you were WONDERFUL

Last night, Mark and I went to see Caryl Churchill's Serious Money at Birmingham Repertory Theatre. It's a great venue - all seats are good seats. The cast captured the look and feel of the 80s brilliantly, and almost all of them had appeared in The Bill at some point, which always pleases me mightily.

It's a full-on attack on the greed of the finance industry - in verse. Government, brokers, bankers and entrepreneurs plot and compete to defraud each other and to wreck the economy and ordinary peoples' lives in pursuit of short-term, personal profit - even sex palls in comparison with the thrill of the chase. If you want a funny, crude, incisive guide to why we're all going to be poor for the next few years - see this play.

Which brings me to my major point. Some of you dear readers are under 26 years old. I've suggested a kind of slow motion culture club. How about starting with free theatre tickets? It's a government scheme which theatres all over England have joined, offering 'free tickets to see any show' every Friday night at the Rep and loads of other places, until March 2011. So you could see Serious Money, or anything else. Here's the site:

A Night Less Ordinary

or

Birmingham Rep and look for 'a night less ordinary'.

Type in the area you want to go to and follow the simple instructions. I shall be polishing my fake ID in preparation.