Back to London for a couple of days before my holiday and encouragingly managed to get through a whole day without any chocolate or alcohol. It's a new dawn. There is no way I will ever eat chocolate or drink alcohol ever again.
We finally got to watch the final episode of "The Wire", which did not disappoint. It's an incredible piece of television, showing just what the medium is capable of. This is what all TV drama should be aiming to be, but having watched a bit of British Christmas TV I have to say we are getting nowhere near. It is possible to create something with depth, that is intelligent, complicated, unpatronising and makes you look at the world in a different way. Or see a different part of the world. Parts of the fifth season were very slightly far-fetched I thought, but evenso, it was gripping, surprising and unpredictable. So many TV shows and films run to a reliable formula now, so it's brilliant to watch something that wrong foots you and where the best characters can die. If you haven't watched this yet and have any Christmas money then you could do a lot worse than buy the box set of all five seasons. I bet you can get it all for about fifty quid in the sales somewhere. I am only sad that I have no more of it to watch. I hope writers and executives alike will watch this and aim to get anywhere near as good as it. TV can be art and yet here we seem to be producing programmes like "Heads or Tails" or "X-Factor" or "Celebrities Killing Insects". Of course there are different types of telly and it would be wrong if everything was like "The Wire", but it merely shows us the possible. I hope more broadcasters will aim for quality rather than profit and weirdly enough if you make something genuinely brilliant and original it is much more likely to make you money anyway.
