The Filtnib's Progress

British TV drama is languishing in mediocrity, dominated by cheaply-shot, cliche-ridden fare that looks, sounds and feels like a barely-elevated soap opera (The Bill, first broadcast in 1984, still shows twice a week and yet seems stuck somewhere in the mid-90s in terms of script and style).

Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, TV just gets better and better. I'm thinking specifically of Damages, which is surely the darkest, cleverest serial since Twin Peaks interrogated American suburbia in the 90s. My only problem with Damages being shown on UK terrestrial (BBC1 on Monday nights) is that it spoils every other half-baked programme around.

In the States, it's just one of a super-league of serialized dramas, so good they're like 10 hour feature films that have been chopped into chewable, consistently compelling segments. HBO have led the field since they created the gold standard in television drama, The Sopranos in 1999; since then they've continued to trailblaze with Six Feet Under and most recently, The Wire (named best TV show ever by Time, The Guardian, Entertainment Weekly etc; so good that Slate magazine are publishing a weekly analysis of the final series).

HBO's success proved audiences would lap up drama that is original and provocative, and forged a path for some serious competition. Damages comes courtesy of FX Networks, a channel owned by News Corp's Fox Entertainment, while TV's newest darling, Mad Men, is the first TV drama produced by cable channel AMC; a good start for them, as it's already won 2 Golden Globes.

Even those American series that fit neatly into genre boxes - hospital-based series like ER, Grey's Anatomy, House; police procedurals like the CSI franchise and Without A Trace; political wranglings in Spin City and The West Wing - are still top quality stuff, with real attention (i.e. money) paid to cinematography, lighting and characterisation, the like of which is all too rare in the UK.

The only thing we can do reliably well is period-drama, as the recent Sense & Sensibility and Cranford testified. But surely there must be some TV-friendly British writers more contemporary than Austen and Gaskell? The best we've had recently is Spooks; Life on Mars was good, but not as good as its hype. I tried watching Holby City the other week until the appalling script (somewhere between a Hallmark card and a first aid manual) forced me to switch in exasperation to the far more entertaining BBC Parliament.

In 1879, Matthew Arnold lamented: "In England, we have no modern drama at all." He was talking about theatre but sadly I'd say the same about our TV programming today. In the 19th century we led the way in serialized drama but then the medium was novelistic: Dickens' Bleak House and The Mystery of Edwin Drood were devoured by readers in chapters every month. I'd argue that the best TV dramas coming out of the States right now can be compared to those Victorian novels in terms of inventiveness and sheer emotional power. Writers, to your pens. Programming directors, to your cheque books. We need a serious injection of original, imaginative, risk-taking writing here.

The Diving Bell & The Butterfly opens with a series of blurred images in white and grey. On the soundtrack, Charles Trenet is singing the irresistibly jaunty 'La Mer' with gusto. It's a dark jest, for we are not used to seeing the shapes on the screen accompanied by music of any kind. They are X-rays of bones - vertebrae, femur, patella, spine. The American director Julian Schnabel has made a piece of cinema that looks death in the eye while singing above it, and the opening credits set the tone for the entire film – profound tragedy spiked with a defiant, life-affirming humour.

Schnabel is up for an Oscar for Best Director, but the film's real star is it's source material: the autobiography of Jean-Dominique Bauby, whose glamorous life as editor of French Elle magazine was interrupted by a stroke, leaving him with a rare condition called 'locked-in syndrome'. Aged just 43, Bauby was fully conscious but completely paralyzed. We know this only because in the ensuing months, Bauby began to dictate his entire autobiography by moving his left eyelid, using a painstaking system in which an assistant read out the alphabet and he blinked at the right letter. Each word took around two minutes.

The story of how Bauby achieved this could have been slow, repetitive and saccharine, but the film's triumph is to make his ordeal not only watchable but deeply absorbing. Played with great sensitivity by the French actor Mathieu Amalric, our hero is always sympathetic despite his flaws; through flashbacks we gain a window into a previous life that was sensuous and hectic, with a wife, children, mistress and sports car vying for his time. Such memories offer a welcome counterpoint to the vacuum of life in a hospital bed, and force Bauby – and us – to consider the legacy of our relationships once we no longer have the power to make amends.

But perhaps the film's greatest achievement derives from Schnabel's seeming determination that the audience experience something of the diving-bell-like isolation Bauby described in his book. As he first awakens from his coma, we see a doctor leaning in close and asking him to speak. "What? Can't you hear me?" says Bauby, baffled. Only we, the audience, share that anguish. Indeed, for the first twenty minutes of the film, we see almost exclusively from his fixed perspective; the small hospital room, the nurses who loom in and out of focus, the vase of roses of which he asks, unheard, "Who brought those?"

He never gets an answer, and the donor-less flowers might as well stand for the many incomprehensible things in life, for it is with these that the film is most deeply concerned: loss, betrayal, the obstinacy of love in the face of catastrophe. I cried three separate times in this film, nudged by the shamelessly emotive piano score (try listening to the 'Theme for the Diving Bell & the Butterfly' by Paul Cantelon below). I don't think Schnabel quite deserves the Oscar (that's surely PT Andersons) but the Diving Bell team have framed the huge themes of this film with real wit and vision. In the end though, Jean-Dominique Bauby is the true 'auteur' in this film, and his courage its most compelling device.

On Monday I treated myself to a ticket to see the new release of Blade Runner: The Final Cut at the Rio. I was reminded of how fun it is to go to the cinema alone, something I used to do a lot whilst at Cambridge, but got out of the habit once in London sheerly because of the expense of cinema tickets. However as the Rio does £5 student tickets on Mondays, maybe I'll get back into the habit. The great thing about solitary cinema is you don't have to worry about what the other person thinks; whether they're enjoying it as much (or as little) as you are; whether you made an error in choosing the film. You can just sit selfishly back and experience the film for what it is, distractionless.

At Monday's screening, just being in the cinema felt special. Once the trailers had finished, as the curtains trailed open to a black screen and the title credits appeared, a collective thrill ran through the audience like quicksilver. I think it's because we were all there as fans of the original film. We knew something good was coming. The theatre was almost full, mainly with young people in their twenties and thirties; gangs of sci-fi geeks, cult film buffs, the slightly intimidating dalstonite fashiontellectuals, and the odd person who might have even seen the original in a cinema rather than on their parent’s VCR.

The film’s Vangelis-scored soundtrack is incredible. Sitting in the blackness and feeling the waves of plangent chords wash over you is shiver-inspiring; like getting into a miner’s lift, watching the mesh shutters close and feeling yourself descend into the dark middle of the earth - you feel even before Blade Runner begins that this film is going to take you places, show you things that are new and dark and important.

It is stylish like too few movies dare to be today. Of course it takes a gutsy director with a capacious imagination to make something this coherent in vision. You also need a razor-sharp narrative focus, something that Ridley Scott managed to carve from the ingenious but multi-threaded novel that the film is based on: “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” by Philip K. Dick, written in 1968. In that, we engage with a number of characters, each with their own claims on our affection; in Blade Runner there is really only room for one protagonist and that is Harrison Ford’s morose yet likeable Rick Deckard.

And in a way, that’s cleaner, clearer. Like one of my journalism tutors says: “Once you’re on the M1, stay on the M1” - so, to keep your audience's attention, don’t go off on any slip-roads, just cleave to one story. Scott manages that perfectly: there’s no crossing of wires here, no distracting slip-roads into the religion or drugs themes that add breadth but also complicate the novel. Occasionally themes are gestured at that would have been better left out - when Ford's Deckard notes that the owl in the Tyrell Corporation offices is a fake, it's an observation loaded with meaning in the novel, yet somehow empty in the film, where the idea that all animals are now virtually extinct is never stated or explored.

Where the film exceeds the book is - perhaps predictably - in its visual evoking of a dystopian future. The story is set in ‘L.A., 2019’, but it’s a gloriously Chinesified L.A. with street stalls selling noodles, signs in Mandarin and kimonos everywhere; clearly the filmmakers foresaw China's global dominance even in 1982.

The other overriding influence is film noir: Rick Deckard is the future's Philip Marlowe, a hard-drinking, raincoat-wearing gumshoe except he carries a gun that can blast robots through glass, rather than the 9mm luger pistol preferred by Marlowe, and he travels around in jet-propelled flying cars. Aside from that, Deckard fits perfectly into the film noir tradition, traversing rain-slicked streets with collar up, falling for femme fatales and sustaining bruises to body and ego in the course of his work. His job is to 'retire' the Nexus 6 replicants - androids - that have escaped their slavery 'off-world' and are hiding somewhere in this always-night, neon-lit L.A.

These replicants are at once terrifying and pitiful; living in constant fear for their lives, capable of developing emotional connections with each other and more than conscious of the rare preciousness of life, yet also merciless and hideously violent. Rutger Hauer's performance is so compelling as to almost outshine Ford, though in fact they complement each other perfectly - Hauer intense, aggressive, everything externalized, speaking in near-poetry; Ford all wordless longing and internal conflict.

The only jarring moment in the film is the scene where Deckard seduces Rachel, a replicant who has been implanted with false memories to make her believe she is human. Why does their romance begin with what looks very much like rape? There must be some carefully thought out logic to it but despite searching online discussion boards I haven't yet found a legible answer.

Despite that, the film is still a masterpiece and has informed many movies since; its influence can be traced in Minority Report, the Terminator films, 12 Monkeys and Christopher Nolan's Batman Begins to name but a few. Catch it in the cinema while you can.

A lighter post. Two things that have made me happy in the last few weeks. First: the band Midlake and their incredible album 'The Trials of Van Occupanther'. I only heard about the group when an American friend, Staton, added a video of their song Roscoe to his facebook profile. Such melodic songwriting and beautifully wrought harmonies. And when I started listening to their other songs, it was amazing because whereas usually you only really like one or two songs on an album, every single track I heard was immediately lovable. Thus I took the unprecedented step of paying to download the whole album from iTunes after Play.com told me I'd have to wait 5 weeks for them to get one in stock. It's been totally worth it so here's the video of one particularly lovely song.