I was reading about him recently, and that got me thinking about the British monarchy and how it could benefit from exposure to the free market.

For me, Emperor Norton was the first free market monarch – realising that the people felt the need for an Imperial ruler, he chose to fill that gap in the market and managed it with a remarkable degree of success – and it occurs to me that the idea of free market monarchy isn’t something we should leave in the nineteenth century.

I’m a republican in that I’d like to see the UK – like many other states – have a head of state who’s the elected representative of the people rather than the latest scion of an aristocratic family getting the job by an accident of birth. (My personal preference is for a non-executive ceremonial President in the same vein as Germany or Ireland, but the mechanics of any future republic are a debate for another time) However, I don’t have any objections to the Royal Family as people and neither do I have any objection to them using the titles associated with royalty. I just don’t feel that it’s any business of the state’s as to what people choose to call themselves.

My proposal is simple – in a future United Republic (or United Former Kingdom, perhaps?) the monarchy would be disestablished rather than abolished. The Royal Family would be free to continue living the life of royalty, but there would be no compulsion on anyone else to recognise their titles or nobility. So, people like me could happily ignore their activities (in as much as the activities of any ubercelebrities can be ignored) while those people who wished to could still be ardent royalists and go to see them doing whatever it is they do. As Emperor Norton showed, if someone with just a hat with a rosette on can make a living as an Emperor, life shouldn’t be too hard for the Windsors.

But where does the free market come into this? Well, with the monarchy disestablished and the state washing its hands of any role in the determination of supposedly noble status, the market would be open for anyone to declare themselves a monarch, a duke, an earl or whatever else they wanted to be. Whether they fail or succeed as monarchs and nobles would be up to the market to decide – if people want to follow King Bob from down the road, give him gifts and pay him royal levies that’s entirely for them to decide. Instead of buying football teams, bored billionaires could declare themselves monarchs and stage great pageants to garner support for themselves. ITV could run Royal Idol in an attempt to find the ‘People’s Royal Family’ – the possibilities are endless, really. Think of the explosion of websites and magazines tracking and rating the activities of the various royal families, think of the benefits to tourism as they flock to see the new monarchs in action (‘Come to Britain and get three Queens for the price of one!’) – yet again, we’ll see the economic benefits of opening up a state monopoly to the competition of the market.

After much preparation, though when I actually stop and think about how far I’m going it all seems rather inadequate, I’m finally ready to go and later this week, I’ll be making my way up to the far north of Scotland to begin. The fact that it’ll take a couple of days just to get to John O’ Groats is rather daunting in itself, but it’ll give me a lot of time on a train to see some of the country I’ll be walking by a few weeks later.

Still, while you can drag the blogger onto his feet, you can’t kill the  blogging instinct that easily, and I will be attempting to use my blog to keep the world up to date with where I am, how far I’ve got to go and just how many families of midges I’ve kept well fed on my way. It might even give me ideas of things to write about here when I return a seated position sometime in October.

I’ll end with a plea for help – if you can afford to donate, then please do, as thinking about the money I’m raising may make the blisters slightly less painful. Also, if you happen to be on or near my route, or fancy a short break in the wilds of Britain, then I’ll be glad of any company on the way, or just for someone to stick my rucksack in a car and take it from the day’s start to the finish. Whatever you do – even if it’s just telling people about the mad long-distance walking blogger – it all helps somehow.

Put simply, it’s Back To The Sweeney, with a car accident in 2006 mysteriously throwing Sam Tyler, a police officer from our time back to the same job in 1973, when policing methods were slightly different, 8-track cartridges were the iPods of their day and everything was covered by a vague tinge of brown. It could have been just another cop-out-of-water drama, the clash between moden and 70s methods providing little more than a standard crime drama with a twist, but Life On Mars adds in a Philip K Dick-sized twist by making the nature of reality part of the story. From the start, we’re led to question whether Sam’s 1973 is real, or just a coma-induced hallucination he’s putting himself through to try and solve the case he was working on, with Open University broadcasts turning into his 2006 doctors trying to speak to him and hypnotherapists turning up in police station canteens urging him to commit suicide as a way of getting back. Equally, though, there’s evidence that 1973 might be real and he could either be back there for a reason, or just a man with delusions he comes from the future. All we can hope is that the production team know the answer, and aren’t just putting off deciding what it is until some point when cancellation looms (yes, Lost, I’m looking at you).

Of course, while flipping through the channels in 1973, Sam Tyler could easily have stumbled upon an episode of Doomwatch where a government department investigated the bleeding edge of science and tried to prevent its consequences from affecting the population. And if/when he gets back to 2006, he can tune to ITV and see Eleventh Hour, which features a government scientific adviser investigating the bleeding edge of science et cetera… However, while Doomwatch engaged enough imaginations to cause a quasi-revival 30-odd years later, I doubt that Eleventh Hour will be remembered in a few months’ time, let alone 30 years later. While it deserves praise for using real rather than pseudo-science, the potentially interesting stories that allows are lost beneath clunky dialogue, ponderous direction (which I’m beginning to think is ITV1’s official house style for drama now, after having to watch a seemingly meaningful shot of a doorknob during this), characters who do things with no rhyme and reason purely to advance the plot and the entire story stopping every so often for Patrick Stewart to deliver a quick science lecture.

I feel slightly bad about criticising Eleventh Hour, as it’s not actively bad, but it’s a wasted opportunity – as Doctor Who, Battlestar Galactica and others have shown recently, science fiction doesn’t have to be slow, ponderous and stuck in the 70s expositional mode, but this just feels like a dinosaur, reincarnated from an earlier age to lumber around the schedules until someone puts it out of its misery.

Glitzy dramas based around the rich and famous in exotic locations were a staple of the 70s in TV and film, so perhaps it’s no surprise that Hotel Babylon has seemingly also pulled itself out of that decade to appear in 2006 along with its historical cousins. Glitzy, trashy and covered with several buckets of gloss, it’s the televisual equivalent of mainlining sugar – probably incredibly bad for you, but hard to stop doing because it feels so good. It’s froth exemplified, and while the highbrow side of me wants to criticise and dismiss it, the part of me that sometimes likes to just sit in front of the TV and be entertained with my brain off for an hour wants to praise it. There’s no pretensions to high drama in it, and one suspects that the hair and make-up budget could fund several more worthy BBC projects, but it’s harmless fun, and one wishes more programmes would aim for that first before trying anything else more complicated.

Attempts to modify the dictionary aside, it’s an interesting, if somewhat scatterbrained, programme, jumping all over the place to show us how certain words emerged into their current usage. The problem was that each of the individual films on the origin of words didn’t seem to add up to a greater whole. While Victoria Coren did a decent job anchoring the programme and attempting to convince an OED panel of the value of some of the evidence discovered, I couldn’t help the feeling that the BBC might have been better off running the individual films separately and scattering them around the schedules, instead of lumping them all together, though I suspect they may end up like that as a regular method of filling BBC Two’s ten-minute gap at 9.50 every evening.

Also trying to educate the British public in the finer use of language, Shameless returned for a third series on Channel 4, determined to ensure that we’re all aware of the finer points of finer points of swearing, cursing and debating in the Frank Gallagher method. Perhaps the best drama series currently running on British television, there were worries before this new series that it just might be slipping from the Olympian peak it had reached during the first two series, with concerns that the departure of Anne-Marie Duff and James McAvoy to other projects might remove the emotional heart of the show and place too much pressure on the other actors and characters to fill the void. We needn’t have worried, because not only do the scripts have you forgetting how important those two were to the story, but also the acting has, if anything, raised itself up a notch with David Threlfall showing he may just be not only the best actor working in British TV today, but well deserving to be high up on an all time list too. Frank Gallagher could have been just a buffoonish drunken caricature of a feckless father, but Threlfall turns him into a real person, completewith hidden depths and tragedies, most notably this week in his drunken rant at God when he believes his son to be dying from cancer.

The rest of the cast follow his lead, managing to ground even the broadest comedy in realism (as an aside, Kev’s car splitting in half is an early contender for funniest scene of the year) with Jody Latham and Gerard Kearns easily rising to the occasion now that their two brothers are the central focus of the Gallagher family. It’s interesting to note that, as the Gallaghers are based on Paul Abbott’s own experiences of growing up with absent parents, Lip appears to be based somewhat on his own story and that as more episodes are written by people other than Abbott, he’s having to face more of the consequences of his actions.

Which takes us neatly onto My Name Is Earl, the latest American comedy to find a home on Friday nights on Channel 4. Under pressure to be a hit on both sides of the Atlantic with both Channel 4 and NBC suffering following the end of Friends and Frasier and looking for a new comedy to fill the void. So, it’s no doubt a relief to them – and to me, given the conclusion to my comedy post a few weeks ago – that Earl is not only original, but funny at well. Having persuaded Jason Lee away from the movies to star in a TV series, it would have been easy to have just created a traditional star vehicle for him, played out in a studio in front of an nitrous oxide-fuelled audience and multiple cameras but instead the laugh track is dispensed with and we get a location-shot comedy about one man’s rather idiosyncratic quest for redemption and good karma. It shares with Shameless, not just a desire to show a broady sympathetic depiction of an underclass rarely show in a positive light on TV, but also an ability to find humour in situations normally only depicted with dark and gritty realism. Beyond all that, it’s funny as well as showing the potential to grow and become even better as it develops, which is all one can ask for in a comedy.

Luckily for ITV, pitching the advertising around the hook of ‘see David Tennant play a bad guy’ was a good idea, as the rest of it wasn’t really worth watching. Not only was it suffering from the usual problems of ITV drama of being stretched out far too long for the plot, but the plot itself was what’s normally known as an ‘idiot plot’ – one that can only make sense if just about everyone involved in it acts like an idiot. Buolding tension in drama is always a difficult task, and it’s not made any easier when the audience at home are continually asking ‘how can you be so stupid?’ Attempting to be shocking and controversial it ended up being ultimately pointless.

Which is a description you can also apply to Channel 4’s documentary Opus Dei And The Da Vinci Code. There’s an interesting documentary to be made about Opus Dei and it’s seemingly inexorable rise to prominence within the Catholic Church, but this wasn’t it. Revealing that The Da Vinci Code is a fallible work of badly-researched fiction and that Catholic sects have some strange beliefs and practices might seem shocking to people who’d be surprised to learn that the Pope is actually a Catholic. It was the sort of softball material that Jon Ronson could have made amusing, as he discovers that there is a member of Opus Dei called Silas, but that he’s not a psychotic albino, but to include it in a supposedly serious documentary smacks of desperation to fill the time available.

Bizarre scheduling also affected the BBC this week, with Magnificent 7, a drama that seemed to have ‘heartwarming’ surgically attached to it at every point, being shunted off to 9pm on BBC2, when it have been perfect as a relax-and-enjoy piece of the Sunday night BBC1 schedule. While the real-life story of Jacqui Jackson, a single mother of seven children (four of them autistic boys) made an interesting and touching documentary, this took out most of the pieces of potential dramatic conflict and replaced them with tender mush and opportunities for Helena Bonham Carter to emote sympathetically towards any members of the BAFTA jury who happened to be watching. It wasn’t bad by any means, just strangely hollow as if no one had bothered to think up a story and thought a bunch of set piece scenes would do the trick.

And with that, it’s time to abandon you to the parade of Christmas specials that are all lined up and waiting to hit you over the next couple of weeks. I’ll leave you with one final question – if someone had told you last year that Doctor Who would not only be the BBC’s flagship Christmas Day programme, but behind only Eastenders at the bookies to be the most watched programme that day, how insane would you have thought they were?

It was very visually interesting, filling the screen with colourful visits to Hindu celebrations in India and the Zorastrian Towers Of Silence in Iran, but lacked the driving narrative a more involved presenter/author could have given it. Instead, we got Winston moving swiftly around the world, seeing different sights and then giving us a basic overview of various religious traditions coupled with a half-baked attempt to draw them together into a consistent whole. It’s an approach that’s failed in the hands of people more confident in the subject, and didn’t really work any better in the hands of an amateur.

Later in the week, Channel 4 produced a much more interesting view on religion, sending Robert Beckford – an academic with a track record of producing interesting documentaries about religion – to discover The Real Patron Saints travelling between the British Isles and the Middle East to discover the stories behind Saints George, Andrew, David and Patrick and what they mean for national identity today. While it occasionally threatened to devolve into the banality of a travelogue, Beckford – unlike Winston – had a story to tell about the way the religious societies of the past had adopted saints to reflect their supposed national characteristics and how those figures had become images of national identity in the unsure, partly post-religious present. By itself, the section on Saint George and how this probably non-existent martyr had become not just a symbol of identity from Catalonia to Moscow but was also mentioned in the Koran should be compulsory viewing for anyone who thinks singing ‘Keep Saint George in my heart, keep me English‘ makes any sort of sense of all, but the sections on the other three were just as interesting, especially how both Protestants and Catholics in Ireland claim Saint Patrick.

On a more banal level, it’s possible that Space Cadets also seemed a good idea at the time it was commissioned, hopefully when the editor in question got carried away with the idea of Johnny Vaughan being strapped to a rocket and blasted into space, far away from any TV cameras and sparing us his habit of emphasising. every. word. he. speaks. as. if. almost. every one. is. a. seperate sentence. and amongst the profound thoughts ever issued by mankind, instead of just more tedious drivel pouring out of his mouth-spout in an unstoppable flood. It’s the sort of Rabblemock HaHa Time programme that TV Go Home used to create before it metamorphosised into Zeppotron TV…who are the producers of Space Cadets. Satire just ate itself, and we’re left to watch the detritus as a horde of executives pat themselves on the back at finding people even more stupid and self-obsessed than themselves and trying to persuade them that they’re going to go into space. Part of me hopes that Vladimir Putin will declare this to be an insult to the very real achievements of the Russian space programme and dig up the co-ordinates for the former US air base it’s being filmed at from the Kremlin archives.

It might be good for all of us – otherwise, the prospect of someone thinking Johnny Vaughan’s the obvious choice to present the BBC’s next big documentary series is far too chilling to contemplate.

Given the mess of A Very Social Secretary, which was so steeped in attempted grotesque satire that it achieved the remarkable achievement of making the viewer almost feel sorry for David Blunkett, I didn’t begin watching this with the highest of hopes, expecting little more than a rush through all the most well-known beats of her life, with little emphasis on anything mundane like creating characters or telling an interesting story.

But this time, I was wrong. While not a hagiography of Princess Margaret, it wasn’t the blatant character assasination of let’s-all-laugh-at-the-clueless-royal that may have been the easiest option to take when writing the script. While not actively inviting the viewer to sympathise with Margaret, there was a degree of empathy for her position and the question of what do you do when your role as the royal ‘spare’ is no longer relevant. Yes, it played fast and loose with history, not only with the opening disclaimer that much of it was made up, but there was also a continuing trend of anachronism, with various non-concurrent events from the 60s and 70s seemingly happening simultaneously.

But, it was enlivened by three great central performances, the previously unknown Lucy Cohu delivering a career-making performance as Margaret, Toby Stephens’ Earl of Snowdon giving an excellent interpretation of a man discovering the bewildering duties that come when you marry a princess and, even though he was only on screen for a short time, David Threlfall’s Prince Philip was a masterful embodiment of the restrictive principles of the Royal Family, proving that he may just be the best actor on British TV right now.

Also playing fast and loose with historical events, the BBC’s Shakespeare Re-Told series was capped off with the rather amusing Shakespeare’s Happy Endings on BBC Four with Kevin Eldon becoming one of TV’s most unlikely, though convincing, Shakespeares, while Patrick Barlow (no relation, I hasten to add) spoofing two TV historians for the price of one as Professor Simon Starkman. While it was a bit hit and miss, it deserved better than a graveyard slot on Four, not just providing a few laughs (though of course it’s rare for Kevin Eldon not to be funny, even beneath a Shakespeare outfit) but providing an informative look at the ways in which Shakespeare’s work have been re-interpreted over the years, such as the numerous happy endings that have been given to Romeo and Juliet.

Real life, of a sort, was on show in The Naked Rambler, a BBC documentary showing just what happens when you decide to walk from Land’s End to John O’Groats in the nude. It prompted one question I often have whenever I see naturists – why do so many of them, who profess to love the human body in all shapes and sizes, cover up such a large part of theirs with beards? Is there some rule that says you must throw your razor out with your clothes? It was an interesting documentary, though seemingly short of a conclusion, the film petering out with the walk in Inverness when confronted with the power of the law.

Finally, among the many things I didn’t watch last week was Channel 4’s exclusive Madonna documentary I’m Going To Tell You A Secret, pretty much because the entire thing was so predictable and no doubt included lots of footage of Madonna and dancers rehearsing, various scenes of her and Guy Ritchie attempting to act normal and instead bringing up memories of Paul Whitehouse and Arabella Weir proclaiming their Cockney credentials on The Fast Show and absolutely no revelations as to just why paying £15 for a piece of red string is good value, or why singing over an old Abba sample is only trashy Europop when someone other than Madonna does it. In the battle between fact and staged-purely-for-television fiction, I can’t help feeling that we learned more about the real Princess Margaret than we did about Madonna.

Saved from winning the title of ITV’s worst programme this year only by the fact that someone in the hierarchy thought Celebrity Wrestling was a good idea worth throwing a large budget at, it’s perhaps the convinving proof that Evans is the ultimate example of being in the right place at the right time. TFI Friday was a fresh piece of television in its day, taking the best bits from The Word and The Tube adding in various ideas stolen from David Letterman before anyone in the UK had heard of him. It wasn’t ground-breaking TV, but it was funny and entertaining until it reached the point when Evans was eaten by his own ego, a process that would continue throughout his career. But, like the man in the casino on a lucky streak, it seemed all Evans had to do was just keep repeating the same actions and he’d keep doubling up.

Unfortunately, just as roulette wheels don’t keep landing on red, so tastes in TV change as well and it’s only painful when you don’t notice it. After attempting to repeat Don’t Forget Your Toothbrush with Boys And Girls (an idea so lazy they hired uber-annoying talent-vacuum Vernon Kay to host it just to ensure it annoyed) and seeing it flop like every other ‘new’ idea he had, Evans must have been delighted when ITV – proving yet again that there’s no well-worn furrow they won’t plough – came to him and asked for a new series. And if you’re wondering why I’ve spent so much time discussing his earlier career, it’s because I’m trying to replicate the spirit of an ideas meeting for OFI Sunday which is nothing more than Chris Evans’ Greatest Hits, repackaged and without even the benefit of anynew material to make it worth buying. There are better things to do on a Sunday night like sleeping, putting the rubbish out or watching the repeat of Rome on the BBC than watching this.

Meanwhile, Channel 4 have done something different for once and commissioned a new series in a genre they’ve never tackled before. Despite having been the home of Hill Street Blues, NYPD Blue and other American cop shows over the years, The Ghost Squad is Channel 4’s first British-made police drama series. While it may not have been worth waiting 23 years for, it’s definitely an interesting addition to the genre. Taking the ‘who watches the watchmen?’ idea of Between The Lines and running with it, the series centres around the police urban legend that ghost squads – officers sent undercover into police forces to root out corruption – still exist. It’s a clever narrative device in that it allows to feature different areas of police work every week while addng in the deeper dramatic questions of just how many off-white lies are acceptable to discover the truth and how much does it cost someone personally to go undercover within an organisation where thats the norm?

While it does occasionally circle around the prospect of disappearing into the navel it’s contemplating – as happened with Between The Lines where the officers’ personal crises would overwhelm the main investigation at points – the first two episodes have shown a lot of potential for the series with good writing matched to good acting. Elaine Cassidy shines as the star of the series, but Jonas Armstrong and Emma Fielding give good supporting performances as do the weekly guest stars, mostnotably Cal Macaninch as a seemingly doomed heroin-addicted officer. Definitely one worth watching, not least because high ratings for it might prevent Channel 4 from cancelling it in favour of yet another series about how to buy a house.

Finally, one new series I missed in my round-up of new comedy last week was Sensitive Skin probably because, although it’s very funny in parts (including Jonathan Miller getting a laugh on screen for the first time in what feels like decades) to classify it as merely a comedy would be to reduce it in someway. But then, as it comes from Hugo Blick, who made Marion and Geoff with Rob Brydon, its subtle mix of tragedy and comedy is perhaps not too surprising. It’s one of those TV series that are good but threaten to slip under the radar of public awareness only being remembered occasionally in years to come by those few who watched them while mediocrity sweeps up the awards and claims the notoriety and memory of everyone else. Though as Blick was also involved in Operation Good Guys, it’s a fate he’s used to. Sensitive Skin isn’t a series that’s going to make you laugh out loud, but it’s a much better use of half an hour’s TV watching time than Little Britain.

The most ubiquitous of all the new series has been the third outing of Little Britain, a show plucked from the obscurity of Radio 4 and BBC Three to effectively become the BBC’s flagship comedy show, thanks to Ricky Gervais’s insistence that Extras should go out on BBC Two. Unfortunately, while Gervais seems to be deepening and widening his repertoire to avoid overmining the same comedic seam, Matt Lucas and David Walliams seem to have become victims of their own hype. While Little Britain was never the subtlest of comedies, there was a sense that their characters were – like those that inspired them in The Fast Show – not too far from ordinary life and just exaggerated for comic effect, but now they’ve become little more than grotesque caricatures, devoid of any sense of reality or pathos. Given that their audience seem to have developed Fonz syndrome – hooting and cheering the appearance of a favourite character in a scene as though it was the Second Coming before they’ve even done anything – watching Little Britain is like a Pavlovian experiment in comedy, with bells repaced by stock catchphrases.

What with having to appear on stage, pose in character for photoshoots, do interviews, record novelty ringtones, approve tatty merchandise and all the other paraphernalia of comedy success, it seems that there’s little time left to actually come up with jokes, so instead we get a parade of predictable punchlines, fat suits, old women urinating in public and comedy ethnic characters who could have walked out of a Jim Davidson routinem that are only shocking in their laziness.

Talking of recycling old ideas leads us neatly onto Broken News, a comedy based around a succession of news channels reporting surreal events with a straight face. As with a comedian’s fake plea of ‘stop me if yo’ve heard this one before’ it too hopes the audience haven’t seen The Day Today or The Daily Show and hopes they can get away with this ersatz version. Taken on its own, Broken News isn’t too bad, with some amusing moments and interesting ideas such as the Adrian Chiles-esque business reporter who speaks in a stream of nonsensical metaphors or major European news reduced to a humorous ‘and finally’ moment on American channels, but its general attitude is one of mildly amusing satire rather than the eviscerating contempt of Chris Morris, Armando Ianucci and Jon Stewart.

There seems to be a law that in any mention of Channel 4’s Peep Show the word ‘underrated’ must be used, despite the fact that no one can actually find someone saying anything bad against it. I’m not going to try and make a name for myself by becoming that negative person because it’s not a bad bit of comedy, with enough going on to keep you laughing throughout. I think the use of ‘underrated’ comes about, though, because there’s no one raving about it and saying how wonderful it is. Though perhaps this is a welcome sign of a developing consistency within Channel 4’s comedy output which seemed to veer wildly between near-genius and utter rubbish with no middle ground.

However, the producers of all these shows, and anything in the pipeline at the moment, can rest easy as the title of Least Funny Supposed Comedy Inflicted On The British Public has been won hands down by Blessed. From a writer of Blackadder and featuring a star of Father Ted it’s handy proof that the real talent that made those series so successful obviously weren’t Ben Elton and Ardal O’Hanlon. It’s devoid not just of humour, but anything that might even vaguely resemble a joke, features stereotypical characters that would have been rejected as dated in the 1980s and can only be on our screens as a result of some top-level penetration of the BBC by moles from ITV determined to make their comedy output look good by comparison. In fact, it’s so bad, it’s not even worth watching in a ‘so bad it’s good’ ironic manner, with more laughs likely to come from swtching over to whichever World War Two documentary the History Channel happens to be running at the time.

In short, Britain is suffering from a comedy drought. Luckily, America looks set to help us out with emergency imports of My Name Is Earl beginning on Channel 4 next year. More on that another time, as I’m still trying to find ways to scrub the memory of Blessed from my memory.

No one’s managed it yet, and so the audiences keep tuning in, hoping they’ll be able to say they watched the moment it all went wrong which meant that, last week, The West Wing became the latest TV series to try the experiment.

The important point about live episodes, of course, is that they have to be, in the words of numerous continuity announcers, a Very Special Episode. One can’t just make amendments to a regular script and do it live, there has to be some big reason for it to be shown live, which meant that we got what may be one of TV’s finest hours of post-modern self-referentiality. In keeping with the current spirit of the show, which is to feature the original characters less and less while throwing new ones at the audience willy-nilly in the hope that some of them will stick, The West Wing‘s live episode was centred entirely around the Presidential debate between the two characters hoping to replace Martin Sheen’s President Bartlett: the Democrats’ Matt Santos (Jimmy Smits) and the Republicans’ Arnold Vinick (Alan Alda). What gave it that extra edge was that, officially at least, the producers of the show have yet to declare who’ll be replacing Martin Sheen as the President, and thus having a chance to be the leading character in an ongoing drama series. Thus we had the spectacle of two actors trying to connect with the audience at home in an effort to be the one selected, portraying two characters hoping to connect with a fictional audience in their fictional home in an effort to be the one selected. So, while the drama was clearly tightly scripted, there was always that dim hope that one of them would go off-message/off-script and make their own appeal direct to the people at home, following the lead of their characters who proved the fictional nature of the West Wing universe by choosing to throw out the rules of the debate.

While it was a interesting piece of television, and both Smits and Alda are good actors, one couldn’t help but feel that this was a missed opportunity. Not only was the live episode centred around two relatively new characters, none of the long-term cast were seen on screen, or even mentioned. It’s another reason to lament the departure of Aaron Sorkin from the show he created, for surely with his experience of writing for the theatre, he could have created a much more interesting drama that might have given actors like Martin Sheen, Allison Janney and Richard Schiff one last chance to shine before departing the series.

As well as doing it live, another recent trend in British TV drama has been re-imaginings of old classics. As with so many other things, Andrew Davies began the recent revival with a modern-day telling of Othello for ITV. The BBC responded with The Canterbury Tales in 2003, and now adds Shakespeare Re-Told to the mix, which kicked off last week with Much Ado About Nothing. It does make me wonder if there were any stages during the BBC’s development of the Davies-scripted Bleak House where that was set to be a modern reworking, and if a viewing of the rather poor 1998 film version of Great Expectations put them off that idea.

It’s kicked off an interesting debate in certain quarters, based around the question of which is more important in Shakespeare, the plot or the dialogue? While most argue for the words, it’s worth remembering that there’s a long history of artists from Verdi to Kurosawa and beyond, who have plundered Shakespeare’s stories for their own use. And while it would be presumptuous to place David Nicholls’ script amongst that august company, it made for an entertaining piece of television and, like toher similar versions before it, will probably be praised to the heavens by English teachers for years to come. Indeed, that was the problem with this adaptation in that it kept too closely to the original, rather than pushing off in a new direction, to the extent of keeping the character names from the original, which I suspect may have the result of several babies being named Hero in the near future, as their Billie Piper-loving parents decide it’s a bit less obvious than calling her Rose.

Much Ado About Nothing did acknowledge the original by featuring Sonnet 116 in several scenes, though that did beg the question of just how two characters called Beatrice and Benedick had failed to notice how their lives were imitating art, though that is perhaps due to me being far too literal. But, the on-screen chemistry between Sarah Parish and Damian Lewis was hard to deny, and I’m sure I can’t be the only viewer who would love to see them (and, indeed, the rest of the cast) tackling the original version.

Perhaps to fit in with that other TV trend, they could perform it live, in a return to the TV productions of the 50s or 60s. Of course, hoping for something like that is a dream, with the most likely implentation of it being ITV presenting it as a challenge to reality-show exiles looking to keep their ‘careers’ going. Celebrity Shakespeare Live, anyone?