Mabel is unimpressed. "What are you doing?" "Writing a piece about television." "Hm." She considers me with the bored disdain that only an eight-year-old can deliver, when they're tired and hungry and just home from school. "Television. It rots the senses in the head. It kills imagination dead." I stare blankly, my fingers hovering over my laptop keys. "'Who told you that?" "Everyone knows that, Mum." She sighs, already halfway out of my office.
Roald Dahl's got a lot to answer for. It's not that I am advocating the ditching of the classics. I have oompa loompa-ed my kids with the best of them, sending my son Jesse off to school with his face orange and his hair green for National Book Day. My daughter has skipped her way along the yellow brick road in Dorothy garb. There is nothing I like better than to see my children curled in a corner with a warm book… sorry, Kindle. But please – can we give television a break?
Where do I begin? Television has been my friend. Television has been my portal in the storm. Television has been the place I have laid my weary head when nothing else seemed to make sense. It has in the past year alone sucked me into the heart of 80s England, catapulted me to pox-ridden Victorian back streets and ambushed my dreams with ghostly fades caught in a hellish limbo between heaven and earth. And did I say made me laugh – a lot?
I love television because it comes to you. Unlike film or theatre, it sits in the corner of the room. Or in these technological times lurks in the recesses of your computer. And if it's not immediately watched, it's there to be found. If it's good, someone will say, "Have you seen it? Watch it!" with an urgency that can compete with the best West End runs or Oscar-winning hits. You won't pay for it with a ticket and you might wait until the box set is out or catch it on some mad-hour re-run. But in your own time – 3am or 3pm – it might just travel into your world and it might just matter to you.
So why do I find myself turning it off and ushering my children towards more valid pursuits – kicking a ball repeatedly against a wall or to homework or friends or conversation or that book – just anything, anything so that they are not "stuck in front of the television"? This is the mantra, I know, of other parents, too. Is it so wrong to be stuck? Is it so dangerous to while away the hours gorging on series, serial or comedy? True, it may not demand the imaginative leap of War and Peace or your average Roald Dahl, but if it's good it demands that you feel. That you connect. That you laugh. That you cry. Often you learn something new. For a few minutes however many days a week you see the world differently. It may not make a more imaginative audience, but it can encourage a more empathic one.
It's the metronome for people's lives. The 10 o'clock news timekeeper, the messenger that can tell you things you don't want to know and perhaps some things you do. It is the stomping ground for some of our finest directors, producers, writers and actors. It's democratic. It can be that quietly political, boldly entertaining, searingly honest hour in your day that took you by surprise. And you didn't even have to get out of bed. For all the reasons that it can be detested, it can for those same reasons be loved. And it can be brave.
This year I have watched some brave television. Not always successful, not always the most-watched programmes, but TV that is out there, doing something, affirming that the imaginative mind is still alive and well. These are programmes upon which blogs are built, Twitter buzzes with renewed frenzy and people are still talking about them long after the shows are gone. In Debbie Tucker Green's Random, a playwright has turned screenwriter and even more admirably director, using the bold tactics of theatre and bringing them to life on the small screen. It is heartbreaking and brutal and difficult and essential television. Then there was The Fades – a Beckettian apocalyptic vision riddled with teen existentialism and bold, vivid storytelling created and written by Jack Thorne.
Thorne is also responsible for the enthralling This is England '88, helmed by the masterful Shane Meadows, a filmmaker who grabs you by the throat and wrestles you into painful, brilliant emotional submission on both small and big screen. Lucinda Coxon deftly adapted The Crimson Petal and The White, elevated into something magical, poetical and captivating in director Marc Munden's hands. Boardwalk Empire was epic and Greek in its themes, delivering one of the best final episodes of a series that I have ever seen. Steve Buscemi and Michael Pitt, film stars directed by a renowned film director [Martin Scorsese] all drawn, like Meadows, to the small screen.
I am biased. It is my bread and butter, an industry that has been kind to me. But that is what I love about it: its industry. What starts with a blank page or often a wing and prayer ends with you standing on a set marvelling at how many people it takes to make an hour of drama – infinite, brilliant people taping down wires and adjusting wigs and murmuring lines in the quiet of a canteen and staring at continuity photos; all doing what they are doing because while it's not brain surgery, it matters.
Writing The Hour, a series where everyone is chasing a deadline while you're chasing one too, is a terrifying experience. In the heart of London, in a former town hall, time has stood still. Or rather, the brilliant creative team led by Eve Stewart has knocked the building back into the 1950s. I live in a Charlie Kaufmanesque, Synecdoche New York world, where the lines between reality and fiction blur.
From my office, I can hear the lines I've just tweaked being filmed. I pass an extra, a showgirl or earnest studio guest and I double take. Lix Storm, former war correspondent and hard-drinking newswoman, played by the brilliant Anna Chancellor, pauses for a chat. Line tweaks are discussed, motivation dissected and then she's gone. The scene is shot and in the can by the time I've come back from my leisurely trip to pick up another coffee and cake. I have put on two stone. The Hour has literally piled on the pounds. I am struck how like the old Hollywood studio system it is. Directors, actors, script editors and security guards all queuing up for their lunch.
A serial is a different beast. Characters boomerang back. They tell you when they're not working, when you've taken a wrong turn. And when they don't, the actor playing them will let you know, because they own them more than you. It is a machine that eats up story and yet the potential of its wheels to keep turning, taking you to completely unknown places, is thrilling and irresistible.
It has been a good year. I know it's been a good year, not just because of the shows that I have mentioned, but because like all neurotic writers I suss out the competition, I probe, I test the water of those I can trust, I read the reviews. The good stuff is brilliant, and the bad stuff, the rotting-the- mind stuff, the killing imagination blind… Well it's like anything, a little bit of it can't do you too much harm. Mob Wives… That's all I'm saying.
So here goes, moments that have mattered to me beyond those already mentioned: Top Boy, thank you for raising everyone's game. Holy Flying Circus, Homeland, Call the Midwife, Borgen, Page Eight: sorry, haven't got to you yet but too many people have told me to watch so I will. The Killing of course, Danish not American. Modern Family, 30 Rock, Fresh Meat, Rev, Twenty Twelve – comedy gems from both sides of the Atlantic. 24 Hours in A&E, One Born Every Minute, The Choir: Military Wives, I have shed a tear with all three. I could go on.
As the industry tears the dry-cleaning wrappers off its suits and spangles for next Sunday's Baftas , and production companies juggle table plans to ensure all are made to feel good on the night, I look forward to writing less and watching more, becoming a punter again. When I can I will lure my children away from endless runs of Simpsons. How could I forget The Simpsons? They are the memories that my children will have of their childhood watching TV. But I will lure them away in the hope that they will have those moments that still stay with me. I still remember the haunting music of Tales of the Unexpected, watching Lamb to the Slaughter, the murderous tale of an enraged detective's wife who kills her husband with the Sunday joint. I must have been 11, maybe a bit older, but I think it was the moment when TV got me hooked and led me back to the brilliance of Roald Dahl's books. Like I said, Dahl's got a lot to answer for. I will sit with my children, and share with them one of my greatest pleasures, stored in my heart like a wonderful book or a great play or film. Just sit with them and hope they will feel as I so often feel. That there is nowhere else I would rather be.
