Material Witness

Is Stephen Fry hindering my son's reading development?

On Saturday morning my six-year-old son returned from a visit to the local library excitedly clutching the audio CD version of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

While the timing of this surprised me - I am currently reading him Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows and I thought we were enjoying a father/son bonding thing - the fact that he wanted them did not.

For the last couple of years he has listened to the tapes of the first five Potter books relentlessly. And, extraordinarily, entirely randomly. He simply puts in whichever tape is close to hand. So one moment you are hearing Stephen Fry describing Harry's first visit to Diagon Alley, the next moment Cedric Diggory's copping it in the graveyard.

And he is completely mesmerised by them, and will sit for hour after hour listening, randomly, to Fry and Harry. If he has a grasp of the chronology of HP - and actually it is unsurprisngly shaky - it is because he has seen the five movies released so far or recalls it from the books I have read him. But his command of the detail is extraordinary. He peppers every other conversation with some obscure fact and can answer most of the questions I throw at him. 

Since he's been knee high, Paddy has loved being read to and bedtimes became a battle of wills: "One more story. Just one more. Pleeeeaaasssse..." Still now he will listen to more or less anything, from baby stories read to his little sister right up to the Today programme. Although he is becoming more discerning, justifying his decision to borrow the Potter tapes with the mumbled explanation: "They're better." At least he had the decency to look embarrassed.

We have fed his love of audio, regularly hiring tapes and CDs from the library and always listening to stories on car journeys. We have a couple of Young Bond CDs. For Christmas we bought him a box set of CDs of the first six Alex Rider novels, which he likes also, although not as much as Potter/Fry.

I enjoy them also. I started listening to audio regularly after getting a job that required endless hours on the road a few years back. I began by deciding this was the perfect opportunity to "read" all those classics I'd never gotten around to before. What I discovered quite quickly was that the necessity to concentrate occasionally on the road meant drifting out of the books. After rewinding about 30 times in the first two hours of  A Tale of Two Cities, because, like a tortured goldfish, I repeatedly discovered I had no idea what was going on, I knew it wasn't going to work.

I needed simpler stuff that could be picked up if the odd page was missed. Crime is perfect for that and I discovered Sue Grafton this way. I listed to a lot of Bernard Cornwell and Robert Crais. But Harry Potter fit the bill perfectly and I quickly found that when reading new books I heard Stephen Fry reading them (so upset though I am that my son should prefer SF to me, I do understand). Still now I listen to them driving and running.

But listening to audio has no impact on my reading. I only listen to books when doing things that make it impossible to read them.

But for Paddy they are the main event. He rushes hime from school and disappears upstairs to listen to Harry Potter or Alex Rider and it is becoming increasigly difficult to get him to "read" - whether it be for homework or for pleasure. Part of this I am sure is pure expediency. He knows it is quicker and easier to listen than it is to read. There is, no doubt, an element of laziness.

But what concerns me is that ultimately he will regard audio not as a convenient alternative to reading but as the main event. Should I be worried about this? Or just pleased that he is interested in stories and story-telling? I guess I worry that he won't learn to enjoy the process of reading, the active experience that it is and that he will view it as an entirely passive process.

However beautifully a story is read, it removes some of the room for reader interpretation. An accent, an intonation, a dramatic pause - they all matter.

With time-pause TV, video-on-demand, Audible downloads, iPods and the like, the media has become immediate, rich and varied. Few of these require the work you have to put in with a book. At the same children seem to be spoon fed so muc of their school work and entertainment, that perhaps books seem just too much like hard work.

There is very little better than opening a good book. I hope Paddy comes to appreciate that.

Stieg Larsson and the girl who might once have been Pippi Longstocking

The online response to the publication of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo has been extraordinary. I don't think I can remember a book in this genre prompting quite so much discussion before.

In the first instance what is striking is that the response is overwhelmingly positive. Although almost every review I have come across has pointed out some of the flaws in Stieg Larsson's books, the power, scope and humanity in the stories has overcome them.

Unsurprisingly, much of the attention has focused on the character of Lisbeth Salander, and less obviously, perhaps, on Larsson's inspiration.

No doubt many Swedes, and indeed many millions of others, will have spotted the hand of children's writer Astrid Lindgren in Salander. But as I have not read the Pippi Longstocking stories, either to myself or to my young children, I did not recognise Lindgren's famous fictional orphan in Sweden's new literary heroine.

So I find myself indebted to Dorte, writer of the impressively bi-lingual DJS Krimiblog, for pointing out the comparisons between Pippi and Lisbeth in an unusually long debate in the comments section of my review of The Girl Who Played With Fire. I will not rehash all of that, if you want to read it, you should go to DJS Krimiblog and get it there.

I had also planned to publish something of a round-up of the various excellent reviews of Fire that have been doing the rounds in recent weeks, but the ever alert Maxine of Petrona has already done it, and I highly recommend you take a look over there. 

Maxine herself has contributed thoughtfully to the debate, reminding people that Salander's origins in childrens' stories, fascinating though it is, should not cause them to overlook the institutional sickness that allowed a child like Lisbeth Salander to be so appallingly abused within one of the world's most heralded social security nets.  It is a point well made. As I wrote below, my own feeling is that the systems themselves are not "evil" but without vigilant oversight and care they are too easily exploited by evil people. Too often the good do not give anything like sufficient thought to how the bad might behave given the opportunity to do so. Perhaps they do not even have the imagination to be able to foresee the devious potential and destructiveness of such malevolence. Fire makes it clear that the consequences of this blindness, laziness and negligence can be catastrophic. 

Fire has also been widely reviewed in the mainstream media, which for once has turned its attention to books people are actually reading rather than the usual obscuria. Among the more thoughtful are Mark Lawson in the Guardian (is it just me or does anyone else actually hear Lawson's so-familiar voice when they read this?) and Natasha Cooper, author of A Poisoned Mind in the FT.

Cooper makes the obvious link between Mikael Blomqvist and Larsson, himself a crusading, liberal reporter, but more interestingly draws a parallel between Salander and Kathy Mallory, Carol O'Connell's NY detective. On the face of it, there do appear to be similarities, but I would need to read O'Connell.

Cooper also makes a point made by many other reviewers, that maybe Larsson's sometimes unwieldy and untidy story might have been edited into something more polished if Larsson had lived longer.

Her concluding line, however, speaks I suspect for all of us: "If only there had been more time, not just for fine polishing but for more novels. Stieg Larsson was only 50 when he died."

Indeed. Personally I could do without the polishing, I think the rambling plots are part of the books' beauty. But I would certainly take more novels.

Before I read The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, I wondered how much Larsson's premature death had contributed to the extraordinary success of his books and whether his own tragic tale (he did not live to see how popular his books became) had not been the primary cause of the hype, rather than his writing.

It did not take more than a few dozen pages of Dragon Tattoo to set me right of course. These are extraordinary books. And while his own story doubtless has had an impact on his sales and his legend - I am not sure there is any other word for it - the books speak for themselves.

The online debate shows that people really care about Larsson's work. And that is as uplifting as it is unusual.

REVIEW: The Girl Who Played With Fire by Stieg Larsson

 In the first instlament of the late Stieg Larsson's Millennium trilogy, Lisbeth Salander is almost a spectral presence. She is flesh and blood. She breathes, she kills, she has sex with Mikael Blomqvist and yet she never quite seemed to be real, but instead was an elusive, unknowable presence.

Those who were haunted by her in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, will be delighted by the follow-up, The Girl Who Played With Fire which susbtantiates Lisbeth Salander, revealing the history and at least some of the psychology of one of the most idiosyncratic and original heroines of the genre.

Salander, the computer genius and sometime investigator, and Blomqvist, the celebrated reporter with the fallen star, were the twin pillars on which the brilliant Dragon Tattoo was built. But, despite the name and Salander's possession of the reptilian tattoo, it was very much Blomqvist's story.

Fire is Salander's story. It is brutal, bleak and emotionally bruising, but it is quite brilliantly told and never less than gripping - even when off on one of its many diversions. It emphatically confirms that the Stieg Larsson phenomenon sweeping out Sweden and conquering Europe was no one-off as well as the great sense of loss that the next Larsson book we read will be the last.

The fact that Larsson died before the publication of his novels has prompted considerable debate over whether the somewhat meandering and meticulously detailed nature of the narrative can be attributed to the fact that he was denied the opportunity to edit his manuscripts as fully as he might have. 

It is a fascinating debate, even if it has no obvious means of resolution, and there is an element of first draft about both these books. But Larsson's tendency to stray from the conventions of narrative into historical cul-de-sac, mundane detail or even vignettes that seem to belong in an another story altogether - such as the somewhat bizarre 100-page Caribbean holiday Salander takes before Fire starts "properly" - is part of the charm of his writing. It is idiosyncratic and unpredictable. But almost always enjoyable. Salander's Grenadian excursion would have made a perfectly entertaining short story of its own.

Where there is a weakness in the stories is in Larsson's propensity to contrive improbable solutions to Salander's problems, creating situations that lack credibility. One of the worst examples of this is the moment at which Salander needs access to the police intranet so she can keep track of an investigation and we are promptly treated to a description of how she and an associate some time previously had organised just that. And as luck would have it, the exact combination of circumstances she needs for this still to work fall fortuitously into place. It's pretty lazy stuff for a writer who brings so much energy to his craft. 

And it's a small gripe. Otherwise this is a quite outstanding novel - part police procedural, part psycholigical thriller, part journalistic crusade. There's just so much going on, it is utterly addictive.

 Fire revolves around the investigation of three murders that take place on the same night: a husband and wife pair who have a book and an academic treatise respectively focused on the hypocrisy of Sweden's legal and political establishment in its treatment of the sex industry - the former is to have his book published by Blomqvist's Millennium imprint; and across Stockholm a lawyer who just happens to be Lisbeth Salander's legal guardian.

Salander, fresh back from the West Indies, quickly finds herself at the centre of both a police investigation and a manhunt led by criminals apparently intent on concealing their part in these and earlier crimes. As Salander, in hiding, becomes Sweden's public enemey number one, Blomqvist begins his own investigation into the deaths of his colleagues just as she, independently, looks to clear her name. Following their own separate paths, both quickly find themselves following a route that leads inexorably into Salander's past.

The accompanying cast is extraordinary by any standard, ranging as it does from the classic unreconstructed copper, through a giant who doesn't feel pain as well as bent spies, rock producers stars with attitude and journalists covering the entire ethical range from red top hack to moral crusader. And Larsson takes care over all of them  

Along the way, Larsson examines the irresponsibility of the press, the corruption and greed of elements of the establishment and the indefatigability of the human spirit. He does so with a canvas rich in ideas, in deep and credible characters, and in compelling, detailed story-telling.

Fire is nothing less than a triumph and the wait for the third instalment of Millennium will be a long one.

Kate Winslet and The Reader - uncommonly good cinema

Waking up this morning to the hysterical, almost incomprehensible Kate Winslet accepting a second Golden Globe award made a refreshing change to the current steady, daily diet of economic gloom and doom. (Frankly, even the consular secretary from the US Embassy explaining changes to the Visa Waiver Program was a breath of fresh air).

By all accounts, the award that caused the emotion was for the forthcoming (in the UK at least) Revolutionary Road and not The Reader, for which Winslet had already collected a Best Supporting Actress gong.

This latter was well-deserved, if somewhat baffling. Although Winslet was absent from the screen for large parts of The Reader, her captivating, intelligent performance was the lynchpin of a tremendously good film.

Rarely can I recall seeing a single film dealing successfully with quite so many themes: rites-of-passage sexual awakening; the burden and shame of illiteracy; the Holocaust and German guilt; the inadequacy of law and the fragility of moral guidance; loss, family and redemption.

David Kross was excellent as the young Michael Berg, and the film provided a reminder of just what a good actor Ralph Fiennes is. But Winslet as the former SS camp guard Hannah Schmitz was moving and mesmerising. Bravo!

Andrew Taylor talks Edgar Allan Poe

January 19 marks the bicentennial of the birth of Edgar Allan Poe, and to mark the event BBC Radio 3 is broadcasting a series of essays on the great scribe read by five celebrated contemporary writers - Loving the Raven.  As Andrew Taylor dropped me the line advising of the series, which begins on Monday at 11pm,  I have headlined him here, but Joanne Harris, Mark Lawson, Kim Newman and  Louise Welch will also be involved.

Doubtless those who retire early will be able to listen again on the Radio 3 site.

There are many better qualified than me to write about Poe so all I will add is a little from the periphery.

Firstly, Poe was the inspiration for what I believe is the cleverest ever episode of The Simpsons, an early (1990) contribution to their Treehouse of Horror Halloween specials in which Bart is The Raven, terrorising Homer. (In fact I think it may have been the first ever Treehouse of Horror episode). It is available here. If you have never seen it, it is well worth a visit.

Next Laura Lippmann is a worthy heir to Poe, writing terrific mysteries set in their shared home town, of Baltimore. In the second novel in her excellent Tess Monaghan series, In a Strange City, pays homage to Poe with a tale centred around a ritual played out each year on his birthday.

Finally, I note that the Baltimore Ravens, a team the City named in honour of one of its most sons, is making a run at the Superbowl. Coincidence? I think not... Spooky.  

Marcus Trescothick opens up

I once had the somewhat dubious pleasure of interviewing Marcus Trescothick. The meeting took place in the Media Centre at Lord's, in July 2004. I probably spent 30 or 40 minutes talking to him, much of it discussing his fluctuating form with the bat and the forthcoming prospect of facing a new generation of West Indian pace bowlers. The result was published in the Financial Times,  and can be found here. 

By the time I met Trescothick, I had been writing about sport and sportsmen for the FT for about 15 months and had interviewed many sportsmen - and even ghosted a column for England flanker Richard Hill that appeared in the FT during the 2003 Rugby World Cup.

And what I had learned in those 15 months was not to expect too much of interest from the mouths of sportsmen and women. Many considered talking to the media a chore and behaved accordingly. Others were suspicious and therefore guarded and subsequently dull. Few had any genuine insight to offer into their sport or their own performances and most had also been drilled by media minders to toe a particular corporate line. 

I had no particular problem with any of this. What right had I to expect Churchillian oratory or Socratic insight from men who hit balls for a living or women who pushed stones down a runway of ice? None. And I fully understood that it was not in their interests to court controversy. So you learned simply to make the best of it. Get what you could and try and make something of it. You can judge whether I acheived that in the case of Trescothick.

The England batsman, as I had suspected he would, fell more into the guarded and slightly suspicious category. He was courteous but not particularly friendly (and why should he have been?) He was perhaps slightly more open about his own patchy form with the bat than I might have expected, but did not have anything particularly interesting to say.

Only once during the conversation did I feel I connected with him in any way and that was when I asked him about Mark Lathwell, his former Somerset colleague. Lathwell was one of the most gifted batsmen I have ever seen play. He was unorthodox and possessed a wonderful array of stokes, particularly an exquisite back foot drive that I can still see now in my mind's eye.

To many Somerset fans the names of Trescothick and Lathwell will forever be linked. They opened the batting together when Trescothick (four years younger) was beginning his career and between them held the promise of an exciting future for fans who had endured another lean period since the departures of Ian Botham and Viv Richards in 1986. As a Somerset fan and member I had followed their careers very closely although I had seen a lot more of Lathwell and only seen them together on the odd occasion.

I mentioned this to Trescothick and the "genius" of Lathwell in that he played shots that nobody else did. For just a second his eyes lit up and he agreed, before we discussed the fact that Lathwell had fallen out of cricket, injured and apparently disinterested, a few years before.

Lathwell played two test matches for England (to Trescothick's 76) and later reports suggested that he found the whole experience stressful and uncomfortable and was far happier in the more familiar environment of the Somerset dressing room.

And four years on from our meeting, that is where Trescothick found himself. Just a few months after Trescothick played a major role in guiding England to a first Ashes success in two decades, he was struck down by chronic depression that left him unable to tour with England and at times, according to his autobiography, Coming Back to Me, threatened his life. At the beginning of the 2008 season after several attempts to overcome the travel anxiety that often seemed to trigger the severe episodes he retired from international cricket and resumed his career as a full-time Somerset player. 

In September, Trescothick's  autobiography was published and in December it won the Whitbread Sports Book of the Year and last week became the first sports biography I have read in about five years - having stopped when I realised just how dull and dismal most of these memoirs are.

Despite the fact that I have always had a huge soft spot for Trescothick, as a Somerset boy, I couldn't quite bring myself even to read his book. It seemed highly unlikely that the player I interviewed could produce 300 pages worthy of £16.99.

So my resistance lasted our months, and what I found was a Marcus Trescothick who still had relatively little of interest to say about cricket, but who has written one of the most honest and open biographies I can recall reading. Trescothick strips himself completely bare and gives a blow-by-distressing-blow account of the disintegration of his mental well-being and at the same time probably does as much to expose the perils of the world inhabited by top class sportspeople.

The popular view of this world is one in which the toughest problems facing its inhabitants are choosing between Krug and Cristal or Ferrari and Maserati.

But Trescothick offers an entirely different view. In the cricket world at least it is one where either injury or a loss of form can whip your career out from under your feet in an instant. Where month after month is spent on the road living in hotel rooms and out of suitcases. Where every move you make, every shot you take is viewed through the microscopic lens of the reporter and the telephoto lens of the photographer.

What is striking about Trescothick is that his love of cricket, of scoring runs allowed  him to overcome all anxieties and misgivings. In one chapter, in which he makes his England debut, almost every line is completed by the phrase: "Isn't his great?" Going into the dressing room for the first time? Great. Walking out to bat in England colours on debut? Great. Biffing your first boundary? Great. All of it great. The one cricketing insight Trescothick really communicates is his pure and unalloyed joy at playing cricket, and playing for England is the realisation of a dream he had held since he could stand.

But even this great cricketing enthusiast is worn down by the relentless hamster-on-a-treadmill world of international cricket. And even before his breakdown he is becoming disillusioned with the game, his love of it no longer unable to overcome homsickness, missing his wife and child and the tiredness and boredom of long-term travel.

And then his illness strikes with devastating consequences and the dream is over.

I very much doubt that Coming Back to Me was the best sports book of 2008, but I doubt there was another written that was quite so compelling. Trescothick comes across as a decent man struggling to deal with a problem far more challenging than any fast bowler, and confronting that challenge with an honesty that is disarming.

Ten days after I interviewed him at Lord's Trescothick went to Edgbaston and scored a century in each innings for England. I sat in the press box, thrilled to be there to see it and suppressing the excited fan in me so that I could retain the appearance of professionalism.

I miss him in and England shirt, and for me a lot of the pleasure and interest of watching England cricket retired with him. England miss him even more and are no nearer to finding a long term replacement than they were 30 months ago when he last played.

But I am delighted he has found his peace and I look forward to a 2009 full of runs for Somerset. And in my mind's eye, on a cold Janaury day I imagine a hot day in Taunton in an altogether simpler time, with St James's church in the background, and Mark Lathwell and Marcus Trescothick in the middle, the former bashing the ball of the back foot through cover and Trescothick slog sweeping to deep mid wicket. Happy days.

What multi-channel TV is actually for... and i(TV)Players

Quiet night in. Credit crunch thing. You know, staying in is the new going out.

Only there's nothing on the box, is there? Although fortunately there was six years ago when the BBC started Spooks. So last night, flicking through the listings of some of the 23,600 channels provided by Sky that I never use, I come across a listing for the spy drama on a channel called Watch.

As luck would have it is the first ever episode, with a magnificently dishy Keeley Hawes sporting a short bob and Matthew MacFadyen with an attitude. Having picked up Spooks round about series 4 by which time Hawes and MacFadyen had been replaced by Hermione Norris and Rupert Penry-Jones it was great to be able to go back and see how it all started. The verdict? It has become a lot slicker and pacier over the years, but the first series will be a good companion in the grey months of January and February.

During Spooks, Watch ran an advert for another channel called Alibi, this one apparently a repository of crime programmes so potentially another good source of quality old shows. At present the listings suggest a lot of stuff I'm not really interested in like Taggart and Silent Witness, but fingers crossed for better to come.

It's a little unfair to say there's nothing on, because there were some bits and pieces over the weekend. First a new ITV drama called Demons, about a teenager who discovers he is the last descendant of Bram Stoker's vampire hunter Abraham van Helsing. The main attraction of the show was that it stars the splendid Philip Glenister of Life on Mars fame.  

Glenister stars as the boy's god-father and protector, showing him a world of non-human "freaks" running out of control in London. The whys and the wherefores are not really explained, leaving the plot thinner than workhouse gruel, while Glenister is strangely emasculated, running around talking about "smiting level 3s" in an odd American accent.

So far then, not so very good. But ITV has clearly spent quite a bit of money on lavish sets and some decent talent, and so I'll give it one more shot.

Also on ITV over the weekend - spending the entire drama budget in one go before Strictly Come Ice Skating starts up again - was Above Suspicion, a Lynda La Plante adaptation. A decent enough story given a  bit of life by an excellent cast including the powerful Ciaran Hinds, who was last seen on my television as Julius Caesar in Rome, and Kelly Reilly as a naive young DC on her first big case.

It was OK. Good not great. Or perhaps tolerable not terrible. Enough there that I was hoping to see the next episode next Sunday. But it turns out episode 2 was on Monday, and so I have missed it.

Or at least I would have, if it were not for the new development that is ITV''s answer to the iPlayer. It's the ... ITVPLayer!! How did they think that one up I wonder. 

All of which reminds of a line from the Best of the Now Show (Radio 4's comedy sketch show - probably available still on the BBC iPLayer) pointing out that with this new technology you can now not watch programmes anytime, not just when you don't want to watch them.

Still, there are always reruns of Spooks.

REVIEW: Skin and Bones by Tom Bale

Remember Hungerford? Dunblane? Tom Bale clearly does. His debut novel, Skin and Bones, begins with a chillingly familiar scenario: a lone gunman on the loose in a quiet Sussex village, moving from house to house and systematically killing every mann, woman and child he finds.

You know how the story goes from there: the gunman finally ends the killing spree by shooting himself; the investigation begins as does the gruesome task of identifying the dead; the media then descend on village to cover the story as the shooting becomes a 24-hour-a-day national obsession; the killer is named and characterised as a "loner" or "misfit"; and then finally the media moves on the next  24-hour-a-day national obsession.

But what if the lone gunman theory is false? This is the path taken by Bale, who presents the violence through the eyes of a badly injured survivor, Julia Trent, who witnesses a second gunman killing the first. Her story is dismissed by the police as the ramblings of the wounded. There is no evidence to support the story a second killer.

But Julia Trent is not about to be dismissed so easily and joins forces with Craig Walker, a former investigative reporter whose father was killed in the incident, to prove that there is still a murderer on the loose.

What they find are all the elements of a cracking thriller: greed, envy, corruption, revenge, ties to the grey hinterland where business mixes uneasily with crime, and dark family secrets.

In general, Bale marshals his forces well.  The early scenes of killing are brilliantly and convincingly realised. The plot is worked through to a clever and tense ending following a number of satisfying twists. The prose is sharp and the narrative has good momentum.

On the positive side of the ledger, the character of Julia Trent is probably the best thing about the book. She is brave, resourceful, determined and likable. And an enjoyable plot always stays the right side of credible.

Not quite so convincing is Craig Walker, who did not quite ring true as a former hot shot journalist and is defined by an incident at the beginning of the book that seemed a quite unnecessary development and that hampered his development. Also following the explosive and thoroughly gripping opening scene the book lost its way for 50 or so pages as the plot was established. The introduction of a large number of new characters quickly - many of whom are not named or adequately explained as Bale builds his mystery - left me dazed and confused for a while.

But Bale picked up the pace of his story nicely to produce what is ultimately a fine and enjoyable debut novel that offers considerable potential for the future. He clearly has a comprehensive understanding of what makes a great mystery novel and with some polish he could live up to the "Like Harlan Coben" sticker I saw on the front cover in Waterstone's on Saturday (where Skin and Bones was featured in the plum new fiction shelves at the front of the store). But he is not quite Harlan Coben yet.  

New year, new look

To my surprise I realised earlier this week that this blog is getting on for three-years-old. Surprised because, I am always slightly surprised by the speedy passage of time, but also because when I started Material Witness, in about April 2006, I had no real expectations of how long I would do it for, whether I would have the time or the inclination to stick with it.

But 263 posts later (I am not the most prolific blogger, clearly) I am still going, and thanks to the generosity of publishers, publicists, readers and fellow bloggers, I still have a shelf of books to read and a steady flow of visitors.

And after (almost three) years, I thought it might be a good idea to overhaul the look of the site, which has remained the same since the beginning. I, er, hope you like it. If you do/don't please leave a message and tell me belo. The beauty of Typepad is that changing it is a doddle so if the reaction is as violent as the new orange headlines (I like that it matches Damian Lewis' hair - see below) I can move on to something else.

Anyway while we are housekeeping, a couple of new year's resolutions. 

For what is probably the third year in a row, I vow to be a better citizen of the blogospheres. A lot of fellow bloggers have given me a lot of links and plugs and I have not done nearly enough in return. SO here's a start. A chap called Nicholas Bate, who writes a lively business blog, often sends people my way, sometimes with the line: "Need something for next week's commute". Mr Bate has good advice this week for those considering looking for a bargain in the sales.

Secondly, I am going to read more non-fiction in 2009.

Happy New Year

Damian Lewis breathes Life into cop show format

Perhaps the only drawback of having a hard drive recorder is that I often watch shows far too late to be able to make useful recommendations (see Wallander review in the week after the series finished on the BBC).

Even so, in these days of DVD box sets, Torrents and iTunes there is some value in promoting an unusual and highly watchable cop show. Life first aired in autumn 2007 on NBC and was picked up by the network for a full series after decent ratings and critical acclaim. The first series was truncated to 11 episodes by the writers' strike but a second series was commissioned and shown in 2008.

In the UK Life aired in late 2008 on what, for me at least, was the uncharted backwater of ITV3 and I might never have found it if it were not for the fact that Damian Lewis was cast in the lead role of Detective Charlie Crews which ensured that the review pages here picked it up a little. I pushed the little green "series link" button on Sky Plus and a few weeks later was very pleased I did.

Life tells the story of Detective Crews, who has returned to the LAPD following a long stint in prison for a pair of murders he did not commit and has been absolved of following the introduction of DNA evidence. Unsurprisingly, the former cop was brutalised in prison and has come out a changed man having found his "Zen". He has also come out extremely wealthy following a wrongful imprisonment settlement that includes his detective's shield as well as a large, but unspecified, sum of cash.

Crews is not especially welcome back in the LAPD, but eventually settles into an uneasy relationshiop with his partner Dani Reese, who herself has overcome problems of drug addiction following a stint undercover in narcotics.

Life is both series and serial, with a separate and distinct murder for Crews and Reese to solve each episode running alongside Crews' own search for the plot and plotters who framed him.

While the latter carries the series and gives it its narrative power, the former are always entertaining and somewhat unusual (the half-corpse IRS agent/spy story was particularly inventive) and it seems that the writers were given licence to have some fun with them.

The back story of Crews' own life and investigation is excellent television with suggestions of institutional corruption and personal treachery giving it weight. The way the story is told with on-screen "interviews" about Crews' crime with his ex-wife (who left him, not believing his professions of innocence), his ex-partner (who did not back him up in the investigation), his lawyer is a clever device for exploring the plot.

Crews' own eccentricities are also entertaining. His penchant for fruit, for fortune cookie expressions of philosophy, unusual cars and for spending his money in strange ways (an orange farm and a solar power installation) give Life a different point of differentiation from cop shows where the leads are mean, moody and world weary. (The Zen was overdone somewhat in early episodes but bear with it, it improves dramatically by episode three).

For all this to work, Crews has to be just about perfect. Anything less and the whole thing could descend quickly into hokey slapstick. Fortunately for NBC, it has a man in the lead who has emerged as one of the finest television actors of his generation.

Damian Lewis, a ginger old Etonian, may not have been the obvious choice for a Californian homicide detective, but the producers had clearly seen his superb portrayal of Major Richard Winters in the truly excellent Band of Brothers and known they were backing a winner.

Lewis has everything it takes to pull off Crews. His timing and delivery is terrific and he is a fantastically physical actor, in this case from the neck up, allowing his face to tell Crews story without speaking. He has an understated screen presence and authority that works just right in Life, as it did with Winters.

The supporting cast works well too. Sarah Shahi plays his partner Reese with just the mix of exasperation and amusement, while Adam Arkin is particularly watchable as Ted Earley, a white collar criminal Crews saved in jail (a story not told in the first series) and who becomes his financial advisor and housemate on the outside.

Life is not Wired or NYPD Blue. It is not a warts and all exploration of society and criminal justice and nor does it belong in the very top tier of television police dramas. But it is refreshingly different, highly entertaining, beautifully written and well acted. I look forward to the second series.