Sweet Nothings

They're currently repeating Early Doors on BBC4, Tuesday nights at 9:30pm, just before Mad Men, in fact. You'd be forgiven for not knowing the first thing about Early Doors , because unlike Mad Men it's a series that existed almost completely without hype. Originally, 'Doors (as nobody calls it) was set to be Craig Cash and Caroline Aherne's follow-up to the multi-award-winning, insanely popular Royle Family , with the writing duo playing the landlord and landlady of a northern watering hole. That idea was scuppered when Aherne's well-documented "issues" got the better of her, and she buggered off to Australia and wrote a near-identical Aussie version of the Royles while she was there. Undeterred, Cash drafted in Phil Mealey as his new partner and carried on writing the new show, which can fairly be described as the Royle Family in a pub. Perhaps BBC bigwigs perceived the show to be too derivative and lacking in star power after Aherne's departure,...

Everyone and his blog has something to say about The Wire, but I have to add my tuppence worth. Very seldom comes the time you can genuinely say something is The Best Thing... Ever in its field, but to say this about The Wire is almost selling it short. In a nutshell, here are the main reasons why we all agree it's so good: (1) It plays like a novel - the story builds up organically with no mandatory big action sequences or cliffhangers to end episodes. (2) It's brutally honest. Nobody is perfect, pretty much every character is morally compromised at some point, and institutions never operate the way they should do. Power always corrupts. (3) Completely believable characters, and terrific performances. A lot of the supporting cast are actual Baltimore natives, many of whom have been involved in escapades on which the characters are based. (4) It's one of those works where us fans end up jealous of newbies watching for the first time - they have all this magical stuff ahead...