The Wire's war on the drug war

The writers of The Wire have used the latest issue of Time magazine to plead for greater leniency for non-violent drug cases...

We write a television show. Measured against more thoughtful and meaningful occupations, this is not the best seat from which to argue public policy or social justice. Still, those viewers who followed The Wire — our HBO drama that tried to portray all sides of inner-city collapse, including the drug war, with as much detail and as little judgment as we could muster — tell us they've invested in the fates of our characters. They worry or grieve for Bubbles, Bodie or Wallace, certain that these characters are fictional yet knowing they are rooted in the reality of the other America, the one rarely acknowledged by anything so overt as a TV drama.

These viewers, admittedly a small shard of the TV universe, deluge us with one question: What can we do? If there are two Americas — separate and unequal — and if the drug war has helped produce a psychic chasm between them, how can well-meaning, well-intentioned people begin to bridge those worlds?

And for five seasons, we answered lamely, offering arguments about economic priorities or drug policy, debating theoreticals within our tangled little drama. We were storytellers, not advocates; we ducked the question as best we could.

Yet this war grinds on, flooding our prisons, devouring resources, turning city neighborhoods into free-fire zones. To what end? State and federal prisons are packed with victims of the drug conflict. A new report by the Pew Center shows that 1 of every 100 adults in the U.S. — and 1 in 15 black men over 18 — is currently incarcerated. That's the world's highest rate of imprisonment.

The drug war has ravaged law enforcement too. In cities where police agencies commit the most resources to arresting their way out of their drug problems, the arrest rates for violent crime — murder, rape, aggravated assault — have declined. In Baltimore, where we set The Wire, drug arrests have skyrocketed over the past three decades, yet in that same span, arrest rates for murder have gone from 80% and 90% to half that. Lost in an unwinnable drug war, a new generation of law officers is no longer capable of investigating crime properly, having learned only to make court pay by grabbing cheap, meaningless drug arrests off the nearest corner.

What the drugs themselves have not destroyed, the warfare against them has. And what once began, perhaps, as a battle against dangerous substances long ago transformed itself into a venal war on our underclass. Since declaring war on drugs nearly 40 years ago, we've been demonizing our most desperate citizens, isolating and incarcerating them and otherwise denying them a role in the American collective. All to no purpose. The prison population doubles and doubles again; the drugs remain.

Our leaders? There aren't any politicians — Democrat or Republican — willing to speak truth on this. Instead, politicians compete to prove themselves more draconian than thou, to embrace America's most profound and enduring policy failure.

"A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right," wrote Thomas Paine when he called for civil disobedience against monarchy — the flawed national policy of his day. In a similar spirit, we offer a small idea that is, perhaps, no small idea. It will not solve the drug problem, nor will it heal all civic wounds. It does not yet address questions of how the resources spent warring with our poor over drug use might be better spent on treatment or education or job training, or anything else that might begin to restore those places in America where the only economic engine remaining is the illegal drug economy. It doesn't resolve the myriad complexities that a retreat from war to sanity will require. All it does is open a range of intricate, paradoxical issues. But this is what we can do — and what we will do.

If asked to serve on a jury deliberating a violation of state or federal drug laws, we will vote to acquit, regardless of the evidence presented. Save for a prosecution in which acts of violence or intended violence are alleged, we will — to borrow Justice Harry Blackmun's manifesto against the death penalty — no longer tinker with the machinery of the drug war. No longer can we collaborate with a government that uses nonviolent drug offenses to fill prisons with its poorest, most damaged and most desperate citizens.

Jury nullification is American dissent, as old and as heralded as the 1735 trial of John Peter Zenger, who was acquitted of seditious libel against the royal governor of New York, and absent a government capable of repairing injustices, it is legitimate protest. If some few episodes of a television entertainment have caused others to reflect on the war zones we have created in our cities and the human beings stranded there, we ask that those people might also consider their conscience. And when the lawyers or the judge or your fellow jurors seek explanation, think for a moment on Bubbles or Bodie or Wallace. And remember that the lives being held in the balance aren't fictional.

The authors- Ed Burns, Dennis Lehane, George Pelecanos, Richard Price and David Simon are all members of the writing staff of HBO's The Wire, which concludes its five-year run on March 9.

Notes from a Craggy Island

Ten years, and a million DVDs since his demise, Father Ted has spawned a fully-fledged cult. John Walsh slips on his dog collar and joins the faithful...

I think it was the moment when a sardine sandwich, flung by a chap in a Pink Panther suit, went whizzing past my ear, and a furry gorilla flew through the air and cannoned into Joe the MC, that I finally grasped the long-term ramifications a television show can produce in our me-too culture.

It was hard, mind you, trying to follow a serious train of thought when, onstage before me, a whole line of Lovely Girls were doing their final, virginal twirl before an audience of yelling, whistling and over-stimulated priests, nuns, bishops, housekeepers, Elvis impersonators, milkmen, hairy babies, monks and giant rabbits. I'm not sure the island of Inishmore has seen anything like it. But, for a few hundred deranged fans, this isn't Inishmore. It's Craggy Island and, though it started life as a fictional location, it's as real to them as their bricks-and-mortar homes in Dublin, London, Cardiff, Edinburgh, Ottawa and Tokyo.

Perhaps I should explain. I was in the west of Ireland, attending TedFest II, the second celebration of Father Ted, a TV sitcom that filmed its final instalment 10 years ago. The show, written by Graham Linehan and Arthur Mathews, ran on Channel 4 for three series (plus one extended Christmas Special, set in the lingerie section of a department store) between April 1995 and May 1998; it was popular at the time, but, thanks to frequent repeats, acquired a massive following after its demise; more than 1 million DVD box sets have been sold.

A year ago, Welsh film-maker Peter Phillips met Irish film editor Fergal McGrath in Sri Lanka on a children's therapy project. The former had set up the successful Elvis Festival in Porthcawl, and the two men discussed doing the same for Father Ted. "We didn't want it to be a TV-watching festival," says Phillips. "We wanted to create Craggy Island with a few like-minded people."

The Friends of Father Ted festival was born, in a storm of drink, fancy dress and sporting events. This year's marked a poignant anniversary. The star, Dermot Morgan, who played Ted, died 10 years ago last week: he suffered a fatal heart attack the day after they filmed the final episode. It was spookily well-timed. No further series had been planned, nor could any be planned now, since no one could take Morgan's place.

It's easy to see why the sitcom became so cultish: viewers feel they could, without much trouble, step inside the action, visit the "parochial house" on Craggy Island and meet the inhabitants: Father Ted Crilly, genial, 40-ish, grey-haired and ambitious who, behind his worldly demeanour, lies and schemes like Sergeant Bilko; Father Dougal McGuire (played by Ardal O'Hanlon), a wide-eyed, 20-something halfwit in a variety of knitted jumpers who fails to grasp basic facts about the world ("This cow," Ted tells him, holding up a plastic toy, "is small. Those cows [real ones, seen through a window, grazing in the distance] are far away"); and Father Jack Hackett (Frank Kelly,) red-faced, wild-haired, catatonic, drool-stained, voraciously alcoholic and foul-mouthed; "Drink!", "Arse!", "Feck!", "Girls!" constitute almost his whole conversational repertoire. Then there's their housekeeper is Mrs Doyle (Pauline McLynn,) a middle-aged, much-exploited slattern with a large mole on her lip. Psychotically hospitable, she regales priests and visitors with gallons of tea, hills of sandwiches and mountain ranges of cake, which she urges them to consume with cries of "Go on, go on, go on, go on, go on, go on..."

We learn that they've been sent to the island, out of harm's way, after a number of scandals involving money, nuns and unspeakable damage. They're never seen performing religious duties but while away the hours plotting to win the All-Priests' Stars in Their Eyes Lookalike Competition, or fending off the irruptions of unpleasant strangers to their peaceful home, whether stroppy women rock stars (a wounding dig at Sinead O'Connor), sinister oddball clerics, or the ghastly pop star Eoin McLove.

Theirs is a world of moth-eaten innocence and surreal anarchy. The only moral action they ever take is to picket a rude foreign film at the cinema, where they carry meek placards bearing the legends "Careful, Now" and "Down With This Type of Thing," thus making it the most popular film in Craggy Island's history.

TedFest II started last week with a gathering of fans in Kilfenora, Co Clare, where much of the show's external footage was shot, and climaxed on Inishmore, the largest of the Aran Islands. None of the action was shot on the Arans, but the opening credit sequence is an air-shot of Inisheer, the smallest of the three. Clear? Last year, Inisheer objected to Inishmore's giving itself airs as "the real Craggy Island", and they held a football match to decide who had the right to the title. Inishmore won.

The island's residents may wonder if this was the happiest outcome, as they watch revellers arrive by every ferry, and cram every B&B, hotel room, lodging-house digs or tent, transforming their bleak limestone citadel into the setting for the biggest, silliest and probably booziest fancy dress party in what's left of Christendom.

My first sight on landing at Inishmore was a small scurrying figure on the quayside in a tweed jacket, woolly hat and apron, bearing a tray of teacups and cardboard egg sandwiches. It was the first of several dozen Mrs Doyles (male and female) I was to see during the day.

I fell into step beside Aisling, 23, a hazel-eyed beauty from Dublin pulling a builder's brick on a string leash. (Do keep up – Father Jack briefly adopts a brick in the episode "Speed 3" and makes it a pet.) Aisling recently graduated from Trinity in Politics and Sociology and drove across the country with two friends at 5am, fortified only by Buckfast Abbey Tonic Wine, the Dublin alkie's tipple. None had a ticket, but the security, she says, is "a pile of shite because, if you're in a costume, nobody checks". The girls had a brilliant time last year. Their ambitions are "to have a few drinks and a laugh and maybe hop up on a priest."

In Paitin (ie Poteen, or Irish moonshine) Jack's Bar at the Ostan Arann, the only hotel on Inishmore, a handsome, three-star establishment run by PJ O'Flaherty in a dog-collar, the Bishop from the ferry is on his second Guinness, talking to a small boy with a dog; the kid is weighed down a by a huge cross around his neck, as heavy as an albatross.

Aisling and her friends are at a table with a Pat Mustard, one of several incarnations of the lecherous milkman who, in the show, has sex with all the Craggy Island housewives and sends Mrs Doyle into a delirium of flirtatiousness. He is hairy, ear-ringed, has a chain round his neck; he has single-handedly populated the island with hairy babies. I worry about Aisling. Will her innate virtue be eroded by an excess of Buckfast Tonic, or an excess of Mustard?

The bar fills up with nuns. They come in all configurations, but seem startlingly young to be fans of a show that packed up a decade ago. Marie and Bernadette are twin sisters, aged 23, from Limerick; they're here with their neighbour and friend Sarah, 25. "We just love the programme," said Marie. "We know all the lines. Give us any line from the three series, we'll tell you where it's from." Not since the heyday of Monty Python have so many people memorised the lines of comic sketches. "I'm surprised people get the humour," said Bernadette. "It seems very Irish to me."

"Sometimes, for Irish people," said Marie, "it's like watching a documentary." They explained that, for girls at TedFest, the choice is to dress as Mrs Doyle, a nun or a Lovely Girl. Bernadette bought their costumes from a shop in Camden, north London. There had, she explained, been some saucy, mini-nuns' outfits, "but," she said, "I'm bein' quite blasphemous enough as it is without wearin' the tarty version."

Blasphemous? Was she serious? Probably. In an economically booming, successfully Europeanised, post-punt, post-emigrant and almost post-Catholic culture, this dressing-up as the clergy who ran the country in their parents' and grandparents' days is clearly a form of rebellion, but some vestigial guilt remains. "When she heard Dermot Morgan was dead," one girl told me, "me mam said, 'I'm not a bit surprised. That's what you get for cheekin' the priests.'"

I can't hang around the bar, though, because the five-a-side football is under way near the harbour. At the pitch – a small, indescribably muddy field whose goals must have been bought in a toyshop – I'm surprised to discover the real-life Sicilian five-a-side footie team gracefully warming up.

What are the Italians doing here? It's a piece of Irish logic. The Craggy Island World Cup, sponsored by Paddy Power, the bookies, is open to all "islands off the coast of Ireland". Teams have been fielded from two of the Arans, plus Clare Island, Tory Island, Rathlin Island, Inishbofin and a few others. Then last month, Giovanni Trapattoni, the Italian football coach, signed up to become the Irish national team's manager, starting this May, and the Craggy Island organisers asked the island of Sicily – certainly "an island off the coast of Ireland", though it's 1472 miles "off" – to send a five-a-side team.Which is why there are five well-groomed, wavy-haired (or fashionably shaven-headed) Italian Adonises on the muddy pitch alongside the hard men from Inisheer.

Scores of nuns press forward for a better view of the Sicilians' thighs. (Even the man from BBC Sport Northern Ireland is in full habit.) The first Mrs Doyle from the jetty is there, re-doing her jammy smudge of lipstick, beside a dispirited chap in a gorilla suit. Italian macaroons are handed round as a gesture of friendship. Despite being 10/11 favourites, the Sicilians lose to the islandmen, 4-2 on a penalty shootout. Four games later, the final sees the host island, Inishmore, playing Inishbofin for World Cup glory. The commentator is hilarious. "Inishbofin is playing into the – no wait, both teams are playing into the wind," he says. "The ball is cleared by No 4 there, the man with the highlights, obviously done at home by his cousin... The atmosphere is electric – like a hairdryer in the bath." When a goal is scored, a ragged cry goes up from the home supporters, outnumbered though they are by be-mitred bishops and hirsute milkmen. "I don't know how to say this," says the commentator, "but I just heard a nun behind me say 'Fookin' hell'..."

Back at the hotel, I discover that I've been invited to be one of the judges at the Lovely Girls beauty contest this evening. I am stunned by the honour (and when I ring the children in London to tell them the news, a note of genuine respect enters their voices for perhaps the first time ever).

In the bar I celebrate with a glass of Burgundy. The bar is crammed with lunching clergymen, red-faced monks and a contingent of Lovely Girls, chosen from local heats around the country. The girls drink gin and tonics, simper, flirt and take snaps of each other on their mobiles. One explains how much she likes "the humour of the fancy dress, because it's so subtle. It just creeps up on you, and you see something and say, 'Oh God, yes.' Like Eileen there, with her fake arms." I'm mystified. What arms? What is she talking about? "Eileen," she says, "show John the arms, willya?" A sweet-faced teenager, at a table of friends, displays two fleshy plastic forearms, attached to her wrists.

"I don't remember a Father Ted episode with fake arms," I say, stupidly. "When was that?"

As one woman, the six girls take a collectively aghast deep breath; one clamps a horrified hand to her mouth. I have made the most appalling gaffe. (The fake arms feature, of course, in "Escape From Victory", when Ted cheats at a football match.) A history professor announcing at high table that he'd never heard of the Franco-Prussian War would have felt less of a fool and an imposter. Will I be thrown out on my ear?

I retreat swiftly, to find the Sicilians surveying their lunch with distaste. On Saturday afternoons, many Irish people lunch on "soup and a sambo" (ie sandwich); perhaps the nomenclature confuses the stylish Italians. Their steely manager sips a pint of Guinness and grimaces.

Struggling through the mass of T-shirts saying, "Careful Now" and "I Love My Brick" and "It's A Priest Thing – You Wouldn't Understand", I discover Ken Robertson, head of communications at Paddy Power, the sponsors, who have shelled out £5,000 for the winner of the football, and a "significant" sum to get their name on the TedFest literature and T-shirts.

"It's the bizarreness of the event that attracted us," he says. "We like to get involved in unusual sports. Two years ago, we held the biggest ever strip-poker event with 400 players at the Café Royal, and this year we're supporting the Bingham Cup, the gay rugby world cup, which will be the biggest sporting event held in Ireland this year. We're really getting behind it, excuse the pun."

By the door, the glum Italians are leaving. "Can we just say goodbye to the Sicilian team?" says Peter Philips, the organiser, "who lost the tournament but brought us some lovely cakes?" The departing players beam at the wild cheers this provokes.

By teatime, the crowds have swelled even more, for an hour of Buckeroo Speed Dating, which involves silver-tongued men pressing their attentions on scornful young women, while loading a plastic donkey with buckets and ropes until it kicks them all off.

In the bar, extra Lovely Girls have been drafted in for tonight's contest, by a Wild Card system. One is Lisa Smith, a dark-haired, hyperactive management consultant from Galway, with a fondness for "touch rugby." Around us the costumes are getting sillier. One man is dressed as a six-foot bottle of beer. One is dressed as Henry Sellers, a walk-on TV personality with a fondness for sherry in an early episode. There's a score of men in silver-grey Ted wigs. People in rabbit heads wander past (Bishop Brennan suffers an infestation of rabbits at the parish house in "The Plague") and a very sensible-looking girl called Sarah, in pearls, pleated skirt and wimple says, "Sure, what else is there to do than be extremely silly sometimes?"

Huge amounts of drink have been consumed since 11am, but nobody seems actually drunk; the lecherous Pat Mustards redouble their hairy seduction attempts over more Bulmers. Urgent canoodlings in the corridors suggest there may be a high incidence of priest-hopping before the evening is over. It occurs to me that few people have dressed up as the decrepit Father Jack – but I suppose it makes it harder to pull, when your shirt-front is covered in drool, vomit and dribble. What about the Mrs Doyles, in their aprons and picture hats? They seem, surprisingly, to be much in demand among the boys. There must be some atavistic (can it be Oedipal?) impulse in young Irishmen to part these decent, God-fearing, pinafored ladies from their foundation garments. I'm almost sure I felt a twinge myself, once or twice.

The climax of the weekend is the Lovely Girls beauty contest, in which nine prime examples of Irish womanhood are put through their paces in the island's small but glamorous dance-hall. Talent, everyone explains to me, is not the point. Nor are good looks. What's important is loveliness. My fellow judges, Ken and Maria, explain that we're judging "the concept of loveliness of a bygone age".

This contest is a piss-take of the Rose of Tralee Festival, Ireland's hilariously old-fashioned beauty contest, whose entrants must display such things as moral rigour, respect for their parents and an interest in charitable works, as well as have an acceptable figure, in order to win. You can bet the Rose of Tralee girls have never faced such a howling mob of desperadoes as the Lovelies face tonight. One is dressed in a Pink Panther suit (the connection? There's a passing mention, in "Are You Right There, Father Ted?" of Kato, Peter Sellers's domestic manservant/assailant in the Pink Panther movies) and a two-man horse can be seen in the crowd. The Limerick nuns are at the front, plus a slew of disruptive hardnuts dressed as sheep (uh-oh).

We judges take our seats, to much barracking. The compère Joe Rooney (who played Dougal's disruptive young pal Father Damo in one episode) brings on the girls. One by one, they must walk, or sway, successfully around traffic cones to show off their lovely bottoms (I'm sorry, but the word "bottoms" is right there in the Rules) and talk about their dreams of domestic virtue and marital servitude.

Madeleine, in a fetching green beret, explains that the women in the audience shouldn't be out tonight, but "at home, cooking supper for our husbands". If they had need of a job, it should be "doing the little drawings in a parish newsletter". Katie from Kilfenora, a brazen minx with dyed black hair, carries on a pottery hen, extracts plastic eggs and sends them flying over the first 10 rows. Lots of girls bring domestic props – scone-making mix, copies of The Irish Catholic, scrubbers, kitchen tools, holy water bottles – and cakes. One cake is shaped like a Toilet Duck. One is a gigantic scone, from inside which Miss Belfast Lovely Girl – Bridie O'Reilly – extracts a woolly jumper.

My heart is stolen away by the favourite, Miss Cork, a care worker called Tess Marnane, 21, and far too beautiful to be merely Lovely, who performed a charming feather-duster dance; but Miss Galway was also strongly favoured, because of her hand-knitted bloomers. You know Aran sweaters and their thick, white-ribbed material? She recommended Aran knickers as a corrective to the skimpy thong abominations in modern shops, and had brought along a pair, which she pulled on beneath her skirt, to roars from the crowd. "What's this little pocket at the front for?" asked the compere. "It's where I keep my rosary beads," said the girl. "Are they the kind that vibrate?" countered the wicked Mr Rooney.

As a final test, the Lovely Girls were required to make sandwiches in a sudden-death play-off. Each was given a tray of white sliced bread, Kerrygold butter and a tin of sardines and the resulting sandwiches were minutely examined with magnifying glasses, tape measures, calibrated forceps. One girl, disgusted by her efforts, hurled a slice of bread over her shoulder into the crowd. So did another. Soon they came hurtling back on to the stage, along with other, unrelated items of food, and soft toys...

But this is where we came in. I'm not sure what the TedFest says about Irish culture, the preoccupations of the young, the role of the priesthood, or the desire of young men to dress up as rabbits. To some extent, it's the spectacle of modern Ireland unburdening itself of its excessively religious past and embracing a world of anarchy in which identities don't matter. Then again, it's a colossal fancy dress party, where total strangers can admire each other's efforts, and there's no host except a fictional priest impersonated by a charismatic, grey-haired actor who died 10 years ago. A deliciously bogus celebration of churchy virtue and old-fashioned decency, it's the closest thing I know to a pagan saturnalia. As Ted himself might have written on his placard: Up With This Type Of Thing.

The Wire: David Simon on journalism's fatal flaws

David Simon found himself Monday afternoon bunkered down in the bowels of the law school building on the USC campus, discussing the demise of journalism as it relates to the fifth -- and sadly, final -- season of "The Wire." To summarize Simon's thoughts on the fall of newspapers and how the show weaves that depressing topic into politics, crime, corruption and, basically, the decay of civilization, he addressed it this way: "Everyday human beings matter less. The game is rigged. The house odds are against you."

Never the optimist, Simon said the foundation for The Wire was built upon the Greek tragedies -- "Both Stringer and Omar had to die. There was never a doubt." -- and the film Paths of Glory, directed by Stanley Kubrick and starring Kirk Douglas, which he called the only important political film of all time, except for 10 minutes of The Candidate with Robert Redford. Simon, still a Baltimore resident, toiled at the Sun for seven years, which included some time off to focus on his books Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets and The Corner, both of which were turned into TV projects, the former a critically beloved but low-rated series for NBC, and the latter a miniseries for HBO. He still loves the paper and it kills him to see it decimated by lay-offs that ultimately followed the Sun's local ownership to that of the Tribune company.

"I'm heartbroken at what's happened to the Sun," he said, and even though he's much more well known now for his TV work, he still considers himself a newspaperman (and can be seen in a cameo in the Wire finale, slaving away in a newsroom cubicle). "The Sun went from being a paper trying to get it right to a flashier, dynamic paper that knew less of the city than before (Tribune took over)."

When asking the assembled students what was the overriding theme of this season in regards to what happens at the fictional Sun, he shoots down many theories: Yeah, Templeton's making up of sources and quotes play a part but it's not the overriding theme that Simon wants to get out, and, no, it's not just about the strive for Pulitzers. Rather, it's the "do more with less" theory that managing editor Thomas Klebanow asks his writers and editors at the beginning of the season. It failed miserably.

"The whole season of The Wire is about what didn't happen," he explains. "The governor cooking the stats didn't get in the paper. The No Child Left Behind stories that didn't get in, and Prop Joe's death is just a brief."

With management's mantra to make the Sun a Pulitzer Prize-grabbing operation, the Sun's already limited resources can't find the time -- and the paper certainly doesn't have the manpower -- to adequately address the real needs of Baltimore; such as why the schools are failing the city's children, why the police can't make a dent on crime, the backroom politics and decisions that can, ultimately, make a difference in people's lives. Instead, the paper focuses on the homeless. Not an unworthy topic certainly, but not at the expense of everything else.

Remember the scene early on this season when Gus looks out the window and sees a fire blazing in East Baltimore and nobody's covering it? Simon said it was a metaphor for journalism burning to the ground. He recalled being on the newspaper staff and watching in horror, under the tenure of Sun editor John Carroll, as the paper spent hundreds of column inches on the ills of lead paint poisoning, blaming it for the increased drug trade, kids dropping out of school, overcrowding in the city's jails, the Orioles falling to last place... OK, not so much the O's descent into baseball oblivion, but you get the point. And, Simon said, when a Sun reporter met with the governor and the paper's self-obsessed topic of lead paint poisoning didn't come up, the writer falsely included a conversation with the governor anyway into his piece. At that point, Simon walked away from the paper, disgusted as hell.

Simon's other diatribe was mounted against the Internet. Not so much against the vast availability of information, but how that information is given away for free and that there's no regulation of bloggers, the vast majority of them ill-concerned about truth and news gathering. He partly blames newspapers themselves for their current predicament, for not charging readers to access stories online and that readers get what they pay for. It's easy to post comments about the coverage of the war in Iraq, and to use the news gathered there for your own blogging, but he warns that online readers don't have the moral ground to criticize a paper's coverage unless they're footing the bill. You want to do your own reporting in the Middle East and express your own opinions? Fine, he says, just make sure you pay the tab for what it costs to send journalists over there.

The session ended with more Wire-related questions. One student was blown away by the revelation that Cheese is Randy's father (though maybe that shouldn't have been all that surprising consider their surnames are both Wagstaff). Another asked why there's no music in the show -- except for the opening and closing credits -- and Simon said it's because he hates a score and believes it's meant to manipulate the audience. Also, he still considers himself a novice on the set and leaves most of the film-making decisions to his production team, and keeps his focus on the script.

Finally, Simon said he was grateful for the 10.5 hours HBO gave him to conclude the series -- the final episode was only supposed to be an hour but HBO's Carolyn Strauss gave him the OK for an extra 30 minutes when Simon wasn't able to wrap up the series in the allotted time -- and that if he had a full 12 episodes, more would've been shown about the Randy-Cheese relationship and a plot-line about Cutty -- the former gangster who did time and then came back to the neighbourhood to run a makeshift boxing gym -- could've been explored.

But, as The Wire ends its glorious run, this is no time to get greedy or ask what could've been. What viewers have received for five season is pure manna, a gift from the TV gods. Where we're normally given "The Housewives of Orange County" and "The Hills," here we were offered a study on the rise and fall of America's free-market system seen through the eyes of the entrepreneurs of the media, the warriors of the drug trade and the politicians from where it all trickles down.

All that, and Omar too.

The Frog Prince

Paul Giamatti’s John Adams is no swashbuckler, but the HBO show rises like a hot-air balloon says New York Magazine's John Leonard...

Short, fat, and cranky were the adjectives that came to David McCullough’s mind when he was asked to describe the hero of his Pulitzer Prize–winning biography of our very first vice-president. As brilliant as John Adams may have been, he was nowhere near the American masculine ideal of a cowboy or a quarterback. Still, how many of our Founding Fathers can we realistically expect to have looked as matinee melancholy and romantic as Thomas Jefferson? And we needed every one of that extraordinary bunch, from cracker-barrel Ben Franklin to narcoleptic George Washington, to dream up and nail down the nascent republic.

So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Adams, in the seven-part HBO mini-series adapted from McCullough, is played by Paul Giamatti and therefore looks mostly like a frog. For those of us who remember George Grizzard as the farmer-lawyer from Massachusetts in the thirteen-part The Adams Chronicles on public television 32 years ago, or William Daniels singing and prancing through the Continental Congress in the musical 1776, this takes some getting used to, especially considering how often Giamatti must doff and don his wig, as if to telegraph with blinding light from a bald dome. Perhaps we are being asked to see Adams through the indulgent eyes of his wife, Abigail. Since Abigail is played by Laura Linney, there can be no better vantage. Anyone who’s dipped into the thousand letters that passed between John and Abigail during their 54 years of marriage knows that Abigail was at least as smart as James Madison. Anyone familiar with Linney knows that she can be as smart as the situation needs—and simultaneously exasperated.

We’re in excellent company, from the Boston Massacre to the Declaration of Independence to Adams’s plenipotentiary missions to Versailles and the Court of St. James to his unsought but extremely gratifying vice-presidency in the first Washington administration. As Jefferson, Stephen Dillane broods upon liberty with a gothic passion. Tom Wilkinson’s Franklin fills us with impatience and intends to. David Morse as George W. seems taxidermic, a huge stuffed squirrel of secrets. Zeljko Ivanek as the Pennsylvania delegate John Dickinson makes a remarkably eloquent case for Quaker pacifism. Scriptwriter Kirk Ellis (Into the West) and director Tom Hooper (Longford) are equally interested in ideas and personalities. And their camera, whether on location in Colonial Williamsburg or in Budapest pretending to be Paris, likes to point as much at peach trees, bullet molds, smallpox victims, and warships as it does at French gardens, despondent faces, and flags like bloody bandages. On one gruesome hand, the tarring and feathering of a British officer; on another, the thrilling levitation from Paris of the Montgolfiers’ hot-air balloon.

When this balloon goes up, a skeptical Adams turns rapturous. Here is a metaphor for his republic. You may recall that Simon Schama, in his tendentious account of the French Revolution, Citizens, also made hot-air metaphors out of these eighteenth-century balloons. By establishing a direct, unmediated relationship with enormous multitudes of ordinary French, balloonists robbed Louis XVI of his control of spectacle, injuring the king in his ceremonial mystique. According to Schama, a balloon in the air belonged not to the hierarchical world of the monarch, but to the democratic people. Well, up the republic, with flags and flutes for this worthy mini-series, too. Yet as we watch, we’d do well to remember the words of the late Molly Ivins, who once suggested, “It is possible to read the history of this country as one long struggle to extend the liberties established in our Constitution to everyone in America.” No doubt the equally estimable Abigail Adams and Laura Linney would both agree.

John Adams starts March 16 on HBO.

Mad Men, and why we love 1960

The sexist mores of Mad Men, the latest American television hit, are shocking – so why does a period piece set in 1960 look so seductive? Because the people it shows were the masters of the modern universe argues Bryan Appleyard.

"This place," observes Don Draper, creative director of the Madison Avenue advertising agency Sterling Cooper, “has more failed artists and intellectuals than the Third Reich.” It is 1960, and although the Sterling Cooper staff may have failed as artists and intellectuals, as ad men they are masters of the universe. And that is exactly why they were all invented by Matthew Weiner for his television-drama series Mad Men. It was, Weiner has said, “an amazing year”, and advertising was an amazing business. “The truth is, I think an advertising agency is one of the last places in the world where, if you bring in a big client, you’re in charge. There’s complete mobility, and it’s a model for the United States.”

The year is crucial. Nixon is about to lose to Kennedy, and America is feeling pretty good about herself. They liked Ike, the paranoia of the immediate postwar years had begun to subside and the suburbs had become happy havens of prosperity, and, for when they weren’t, the tranquilliser Librium, the Prozac of the age, had just come on the market. Best of all, the year before, the ad agency Doyle Dane Bernbach (DDB) had produced what was, in 1999, to be voted the greatest ad campaign of all time. It nicknamed Volkswagen’s little car the Beetle and showed it almost lost in a blank white page, with the slogan “Think Small”. Everything about this ad went against conventional wisdom: it wasted space, it sold a car as small when Americans liked big and it gave it an apparently demeaning name. Yet it turned Volkswagen into one of the world’s biggest car-makers. The concept of the ad man as a creative genius, not just a salesman, had been born.


He was also world-transforming. The idea that capitalism needs the manipulation of the mass mind to ensure that people will buy products even when - or especially when - they don’t need them was an old one, even by then. Edward Bernays, the nephew of Sigmund Freud, had sold the subconscious as the malleable source of all our impulses to the Americans in the 1920s. Deliberately influencing the subconscious was not only good for business, it was, claimed Bernays, necessary for the workings of democracy. Advertising and public relations soothed and managed the rage, aspirations, suffering and happiness of the masses.

Amid the relative peace and absolute prosperity of the 1950s, this was an idea whose time had come. Democracy and the good life meant consumption - something we could do much better than the Soviets. In order to consume, you needed to be told what to consume. Advertising would win the cold war. No wonder Weiner’s Mad Men think they are the centre of the world. They are. Weiner wrote his first script for the series seven years ago and sent it to David Chase, creator of The Sopranos. Chase at once hired him to work on The Sops. Then, with that show finally out of the way, Weiner was free to go back to Mad Men. First aired in America in July last year, it has already picked up two Golden Globes and several other awards.

Apart from a few old ad men grumbling “It wasn’t like that”, the series has been universally acclaimed. But what, exactly, it’s about is puzzling. There are two views. Most of the American coverage has focused on how different Weiner’s 1960 seems from the way we live now. It is a costume drama, a period piece. On the other hand, Weiner himself has insisted that this is not merely a condescending look back at a quaint and distant past. “You tell me if this is a period piece,” he has said. “The men are asking, ‘Is this it?’ The women are asking, ‘What’s wrong with me?’ You tell me if that sounds like it’s 1960 or 2007.” Mad Men is not a window onto the past, it’s a mirror of the present. It’s the tension between these two views that makes the show so enthralling.

It’s a tension within Weiner himself, for the truth is he’s being more than a little disingenuous in denying the period quality of the show. In fact, Mad Men bends over backwards to draw your attention to the differences between then and now. “There were seven deadly sins practised at the dawn of the 1960s,” wrote Alessandra Stanley in The New York Times. “Smoking, drinking, adultery, sexism, homophobia, antisemitism and racism. In its first few minutes, Mad Men... taps into all of them.”

Weiner plainly delights in shocking us with the sights and sounds of a different world. A Jewish client is a big problem for the agency - they have to seek out the one Jew they employ to make her feel at home. They hit the booze tray from late morning onwards. Gays are invisible, in the closet; and the girls are grateful there are men at IBM smart enough to design an electric typewriter simple enough for women to use. The perception of risk is downright weird. A little girl walks in with a plastic laundry bag over her head and gets told off by her mother for messing up her wardrobe.

But the really big shockers are the cigarettes. Everybody smokes all the time, including a doctor while conducting a gynaecological examination. When the hands of the hero, the creative director Don Draper (Jon Hamm), are in shot, they’re holding a fag; when they’re not, his trousers appear to be on fire. One of the agency’s top accounts is Lucky Strike, and this presents the ad men with a problem. Reader’s Digest - which, another period touch, everybody reads - has said smoking causes cancer, and the authorities won’t allow agencies to claim there are safer brands. "Four out of five dead people smoke your brand,” is not, Draper observes, the best possible caption. But Draper is brilliant, up there with the DDB VW team. He gets round the death problem by saying of the tobacco in Luckies, “It’s toasted!”. All cigarette tobacco is toasted. But so what? It’s a nice, warm, safe word.

Draper’s monstrous genius is, in fact, too big to be locked in the ad world of 1960. Flogging Luckies as toasted may be quaint. But he is also looking after the Right Guard deodorant account. In a moment of subtle drama, he is lying in bed after being told by his mistress he stinks, asking himself Freud’s old question: what do women want? He gets it in one - “Any excuse to get closer” - and a brand is born. The Right Guard slogan, with its psychological intimacy and authenticity, is way ahead of its time. Authenticity was to take over from domestic comfort and bourgeois aspiration as the central advertising theme in the later, summer-of-love 1960s.

But the twist in the tale of all this period detail is the same as the twist in our own Life on Mars: in some fundamental sense, “then”, for all its faults, seems more attractive than “now”. At one level, this is simply about the gorgeous look of the show. The styling derives its power from the hard-surfaced abstraction of the architecture and interior design of the time. A book could be written on the credit sequence alone, with its overtones of Saul Bass, Hitch-cock and Scorsese, and its use of silhouetted linearity. It’s all about alienation, of course, but it’s beautiful and as eerily romantic as the deep-buttoned booths and vodka gimlets in the restaurants.

The clothes, meanwhile, are not just good, they are downright catwalk-fashionable. Ever since the unstructured 1980s, men’s suits have been getting sharper, to the point where the average male silhouette is now more or less back where it was in 1960. Women, meanwhile, have been racing back to what The New York Times’s Ruth La Ferla calls the “meticulously tailored look that evokes the White House of Jacqueline Kennedy”. She adds: “Some of Seventh Avenue’s most influential taste-makers are invoking in their latest collections the proprieties, the seamless appearances and the toney aspirations of midcentury Middle America. They are, in short, going bourgeois to the core.” La Ferla quotes an art director, Sam Shahid: “Things are timeless right now ...” But then he adds, with deadly poignancy: “Or you want them to be.” So, like the 1970s in Life on Mars, 1960 in Mad Men is being seen as both horrifying and seductive. Draper’s wife is going mad in suburbia, but she looks great while she’s doing it, and so, come to that, does suburbia.

It would, however, be a big mistake to see Mad Men as a prolonged wallow in moral dismay and fashionista nostalgia. I know exactly why Weiner insisted this wasn’t a period piece. Primarily, like Chase in The Sopranos, he wants us to be objective. This involves denying us any easy moralising about the characters. Tony Soprano, like Don Draper, does what he does, and, if we keep stepping back and judging, we won’t understand.

In fact, this antimoralistic, high-objectivity stance is now all over the best American television. Both the great current cop shows, The Wire and The Shield, work, not because of simple amorality, but because of a deep awareness that no consistent moral posture can ever work. By setting his Mad Men amid the alien mores of 1960, Weiner distances them, making us watch them as if they were goldfish in a bowl of plate glass and stainless steel. We see them in a little world, they see themselves as the whole world; and, in doing so, we realise that we might also be goldfish. Like Brecht, Weiner understands that emotional distance - alienation - can intensify our engagement with what is really going on.

And finally, there is the whole issue of work itself. The Office, in both its American and British versions, and Joshua Ferris’s highly successful novel Then We Came to the End have indicated a strong contemporary awareness of the oddity of the working - specifically the clerical - life. What was banal has suddenly become exotic. Mad Men goes back to the time when the modern office, with its cubicles, geometric furniture and translucent glass, was born. It revels in the drama this creates. A refused handshake becomes, in this stark, demanding environment, a terrible frozen moment. And there’s a wonderful shot down the facade of the building, the stainless-steel mullions diving down towards the suited figures scurrying into the entrance.

The office had become the great exposer of all human weakness, as well as the centre of all human power. And advertising had begun its long march to world domination. It was 48 years ago, but it seems like tomorrow.

Mad Men hits British screens on BBC4 tonight at 10pm.

A bold new interpretation of The Passion

Jesus is a salt-of-the-earth northerner, Mary Magdalene is not a prostitute – oh, and we got the crucifixion all wrong. Welcome to the BBC’s new interpretation of the Passion says Garry Jenkins...

Mid-afternoon in the suffocating heat of the Moroccan desert, and a day that began long before dawn is at last building to its climax. On a ridge, overlooking a rugged, rock-strewn valley, a swarm of make-up artists, costume-fitters and prosthetics experts are applying the finishing touches to the loincloth-clad figure of the actor Joseph Mawle. Nearby, in-between swigs from small bottles of mineral water, a quartet of red-robed Roman centurions is rehearsing hauling upright the crude, T-shaped gibbet to which the young Englishman is about to be attached.

Until now the day has been bedevilled by small technical hitches that have put back filming. Mawle, facing the biggest challenge of his young acting career, portraying Jesus’s crucifixion at Golgotha, has been up since 3am. So when, a few moments later, the last-minute adjustments are complete and the call for quiet and then action finally goes out, the sense of excitement is mixed with a palpable sense of relief. Hundreds of hours of preparation and planning, both here in Morocco and back in the UK, are about to come to fruition. Or so it seems.

Seconds after the cameras turn over for the first time, a sudden gust of desert wind throws thick, red dust up into the eyes of Mawle and the centurions. Within moments tripods, chairs and other bits of equipment are being picked up and thrown over by stinging blasts of air. As all eyes turn heavenwards, a bank of dense, livid, purple and grey clouds is settling above the scene, obscuring even the vast Atlas Mountains in the distance. Soon fat gobbets of rain are turning the dusty landscape a dark, muddy brown, sending everyone running for cover. Minutes later, with the storm growing in intensity, filming is postponed.

At least producer Nigel Stafford-Clark hasn’t lost his desert-dry sense of humour. "There are times when I wonder whether I’ve walked into the Book of Job. This definitely feels more like it belongs in the Old Testament rather than the New one," he says, huddled under a makeshift tent, looking up at the unruly heavens with a world-weary smile. "I do feel like having a conversation with God and saying, ‘Come on, we’re trying to tell this story, give us a break.’"

Stafford-Clark and his team are here in southern Morocco, near the town of Ouarzazate, to film an ambitious new, three-hour version of the Passion, the story of Jesus’s last week on Earth. Despite the fact that it is summer, this is the second time in a week that the production has been thrown by the capricious Moroccan weather. Last week, plans to film Jesus’s arrest by the Romans in the Garden of Gethsemane were wrecked by a sudden and unexpected flash flood. "It was extraordinary. One day this place looked like it hadn’t seen rain for centuries, the next it was submerged in water that was roaring down from the mountains," says Stafford-Clark.

Stoicism is the television producer’s stock in trade, but rarely can it have been required in such quantities. Encounters with biblical storms are far from the first tests Stafford-Clark and his production team have faced. Given the bold, brave and potentially controversial approach they are taking to retelling the story of Jesus’s final days, they are also unlikely to be the last.

The BBC conceived a new version of the Passion, to be broadcast episodically at prime time on BBC1 over four nights through Easter Week, more than a year and a half ago. The appetite for Biblical stories had been proved by the enormous box office success of Mel Gibson’s film The Passion of the Christ. Stafford-Clark, who had just brought the acclaimed Bleak House to television in a similar format, sensed an opportunity to breathe new life into the subject.

"I had just watched Pasolini’s Gospel According to St Matthew, which I’d loved when I’d seen it in the Sixties," he says, by now safely installed in his office at the nearby Atlas film studios, which have become his base. "It is the only successful version I’ve seen of this story. The big American epics in the Fifties, and even the Zeffirelli version with Robert Powell back in the Seventies, were all very reverential. They all made you feel as if you were looking at it through a plate glass window, as if there was a distance between you and what was going on," he says. "It always felt like King Arthur or Lord of the Rings, as if these events took place in a vacuum."

Stafford-Clark wanted to ground the story in reality for the first time. "It’s billed as the greatest story ever told and in many ways it is. But in terms of storytelling it never seemed to make a lot of sense. Watching all these other versions, I didn’t understand what Palm Sunday was all about, for instance. He was just a humble preacher from Galilee. Why all this excitement? Why did the high priest react the way he did in condemning Jesus to death? Why did Pilate do what he did? When you are given the story normally, all these things have to be taken for granted. They are part of what you are told. I felt there was a chance to remedy that."

The key, for him, was to create a drama that allows the audience to feel as if they were in the thick of the action 2,000 years ago. "If you had been in Jerusalem in AD32 you would have witnessed this. You would have seen the crowds, the excitement of his arrival, you’d have got wind of what was going on in the temple. And then you’d have heard rumours that he’d been arrested,” he says. “It’s something that actually happened. This is the thing we are trying to get across."

The first challenge was to find a writer capable of evoking the turbulent, chaotic political melting pot that was first-century Judaea. He appeared in the unlikely form of the Emmy-winning, Irish-born writer Frank Deasy, best-known for hard-hitting contemporary dramas like Real Men, about child abuse, and Looking After Jo Jo, set in the world of Scottish drug gangs. Deasy’s fast-moving, episodic script shows the tumultuous events of Passover week in Jerusalem from the perspective of all those who took part in it, not just Jesus and his disciples, but Pontius Pilate, the Romans and the Jewish temple authorities too. "As a dramatist, the big challenge was to evoke a world in which this story has not taken place, a world without Jesus or any Christian churches or any of the Christian concepts that are so familiar to us," he explains.

As well as reading the Gospels and conducting his own research, Deasy spoke to Professor Mark Goodacre, a leading New Testament scholar at Duke University in North Carolina, who was engaged as a historical consultant to the series. It allowed him to add dramatic depth – and potentially controversy – to the orthodox version of the story. Deasy was determined that every character had a story of his or her own. "By the end I hope people feel they have been on a very deep journey with these characters, that they feel they have shared the most powerful week of their life. So everyone had to have a motive that we could understand, a logical psychology to the things that they do," he explains.

As a result, for instance, Mary Magdalene, played by Paloma Baeza, is portrayed not as a prostitute but as a woman who is, effectively, one of Jesus’s sponsors. "There is increasing evidence that she was a wealthy widow who supported Jesus’s campaign. As he emerged from Galilee, he needed backing," says Deasy.

Pontius Pilate, played by James Nesbitt, is also revealed in a new light, as a career soldier posted to one of the most troublesome outposts of the Roman Empire. "We see him as a man with a wife and a career and a villa in Rome to worry about," says Deasy. "Again I wanted his decisions to be plausible. He’s a guy managing a career and a volatile political situation. I think Pilate is an interesting contemporary figure. You can almost view the current situation with the Western powers in Iraq or Afghanistan in the things Pilate says. He is someone who is dealing with people with huge convictions about things that mean very little to him and he is trying to impose order," he says.

The character who emerges from the shadows of history most strongly in this version of the story is the high priest of Jerusalem’s temple, Caiaphas. In most versions of the story the man who condemns Jesus to death at the hands of the Romans is a one-dimensional figure, the most identifiable bad guy. Through his research, however, Deasy began to see a man who was part priest, part politician, a leader who was faced with keeping a lid on the cauldron of intrigue and insurrection that was Jerusalem during the biggest festival of the year, Passover. So when Jesus appears in Jerusalem, fulfilling an ancient prophesy that the Messiah will arrive on a donkey through the city’s eastern gate, Deasy’s Caiaphas, played by Ben Daniels, is motivated not by bloodlust, but by the need to protect his people from the violence the Romans routinely meted out when tensions rose within the city. "I became more and more fascinated by Caiaphas," Deasy says. "He is usually a cartoon villain. But he is trying to protect his world for noble reasons. He loves his people and his family. By going down a very human route with Caiaphas it led me into really interesting dramatic territory."

At the heart of the drama, of course, is Jesus himself. Like Stafford-Clark, Deasy wanted to move away from the image of an otherwordly figure. "In so many other treatments Jesus is pure, floating on a cloud 2ft above the ground," he says. "He has to emerge as a person to other living people."

The key to this was giving him a voice that was rooted in the world, something Deasy found in an unexpected place. "I was struggling, so I talked to a friend of mine who is a priest. Every day he makes these concepts fresh to a contemporary audience so I asked him how he did it. He gave me a really simple piece of advice," he explains. "He said to think of Jesus as coming from Newcastle, as a working-class man from the north of Palestine who speaks Aramaic to fishermen and peasants, who comes to London where people speak Hebrew and are more educated. And he starts to preach the Gospel. He has got to use words that are quite simple, clear and rough at times. He has to explain concepts like redemption, righteousness, forgiveness, in plain, everyday language. This idea of Jesus coming from a real place worked. After that I found a voice for him that was easy and conversational, simple, without being patronising."

Perhaps the boldest decision Deasy made was the last one. The final episode of the six-part drama depicts the resurrection of Jesus in a way that is open to individual interpretation. In keeping with the Gospels, he reappears to his former friends in different ways, leaving them to decide what it is they have seen.

"A lot of accounts skip the resurrection," Deasy says. "We have followed the different gospel accounts faithfully. There are lengthy discussions among the disciples about what it means. They are the conversations we would have today in the light of an event like that. It resolves itself in that there is a resurrection of hope among the disciples. There’s a sense of new life, that suffering has been transformed into something meaningful. The extent of what that means as a viewer is up to you."

While Deasy was completing his script, Stafford-Clark was turning his attention to filming. When he decided to shoot in Morocco during summer, director Michael Offer thought he was crazy. "The old phrase about mad dogs and Englishmen sprang to mind," laughs the Australian director. "The heat has been challenging, particularly for the actors wearing beards and robes."

The Atlas film studios have been a favourite location for film-makers from David Lean to Ridley Scott, who filmed sequences for Gladiator here. Every aspect of The Passion’s look was carefully researched. For instance, production designer Simon Elliott and his team went to great lengths to ensure that the last supper was an authentic meal from the Judaea of the time. "The Passover lamb eaten during the festival would be part of the meal, along with herbs and green vegetables," says Elliott. "There were dates and raisins and unleavened bread and a sausage made of honey and dates."

In a similar vein, Elliott and his team tried to recreate the crucifixion as realistically as possible. Historical evidence suggests that Jesus would have been nailed to the cross in a way that is at odds with the image that has dominated Christian iconography for 2,000 years. "There has only ever been one archaeological find of a crucified skeleton, in Palestine in the Sixties," explains Elliott. "The body was in a slightly different position to the classic one, with the legs tucked up and under. Historians think it shows the crucifixion was fiendishly designed. If you could bear the pain of having the nails driven through your ankles you could take the weight and lift up your chest. But if you were put in a position where you couldn’t lift yourself up you died of asphyxia – you were basically suffocated. That’s the reason they broke your legs, so you would very quickly suffocate."

If the burden of retelling the greatest story ever told was heavy for the production team, however, it was greater still for the man chosen to portray Jesus. A relatively little known actor, acclaimed for his work in the BBC2 drama Soundproof and most recently seen in the gay drama Clapham Junction, Joseph Mawle was Stafford-Clark and Offer’s first choice for the role. He admits he has found it hard and lonely work. "It is incredibly daunting," he says. "It is in some ways the biggest role you can take on. There were times I got quite shaky about it and thought, I’m really scared, to be quite honest with you. If we don’t like Jesus, then we are in trouble."

The key, he says, has been to play him as flesh and blood. "He was a man. No two ways about it. The only way I could approach him was not as a god, but as a man," he says. He has, he admits, been particularly wary of the crucifixion scene. "I am pretty scared about it. I want to get it as right as possible, to play the reality as much as possible and to tell the story as best as possible."

Frustratingly, however, he will not be doing it today. As word comes through that filming has been abandoned for the day, Mawle heads off to begin preparing to film an interior scene at the studios.

Nigel Stafford-Clark, meanwhile, is in his office, anticipating battles much further down the line. Aware of the scrutiny that the film will get, both here and in the US where the BBC’s co-financier, HBO, will show the drama, he has already begun dialogue with the Christian community. "We have told them what we are doing," he says. "It’s very important that it doesn’t come as a shock to people, particularly to those for whom it is the most important story in their lives. The reaction has been very positive."

He is too old and wise a hand to expect it to avoid controversy completely. When he made Bleak House he had to field complaints from the Dickens Society and, faced with a rather broader constituency this time, he is braced for criticism again. He is unapologetic about the approach he and his team have taken, however. "My job is telling stories. The fact that it is the backbone of one of the world’s great religions is what, for me, has stopped it being told properly as a story before because people back away from it. It’s not just a story that is told in churches. It really happened," he says.

"Our version is not remotely controversial. There is no attempt to twist anything – you don’t see Jesus sleeping with Mary Magdalene or anything like that. We have tried to make it feel like it is really happening. And because you understand why people are behaving the way they are, what Jesus is doing becomes even more extraordinary."

"With the world the way it is at the moment," he continues, "anything that is about something that goes beyond your everyday existence is of value. People are looking for something beyond their new car. Telling a story like this quenches that thirst. It makes you feel there is something beyond your own limited existence."

And with that he leaves his office to head back out towards the set – checking nervously for the arrival of another Biblical storm.

The Passion begins on BBC1 on Sunday, March 16, and continues throughout Easter week

Further reading: A new passion;

Men behaving badly

Set in 1960s New York, the golden age of advertising, Mad Men portrays a world of wealth and clashing egos. Can it live up to its billing as the new Sopranos? Jonathan Bernstein thinks so...

As writer and executive producer on the last three seasons of The Sopranos, Matthew Weiner has the blood of Bobby Bacala and Christopher Moltisanti on his hands. His new series, the critically worshipped, Golden Globe-winning Mad Men, is another close study of a secret fraternity where egos clash, tempers flare and bloody vendettas are launched. Mad Men takes place in the Madison Avenue of 1960, when advertising was seen as a sexy, aspirational profession rather than one that needs to be prefaced by an apologetic explanation.

Don Draper, the series' lead character (played by the previously little-known but soon to be big-known Jon Hamm), embodies every attribute that once made advertising guys the envy of the nine-to-five world. He's suave, he's prosperous, he looks good in a suit, he has a bottomless repository of cynical quips, he glides through life in a haze of cigarette smoke, fuelled by martinis and the ministrations of a chic, discrete boho mistress who soothes away the pain of the day before he swans back to the suburbs and his perfect model-pretty wife and high-spirited, unblemished kids.

But Don Draper is an unknowable empty shell, hiding a secret past and utterly detached from his equally at-sea model-pretty wife. And, just as Don has made himself a sexy success by presenting a glossy, smoky facade, so his Manhattan-based agency Sterling Cooper, which made its millions by playing on America's insecurities about all the things they don't have and didn't know they needed, is a barely-hidden house of pain. Women are seen but rarely heard beyond the squeals of pleasure accompanying the regular, friendly slaps on the butt. The mousey girl who shows an aptitude with copy and makes the rare transition from the secretarial pool to the copywriter's desk is regarded with pity and suspicion by all the other females in the office. The only visible black faces are the cleaners who leave in the morning moments before the staff roll in. When a Jewish client comes in for a meeting, a frantic search culls the agency's lone Jew from the mailroom. Sterling Cooper's sole gay employee works overtime presenting himself as a ladies' man and comes close to unravelling when a male client makes a pass at him. The agency boss Roger Sterling (John Slattery, the only nominally recognisable cast member) can't control his raging appetites even after he's felled by a series of heart attacks. And, on the eve of the Kennedy- Nixon election, the pulse-takers of the agency are, almost to a man, convinced of a Nixon victory and confused by the prospect that times may be changing.

For all the secrets and the affairs and the personality clashes and even the physical confrontations, Mad Men unspools at an almost hallucinatory pace. Characters listen and consider what others have said. There are long leisurely moments devoted to people thinking about what has just happened to them. By TV standards - by life standards - Mad Men requires a considerable amount of attention. "Someone was joking with me," says Matthew Weiner. "They said 'you know what your show is? It's the phone's ringing and someone walks into the room but they don't answer it.' I can honestly say that the directorial style and the pace of the show is determined by how I like things. There's so much subterfuge, so much lying and dishonesty when people are together socially, that a lot of what you're seeing when it gets slow is the honesty. Some people have described it as dreamlike but there's always a story being told. I hope that when people watch it they're not doing their chequebooks and talking on the phone because they're going to miss something."

Despite the treatment meted out to anyone who isn't white, male and the right kind of rich - Sterling Cooper's ambitious, privileged twenty-something is an almost universal object of contempt - Weiner is an ardent admirer of the era whose foibles he chronicles: "1960 was just such a fruitful, interesting time in the United States. There was so much intellectual activity going on. There's amazing musical things, amazing books were coming out. Because of the prosperity of the time, people were starting to pay attention to materialism. And also, it really was the apex of New York City. It was the centre of production, publishing, fashion, playwriting, television. It was the biggest port, and then the pill came out in 1960, which was one of the greatest challenges to ever happen to humanity. And at the bottom of all that, advertising was on the verge of a revolution." But when we think of that time in America, our first impressions are the white picket fence and the happy family. "There's such a dichotomy in the culture between the way it's been presented to the world versus the way people were actually living. A lot of the cliched depictions of the 50s - and I picked 1960 as the height of the 50s' [popular US sitcom] Leave It To Beaver and the ideal family with the dad in the hat driving the car - people were laughing at these things back then. We have a perception of the way it was and it's not even close to the way it was."

While fictional advertising men and women are as plentiful now as they were in the days when Rock Hudson and Tony Randall strode the corridors of cinematic agencies, the current incarnation of the copywriter is permanently repenting for the shallowness of their career choice.

Don Draper may be a shadowy figure, unable to fully open himself up to anyone in his life, but he's at his best when he's unashamedly selling, whether it be a product, his agency or his version of himself. "I've always thought that the reason advertising has this appeal is that there's great stock given in jobs that are creative but also make money," says Weiner. "I find that salesmanship is an American religion. It's not about conscience. His conscience should be focused on his life. Business is not about conscience - business is about selling products, which is what he's best at. If you set it now, he would have to be apologising, he would have to be feeling sick about what he does."

As the man behind the suffocation of Christopher Moltisanti and the execution of Bacala in a model train shop, Weiner does not discount the role played by The Sopranos in the ultimate evolution of his subsequent show. "The Mad Men pilot script was how I got my job on The Sopranos. When I got there the show was already a billion dollar success. David (Chase)'s attitude was basically 'serve the story, make sure you're saying something, make everything a little movie'. You start to really think about the audience and surprising them and not giving them what they're expecting. I was there for three seasons, I'd already seen it as a fan for four. It made me raise my game, it made me pay more attention and it made me trust myself."

Mad Men, Sun, 10pm, BBC4

Mad Men- fine advertisement for American TV drama

A series set in a New York ad agency is a brilliant evocation of 1960s America suggests Benji Wilson.

It does Mad Men - a new US drama set in the world of advertising on Madison Avenue in the early 1960s - a disservice to begin by talking about the amount of smoking it contains. But given that these days cigarettes are considered almost as pestiferous as the pox, it's impossible to ignore: every single character, without exception, is continually chugging away. The fictional advertising agency Stirling Cooper is a hazy, tar-stained place, and if the world Mad Men creates wasn't so completely convincing, it might look as if the writers were trying to make a point. But, instead, it reminds us that in New York in 1960 this is just what people did.

The same goes for the drinking, the misogyny, the anti-Semitism and the racial gibes. They are all so completely of-a-piece with the surrounding milieu that, after an episode or two, they become part of the socio-cultural furniture. It makes for some uneasy viewing, in a weird place between abhorrence and nostalgia.

Playing ping-pong with our memories of things past in this way is a trick that's become fashionable on television recently, most notably in the BBC's Life on Mars and its follow-up Ashes to Ashes. But where those two series play it for laughs, and sugar the pill with plenty of wham-bam action scenes, Mad Men is a much more subtle piece. It centres around Don Draper (Jon Hamm), the creative director at Stirling Cooper. A war hero with a 1950s movie-star mien, Draper has one foot firmly in the past, but as a brilliant ad man and a survivor, he also has one eye on adapting for the future.

The team that he assembles around him, from his fledgeling secretary Peggy (Elizabeth Moss, aka President Bartlet's daughter Zoey in The West Wing) to the unctuous tyro Pete Campbell (Vincent Kartheiser) all have their own secrets and fears. In the first few episodes very little happens. Instead, Mad Men takes exquisite care to ground the viewer in the sights, aesthetic and mores of a particular moment in time. When it launched in America last year, Mad Men was the single stand-out critical hit, hailed as being an entirely original immersion in America's not-so-distant past. It won Best Drama at this year's Golden Globes, with Hamm taking the Best Actor award.

"I placed it very specifically," says the show's creator, Matthew Weiner, who worked as a producer and writer on The Sopranos. He cites the idiom of Salinger and John Cheever as well as movies such as The Apartment and Cash McCall as influences. Of course, 1960 was the year that John F. Kennedy was elected. But Weiner is trying to show how America remained as divided as ever. "There's always a counter-culture in the United States. The election of John F.Kennedy has been historically metabolised as this assertion of youth and hope - the truth is that election was decided by a very small percentage of the country; half the country did not vote for him."

Also, 1960 was a very important year for advertising. In the third episode Don and his masters-of-the-universe discuss Doyle Dane Bernbach's famous campaign for the Volkswagen Beetle, which used headlines such as “Think Small” and “Lemon” to sell Americans a little car that couldn't have been more different from the cocksure gilded beauty of a 1960 Cadillac.

"Advertising had just begun to change," says Weiner. "The Volkswagen ad is really revolutionary. It has a subversive quality that's based on honesty, humour, and it's talking to the consumer." That went entirely against the prevailing postwar mood, where people had implicit trust in the genius of American manufacturing, and had come to believe what they were told about each great new advance. Because Mad Men uses advertising as a metaphor for identity - are you how you present yourself to other people, or is the hard-sell just there to cover up your faults as a product? - watching Draper and co struggling to come to terms with a new type of advertising goes hand in hand with watching them face up to the climactic change that the 1960s was to bring.

"Dramatically speaking I liken it to the Titanic," says Weiner. "Why do people watch that movie? Everybody knows how it ends. But there is some pleasure in seeing people struggling to survive when the catastrophe happens, and there's also some intrinsic drama in people walking around talking about how safe the ship is. That's really what I'm doing."

With the current American presidential election candidates talking of 'change' to the point where it's become a blah-blah bromide, Mad Men has very cleverly stationed itself at another cultural crossroads. Everyone is teetering on the brink; they just don't quite know it yet.

Mad Men, Sunday, BBC Four, 10pm; Tues, BBC Two, 11.20pm

Jacques Cousteau in a box

The pioneering work of undersea explorer and environmentalist Jacques Cousteau, newly available on DVD, is as fascinating as ever to modern viewers, says Simon Reeve.

Jacques Cousteau was the towering figure of marine exploration, a man whose adventures - circling the globe at least 15 times - make my own trips, most recently travelling around the Tropic of Capricorn and the Equator, feel positively mundane by comparison. More than anyone else in history, he introduced us to the beautiful and mysterious world beneath the surface of our oceans, co-inventing the Aqualung during the Second World War and then making award-winning films and scores of underwater documentaries for American and global television.

During his long career Cousteau, who died in 1997, was rightly recognised as a pioneer. After his friend and patron Thomas Loel Guinness gave him a former Royal Navy minesweeper in 1951, Cousteau spent nearly five decades sailing the oceans, making Calypso the most famous small boat in the world. Cousteau turned Calypso into a floating laboratory, complete with a film-editing suite, and aboard it made the first full-length underwater film, the 1956 Oscar-winning epic The Silent World. He published more than 40 books, including a 20-volume encyclopaedia called The Ocean World of Jacques Cousteau, and became one of the first global environmental stars, warning that humans were poisoning the planet.

So it is a fascinating treat, and a professional education, to watch the great man's later adventures on a new DVD box set featuring his documentaries on New Zealand, Tahiti, Haiti, Cuba and Cape Horn. He easily holds his own among the best television travellers, but even against the modern brilliance of Planet Earth the films stand up well. Inevitably there are wobbly shots and dodgy angles. Cousteau had to make do without the full enhancing and grading capabilities of modern editing suites, and as a result much of the underwater footage appears visually dull and lacking in colour. Nevertheless, many of the images are still breathtaking, and rank alongside the finest modern natural history camerawork. The films feel real, genuine, like polished vinyl next to the CD-quality of recent wildlife films.

It is hard to imagine a major US network commissioning these programmes today - and more's the pity. The films have only the briefest of nods to dramatic tension, ponderous scripts, and a small, stooped Frenchman with bad teeth as the central presenter. Cousteau is also old and wise, both traits considered unattractive in our youth-obsessed world. But Cousteau understood his medium and recognised the need for gimmickry. He used all manner of gadgets in his films, kept a red woollen hat on his head at a jaunty angle, and forced his crew to wear eye-catching silvery diving outfits underwater. They look like a cross between Flash Gordon and Woody Allen in Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex.

Since Cousteau's death in 1997, his legacy has taken a few knocks. Allegations of anti-Semitism and mistreatment of wildlife during his early films have dented his reputation. But claims by bitter relatives that he was overly ambitious and arrogant, repeated in endless press profiles, cannot obscure the man's extraordinary achievements or the value of his timeless films.

As a documentary-maker, I particularly admire the fact that Cousteau does not commit the grave sin of focusing exclusively on glossy wildlife footage without giving the surrounding context. For decades, even the finest natural history filmmakers have made wonderful films about concentrated groups of creatures living in small patches of wilderness, while ignoring surrounding deforestation and framing their shots to exclude the tourist coach party on safari. So we have watched in awe, but without learning of threats to the creature or the reality of their sanctuary.

Cousteau was approaching the end of his career when he made the films featured in this box set, and his formula had evolved. Less than half of the episode about Haiti is set underwater; the rest of the programme is an exploration of Haiti and an explanation of how precious land and marine resources have been systematically devastated. In Cuba, Cousteau chats with Fidel Castro in various locations, and the footage is woven through the film. The US base at Guantanamo Bay even makes an appearance, with Cousteau questioning the base commander about whether a US presence on the island "whoo-milliates Cuba". Viewers young and old who would never normally watch anything on Caribbean politics are gently introduced to issues that still resonate today, more than 20 years later.

In some small way, this is what the BBC and I have tried to do with our series Tropic of Capricorn. My latest adventure, following the southern border of the tropics, is an attempt to introduce television viewers to the delights and tragedies of obscure parts of the world. Cousteau remains the master of the craft. His enthusiasm is contagious. I have long been happy on the ocean surface, sinking no further than the limitations of snorkelling allow. But after several hours watching Cousteau and his crew exploring the great blue depths, I will now be swapping my snorkel for a scuba tank, and learning how to dive.

Jacques Cousteau: New Zealand, Tahiti, Cuba & Cape Horn, the DVD box set, is released on March 10

In Treatment on the couch

Dr. Paul Weston looks normal. He lives in a nice house, where his patients come for therapy. He listens, he zeros in on their problem, he walks them to the door. But underneath, as viewers of HBO's In Treatment know by now, he might have as many -- or more -- problems than his patients.

Presented as a nightly soap opera, the show has become a guilty habit for those familiar with the subtext of therapy, argues Lynn Smith. Among the most addicted are therapists themselves who admit to some intense feelings, pro and con, about the drama. "It's like liver and onions," said Encino psychoanalyst Phillip A. Ringstrom. "People either love it or hate it." Some love it and hate it. Some started out hating it and now love it -- and vice versa.

Already some analysts have scheduled an In Treatment panel for March 9, with show runner Rodrigo Garcia and others, on "Responding to Erotic Transference" at New York's Mt. Sinai Hospital. Another New York group held a "psychoanalytic salon" last week to discuss issues raised by the television show, which presents a fly-on-the-wall look at a troubled therapist's sessions with his troubled patients. One real-life patient said he relates to the show's patients and compared his emotional growth favourably, said Beverly Hills therapist Cara Gardenswartz. "He is able to see objectively . . . what they are unable to see," she said. Others have introduced a personal issue indirectly by referring to one of the patients' issues.

On the other hand, some therapists worry that Weston (played to repressed perfection by Gabriel Byrne) behaves unethically and fear the nightly soap-style drama could hurt business by reinforcing stereotypes that therapists have as many, if not more, problems than their patients. "If managed care didn't wreck us, then In Treatment will do the trick," said Rosalind S. Dorlen, a Summit, N.J., psychologist. They say Weston discloses too much and crosses boundaries with his patients: Laura, a doctor who's mad about him; Sophie, a suicidal gymnast; Alex, a narcissistic Navy pilot; and Amy and Jake, a jealous couple caught in a cycle of rage and remorse. These patients are unusually aggressive and resistant, slamming doors, arguing, bringing in their own coffee makers.

And when at the end of the week, a visibly less compassionate Weston unburdens himself to Gina, a fellow therapist, she responds harshly. "She's far too intrusive and critical to be a helpful therapist or supervisor," said Dr. Glen Gabbard, a professor of psychiatry at Baylor College of Medicine and author of "Psychiatry and the Cinema." He said therapists in his clinic told him, "I'd never go to someone who's so critical of me."

In Treatment has averaged only 320,000 viewers, not a large number even by cable standards. Yet in a time when pharmacology has gained ground in treating problems, what happens behind the closed doors of therapy still has the power to fascinate. "Not since The Sopranos have I seen so many therapists talking to each other about a show," Gabbard said. "If I walk down the hall, I'm stopped by four or five therapists asking, 'What did you think of last night's session?' 'What is going on with Dianne Wiest [who plays Weston's therapist]?' 'Is this therapy? Is this consultation? Is this supervision?' 'Is it chitchat between two people who hate each other and try to make up?' "

At first, therapist Gardenswartz found the show both depressingly realistic and annoyingly unrealistic. By the end of the third week, however, she had noticed "parallel process" in Weston's mimicking Laura's complaints in his sessions with Gina. "Now, we have something," Gardenswartz said. Some therapists said they plan to use clips of the show in postdoctoral courses to illustrate professional issues that arise in real-life sessions: Should therapists make coffee? Or start a couple's session when only one person has arrived?

Because real therapeutic sessions are private, media portrayals inordinately impress the public, patients and therapists themselves, Gabbard said. "We tend to internalize the media portrayals and carry them within as internal templates," he said. The profession has complained about simplistic, clownish or evil therapist characters for years. To find an unquestionably positive media portrayal, therapists had to go back to 1980's Ordinary People where Judd Hirsch's character helped Timothy Hutton's Conrad recover lost memories. "One young resident told me that he had used an exact line from the therapist in Ordinary People and it seemed to work well with his patient," Gabbard said.

In movie and television psychotherapy, conventions call for the therapist to dramatically recover repressed emotionally cathartic memories, he said. "The therapist always has as many problems as the patients. And a woman therapist always sleeps with the male patient, with The Sopranos being a big exception," he said. Also, something has to happen besides two people sitting in a room, talking. "More people get up and use the bathroom in the middle of a session in one week of Dr. Weston's practice than in 30 years of my own practice," he said.

The Sopranos' open-minded and serious Dr. Jennifer Melfi (Lorraine Bracco) represented a pivotal turning point for therapists on television. "I heard that after The Sopranos was running for a couple of seasons, more men started going into psychotherapy," said Ringstrom, who wrote a running commentary on Slate as one of the "Four Shrinks." Until In Treatment, however, many therapists didn't like the wave of television therapists who followed Melfi. According to Gabbard, "Huff didn't get into the actual therapy or the patients' inner lives. State of Mind was the same. The main focus was the wacky zoo that inhabited the house where a bunch of really screwed-up people with no boundaries did strange things played for laughs." And HBO's Tell Me You Love Me "made the terrible mistake of showing explicit sex scenes in a highly clinical way," he said. "One of the good things of In Treatment is that it shows how much more erotic it can be to talk about it."

Some of the show's flaws can be chalked up to the Israeli series from which In Treatment was largely translated. "When they translated the show into English, they left the words, but some of it comes across differently here," said Lewis Aron, director of the New York University post-doctoral program in psychotherapy and psychoanalysis. "They kept talking about the wall, and the violation of boundaries," that played out in Israel as a literary metaphor, he said. "The wall in Israel is the wall between the Palestinians and the Israelis. That's a country that's all about the violation of boundaries," he said.

What's more, part of Weston's struggle comes from the sort of therapy he's shown to practice -- what Ringstrom called a "method of suspicion" popular over the last 50 years. "He comes out of an old tradition in psychotherapy where 'the customer is always wrong.' Basically it's whatever the patient is saying is suspect. So on the one hand, he is very caringly getting them to open themselves up to him, and then he's playing gotcha." Now, Ringstrom said, many therapists practice hermeneutics, in which what a patient says is understood as the best they can do at the time. "You're helping them deepen their understanding but not necessarily always suspecting they're trying to con themselves, or you," he said.

Aron, who sponsored the New York salon, said one reason he likes In Treatment is that it at least shows "seriousness and depth of thinking about life and relationships." But that's not all.

"The main reason I like it is that I'm so relieved every night that those patients are his and not mine."

Here is psychologist, author and theoretician Robert W. Firestone's opinion about the psychotherapy deployed In treatment style.