Scripts with everything... and nothing

What she watched:

The South Bank Show ITV1

Best: His Mother's Son BBC2

The Apprentice BBC1

"The only place on earth I'm remotely well known is in dentist's offices," said William Goldman, the lapsed novelist and peerless screenwriter (not to mention the man who gave dentistry such exceptionally bad, if entirely compelling PR, in Marathon Man) during last week's rather random South Bank Show (ITV1) - random in as much as Goldman didn't have anything to pitch to the audience (or indeed even to the Orange Film Board, and that's an ad I'd pay to see: "It's All the President's Men meets The Princess Bride ..."). However the author of 1984's Adventures in the Screen Trade is such a master of anecdotage that one wonders why it's taken so long for Melvyn to inveigle his way into Goldman's fabulously appointed Madison Ave apartment - presumably one of the perks of having been the world's highest paid screenwriter as long as 40 years ago when he received $400,000 for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. ("It's still a shit-load of money," observed Goldman, "but then...").

I read Goldman's 1964 novel, Boys and Girls Together, when I was 16, long before I knew he wrote movies, and the memory of how much I loved it as a teenager means it necessarily remains one of my favourite books today, even though I daren't reread it, so I'm predisposed to find Goldman fascinating enough all by himself, without additional talking heads Dickie Attenborough and Robert McKee.

However, even Hugh Grant (Why? I must have missed the Grant-Goldman career interface) couldn't detract from the quality of reminiscence as he dismissed filmic auteurs ("How can the director be the film's author?") and described all critics as "failures". And if it isn't common knowledge that Robert Redford only got his big break in Butch Cassidy because nearly all the leading men in Hollywood, from Brando, to Beatty via McQueen had either turned it down or had their agents screw it up for them, then it should be. As should that film's director, George Roy Hill's observation that "if you can't tell your story in an hour 50, then you better be David Lean."

The madly mercurial, fear-driven culture of Hollywood inspired the writer's famous observation that [in Hollywood, at least] "Nobody Knows Anything". How else, other than by happy accident (he wondered to Melvyn) could it be that a fine and subtle actor such as Matt Damon would become Hollywood's biggest monosyllabic action star?

And just to shore up Goldman's NKA theory, only in the movie business could the writer of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Marathon Man (from his novel), All the President's Men, A Bridge Too Far, Magic (from his novel again), the adaptation of Stephen King's Misery, The Princess Bride (from his novel ditto) have had such a fallow period in the 80s that he wrote Adventures ... to keep himself busy, and that a book which could have been a bridge-burner actually heralded his second act.

It's hard to watch 90 minutes of TV drama in the light of the Goldman oeuvre and not find it wanting. It may be horribly unfair that I watched Best: His Mother's Son (BBC2) with the memory of Goldman's gloriously economical five-word opener for the Misery screenplay fresh in my mind: "Finishing. Leaving. Driving. Storm. Crash..." and found myself writing the word "boring" at least five times within Best's first 15 minutes.

The clue was in the title. This wasn't so much a film about George Best as it was about his mother and the rest of his family, and, with respect, aside from members of the Best family, who cares? The inspiration for the screenplay seemed to have come from Best's own claim that he felt responsible for his mother Ann's death since she had her first alcoholic drink somewhat late in life, at the age of 44, just as his career took off (the trigger apparently being George's failure to turn up for the christening of his youngest sibling) and that having somewhat zealously developed a taste for it, she was dead of alcohol-related heart disease a mere decade later.

But other than the kind of little local difficulty one would expect as the mother of a famous Protestant boy in the Belfast of the 1960s (though this wasn't a film about The Troubles), Ann Best's life seems otherwise to have been relatively stable and loving, surrounded by family and friends and a devoted husband, so I think it's fair to say that, in the nature v nurture debate, in this case it may just come down to nature, and if there is an alcoholic gene, the Bests probably have one.

The performances, from Michelle Fairley as Ann and Lorcan Cranitch as Dickie Best, made one aware that a brilliant actor can do a lot to lift leaden material, but again one wonders to what end? The script was bustling with cliches and platitudes, and while this may have accurately reflected the film's backdrop, it's a chronic waste of everybody's time to hear an actor of Cranitch's range muttering boil-in-the-bag soap dialogue such as: "Staying out all hours ... fast cars and women... He needs to focus on his football!". Or Ann Best taking her first drink with a perky: "Might as well - small one! First time for everything!" And as for the Best character himself, Tom Payne looked the part, but given that George Best wasn't even the star of his own film here, it may seem unfair to characterise Payne's performance as two-dimensional, less so when you realise that was one more dimension than the writer gave him.

There was nothing really dreadfully wrong with Best, other than its existence in the first place, so it became, rather confusingly, a bad idea for a film executed bizarrely well, albeit mostly as an exercise in nostalgia for nostalgia's sake.

I can't help feeling that if there was ever going to be a decent film about George Best we would probably already have seen it, but for the purposes of a screenplay, Best's narrative arc sucks: beautiful gifted young man with world at his feet throws it all away quickly and then carries on destroying himself very slowly... no, you don't want to see that on a Saturday night with a bucket of popcorn, do you? Where's the redemption? Where's the second act? Where's the emotional closure?

Meanwhile it's all about closure in The Apprentice (BBC1) which was a delight last week, when the task involved flogging motley objets, the value of which was often in the eye of the beholder - which, when the beholder was Ben or Noorul, added greatly to the comedy, if not their bottom line:

"David Bailey, Photographie," muttered Ben, Franglais-ishly, peering at a glossy magazine.

"Is it in foreign?" wondered Noorul proving that the international language of stupidity knows no boundaries. The Apprentice: it's Apocalypse Now Meets The Devil Wears Prada ... it's Caddyshack meets Friday the 13th... No, OK, it's just very, very funny.

Ade in hell, Evans above

I can't help feeling that Ade Edmondson was cruelly robbed of victory in Hell's Kitchen (ITV1), not least because while his wife, Jennifer Saunders, was receiving the Outstanding Lifetime Super-Achievement Bafta (aka, the "good-God-does-that-mean-my-career-is-now-over?" award) alongside Dawn French last Sunday, poor Ade was being held captive in a film studio on an industrial estate in a godforsaken part of east London wondering how he came to be doing battle with Krystle Carrington in a celebrity cookathon (aka the "if-my-other-career-really-is-over-at-least-I'm-doing-some-top-class-work-experience" competition).

Mind you, it's not as if the winner, Linda Evans, even got a gong... at least I don't think she did: the final credits rolled so indecently fast I assumed we'd be hopping over to ITV2 for some analysis. But no, when it came to portion control, we got a starter masquerading as the main course.

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