I watch all TV drama as a viewer and as a writer. I can't help it. Having written scripts for TV - soap and sitcom, thus far - I can't help but view what I consider to be superior homegrown drama with one eye on the skill of the writer and the mechanics of the writing. In the case of Five Days, which ran every night from Monday to Friday last week (and whose final episode didn't come out on my Sky+ due to the series link refreshing each day and a clash being missed, so I had to finish the run on iPlayer on this tiny screen - grrrrrrrrrr), the writer I found myself admiring was Gwyneth Hughes. She also wrote the previous Five Days in 2007, about a missing mum, which was packed with top-flight British TV acting talent and was based around police procedural. As I remember it, the final outcome didn't quite merit the five nights I'd invested in it, but it was clearly a quality piece of work.

This second helping - different setting, different characters, different cast, same reliance on policework - had a much more satisfying outcome. No need to go into plot, but it began with an apparent suicide off a railway bridge and an abandoned baby in a hospital toilet, developed into a full police search and drew much of its tension and intrigue from relations between the Muslim and non-Muslim communties in what must have been a Yorkshire town, as it was somewhere near Scarborough, which was named. Not being a Coronation Street viewer, I hadn't really come across Suranne Jones before, but she was very strong in the central role of a police officer, keeping her end up in an incident room largely staffed by blokes, and having to deal with the inevitability of Alzheimer's with her mum, Anne Reid (who seems to get all the old lady parts now). David Morrissey, who doesn't do substandard drama, gave depth and heart to a detective with family problems of his own, and the likes of Hugo Speer, Bernard Hill, Ashley Walters, Shaun Dooley, Shivani Ghai and Steve Evets added further ballast. I must admit, I enjoyed the direction, too, from Toby Haynes and Peter Hoar: stylish and artistic but never to the detriment of the story being told. No idea what he's done before, but the music, by Craig Pruess, was also outstanding. Although to be honest, I was concentrating hardest on the script, which had to deal with a wide range of characters, and did so with skill and good humour. Most threads were satisfactorily tied up, and I didn't second guess the action.

This is what British TV drama can do, and I for one am relieved to know that it can still do it, backed by a broadcaster bold enough to strip it across five days. I'd pay my licence fee for stuff like this.

Meanwhile, over on ITV1, I've been irritated and underwhelmed by new comedy drama Married Single Other, whose decent cast (including the ubiquitous Dooley) are battling against clunky exposition and a patina of arch wit that seems to make every character sound like every other character ie. arch and witty. That said, I haven't written a piece of drama that's actually been on telly since EastEnders and that's eight years ago now, so maybe I'm not in a position to nitpick.

Ah, the BBC, how carefully you tread. On Wednesday's Masterchef, we met Tim, 36, a very nice-seeming man and a very good cook, as it happened. He is, by trade, a Paediatrician. However, he was captioned as "Children's Doctor". This struck me as coy at the time, but the more I think about it and discuss it with other people, the more it becomes apparent that he was given this storybook epithet in order to avoid putting a word with "paed" onscreen. Children's Doctor is factually correct - he is a doctor who specialises in treating chidren - but this makes him a paediatrician, in the same way an animal doctor is a vet, and a foot doctor is a chiropodist, and a vagina doctor is a gynaecologist. Can it really be true that the News Of The World has won? That any word which might be misconstrued as "paedophile" is now too sensitive to put before this stupid nation? If the BBC had captioned Tim a "paediatrician", WHICH IS WHAT HE IS, would an angry stream of emails been sent at the very sight of the letters "p", "a", "e" and "d"?

Dear the BBC

I am writing to complain about the fact that a convicted child molester is currently making a raspberry jus on my screen. What kind of sick programme is this? I do not pay my licence fee so that murdering, pervert scum can learn how to cook a scallop on a bed of pea puree balanced on a slice of black pudding ... oh hang on, the next letters in the word are "i", "a", "t", "r" and "i" ... what does that spell?

I hope I'm wrong. Maybe Tim asked to be billed thus. Maybe it's not the BBC but the society we live in that's to blame. Neither is a good outcome.

Oh, and come on, Tim!

Today is Bobby Womack's birthday. I know this because it is also my birthday. I had a Radio 1 diary when I was about 14. This is how I first learned that I shared a birthday with Bobby Womack. I didn't really care about Bobby Womack at that stage. I care more now. I met and interviewed Bobby Womack when I was hosting the Teatime show on 6 Music in 2003, a network that should be saved, by the way. He was over to promote Lookin' For A Love: The Best Of Bobby Womack 1968-1976. It felt good to meet him at last, especially as I grew up to recognise that Across 110th Street is one of the greatest soul records of all time. (I asked him, by way of keeping the conversation going in the studio while the record was playing, what it was about. He smiled and told me to listen to the lyrics, which was the correct response. It's good when soul legends tell you what to do.) I was 38 when I met Bobby Womack. He was 59. Today, we both seven years older than that. Neither of us is likely to be sitting on a horse, smoking a pipe. But if one of us is more likely to be, it will be Bobby Womack.

I don't go to many plays. I have seen plays, I'm not a total philistine, but I mainly like it when there's a big famous American film actor in them, and for the most part, I prefer musicals in the West End because you get more singing and dancing for your inflated ticket price. However, due to it having comedy connections and not being in a typical, velvety, warm-Becks-serving West End theatre, I went to see Party by Tom Basden last night at the Arts Theatre in London's Covent Garden (where I once saw Richard Herring do Christ On A Bike). I really enjoyed it, but I am going to try and explain why like a theatre critic would, even though I hardly ever go to the theatre to watch people sitting around a talking and not dancing or singing.

Party was the toast of Edinburgh, and I met and interviewed and was charmed by Tom and co-star Tim Key on 6 Music the week before last, so these elements led me to it. It also starred Jonny Sweet, Katy Wix (whom I sat next to at the Comedy Awards the year Not Going Out was nominated, and with whom I feel a kinship as I co-wrote the episode in Series 2 which introduced her character Daisy) and Anna Crilly. Katy and Anna have stormed Karaoke Circus on more than one occasion too. See why I was so drawn to it!

They play five young people in a shed/summerhouse forming a political party. There is one set, and the five of them are pretty much onstage, in the same crap chairs, for the duration, but the narrative is artfully constructed to create peaks and troughs out of their naive bickering without anyone being shot, having a nervous breakdown or being outed as a paedophile. There's a bit in it where they are all arguing and Tim Key's character, Duncan, sits in silence and just reacts, facially and bodily, and it's a moment of pure, beautiful theatre. It's full of funny lines - a credit to Mr Basden - and the satire is done by stealth, but it's often the performances, the nuances and the reactions, that make it special. (I am going to mention director Phillip Breen here, as directors never get mentioned, and he has blocked it and staged it brilliantly, and must be at least partly responsible for some of those skilled reactions from the actors.)

Party runs until March 13, and details are here. You can stay to see Tim Key's Slutcracker some nights, too, for a discounted ticket price, which I didn't, but should have.

It's hard to dislike a Jean Pierre Jenunet film: he's so inventive and visual and economical (this is a director who can really tell a story), but you have to wade through so much self-indulgence and what can only be described as Cirque du Soleil-style gurning! Mimacs, his first for a long time - the last being a positively restrained A Very Long Engagement - is being heavily trailed and marketed. I'm sick to death of seeing its trailer at Curzon cinemas, although they do trail the narrow band of movies that the Curzon is showing, so the range is limited - that said, it is a very annoying trailer. In it, you quickly surmise that a man gets shot in the head by accident, finds his way into the bosom of a family of misfits who live underground and then takes revenge upon the armaments firm that made the bullet which remains lodged in his head. The only key piece of information missing from this hyperventilating trailer is that ... mmmm, the film is FOREIGN! An increasingly dishonest practice from the distributors of foreign-language films that make it to a wider release: mask any trace of a foreign tongue from the trailer. As I wrote in last week's Radio Times, this is like taking jokes out of a trailer for a comedy. Poor old Jeunet, it's always happening to his films, because he's - sacre bleu! - popular; Amelie and A Very Long Engagement were similarly mis-sold as films of non-specific origin, and the only word in the trailer for Micmacs is ... "Boo!"

Anyway, it's about as French as a film can be. Dany Boon, who plays the lead, actually seems to mutter away in a bizarre French dialect, which isn't even subtitled. Maybe it's a language he has invented. Anyway, I almost wished Micmacs was a silent movie. It's visually splendid, with loads of incredible imagery and tableaux and shorthand, but the script is really horrible. There are puns in it, even though it's French - one about Rimbaud and Rambo (yawn!), and, worse, one about "gaze" and "gays" - although I'm reluctant to criticise the finer points of a screenplay (co-written by Jeunet) that wasn't written in English! Perhaps it's more subtle and nuanced in the native French.

For all the gurning and screaming and bendiness, there is a very serious and very contemporary message within Micmacs about arms dealing and modern warfare and terrorism, but for the most part all this ballast is lost under that trademark Jeunet style: everything's composed and hyper-real, like a Coen Brothers movie without the restraint or nods to the real world. It wasn't as irritating as the trailer - in fact, it's far slower and more considered than I expected. But it's tiring to watch a movie where everybody is eccentric and nutty. I certainly preferred Amelie. And A Very Long Engagement. And Delicatessen. And City Of Lost Children. And ... oh, everything he's ever done except the rubbish Alien one. It's much better than that. I was hoping the allusions to Bogart and Bacall at the beginning would bear fruit (the credits sequence is beautifully realised in the style of a Hollywood film noir), but they are lost in the overall kinetic madness. Pity.

True Blood, Season Two, then. Hey, I didn't want to crow in an unbecoming manner about the fact that I saw the first few episodes before they were aired on the mighty FX, so I kept quiet. Now the first one's gone out, I will crow. But NO SPOILERS BEYOND EPISODE ONE, don't worry. (If you haven't seen that one yet, look away nooooooow.)

This series has a lot riding on it - and I mean riding, tee hee! The first season was such a jolt in the ribs - sort of a bit like a few things, but utterly unlike them, and even from the charmed pen of Alan Ball it was a new kid in town. Sure, it chimes with the current zeitgeist-mania for vampires, but it's so not aimed at children, like all the other ones are. (And I speak as a grown-up who was fooled into going to see Twilight at the cinema. I should have stayed at home and watched Skins or In The Night Garden.) S2 begins literally seconds after the end of S1, with the identification of the corpse in the back of Andy's car, and we're off! As before the town is the skellington of the show, with Merlotte's its beating heart, the intersection where all human, and non-human, life passes. The two big shifts for S2 are Jason's conversion to happy-clappy right-wing Christianity, and Tara's willing submission into Maryanne's surreal, dead-eyed netherworld of sex and creepiness, a kind of masque of the red death. (Sam's flashbacks give hints of something way darker than turning into a doggy or sucking a bit of neck.) There's some shocking Saw-type action in a grotty cellar where Lafayette is having the joys of life sucked out of him, courtesy of Eric (who continues to be mah favourite character): how appalling to see abject fear in the eyes of Lafayette, a character where previously we only saw lust, wisdom and mischief. Sookie and Bill and vamp-gooseberry Jessica keeps the soap element going, especially when they get ... mercy me, if I go any further I will accidentally give away the other sights I have seen from the other side of Episode 5. All I will say is, these are sights to behold.

Two new films this weekend, both at lovely Curzons, one a triumph, the other a bore. Capitalism: A Love Story is the latest Michael Moore. I know Moore divides as well as conquers. I happen to be on his side, and have written before about the disgraceful body fascism employed by some of his critics (the venerable Philip French was moved to describe him in this way in his downbeat review of Capitalism in today's Observer: "Meanwhile he struts around, pot-bellied and badly shaven, in ill-fitting jeans and scuffed baseball cap ..." - what is this, a fashion parade for thin people?), but I do understand why he's not to all tastes. His scattergun approach to editing and presentation may not stand up under the microscope of close scrutiny, but his heart is in the right place, it's good that somebody is making films like this, and he reaches a wide audience. He is a polemicist, just one who happens to be entertaining with it. Some don't like him because he's left wing and successful/rich, which is apparently the highest form of hypocrisy. This doesn't bother me: he's making films that expose America's gun laws, foreign policy, healthcare system ... they may preach to the choir to an extent, but he remains a thorn in the side of corporate America and could easily have shut up and retired by now. He hasn't. He's still needling.

Those who find the sight of Michael Moore distasteful and would prefer it if he looked like Robert Pattinson or George Clooney, there's less of him in his more recent films, and less again in Capitalism. And there are fewer stunts. A bit of megaphone action and the now traditional dealings with security guards at revolving doors, but when you see Moore in this one, he's either interviewing someone or revisiting Flint, Michigan, and gazing thoughtfully at some rubble where an industry and a town used to be with his dad. In relating the recent bank bailout to Roger & Me, Moore provides a neat circularity (the simple message: every film he's made has been about capitalism); also, he depicts his childhood as happy and abundant, and no doubt does so through rose-tinted thesis-making spectacles, but at no point does he big himself up as a poor, working class hero; though his dad was an auto worker, they lived well, as many working families did in 1950s America. It's not the first time Moore has presented utopian images to help prove his gloomy point (remember the kite-flying Iraqi children in Fahrenheit 9/11?), but since these images are personal, it does what all great documentaries do, it focuses the bigger picture on individuals. It's not the first time he's shown evictions either, but these "foreclosures" have become more and more common, and it's the hard reality of being turfed out of your house that better illustrates the subprime crisis; we can sling mud at bankers all day, but that makes the issue more abstract. See a family set fire to the furniture they can't fit in the back of their truck as they load up and head off for ... where? ... is image enough.

I was moved by much of Capitalism. Unfortunately, the happy ending - Obama's election - although a hint of the people rising up, doesn't work, as Obama hasn't yet done very much. This is a shame, as the two upbeat stories Moore uses to shows us that all is not lost - both depicting people power (ie. unionisation, Moore's favourite drum to beat) - are far more effective. Frankly, I think you can guess by now whether you're going to enjoy this film. If you think you will, you probably will. If you think you won't, stay away.

By the way, you can, I'm delighted to say, still read the transcript of my interview with Moore at the NFT in 2002, when Bowling For Columbine was released. It was a real treat to do, and to go for a Chinese meal with him the night before.

Ah well. The Last Station had all the makings of a decent historical drama: fine cast, a nice bit of literary heft and an unploughed narrative furrow ie. the battle for Tolstoy's will between his idealistic disciples and his aggrieved and fruity wife, Unfortunately, it's dull. I actually found myself resting my head on my hand; never a good sign, and the cinema was packed with enthusiastic old people. James McAvoy, Helen Mirren and Christopher Plummer gave real spark to the opening scenes, but the story itself turned the story into a to-ing and fro-ing game of blame tennis, and as Tolstoy's death approached, I found myself willing it on. Pity. This was a clever way of doing a literary biopic: avoiding showing its subject actually writing anything and focusing instead on his legacy, but the bedroom antics between Plummer and Mirren were excruciating, and you were left with a series of arguments in ornate rooms. By the way, it was set in Russia in 1910. Nobody smoked as much as half a roll up through the entire film. My question: is this historically accurate? My guess would be that pipes would be belching out smoke pretty much 24 hours a day. Was Tolstoy anti-smoking? Or was this some kind of health and safety version of pre-revolutionary Russia? I'd love to know.

For all London-based lovers of the Curzon: check out the Curzon Soho's Midnight Movies slate. Edgar Wright hosted one of Death Wish 3 the other week, and they have a disco-based Candy Darling one coming up on Friday March 19 for the Warholian among you, and a Barbarella cocktail evening on April 30. (Apologies to those not in London, but there are some benefits to living here, to counter the mess, the engineering work and extortionate house prices.)

Is 6 Music really on death row? Nobody actually knows for sure, and speculation and paranoid rumour have been rife for some time. But it's looking worse this morning than it did when I left the building at 10am on Wednesday. Well, the news broke last night, when the Times announced that 6 Music was to close and those that were still up went a bit nuts. The full story, by Patrick Foster, is here, but the thrust is this: the BBC will close two radio stations in an overhaul of services to be announced next month. The piece uses the word "will," not "might" or "may" or even "is expected to". Its unequivocal tone is what makes it so scary.

We all know that DG Mark Thompson is being forced to make cuts to appease readers of the Daily Mail and the Tory government-in-waiting, who think that the £3.6 billion annual licence fee is being wasted on some programmes and stations that they don't watch or listen to. The bashing of the BBC has long been a national sport among the media conglomerates who control the Rest Of The Media, corporations with fingers in multiple pies that chuck money at redesigns and failed ventures every day but are only accountable to their shareholders. Because of what used to be called "the unique way in which the BBC is funded", the private sector want the BBC to be cheaper and better and have the means to lobby for this outcome; the own all the newspapers. Any medium reliant on advertising income is suffering in the recession. They're bound to be pissed off that one of their major competitors doesn't have to rustle up ads. (Except the likes of Radio Times, for whom I also work, which is run out of the profit-making wing, BBC Worldwide, as a wholly commercial venture - more blurring of the public/private lines that started under the previous Tory government, who demanded the Corporation pay for itself. It's since come under fire to making too much money. A lose-lose situation. Close some things down, quickly!)

The Times piece says, "In a wide-ranging strategic review, [Thompson] will announce the closure of the digital radio stations 6 Music and Asian Network and introduce a cap on spending on broadcast rights for sports events of 8.5 per cent of the licence fee, or about £300 million. He will also pledge to close BBC Switch and Blast!, leaving the lucrative teenage market to ITV and Channel 4. But BBC3, which is aimed at 16 to 35-year-olds will not be touched."

The question is - and it really doesn't matter in the broader scheme of things - how come Patrick Foster has read this report, which is due to be made public next month? There are jobs at stake here. This is not about me - I just freelance for 6 Music, and have been thoroughly enjoying doing so since just before Christmas - most of the people who work at the network, day in, day out, doing a death-defying job with less resources and less warm bodies than any other comparable 24-hour music network while attracting some of the biggest names in music and receiving full support of the record industry, are on staff, or contracts. I worry for these people first, and for the loyal listeners second, with my own interests a long way down the list. I am like one of those media conglomerates - I have fingers in many pies; that's how the self-employed survive. To axe 6 Music and Asian Network - that's two entire radio stations, think about that for a minute, it would literally strip away two options on your DAB - seems sensational to me. I understand that cuts must be made, and that you can make an argument for or against any of the digital services ("Why don't they just shut BBC3?" say wags - but BBC3 is a fantastic training ground for new talent, whether you watch it or not - I don't listen to Radio 3, but I want it to exist), but my guess is that it's a lot less complicated to do the maths by chopping out entire organs than to put the body on a better diet.

The report has been drawn up by the BBC's director of policy and strategy, John Tate, who apparently co-wrote the 2005 Conservative manifesto with David Cameron. I present that simply as a fact. It seems - if the Times has actually read the report - that BBC2 gets a budget hike as long as everybody stops spending money on posh imports, like Mad Men. Frankly, as long as somebody shows Mad Men, I can live with this. (Most of my US imports are watched on FiveUSA and Hallmark anyway.) I'd rather not watch it with adverts, but I can always wait for the box set, or speed through them - oops, look at me contributing to the commercial sector's woes with the fast forward button Sky put on my remote control for me. It's so confusing!

I thought 6 Music's death had been greatly exaggerated, having emerged from the BBC Trust report with a clear brief: to ramp up the specialist music content. Brilliant. We can do that. (I speak as someone who co-hosts a Saturday morning show where the onus is very much on the other stuff.) It seems my optimism was misplaced.

Of course, we should all sit back and take a pinch of salt; the Times pieces is necessarily written and published from a stance of wishful thinking, and may not turn out to be gospel. Rupert Murdoch is easy to paint as the villain, as he's foreign and he broke the unions and gave us Page 3, but he also gives me House and Caitlin Moran, and as a media ogre he's no more against the BBC than whoever runs the Guardian Media Group, a media conglomerate to whom I happily give £1 every day, and more than that at weekends (I paid a pound!), and for whom, very occasionally, I work. I do the odd piece for the Times. I subscribe to Sky. It's complicated. But I love the BBC to the very marrow of my bones and always have done. Anything that chips away at its authority, its creativity, its inclusivity, its ability to inspire, its mission to serve and its dominance in the specialist fields of excellence and stimulation is, to my mind, bad. If they'd announced that they were closing 1Xtra and CBeebies I'd be just as pissed off, and they literally do not cross my radar. It's not just about my friends losing their jobs, it's about a prevailing storm.

Batten down the hatches, lovers of diversity and cleverness. As I always say, those who seek to give the BBC a good thrashing for being a Communist and having some croissants at its meetings and paying really good presenters some money for doing their job will be the first to write to the letters pages of the Times and the Mail and the Telegraph when the Today programme is sponsored by Immodium Plus.

Not really. But Michael Legge and I are teaming up for a couple of Edinburgh work-in-progress shows at the Hen & Chickens in London's N1, on April 18 and 19 (starting 9.30), and May 31 (starting 7.30). As they are works in progress, the shows themselves could get better, or worse, so take your pick whether to go the earlier or later ones. Tickets go on sale TONIGHT at MIDNIGHT. We'd love to see you.