Quintin Jardine's blog

Our expensive rail network is bust. It’s totally unfit for purpose. End of story.

I have begun to rewatch, not for the first time, my all time favourite TV show, The Newsroom, starring Jeff Daniels, Emily Mortimer, Sam Waterstones, and Dev Patel. If it has a fault it lies in Aaron Sorkin’s tendency to cram too many words into a broadcast minute, but every one makes sense so that’s okay.

I’m often asked when Skinner will be adapted for TV,; my answer, ‘Don’t know, don’t care..’ I really mean that. I had a close call once, and learned from that experience. My characters are my creations; they are real to me, so much that I feel a duty of care that would prevent me handing them over to another without the kind of strict guarantees that a production company would not offer.

There’s some very good TV but there’s some garbage too. For example, ‘Granite Harbour,’ the current BBC1 offering. I watched the first episode because it is set in Aberdeen. I binged the rest because I expected it to explode into life. It exploded all right. Took me back to my schooldays and an eedjit with a stink bomb.

I don’t recall ever seeing as many loose end left untied. I don’t recall any other plot that left me wondering wtf it was all about. I don’t recall another series that gave one of the lead characters, the biggest male name on the cast list, a few lines before killing him off in the first five minutes.

I don’t care about any of that. I have escaped. But one question remains, one that really needs answered. Who the hell did Dawn Steele’s hair?