I’ve just watched the second episode of Britannia High on ITV (there’s a mini-site but it’s mostly aimed at the pre-teen audience, but I might try the radio show later). I like it very much, but I’m not quite there with it yet. Partly, it’s not their fault - I’m very familiar with Manchester and have performed at the RNCM where a great deal of it is filmed, and it’s quite disconcerting to have them run from Victoria station in central London into St Peter’s Square in Manchester.

Partly, though, I just don’t feel the characters yet. I am a massive TV fan and there are some series I have adored; The X-Files was my first love, and I’m currently reworking my way through the series which is teaching me a lot about where my ideas come from - a topic for another post perhaps! Buffy The Vampire Slayer (not quite as keen on Angel ), Firefly , The West Wing , Dark Angel , to name a few. There’s also the staples of ER, Friends and guilty pleasure Coronation Street.

The thing is, for the ones I really, truly have loved, I can remember when it was that I first fell in love with them and those moments are entirely character-driven. For Buffy, it was before the series came to the UK; I’d read friends’ blogs, who lived in America and whose judgment I trusted, raving about it and rented the DVDs of the first episode, Welcome to the Hellmouth, and the season two episodes, Surprise and Innocence. I adored the entrance when the teenage boy and girl enter the creepy school and it turns out the girl is the one who’s unexpectedly the vampire, but that wouldn’t have been enough to keep me watching - twists become predictable. It was the moments when Buffy met Giles, actually, that made me watch the second dvd because this was something which had spark, which had potential to become important to me. The second dvd, it didn’t matter that I didn’t know what had happened in the interim, that Angel had become evil, that Giles had undergone such loss, all the trouble the gang had had - it was clear in their behaviour how important this was, and it wasn’t the moment when he became evil, it was the moment he left her in the bedroom. ‘I’ll call you’. And the look of profound despair and confusion on her face. Character.

The West Wing also wasn’t the first episode. I’d heard good things to make me watch it, and found it interesting but it was the scene in Mr Willis of Ohio, when Zoey’s been on a night out and slightly threatened. Her father, President Bartlett, starts to shout at her his nightmare scenario of her being kidnapped. It was utterly gripping. Character.

Britannia High hasn’t had that moment yet. I don’t know if it will, but I will be disappointed if it doesn’t, and probably stop watching. Character drives everything. A plot is meaningless without it, because character dictates how the plot will occur, what effects it will have, who’ll get hurt and who’ll profit. It dictates whether you care enough to be there at 7pm every Sunday or whether it’s something you’ll catch if it happens to be on. It dictates whether you seek out the author’s next book or overlook it at the bookshop. It’s whether you’ll buy the dvd or forget the film when you leave the cinema. It doesn’t matter what the genre, if the character’s not there, nothing else will have importance.