It was a nice surprise to turn on the TV in search of something vaguely tolerable to provide five minutes of visual entertainment whilst I eat my dinner and hear “..and now on BBC 2, a psychological drama based on a story by JG Ballard..”.

And an even nicer surprise – Home was really good. Possibly the best piece of original television programming witnessed in god knows how long. A pretty heavy-going adaptation of one of Ballard’s prime-era assaults on reality, and on prime time Saturday night TV – not even midnight! 9pm! How about that?

“Challenging” and “unsettling” are of course the most obvious clichés in regard to stuff like this, and more often than not they’re just synonyms for “violent” and “weird”, but if we can escape cliché for a minute and return those words to their full original meaning, I think they’re the perfect adjectives for ‘Home’. While a lot of Ballard’s key writing is idiosyncratic to the point of being nearly incomprehensible, this drama managed to put across all of the ideas which make him such essential reading in a concise and powerful manner. Nice going.

Basically, there’s something uniquely uncompromising about Ballard’s vision… he’s one of only two modern writers I’ve read – the other being William Burroughs – whose works are actually DANGEROUS.

These days it’s par for the course for writers (and filmmakers and whathaveyou) to chuck around paradigm-fucking weird shit willy nilly, but usually it’s all in good fun and well anchored by logic and solid reality/fantasy divisions and tedious ‘what if..’ structures, reducing the impact of what should be world-destroying to the level of a momentary brain-itch. Not so Ballard & Burroughs – their shit’s for real. Burroughs is by far my favourite writer of the two, but I think Ballard is more extreme. You see, beyond all the nasty shit for which his work is most renowned, Burroughs was essentially a humanitarian, and through the purging of all the worst aspects of human nature, his writing is essentially a desperately naïve plea for a world of freedom, free from the machinations of the Ugly Spirit.

Ballard’s a different matter though – he couldn’t give a fuck for anybody. No woolly liberal sentiments underlie HIS attack on the world, and whilst restrictive bourgeois society may bare the brunt of his assault, he takes things WAY further. In Ballard’s view, the only way to break out of alienation and dissatisfaction is to tear apart not only social norms, but also all notions of morality, meaningful human contact and, eventually, reality itself. In this sense, Ballards’s ideas are frighteningly Nietzschian, and also somewhat Gnostic I suppose in his violent denial of the material world. There’s something totally vicious in the way that all human contact in Ballard’s books is completely cynical and meaningless, and the only way the supreme individual / isolated protagonist can transcend the illusory hell of ‘human nature’ is by killing and destroying without compunction in his quest for… whatever. The realisation of enlightenment in Ballard-world is never elaborated upon – the bleakness of his outlook seems to suggest that if nothing else, it simply represents an escape from the nullity of human experience.

With this in mind, it’s easy to understand why books like ‘The Atrocity Exhibition’ and ‘The Unlimited Dream Company’ are so often seen as ‘difficult’, and the understated extremity of the views they quietly (and sometimes noisily) put forward often goes unappreciated.

But, um, anyway, the fact that this BBC drama has inspired me to churn all that out should give you some idea of it’s level of quality. I’d imagine a repeat or video release is probably out of the question (I chuckle to think of the avalanche of complaints the BBC is probably receiving as I write – “..how dare you subject by impressionable 12 year old son to graphic depictions of home dentistry and an extremely disturbed man demonstrating how to build a machine for trapping and killing household pets…?!?!” etc.)

So, er, well done to the filmmakers for making it, cheers to the BBC for having the balls to show it amid their usual wall-to-wall mind-numbing banality, and here’s hoping that you, dear reader, got/get a chance to see it.

After watching it, I should have been running off to do something fucked up and antisocial in the name of the fight against reality, but instead I gave in and switched the channel, and am writing this as I watch ‘Resident Evil’. Hey, it promised cute girls and zombies – I’m only human! Christ alive, it’s bloody awful though! Not that I had high hopes or anything, but it’s fucking appalling, like if a particularly unimaginative 12 year old geek-boy made a film, only with all the sex and violence that 12 year old boys do so well mercilessly cut out. It makes me want to write a far more dramatic screenplay in which I rescue Milla Jovovich from this hopeless, wince-inducing travesty and cast her in something good instead.

No, seriously, I think that kind of post-modern caper has potential.

Instead of playing an off-the-peg “sassy heroine” partaking in an adolescent world of secret military installations, machine guns, bad computer effects and po-faced, super-tough marines going ‘hut hut hut’, she’d play an intelligent woman who wakes up to find herself trapped in that sort of world and, instinctively recognising it as unreal, she’d fight to escape it and find her way into a better film by systematically trashing the power-mad phallocentric male-fetish principles which underlie it… sounds like a hit, huh? No? Well alright then, fuck you.

So anyway, how did you spent YOUR Saturday night?