I rent out the BBC series Jekyll on DVD. It’s a perfect example in how to keep the viewer gripped for six one-hour episodes, so much so that I have to watch all the episodes together in one evening, going to bed at about 3am. I salute the makers for holding one’s attention so, particularly in these days of so many alternatives fighting for slices of people’s leisure time.

I would equate Jekyll with the 80s series Edge Of Darkness – which I also watched in one six-hour VHS session at the time, utterly gripped. One is left yearning to see what happens next, to the point of chemical addiction. Except when Edge Of Darkness went out, there was just the three other channels, and no Web.

Ten years before that, it was a case of ‘what’s on the other side’. A recent documentary on Abigail’s Party puts its cult success into context. The Mike Leigh play went out at a time when ‘the other side’ was on strike, so there was literally nothing else to watch that evening. Likewise The Naked Civil Servant, Quentin Crisp putting his entire celebrity down to the biopic of his life going out against the news on a dull weekday evening.

It’s the eighth anniversary of Mr Crisp’s death tomorrow. Xavior Roide is organising a walking tour of his London haunts and abodes, including the Chelsea bedsit which he famously failed to ever clean. ‘After the first four years, the dirt doesn’t get any worse’ still the one line people tend to quote, assuming they know of him at all. He lived in the same bedsit for forty-one years. By which point he quipped that the cockroaches had applied to the council to be rehoused.

‘If it had been released as a proper movie’, he said about The Naked Civil Servant, ‘the only people paying to see it would have been gay men. Oh, and liberals wishing to be seen going into and coming out of the cinema.’

Jekyll‘s basic story isn’t quite enough to fill six hours, but writer Steven Moffat always manages to add rather than dilute: the window-dressing approach to TV writing. But where slick USA genre shows like Heroes can sometimes take themselves too seriously, forgetting that a dull character with super powers is still dull, Moffat knows that unexpected moments of comedy are as gripping as unexpected developments of plot. If they’re done well.

In one episode of Jekyll, a stock thriller character – a random soldier ordered to shoot Mr Hyde – is suddenly given a whole backstory in remarkable, unexpected flashbacks. We learn why this normally anonymous mercenary loves the now dated Crazy Frog ringtone, how he was hired via a blank cheque (literally), how he was trained to be a ruthless, unthinking machine, and why he’s been kept aside purely for the task of killing Mr Hyde for some time. We then cut back to the present scene, where Hyde quickly throws the soldier off a rooftop, and he’s never mentioned again. It’s so unexpected, and so brazen, that the viewer can only be left glued to the screen, wondering what could possibly happen next.

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Other favourite British TV, more of the moment: the new series of The Mighty Boosh. A kind of cute surrealism, a la Vivian Stanshall: baffling to some, charming to others. A scene where Noel Fielding is selling wares to a queue of trendy youths, all decked out – like Mr Fielding himself – in cartoonishly dyed hairdos, painted faces, neck scarves and colourful, effeminate, shiny and skinny 80s-ish clothes, leaves me thinking about Romo (again). The eternal appeal of the dressing-up box. Perhaps the laddish Britpop fashions of the 90s will shortly take their turn as the least lovely decade in the last fifty years, as the 80s and 70s did before them.

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The press on the Tutankhamun show in the papers this week refers to the relics’ last major outing at the British Museum in the 70s, complete with vintage shots of raincoated visitors queuing around the railings in Bloomsbury. It is History as a Greatest Hit. Though the broadsheet consensus on the Egyptian nick-nacks this time hints more at a tacky cover version, or a desperate remix. One should never put too much store on reviews, of course, but when the ticket price is extravagant (£20), and the venue out of the way (the former Millennium Dome, now tackily rebranded by a mobile phone company as The 02) these things do tend to make up one’s mind, just as they can do with West End shows.

For books or films or albums it’s different. Not only are they more affordable, but with the crowd element removed a bad critical reception of a book, film or CD is more likely to make you feel the critic is not right for the work, rather than the other way around. With a play or exhibition, it’s much harder to feel a personally favourable connection, when there’s an unfavourable consensus. Though I still wish I’d seen that Mike Read-penned Oscar Wilde musical, before it closed after one disastrous night. If only for the novelty factor.

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