Who Shot JKR?

Dallas is back, and I have been casting half an eye over it. It was, after all, a big part of my childhood - a boring part, yes, but as you get older you find that nostalgia grows increasingly indiscriminate. Good to see that Patrick Duffy actually looks better than he did back in the day, though his acting hasn't improved any. Just as well there's a new handsome young buck to play his son Christopher - Jesse Metcalfe, radiant in his blandness. He and Bobby are anxious to explore new energy sources, though at one point a character warns Christopher that 'oil is in your blood', a line that - like a lot of what goes on in this series - strikes you as both absurd yet somehow inevitable. JR is still around, aroused from some catatonic state half-way through the first show like Dracula revived by a dribble of virgin's blood - though here it's the scent of oil that has awoken him. His son has been drilling for oil in Bobby's back garden without Bobby knowing - well, it's a big garden. It has to be said that JR's eyebrows are extraordinarily impressive, almost seeming to demand a series of their own.

The show has a clunky way with technology, as if it were only pretending to be set in the present day. In the early stages, there is a lot of fuss over a mysterious e-mail to Christopher's fiancee, purporting to be from Christopher himself wanting to call off the wedding. Everyone's talking about 'the e-mail'. Who sent the e-mail? If this is their version of 'Who shot JR?', I think they might need to try harder.

Meanwhile, we are reassured to learn that the Oil Baron's Ball is still going. Only now it looks like the MTV Awards.

It may be that TV is playing it safe by trading on past glories, but look what happens when it tries to be 'ground-breaking'. I had the misfortune to catch some of The Audience on C4 before my overwhelming urge to throw a brick at the screen encouraged me to switch it off. In this programme a person with a problem is pursued by 'the audience', a group of fifty random people who try to help them solve it. In this episode it was a farmer, and it took only a brief glance at the screen to diagnose his problem - he had a load of random people following him about trying to tell him what he should do.

Visually, it's inelegant - they might just as well tie a dead sheep to him. However, dead sheep aren't able to cry and pontificate and go on and on about how their lives have been transformed by this experience. Hang on - their lives? What about the guy they're meant to be helping? And what about me? I thought I was the audience. What about my needs?

But I suppose this is the future of TV: the show that watches itself, so you don't have to. What a relief! Time to pick up a book, then - and guess what, Harry Potter's got a new one out, a bit like the old ones but without the magic and with more self-harm and swearing. Jan Moir in the Daily Mail said it was 'socialist propaganda'. Mind you, the Mail thinks that about more or less everything. Even Mein Kampf.

In the novel, set in a village called 'Pagford' (yes, it's difficult thinking up good place names, isn't it?) a Hindu family move into the old vicarage and are subjected to racial abuse. Ms Moir felt that this was unlikely, so it was amusing to read, further on in the paper, that a vicar had banned yoga classes because they were 'too Hindu'.

You have to feel sorry for JKR don't you? Write something similiar to HP and everyone will sneer; write something different and no-one will buy it. And by 'no-one' I mean only half of the civilized world. However, if you do want an adult novel with 'magic', there are plenty of other options out there - try Chris Adrian's The Great Night, for example.