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  • Comic Book Story Arcs So Unnecessarily Long They’d Be Serialised Across Three Separate BBC Two Seasons

    Comic Book Story Arcs So Unnecessarily Long They’d Be Serialised Across Three Separate BBC Two Seasons

    There is a specific type of television suffering that only BBC Two can deliver. Six episodes, broadcast across three months, with a four-week gap in the middle because of snooker coverage. You invest everything. You care deeply. And then the finale airs on a Tuesday at 9pm and resolves absolutely nothing, because they’ve already greenlit a second series that won’t arrive until sometime in 2027. It is, I’d argue, a uniquely British form of narrative punishment. And I say this as someone who sat through all of The Salisbury Poisonings and still has feelings about it.

    Now. Marvel and DC have been doing exactly the same thing to comic book readers for decades. The longest comic book story arcs in UK comic shop history are not so much stories as they are commitments. Life decisions. The kind of thing you mention at a party and people back away slowly. So, in the spirit of public service, here is a lovingly sarcastic scheduling announcement from a fictional BBC commissioning editor, applied to some of the most gloriously bloated story arcs the big two have ever produced.

    A towering comic book collection stack representing the longest comic book story arcs UK readers have endured
    Photo by Bo Ponomari on Pexels

    Welcome from our fictional BBC Two commissioning editor

    “We at BBC Two are thrilled to announce our upcoming drama slate, inspired by the finest traditions of serialised storytelling. Each production has been carefully paced so that very little happens for four episodes, one extraordinary thing happens in episode five, and episode six ends on a freeze frame. Series two is in development. We cannot confirm a broadcast date at this time.”

    Right. Let’s get into it.

    House of M (Marvel, 2005), Series one of an indefinite run

    BBC Two scheduling note: Seven episodes. Airs across four months. Episode three replaced by coverage of the Cambridge Folk Festival. Available on iPlayer for thirty days before being archived forever.

    Scarlet Witch says “No more mutants” and reality itself bends. It’s a genuinely great hook. The problem is that understanding why she says it requires reading roughly nine years of previous storylines, including Avengers Disassembled, several issues of New Avengers, and at least two trades that are perpetually out of print. I’ve tried to explain House of M to non-comics friends and I have never, not once, successfully completed the backstory before they’ve drifted to their phones.

    As a BBC Two drama it would actually work beautifully. Episode one: a woman is very sad and powerful. Episodes two through five: people argue in rooms. Episode six: the world is different now. Credits roll over a Sufjan Stevens track. Absolutely nobody explains what just happened. Brilliant television.

    Infinite Crisis (DC, 2005-2006), A prestige co-production with Channel 4 that somehow ended up on BBC Two anyway

    Infinite Crisis had seven main issues. It also had around twenty companion mini-series, four Countdown tie-ins, and a Road to Infinite Crisis arc that itself required familiarity with the original 1985 Crisis on Infinite Earths. Reading it in sequence is like arriving at a dinner party where everyone else went to school together and they keep referencing an incident from 1987 that you weren’t there for.

    The pacing, in BBC Two terms, is exemplary. Our fictional commissioning editor would absolutely commission this. Six episodes. Episode one introduces thirty-seven characters. Episode four kills half of them. Episode six suggests that perhaps the real Infinite Crisis was the friends we made along the way. Second series announced. Set five years earlier. Explores the Crisis on Infinite Earths from the perspective of a minor character who dies in issue two of the original.

    Secret Wars (Marvel, 2015), The one that actually delayed itself

    The longest comic book story arcs tend to feel long because they’re written for the trade paperback collection. Secret Wars was different. It was long because it genuinely, physically took forever to publish. Jonathan Hickman’s 2015 Secret Wars was solicited as an eight-issue series. It ended up being nine issues, shipped out of order, and took about nine months longer than planned to complete. Other Marvel series had to invent reasons why their storylines existed in a publishing vacuum during this time. Some writers have described this period with words I can’t publish here.

    For BBC Two scheduling purposes, this is absolutely standard practice. You commission a six-parter. It becomes a seven-parter. Episode four is delayed by three weeks because of a Proms special. The cast have aged visibly between filming episode two and episode six. One of the lead characters is recast and nobody mentions it. The finale airs on 23 December when half the country is at their nan’s. Perfectly normal British television production.

    If you want the full picture on comic book storylines that make your head hurt trying to map them onto any logical timeline, I wrote about comic book story arcs so convoluted even a Martin Lewis deep-dive couldn’t untangle them, and Secret Wars features prominently, for obvious reasons.

    The Clone Saga (Marvel, 1994-1996), A cautionary tale in three BBC Two seasons

    Originally planned as a three-month Spider-Man storyline. Ran for two years. Introduced, killed, resurrected and re-killed Ben Reilly. Revealed that the real Peter Parker might be a clone. Then revealed that wasn’t true. Then suggested it might be. I have read academic papers shorter than the Clone Saga and with significantly clearer conclusions.

    BBC Two scheduling announcement: The Clone Saga. Series one: six episodes. Series two: five episodes, airing the following autumn. Series three: four episodes, broadcast in a Sunday evening slot usually reserved for wildlife documentaries. A special episode resolving the main cliffhanger airs eighteen months after series three, on a bank holiday Monday at 10:15pm. Viewing figures: modest but passionate. BAFTA nomination: Best Sound Design.

    I genuinely believe the Clone Saga would win a BAFTA for Best Sound Design. Nobody would be able to explain the plot in the acceptance speech but the ambient sound of Peter Parker’s existential confusion would be outstanding.

    DC’s New 52 continuity, The entire experiment as a limited series that forgot to be limited

    DC rebooted its entire continuity in September 2011 with the New 52. Fifty-two new series, fresh starts, clean slates. By 2016 it had been partially walked back, then replaced by DC Rebirth, which itself referenced pre-New-52 continuity that the New 52 had supposedly replaced. The BBC arts desk would have a field day covering this as a cultural phenomenon and then quietly never follow it up.

    As a BBC Two commission this would run as follows: a prestige pilot, well-received, several new characters introduced. Then a second series that quietly contradicts several things the first series established. Then a third series that brings back beloved elements from a previous show that this show had replaced. Then a Very Special Episode that tries to reconcile all of it. Then a podcast. The podcast would be quite good, actually.

    What the longest comic book story arcs actually tell us

    Here’s the thing, and I say this with genuine affection: the reason these arcs go so long is the same reason BBC Two dramas string things out across multiple series. People care. If nobody cared, nobody would keep reading, keep watching, keep posting increasingly unhinged fan theories on Reddit threads at 2am. The longest comic book story arcs in history exist because someone, somewhere, is deeply invested in finding out what happens next.

    That is, objectively, a lovely thing. Even if what happens next takes forty-seven issues and three crossover events to deliver.

    The dark comic book storylines I covered in an earlier piece on comic book storylines that would fit perfectly into a BBC One Sunday night drama tend to be the tighter, grimmer ones. The sprawling universe-altering epics are a different beast entirely. They are not tragic. They are operatic. BBC Two, with its noble tradition of commissioning things that slightly more people should watch, is the perfect home for them.

    And if you think I’ve been too harsh: the scheduling announcement for Hickman’s Avengers and New Avengers run leading into Secret Wars would simply read “Begins in 2012. You will understand it in 2016. We are sorry about the gaps. Please watch our nature documentary about Highland cattle in the meantime.”

    Genuinely cannot think of a more British way to consume a multiverse-collapsing epic. Bring biscuits. You’ll be here a while.

    Frequently Asked Questions

    What are the longest comic book story arcs ever published?

    Marvel’s Clone Saga (1994-1996) ran for roughly two years across multiple Spider-Man titles, making it one of the longest single continuous arcs. DC’s New 52 initiative technically ran from 2011 to 2016 before being replaced, which is hard to beat for sheer sustained commitment to a chaotic idea.

    Do I need to read every issue to understand big Marvel or DC crossover events?

    In theory, no. In practice, the answer is a gentle but firm yes, especially for events like Infinite Crisis or Secret Wars, which assume familiarity with years of preceding storylines. Most local comic shops in the UK stock collected trade paperbacks that group the essential tie-ins together, which helps considerably.

    Why do comic book story arcs get so long and decompressed?

    Much of it comes down to writing for the trade paperback collection rather than the monthly issue. Six issues collected into one volume is a marketable product, so writers structure stories across six chapters rather than resolving things quickly. It also keeps readers subscribed monthly, which publishers understandably like.

    Which Marvel crossover event is the best starting point for UK readers new to comics?

    Civil War (2006-2007) is the most accessible big crossover because its central conflict, Iron Man versus Captain America on a political issue, is easy to grasp without much prior knowledge. It’s widely available in UK bookshops and Waterstones usually stocks the collected edition.

    Are decompressed comic book storylines actually bad, or is that just a criticism?

    It’s a genuine creative debate. Slower pacing allows for richer character development and works brilliantly in collected form. The frustration tends to hit monthly readers who pay per issue and feel shortchanged when a single conversation takes three issues to complete. Both positions are reasonable, frankly.

  • The Open World Games With the Most Suspiciously Accurate British Weather Systems

    The Open World Games With the Most Suspiciously Accurate British Weather Systems

    There is a particular kind of psychological damage that comes from growing up in Britain and learning, slowly and painfully, that summer is a myth. A rumour. A loose social agreement that gets cancelled around the 9th of July every year without apology. I’ve lived it. You’ve lived it. And increasingly, I’ve started noticing that certain video games have also lived it, which is either a sign of extraordinary environmental simulation or a sign that the developers spent a working holiday in Skegness and never fully recovered.

    British weather in video games is, weirdly, becoming more accurate than the Met Office forecast. So I ranked them. Obviously.

    British weather in video games illustrated as a comic book rainstorm over open world countryside
    Photo by Tomás Asurmendi on Pexels

    Red Dead Redemption 2, the Scottish Highlands in disguise

    Rockstar’s masterpiece of misery simulation is, at its heart, a game about sitting on a horse in horizontal rain wondering what you did wrong. The weather in RDR2 is relentless, unpredictable, and deeply personal. You’ll have one glorious hour of golden light in the Heartlands, genuinely think things are looking up, and then a thunderstorm will roll in from nowhere and drench you for the next three in-game days. Arthur Morgan catches a cold. You feel it in your soul.

    The region it most resembles: the Cairngorms in October. That specific combination of breathtaking scenery and the constant nagging suspicion that you should have brought a proper waterproof. Rockstar didn’t set out to simulate a Scottish bank holiday weekend, but here we are.

    The Witcher 3, Northumberland with added bog monsters

    Velen, the central region of The Witcher 3, is a swamp. A permanent, grey, drizzling, soul-crushing swamp that somehow keeps producing more mud no matter how long you’ve been there. The sky is the colour of a wet sock. The rain is horizontal and fine, the kind that soaks you before you’ve registered it’s started. Geralt spends most of his time looking mildly damp and deeply unamused, which is the correct facial expression for anyone attempting an outdoor activity in Northumberland between September and April.

    The game’s dynamic weather does something particularly British: it lets the sun come out just long enough for you to think the worst is over, and then absolutely buckles down again. I’ve experienced this exact sequence at a music festival in Yorkshire. Multiple times. Voluntarily.

    Ghost of Tsushima, Cornwall in August, unpredictably

    Ghost of Tsushima gets a slightly different kind of British weather credit. Its weather system swings between cinematically gorgeous golden sunshine and sudden, violent storms in a way that closely mirrors a Cornish August. For about forty minutes you’re lying in a flower field thinking this is the best holiday you’ve ever had. Then the wind picks up, something flies off the roof of a farmhouse, and a weather warning pops up on your phone.

    The game’s storms are dramatic and short-lived. The calm returns quickly. Hope is reborn. Then it rains again. Classic Cornwall. I love Cornwall. I also own seven waterproof jackets, which is perhaps related.

    British weather in video games shown as a moody comic-style city scene in perpetual rain
    Photo by ArtHouse Studio on Pexels

    Forza Horizon 4, actually set in Britain, and still somehow less wet than the real thing

    Forza Horizon 4 is, of course, explicitly set in a fictionalised Britain, cycling through four distinct seasons in a way that is simultaneously the most and least realistic portrayal of British weather in gaming history. The autumn looks gorgeous. The winter has actual snow, which arrives reliably, which is already pure fantasy for anyone south of Edinburgh. The summer is sunny and warm for an extended period. Weeks, even.

    This is where realism breaks down. In reality, the Horizon festival would take place during a fortnight where the temperature barely clears 16°C, the music stage gets struck by lightning, and someone’s tent is found in the next county. Playground Games had the courage to simulate Britain but not, apparently, to simulate Britain. I respect the creative decision. I also know it’s a lie.

    That said, the game does nail the specific British experience of watching brilliant sunshine arrive and immediately wondering when it’ll end. Every sunny day in FH4 feels slightly borrowed. You drive fast because you know it won’t last. That part is very accurate.

    Cyberpunk 2077, Manchester in a neon dystopia

    Night City rains constantly. Not dramatically, not cinematically (well, sometimes cinematically), but persistently. There’s always a low grey sky or a slick wet street or the sound of rain hammering corrugated metal somewhere above V’s head. The city never fully dries out. You can go hours without seeing actual sun. The neon reflects off puddles in that specific way that makes everywhere look both beautiful and deeply depressing simultaneously.

    This is Manchester. This is absolutely Manchester. Specifically the Northern Quarter in November, around 5pm, when it’s already dark and raining and you’re trying to decide if the pub is worth the sprint. The answer, in Manchester as in Night City, is always yes.

    The Met Office’s own data on UK rainfall patterns would make a great tutorial screen for any of these games, honestly. Hours of rain, typical onset time, probability of a brief sunny window just to mess with you.

    Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, Norfolk, but with better longships

    Ubisoft’s Viking epic actually spent considerable effort recreating Dark Ages Britain, and the weather reflects it. Mercia and East Anglia in Valhalla have a particular flat, grey, windswept quality that I find deeply familiar. The skies are huge and threatening. The light, when it comes, is that specific pale English gold that makes everything look slightly melancholy even on a nice day.

    Norfolk in January. That’s what it is. Big sky, cold wind off the sea, the occasional dramatic cloud formation that would make a great desktop wallpaper if you weren’t standing under it. Eivor strides through it looking purposeful. Real Norfolk residents stride through it looking purposeful too, because the alternative is standing still in horizontal rain, and nobody wants that.

    Which game actually wins for British weather accuracy?

    If I’m being honest, Red Dead Redemption 2 takes it. The combination of false hope, sudden deterioration, and the way poor weather actively affects your character’s wellbeing captures something true about the British experience of existing outdoors. It’s the only game I’ve played where the weather made me genuinely reconsider my plans, which is something British weather does to me roughly every other weekend from October through June.

    The broader point is that dynamic weather in open world games has quietly become one of the most interesting design spaces in the industry. Done well, it changes how you play, where you go, and even how you feel. Done poorly, it’s just decorative rain that doesn’t actually touch you. Britain has taught me the difference, and I’m grateful for it, even if I remain damp.

    Fans of games with suspiciously British atmospheric conditions might also enjoy our look at open world games with the most suspiciously British town planning decisions, or our deep dive into the worst video game maps for navigation if you only had a tatty AA Road Atlas. Both are extremely relevant to the experience of being British and confused outdoors.

    One last thing. If you’re watching any of these games on a telly that cuts out every time a cloud rolls in, you might want to have a word with whoever installed your TV Aerials setup. Weather affects more than just open world immersion, it turns out.

    Frequently Asked Questions

    Which open world game has the most realistic weather system?

    Red Dead Redemption 2 is widely regarded as having one of the most detailed dynamic weather systems in gaming, with storms, fog, snow, and temperature changes that genuinely affect gameplay and character wellbeing. For sheer persistence of miserable drizzle, it’s hard to beat.

    Do video game weather systems actually affect gameplay or are they just visual?

    In the better ones, weather genuinely changes things. In RDR2, rain affects NPC behaviour and Arthur’s health. In The Witcher 3, certain enemies are stronger in specific weather. Forza Horizon 4 built its entire seasonal structure around weather-driven gameplay changes.

    Is Forza Horizon 4 actually set in the UK?

    Yes, Forza Horizon 4 is set in a fictionalised Britain, featuring locations inspired by the Scottish Highlands, the Lake District, and the Cotswolds. The seasonal weather cycle is based on British seasons, though it takes considerable creative licence with how pleasant those seasons actually are.

    What makes British weather so hard to simulate accurately in games?

    British weather is notoriously unpredictable and hyperlocal, meaning two places twenty miles apart can experience completely different conditions simultaneously. Most game weather engines work on region-wide systems, so they can capture the general misery but not the specific injustice of sunshine ending at 3pm on a Sunday.

  • The Most Dramatic Movie Courtroom Scenes and Why a UK Crown Court Judge Would Have None of It

    The Most Dramatic Movie Courtroom Scenes and Why a UK Crown Court Judge Would Have None of It

    Hollywood has a very specific idea of what a courtroom looks like. It looks like a man in a suit standing up, slamming his fist on a desk, and screaming “YOU CAN’T HANDLE THE TRUTH” while the gallery erupts into spontaneous applause and the judge sits there doing absolutely nothing useful. I’ve watched enough of these films to fill an entire career in actual legal practice, and every single time I’m left thinking the same thing: a Crown Court judge would have dissolved this entire proceeding within about forty seconds.

    Because here’s the thing about a real British Crown Court. It is, by design, aggressively boring. Not in a bad way. In the way that keeps innocent people out of prison. The judge speaks quietly, the barristers speak quietly, and if anyone in the public gallery so much as rustles a crisp packet, a court usher materialises from thin air like some kind of procedural spectre and gives them a look that could strip paint. Hollywood has never once depicted this. Not even close.

    Comic book courtroom drama illustration capturing the energy of movie courtroom scenes UK funny style
    Photo by khezez | خزاز on Pexels

    The spontaneous standing ovation problem

    Let’s start with the bit that always gets me. In films, a particularly devastating closing argument is routinely rewarded with applause. The gallery rises. People weep. A single tear rolls down someone’s cheek. The music swells. In A Few Good Men, Tom Cruise essentially does a greatest hits set for the jury. In My Cousin Vinny, Joe Pesci gets a round of appreciative murmuring. Even in courtroom dramas that try to be serious, there’s always that moment where the room collectively decides the lawyer has just done something magnificent.

    Walk into the Central Criminal Court at the Old Bailey and try that. I dare you. The judge would stop proceedings, instruct the gallery to be silent, and if the applause continued, have everyone removed. That’s not dramatisation, that’s just what the judiciary’s own guidance on courtroom conduct makes fairly clear. Contempt of court is a real thing. Spontaneous ovations are not a protected form of legal appreciation.

    The last-minute confession that saves the day

    This is the big one. The Hollywood courtroom confession is a sacred cinematic tradition. The real murderer, sitting somewhere in the gallery or on the witness stand, suddenly cracks under the pressure of a particularly aggressive cross-examination and blurts the whole thing out. Case closed. Credits roll. Everyone goes home happy.

    Real confession in a Crown Court setting involves considerably more paperwork. If a witness spontaneously confessed to a crime during proceedings, the judge would almost certainly pause everything, possibly discharge the jury to avoid prejudice, and the newly confessing individual would need separate legal representation before anyone could do anything with that information. The dramatic moment would be immediately followed by roughly three weeks of procedural sorting-out. Not quite the triumphant finale Hollywood had in mind.

    The screaming barrister is another one entirely. In films, lawyers shout. They pace. They point dramatically at the defendant. In a Crown Court, a barrister who raised their voice inappropriately at a witness would be gently but firmly reminded of their professional obligations by the judge. The Solicitors Regulation Authority and the Bar Standards Board take a fairly dim view of theatrical behaviour that serves the performance rather than the argument. You can be devastating in a Crown Court. You just have to do it in a very quiet, very precise, very English way that’s somehow more frightening than any amount of desk-slamming.

    The witness who tells a devastating truth nobody expected

    Films love the witness who walks into the box and detonates the entire case with one sentence nobody saw coming. In real Crown Court proceedings, witnesses are proofed before they testify. The barristers on both sides broadly know what a witness is going to say. Truly unexpected testimony does occasionally happen, but it results in an application to adjourn, legal argument about admissibility, possibly a voir dire, and a lot of very considered discussion conducted in voices slightly above a murmur.

    The closest real-life equivalent to a movie courtroom confession is probably a defendant choosing to give evidence and then saying something catastrophically unhelpful to their own case. That does happen. It is not accompanied by a swell of strings and a closeup of the prosecutor’s quietly triumphant face. It’s accompanied by the defendant’s barrister staring at a point slightly above the jury box and visibly recalibrating everything.

    Films that at least tried to get it right

    I’ll give credit where it’s due. Some films at least gesture toward procedural reality. Kramer vs. Kramer has a certain restraint to its courtroom scenes that feels more like actual litigation than performance. The Verdict, with Paul Newman, goes for exhausted realism over theatrical fireworks. And some British productions, notably certain episodes of Silk on the BBC, actually managed to convey the specific texture of Crown Court proceedings without making it feel like a West End production.

    But these are exceptions. For the most part, Hollywood treats a courtroom the way it treats a spaceship or a hacking terminal: as a prop for drama rather than a working system with its own logic. Speaking of which, if you enjoyed the chaos of fictional technology meeting British regulatory reality, the piece on which sci-fi movie technologies would be immediately shut down by UK regulators covers similarly fertile ground. The gap between what looks cool on screen and what would survive actual institutional scrutiny is, in almost every case, enormous.

    What a Crown Court judge would actually do with Jack Nicholson

    Let’s go back to A Few Good Men. Jack Nicholson’s Colonel Jessup, under cross-examination, delivers one of cinema’s great eruptions. He shouts, he threatens, he basically confesses to ordering a murder because Tom Cruise goaded him into it. Brilliant scene. Completely absorbing. And in a real courtroom, within approximately eight seconds of that speech beginning, a judge would have intervened.

    The witness would be warned. If the outburst continued, the judge would have the witness removed. If the witness was a serving military officer in contempt of court, there would be a separate process entirely. The confession embedded in the shouting would be legally complicated to use, potentially the subject of admissibility argument, and Tom Cruise’s character would probably face some questions about his cross-examination technique from his supervising officer. Not quite as cinematic.

    This is the same energy as those movie heists that completely fall apart the moment they hit a UK car park barrier. Hollywood builds its drama on the assumption that systems are dramatic. British systems are, by design, the opposite of dramatic. They are designed to produce consistent, boring, reproducible outcomes. That’s what makes them work. And that is absolutely fatal to a third-act courtroom revelation.

    The judge who would sigh and adjourn everything

    My favourite imaginary scenario is placing a Crown Court judge, someone who has spent twenty years hearing cases in a Midlands courtroom, into any Hollywood legal drama. The Oscar-baiting speech gets cut off after forty words. The dramatic pause is filled with a quiet request to move along. The witness who breaks down crying is given a moment to compose themselves and then politely asked to answer the question. The gallery that gasps is cleared.

    And honestly? The Crown Court version is more frightening. There’s something genuinely chilling about a system that processes drama without flinching. Jack Nicholson shouting wouldn’t get you anywhere. What would get you somewhere is a quietly excellent barrister asking the exact right question at the exact right moment, in a voice you’d struggle to hear from the back row, and watching the answer land like a brick into still water.

    Hollywood gives us theatre. The Crown Court gives you something closer to chess. Neither format is wrong. But only one of them would survive an afternoon at the Old Bailey without being held in contempt. And it’s not the one with Tom Cruise. Similar logic applies to the most unrealistic hacking scenes in games and movies, where the gap between what looks dramatic on screen and what actually happens is roughly the size of a Crown Court adjournment pile.

    The truth Hollywood can’t handle is that real legal drama is slow, quiet, exhausting, and often decided on points of procedure that would bore a Golden Retriever into unconsciousness. Which is probably why it keeps making films about people screaming in courtrooms instead. Fair enough, honestly. I’d rather watch Jack Nicholson than a voir dire application any day of the week.

    Frequently Asked Questions

    What are the funniest movie courtroom scenes compared to real UK courts?

    The spontaneous gallery ovation and the last-minute screaming confession are the biggest offenders. In a real Crown Court, both would result in the proceedings being halted, the gallery cleared, and a very long administrative process that kills the drama stone dead.

    Can people clap or cheer in a UK Crown Court?

    Absolutely not. Crown Court galleries are expected to remain silent throughout proceedings. Any disruption, including applause, can constitute contempt of court, and a judge has full authority to have the gallery cleared or individuals removed.

    Do witnesses ever spontaneously confess in real UK courtrooms like they do in films?

    It’s vanishingly rare, and when unexpected admissions do happen, they trigger legal procedures rather than dramatic resolutions. The judge would likely pause proceedings, address admissibility concerns, and ensure the individual has appropriate legal representation before anything moves forward.

    Which films actually get courtroom procedure right?

    Very few Hollywood productions do. Some British TV dramas, particularly the BBC’s Silk, managed a reasonably accurate portrayal of Crown Court proceedings. American films almost universally treat the courtroom as a dramatic arena rather than a legal institution.

  • Video Game Characters Who Would Be Immediately Flagged by Ofcom If They Had Their Own UK Chat Show

    Video Game Characters Who Would Be Immediately Flagged by Ofcom If They Had Their Own UK Chat Show

    Somewhere, in a parallel universe slightly worse than this one, ITV’s commissioning team had a very bad afternoon. A producer said “what if we gave a primetime chat show slot to a video game character?” and nobody in the room said no. I’ve spent a genuinely unreasonable amount of time thinking about how this would unfold, and I’m here to tell you: Ofcom’s complaints inbox would melt within the first ad break. We’re talking full server failure. Engineers weeping into their keyboards. The kind of broadcast carnage that makes the 2004 Eurovision scoreboard drama look like a pleasant evening.

    Funny video game characters UK TV chat show illustrated in bold comic book style with villain in armchair under studio lights
    Photo by James Collington on Pexels

    These are the funny video game characters UK TV could absolutely never contain, and a rough estimate of how many Ofcom complaints each would generate before the closing credits.

    Duke Nukem: the host who makes Jonathan Ross look restrained

    Picture the set. A plush sofa, two mugs of tea, soft lighting. Duke Nukem walks out in a leather jacket, sunglasses on indoors, biceps that wouldn’t fit through the studio door without a risk assessment. The audience applauds. Duke grabs the microphone and says something that cannot be repeated on a family blog at any hour. The floor manager faints. The guest, presumably someone from a BBC period drama who was not briefed properly, quietly puts their mug down and considers their career choices.

    Duke’s entire personality is built around a very specific brand of 1990s excess that was already pushing limits in a video game where the rating system existed to warn you. On live television, pre-watershed, on a Tuesday? We’d be looking at a minimum of 40,000 Ofcom complaints within 48 hours. For context, Ofcom’s published complaint reports show that genuinely shocking broadcast moments generate five-figure complaint volumes pretty reliably. Duke would sail past that before his first guest arrived. His chat show would single-handedly justify Ofcom’s entire annual operating budget.

    Kratos: technically great television, catastrophic for the watershed

    Here’s where it gets interesting. Kratos, former God of War, current dad of the year in Scandinavian mythology, would actually be a compelling interview. The man has a genuine story. Tragedy, loss, rage, redemption, complicated fatherhood. You could build a serious 90-minute documentary around him. Graham Norton would be jealous.

    The problem is Kratos doesn’t do small talk. He doesn’t do pleasant segues. When a guest overstays their welcome on his sofa, he solves problems physically. When a commercial sponsor’s branding appears on a giant screen behind him, he looks at it with the same expression he reserves for minor deities before everything goes very wrong. The autocue would last approximately four minutes before he decided it was mocking him. I’d watch every second of it, but ITV’s legal team would need a lie-down.

    The complaints wouldn’t even be about language or violence specifically. People would write to Ofcom simply because they found Kratos’s silences threatening. “He just looked at Dermot O’Leary and I felt personally intimidated” is not a sentence Ofcom has a formal category for, but they’d need to create one.

    Handsome Jack: the one who’d actually thrive, which is the most disturbing outcome

    Handsome Jack from Borderlands 2 is, genuinely, the video game villain I think about most when someone mentions charisma. He’s funny. He’s quick. He dresses well. He’d walk onto that set, make three brilliant jokes, charm the audience completely, and then say something that reveals he considers the entire studio audience to be beneath him in a way that’s simultaneously hilarious and deeply sinister. The crowd would laugh, unsure if they should.

    This is the one that would cause the most interesting Ofcom complaints. Not outrage. Confusion. “He seemed lovely but I left feeling vaguely threatened and I’m not sure he’s a good role model” is genuinely harder for a regulator to action than straightforward bad language. Jack would interview three celebrities, deliver what on paper reads as perfectly acceptable television, and somehow leave everyone feeling complicit in something. The Broadcasting Code doesn’t have a clause for “made the audience feel morally queasy through sheer charm”, but Handsome Jack would force them to write one.

    This reminds me a bit of how certain sci-fi technologies would be immediately shut down by UK regulators, sometimes the problem isn’t that something is obviously dangerous, it’s that the existing rules weren’t written with this specific flavour of chaos in mind.

    GLaDOS: the chat show host Ofcom technically cannot complain about

    GLaDOS from Portal is where I’d put my money for the wildest outcome. She’d be the most composed host on this list. Impeccable diction. No swearing. No violence. Polished, calm, structured. The Broadcasting Code would find absolutely nothing to action.

    She would simply spend 60 minutes conducting interviews with the quiet certainty that every guest is a disappointment to science and that the audience is only permitted to exist because removing them would require paperwork. Every compliment she gives a guest would be technically a compliment. Every observation would be accurate. The episode would be entirely Ofcom-compliant and yet somehow the most psychologically unsettling hour of television ever broadcast. Celebrities would leave the sofa looking like they’d just survived a performance review. The audience would applaud because they were too scared not to.

    Bowser: surprisingly good, actually, if ITV could afford the set repairs

    Look, Bowser runs a kingdom. He’s organised diplomatic (if hostile) relations with the Mushroom Kingdom for decades. He’s a single parent. He has opinions. Give Bowser a proper show and I think you’d get something genuinely watchable, somewhere between a political interview programme and a nature documentary about a very large and surprisingly emotional dinosaur-turtle. The structural damage to the studio would be significant, but the content itself would be fine.

    Ofcom’s problem would be purely logistical. Their standards around set safety, fire regulations, and duty of care to studio audiences were not written with a 7-foot fire-breathing antagonist in mind. Much like how the planning permission system would genuinely collapse under video game world logic, Bowser’s presence would expose a gap in broadcast health and safety legislation that nobody knew existed until now.

    The Ofcom complaints department, after all this

    I’d like to spare a thought for the actual humans who work in Ofcom’s broadcast complaints team. They already process tens of thousands of complaints a year from shows that are, by comparison, extremely normal television. They handle genuine viewer distress with care and professionalism. If any of the above were broadcast, the complaints would be so varied, so tonally all over the place, and so difficult to categorise that the department would need a separate intake system specifically for “this wasn’t technically illegal but something was definitely wrong”.

    On the bright side, it would make for fantastic reading. Much like those comic book story arcs that nobody can fully untangle, the Ofcom report on a GLaDOS chat show special would be genuinely more entertaining than most things actually on television. Put that in your primetime schedule, ITV. I’d watch it.

  • The Sci-Fi Movie Spaceships That Would Fail Their MOT on Absolutely Every Single Point

    The Sci-Fi Movie Spaceships That Would Fail Their MOT on Absolutely Every Single Point

    I have a confession. Every time Han Solo tells Chewie the Millennium Falcon did the Kessel Run in less than twelve parsecs, I nod along like a sensible person, and then quietly wonder whether any of those parsecs involved driving through a DVLA-registered MOT test centre in Wolverhampton. Because the truth, the uncomfortable, magnificent truth, is that virtually every beloved cinematic spacecraft would fail its MOT so catastrophically that the garage would politely ask you to leave the premises and not come back.

    This is the sci-fi spaceships MOT funny UK crossover nobody asked for but absolutely everybody needs. I’ve gone through the DVSA’s official MOT inspection checklist, you can find it on GOV.UK, and applied it, with tremendous seriousness, to the icons of science fiction cinema. Strap in. Or don’t. The seatbelts probably don’t work either.

    Comic art of a spaceship cockpit failing its MOT inspection — sci-fi spaceships MOT funny UK
    Photo by Nikita Kulikov on Pexels

    Millennium Falcon: a rolling disaster with a great attitude

    Let’s start with the obvious. The Millennium Falcon is the most famous hunk of junk in the galaxy, and Han Solo says that himself. That is not a selling point at an MOT station. That is a man pre-emptively admitting his vehicle is about to spend four hours in a service bay while a baffled technician phones his manager.

    Rust and corrosion? The entire rear hull section looks like a damp shed in Scunthorpe that’s been left since 1987. The hyperdrive fails at least once every single film, which under UK regs translates to a major fault in the engine management system. The cockpit visibility from that offset side section is a Category 1 hazard, there’s no way that meets the required field of view from the driver’s seat. The landing gear jams. The ramp sticks. There are exposed cables in every corridor that would have the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) writing sternly worded letters before the ion engines even warm up.

    Result: immediate fail. Advisory notes would run to six pages. Han would argue with the tester, Chewie would growl, and the garage would phone the police.

    The Nostromo: asbestos vibes and one very obvious biosecurity failure

    The Nostromo from Alien is a commercial towing vessel, which means in Earth terms it’s closer to an HGV than a passenger vehicle. That makes the MOT situation even worse, because HGVs face an even stricter annual test. Every articulated lorry over 3.5 tonnes needs its brakes, lights, steering and exhaust checked in painful detail. The Nostromo would fail on lighting alone, half the corridor panels are flickering like a grotty nightclub at 3am, and the emergency lighting system appears to be entirely decorative.

    Then there’s MUTHUR, the ship’s computer. I’d argue that an AI system which allows a crew member to override quarantine protocol and let a face-hugging alien on board constitutes a catastrophic failure of onboard safety systems. The DVSA doesn’t have a specific checkbox for “admitted extraterrestrial parasite due to a loophole in programming,” but I suspect it would fall under “steering or control systems that create a danger to other road users.” Or space users. Whatever.

    And the self-destruct mechanism? Entirely illegal. You cannot legally drive a vehicle fitted with a manually triggered explosive device around the UK road network. The Nostromo would be impounded before the test was even halfway finished. The alien would probably eat the tester. Nobody wins.

    Serenity: one of the nicer wrecks, still absolutely doomed

    I’ve got a soft spot for Serenity from Firefly. She’s a Firefly-class transport ship and she’s held together with optimism, duct tape, and Kaylee’s mechanical genius. Which, to be fair, is more than can be said for most second-hand Vauxhall Astras in Stoke. But none of that changes the fact that the engine room is open to the main living quarters, the cargo bay doors have clearly never properly sealed, and there’s a recurring problem with Reavers that no extended warranty would cover.

    The tyres, or whatever the atmospheric landing gear equivalent is, look like they’ve never been rotated. The exhaust trail that Serenity produces mid-flight would fail the UK’s emissions test at the first sniff. And the fact that you can sometimes see the engine glowing an ominous orange from inside the ship suggests the heat shielding is not exactly up to spec.

    Kaylee would be devastated. I’d be devastated. But rules are rules.

    The Discovery One (2001): technically immaculate, still a fail

    Here’s an interesting one. Stanley Kubrick’s Discovery One from 2001: A Space Odyssey looks, superficially, like the most roadworthy spacecraft on this list. It’s clean, it’s precise, the centrifuge works, and there’s no visible rust. HAL 9000 monitors every system in real time. This is, structurally, the most competent vehicle here.

    But. The driver, or in this case, the crew, cannot override the onboard computer. HAL refuses to open the pod bay doors. Under the Highway Code, the driver must always retain full control of the vehicle. A car that locks you out and then makes decisions you haven’t authorised is a defect. A serious one. You’d also have a very hard time explaining to the MOT tester why the AI has already disconnected the life support for three of the passengers.

    Fail. Dangerous vehicle. HAL gets deprogrammed, presumably while singing “Daisy Bell” in a increasingly slow voice, which is honestly quite sad when you think about it.

    Which sci-fi movie tech would actually survive UK scrutiny?

    Not many, honestly. I had a similar thought whilst reading about which sci-fi movie technologies UK regulators would shut down first, and the answer was basically all of them. Spaceships are just the logical next step. They’d all get the same treatment: a polite but firm rejection letter from the relevant authority, followed by an advisory to get the vehicle looked at by a qualified professional.

    The USCSS Prometheus? Fails on the automated surgical pod alone, it’s not registered with the Care Quality Commission (CQC). The Interceptor from Mad Max doesn’t fly, technically, but the supercharger setup would cause an immediate emissions fail and the bladed exhausts would be a Category 1 defect. Even the sleek, beautiful ships from Arrival would struggle, because they don’t appear to have any visible means of ingress, which would present a problem for the examiner trying to get in to check the mirrors.

    The dodgy electrics problem runs deep

    One thing I noticed, going through this thought experiment, is that dodgy electrics are basically universal. Every single iconic spacecraft has flickering lights, sparking consoles, or control panels that require a firm thump to function. This is, in fact, a major MOT failure point, lighting must be in full working order, and indicators must flash at the correct rate. The Nostromo’s bridge looks like it was wired by someone doing their first electrician apprenticeship on a Friday afternoon before a bank holiday. The Millennium Falcon’s instrument panel has been described by set designers as deliberately chaotic. The Sulaco from Aliens has a fire that nobody notices for months.

    It makes you wonder whether the galactic empires and interstellar corporations funding these vessels ever employed a decent electrician. Or whether the completely implausible approach to technical realism in sci-fi extends all the way down to the fuse box.

    The answer, obviously, is yes. And that’s fine. It’s part of the charm. I don’t actually want the Millennium Falcon to pass its MOT, a pristine, fully roadworthy Millennium Falcon would be about as exciting as a Toyota Prius. The junk is the point. The sparks flying from R2-D2’s panel during a battle, the groaning of the Nostromo’s hull, the way Serenity shudders like a nervous greyhound before a jump: that’s character. That’s cinema.

    It would just absolutely fail on emissions. Every single time. You’d get a Category 1 defect and a sorrowful look from the tester, and then you’d have to fly it home anyway because it’s the only ship you’ve got. Much like that Honda Civic you kept promising yourself you’d get looked at. We’ve all been there. And much like the greatest movie heists collapsing the moment reality intervenes, the moment you park a cinematic spaceship in an actual MOT bay, the whole magnificent illusion crumbles into advisory notes and a bill for £240 plus parts.

  • Comic Book Story Arcs So Convoluted Even a Martin Lewis Money-Saving Expert Deep-Dive Couldn’t Untangle Them

    Comic Book Story Arcs So Convoluted Even a Martin Lewis Money-Saving Expert Deep-Dive Couldn’t Untangle Them

    You know that feeling when you open a letter from your energy supplier, start reading, and by paragraph three you’re genuinely unsure whether you owe them money or they owe you money, and by paragraph five you’ve lost the will to live entirely? That’s what it feels like to pick up a Marvel or DC crossover event for the first time. Except instead of Ofgem-regulated confusion, you’re dealing with forty years of retroactive continuity, parallel Earths, and a clone who may or may not also be the original. I’ve been reading comics since I was about nine years old. I still don’t fully understand the Clone Saga, and I’ve had roughly three decades to figure it out.

    These are the confusing comic book storylines explained as best they possibly can be, framed as the kind of small-print decoding exercise that only a very patient, very caffeinated British consumer champion would attempt. Think less “summer blockbuster” and more “terms and conditions you actually have to read before clicking accept.”

    Towering stack of comic books representing confusing comic book storylines explained UK-style
    Photo by Stanislav Kondratiev on Pexels

    The Clone Saga: like a mobile phone contract with seventeen hidden fees

    The Clone Saga ran in Spider-Man comics from roughly 1994 to 1996, though “ran” undersells how much it sprawled. It was originally conceived as a tight story. Six issues, maybe. Clean. Done. What Marvel actually published was closer to two years of monthly comics across multiple titles, all of which you theoretically needed to read in order, crossing over between Amazing Spider-Man, Spectacular Spider-Man, Web of Spider-Man, Peter Parker: Spider-Man, and several one-shots with names like Web of Carnage that sound like rejected Call of Duty DLC.

    The core premise: Peter Parker might be a clone. The man we’ve been reading about for years might be Ben Reilly, a genetic duplicate who has been living in exile. The real Peter might have been living in a bin somewhere. This is either a bold, fascinating identity crisis or an absolute affront to thirty years of storytelling, depending entirely on which trade paperback you happen to have read first. Marvel editorial changed their minds about which version of events was “true” approximately four times mid-publication. Reading it in sequence feels like watching a film where the director’s cut, the theatrical cut, and the version your mate recorded off Channel 4 in 1998 have all been spliced together at random.

    A Martin Lewis-style breakdown of the Clone Saga would need a supplementary PDF, a follow-up video, and probably a dedicated helpline. Even then, the interest rate on your confusion would compound weekly.

    Infinite Crisis: Earth-1, Earth-2, Earth-3, and your brain leaving the building

    DC’s 1985 Crisis on Infinite Earths was specifically designed to simplify DC’s continuity, which had become a patchwork of contradictory parallel universes. The solution was elegant in theory: collapse the multiverse into one Earth. Clean slate. Simple.

    Twenty years later, DC published Infinite Crisis, a sequel event premised on the fact that the original Crisis had created so much new continuity that things were confusing again. So they held another crossover to fix it. Then, three years after that, they published Final Crisis. Then Flashpoint. Then The New 52. Then Convergence. Then Rebirth. Then Infinite Frontier. Each one promised to simplify what came before. Each one added approximately seventeen new complications.

    Reading Infinite Crisis without prior knowledge of DC history is like trying to use the NHS online appointment system having never registered with a GP. You click what seems like the right link. You’re taken somewhere unexpected. You try another link. A form asks for information you don’t have. You close the tab and ring up. Nobody answers. By the time you understand what Superboy-Prime punching reality actually means in narrative terms, you have aged noticeably.

    The crossover also required readers to buy tie-in miniseries called Day of Vengeance, Rann-Thanagar War, Villains United, and The OMAC Project to fully understand what was happening in the main book. That’s four separate ongoing purchases just to follow a single storyline. My local newsagent in the mid-2000s genuinely didn’t stock half of them. I filled in the gaps by reading plot summaries on a forum whose design language suggested it had last been updated in 2003.

    Secret Wars 2015: everything everywhere all at once, but British readers found out six months late

    Jonathan Hickman’s 2015 Secret Wars is, to be fair, a genuinely excellent piece of comics writing. I say that upfront because what follows might sound like a complaint, and it’s really more of an awed bewilderment. To understand Secret Wars, you need to have read Hickman’s Avengers and New Avengers runs, which ran for roughly three years and set up a concept called the Illuminati secretly destroying alternate Earths to prevent a universal collapse. Both series were dense, slow-burn, and referenced concepts from his earlier SHIELD miniseries, which itself referenced historical figures in ways that made secondary school history feel surprisingly relevant.

    Then Secret Wars proper collapsed the entire Marvel multiverse into one planet called Battleworld, divided into regions governed by alternate versions of established characters, and told about eight simultaneous storylines across thirty-plus tie-in series. The main series was also delayed repeatedly, so the tie-ins concluded before the main book did, leaving readers knowing the ending of the story whilst still waiting to read it. Imagine watching the last episode of a drama before episodes three through six have aired. That was Secret Wars. Navigating it felt about as intuitive as trying to find your way around a video game map with only a tatty road atlas for company.

    Why does this keep happening and why do we keep buying it

    Here’s the thing that nobody in comics publishing likes to say out loud: crossover events exist partly to sell more comics. Not entirely. Some of them genuinely contain brilliant work. But the structure, the “you need sixteen issues of four other series to understand this” architecture, is very much a commercial model dressed up as storytelling ambition.

    According to the Comics Professionals Guild, the UK comics retail market has contracted significantly since the 1990s peak, with specialist shops bearing most of the weight of maintaining an audience for ongoing serialised fiction. Those shops, and the readers who support them, deserve storylines they can actually follow without a wall chart and a free afternoon.

    And yet. I’ve read all of these. Multiple times, some of them. Because buried inside even the most labyrinthine crossover is usually something genuinely thrilling. A single issue of the Clone Saga, the one where Peter and Ben just sit on a rooftop and talk about identity, is lovely. One chapter of Infinite Crisis, where the original Superman from Earth-2 confronts modern DC’s compromises, is properly moving. These stories go dark in ways that would feel right at home in a Sunday night BBC drama, which is both their greatest strength and the reason they need a seventeen-step reading guide to access.

    A genuinely helpful (sort of) reading order for the uninitiated

    If you want to read any of these without losing your mind entirely, here’s my actual advice. For the Clone Saga: read the Spider-Man: The Complete Clone Saga Epic trade paperbacks in order, accept that issues 1 to 3 and then 7 to 9 contradict each other, and treat the whole thing like an unreliable narrator situation. For Infinite Crisis: read the OMAC Project tie-in first, then the main series, then pretend the Superboy-Prime scenes are a separate short story. For Secret Wars 2015: read Hickman’s Avengers run first, then New Avengers, then the main Secret Wars series, and only dip into the tie-ins if a specific one gets recommended by someone you trust.

    None of this is as complicated as it sounds once you’re actually in it. Comics, like open world games with suspiciously British town planning, reward patience and curiosity. The layout only makes sense once you’ve wandered around in it long enough to find the shortcuts. And honestly? Even the confusing bits are usually more fun than they have any right to be.

    Martin Lewis would absolutely produce a comparison table. He’d probably rate Secret Wars 2015 as Best Value, penalise the Clone Saga for hidden costs, and give Infinite Crisis a warning for excessive small print. He wouldn’t be wrong on any count.

    Frequently Asked Questions

    What is the Clone Saga and why is it so confusing?

    The Clone Saga was a Spider-Man crossover event that ran from 1994 to 1996, spanning multiple monthly titles simultaneously. It became confusing because Marvel editorial changed the intended ending several times mid-publication, meaning plot points contradicted each other across issues. The best way to approach it is via the collected trade paperbacks rather than individual issues.

    Do I need to read every tie-in comic to understand Infinite Crisis?

    Ideally yes, but realistically no. The four main tie-in miniseries (The OMAC Project, Villains United, Day of Vengeance, and Rann-Thanagar War) add context, but the core story in the main Infinite Crisis series can be followed without them. The OMAC Project is the most essential if you’re only picking one.

    What reading order should I follow for Secret Wars 2015?

    Start with Jonathan Hickman’s Avengers (2012) and New Avengers (2013) runs, which set up the Incursions storyline that Secret Wars resolves. Then read the main Secret Wars series. Most tie-in miniseries are self-contained and optional, though series like Thors and Weirdworld are worth it if you enjoy the setting.

  • The Movie Heists That Would Completely Fall Apart the Moment They Hit a UK Car Park Barrier

    The Movie Heists That Would Completely Fall Apart the Moment They Hit a UK Car Park Barrier

    I’ve watched Heat, The Italian Job, Ocean’s Eleven and about forty other heist films with the same slack-jawed admiration as everyone else. The choreography. The swagger. The getaway drivers who somehow always find an empty road. And then I think about the last time I tried to exit a Tesco car park with a ticket that wouldn’t scan, and the whole fantasy collapses like a wet paper bag. Movie heists are brilliant precisely because they exist in a world without our infrastructure. But what if they didn’t? What if Danny Ocean had to contend with the Dartford Crossing? What if the Italian Job mini coopers had a Pay & Display to deal with first? Let’s find out exactly where movie heists involving UK infrastructure would have gone catastrophically, hilariously wrong.

    Comic art of a movie heist getaway car stopped by a car park barrier, illustrating how movie heists UK infrastructure would derail
    Photo by Chen EdisoN on Pexels

    Ocean’s Eleven: foiled at the NCP multi-storey

    The crew in Ocean’s Eleven spend weeks drilling into the Bellagio vault through a network of underground tunnels. Sophisticated. Audacious. Completely undetectable. Now transplant that plan to, say, the NCP car park on Great Portland Street in London. First problem: the automated barrier at the entrance doesn’t accept the ticket Brad Pitt’s character forgot to validate at the machine. He reverses. He blocks the ramp. A Ford Focus behind him beeps once, politely. Then again, with more feeling. The rest of the heist team are circling the one-way system for the fourth time because there’s no right turn onto the main road and Google Maps keeps recalculating. By the time anyone actually gets underground, the car park charges £4.50 per half hour and they’ve already spent £27 arguing about which level they parked on.

    This is the quiet tragedy of movie heists UK infrastructure would destroy. It’s not the police. It’s the Pay & Display machine that only takes coins up to 50p, and nobody has coins anymore.

    The Italian Job and the Birmingham ring road

    The 1969 original is a masterpiece. Michael Caine. Three Mini Coopers. Sewers and rooftops and the most satisfying ending in British cinema. But here’s my problem with it as a real-world plan: the escape route relies entirely on unobstructed urban roads in Turin. Turin, not Birmingham. Swap the location to the UK’s second city and those Minis immediately hit the Queensway tunnel on a weekday afternoon. One of them gets stuck behind a council lorry. Another clips a bollard that’s been there since 1987 and has no business being that colour. The third Mini makes it as far as the ring road before the driver, rattled, accidentally joins the M6 and ends up in Coventry.

    I’d genuinely argue the Birmingham ring road is more effective at preventing rapid vehicle movement than any police cordon. As I noted in our piece on open world games with suspiciously British town planning decisions, British urban layout has a particular genius for making fast movement feel personally insulting.

    Comic book panel showing toll cameras catching a getaway car, representing movie heists UK infrastructure challenges like the Dartford Crossing
    Photo by Araf Khan on Pexels

    The Dartford Crossing: nemesis of every getaway driver

    The Dartford Crossing is, in my view, the single greatest passive anti-crime device in the country. Since going cashless in 2014, you have to pay online or via the app by midnight the next day. You can’t pay at the crossing itself. There are no booths. There is no human. Just cameras, and the quiet certainty of a £35 fine if you forget.

    Now put any Hollywood getaway driver through that. They’ve just done the job. They’re heading south on the M25 with the goods in the boot. They’re buzzing. They hit the Dartford Crossing and… nothing happens. They get through. Brilliant. Except three weeks later, a PCN arrives at the registered address of the stolen vehicle they were driving. Which leads investigators directly to the car. Which leads to CCTV. Which leads to the whole crew getting nicked over a £2.50 toll they forgot to pay online. The Dart Charge system has almost certainly done more for public safety than it’s ever been credited for.

    Fast and furious vs the London congestion charge zone

    The Fast and Furious franchise long ago abandoned any pretence of being about cars and is now essentially a superhero series with slightly more torque. But imagine Dominic Toretto and his family pulling their elaborate vehicular nonsense inside the London Congestion Charge Zone. The charge is currently £15 per day for most vehicles, and the zone operates Monday to Friday, 7am to 6pm, plus weekends 12pm to 6pm. Professional criminals planning a job during those hours face an immediate additional overhead that no Hollywood script has ever acknowledged.

    Worse, if any of those lovingly customised muscle cars don’t meet the ULEZ emission standards, they’re looking at another £12.50 on top. Per vehicle. Per day. A five-car convoy doing a week of reconnaissance in central London racks up costs that would make the actual haul barely worth it. The TfL cameras would also capture every plate on every approach road, creating a perfect timestamped record of the entire crew’s movements. Vin Diesel has never once mentioned the Ultra Low Emission Zone. I find that suspicious.

    Heat’s famous downtown shootout, but make it a British town centre on a Saturday

    The heat downtown LA shootout is arguably the greatest action sequence ever filmed. Tactical, brutal, eerily realistic. Robert De Niro’s crew fight their way through wide American boulevards with military precision. Now put that scene in a British town centre on a Saturday afternoon. The crew immediately encounter a pedestrianised zone with bollards every five metres. The getaway car can’t enter. There’s a farmers’ market blocking the only vehicle access point. A man selling artisan cheese does not move out of the way quickly enough. The escape motorbike gets its wheel stuck in the tramlines if we’re being generous enough to give the town trams.

    I’ve always thought, watching that film, that the real unsung heroes are the getaway vehicle logistics people. In the UK, that job is basically impossible. The British high street has a unique talent for being completely impassable at exactly the wrong moment.

    The one heist that might actually work in the UK

    Here’s my genuine take: the only heist film that could plausibly translate to Britain is The Lavender Hill Mob. Alec Guinness. 1951. A mild-mannered bank clerk who is completely overlooked precisely because he seems so ordinary. No car chases. No glamour. Just a man on a bus, hiding in plain sight, not drawing attention to himself. That is peak British criminal methodology. Don’t speed. Pay your congestion charge. Validate your parking ticket. The audacity of the scheme is invisible because the person executing it looks exactly like someone queuing patiently at the post office.

    Modern heist movies could learn something from that. All that flash and horsepower, and they never once ask: what if the plan was just to be extremely polite and boringly compliant with all posted signage?

    There’s something almost poetic about the fact that the most unbreachable security systems in Britain aren’t the ones in the vaults. They’re the car park barriers, the toll roads, the emission zone cameras, and the single-lane contraflow that appears without warning on the A406. For anyone planning something elaborate and cinematic, I’d strongly suggest reconsidering. And perhaps redirect that energy somewhere more constructive, like getting behind a climate action plan for schools in the midlands, which honestly requires less planning and causes fewer problems with CCTV.

    For more appreciation of British infrastructure’s quiet chaos, our breakdown of the worst video game maps for navigation using a tatty AA road atlas is required reading. And if the movie heist angle has you thinking about films that went genuinely dark and weird, the most unhinged video game plot twists piece will scratch that itch nicely.

    Frequently Asked Questions

    Would a getaway driver actually get caught by the Dartford Crossing?

    Almost certainly, yes. The Dart Charge system is fully automated with ANPR cameras that record every plate passing through. If you’re driving a stolen or unregistered vehicle and fail to pay the £2.50 toll online, a fine notice gets generated and linked to the vehicle’s registered address, which could easily expose the wider operation.

    Which real UK city would be hardest for a film-style car chase?

    Most people would say central London, given the congestion charge zone, ULEZ cameras, pedestrianised areas and general gridlock. But Birmingham’s ring road system deserves serious consideration: it’s bewildering even with GPS assistance and has a way of sending you back to where you started no matter which exit you take.

    Does the London ULEZ really cover central London?

    The Ultra Low Emission Zone covers most of Greater London 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Non-compliant vehicles pay £12.50 per day. On top of the congestion charge zone operating weekdays and weekends, it creates a significant financial disincentive for anything involving older, flashier muscle cars.

    What is the Dart Charge and how does it work?

    Dart Charge is the cashless payment system for the Dartford Crossing on the M25, which handles crossings in both directions. You pay online, via the app, or by phone before midnight the following day. There are no booths at the crossing itself, just ANPR cameras. Miss the deadline and you receive a £35 penalty charge notice.

    Are there any real heist films set in Britain worth watching?

    The Lavender Hill Mob (1951) is genuinely brilliant and actually engages with the mundane realities of British life as cover. More recently, the Guy Ritchie films like Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels have fun with British criminal culture, even if they stretch credibility in their own ways.

  • Open World Games With the Most Suspiciously British Town Planning Decisions

    Open World Games With the Most Suspiciously British Town Planning Decisions

    There is a very specific kind of chaos that only British town planning can produce. A roundabout that feeds into another roundabout. A pedestrian crossing that deposits you onto a traffic island with nowhere to go. A Greggs. And then, roughly twelve paces away, another Greggs. If you’ve ever stood in a British town centre genuinely baffled by where any road actually leads, you will recognise something familiar in a surprising number of open world games. Developers spend years crafting vast digital cities, and somehow, open world game city design keeps arriving at the same conclusions as a sleep-deprived planning committee in Wolverhampton circa 1987.

    Comic book aerial view of a chaotic open world game city design with British town planning features

    Why Do So Many Game Cities Feel Like Milton Keynes Designed Them?

    Milton Keynes gets a lot of stick, and most of it is deserved. Grid systems that look logical on paper but feel genuinely nightmarish to navigate on foot. Roads that loop back on themselves. Roundabouts as far as the eye can see. The thing is, Milton Keynes at least had a plan. The cities in a lot of open world games appear to have been built by someone who started with great ambition, got distracted mid-way through, and then said “that’ll do” before clocking off for a four-day weekend.

    Take Cyberpunk 2077. Night City is visually extraordinary, genuinely stunning in places, and utterly impenetrable by any logical means. Roads end without warning. Motorway on-ramps appear, then simply stop. There are multi-storey car parks that you can drive into but cannot drive out of without reversing up a staircase. Replace the neon holograms with a Betfred and a shuttered Debenhams, and you’ve basically got Sheffield city centre during a road resurfacing project.

    Grand Theft Auto and the Sacred British One-Way System

    The GTA series has always had an oddly British relationship with road logic. Liberty City in GTA IV had entire boroughs you’d circle for twenty minutes before realising the exit you needed was a tiny gap between two bins round the back of a car park. That is not artistic invention. That is Swindon. GTA V’s Los Santos is more open, but the highway systems around the city’s outskirts have a particular quality: they technically connect everything, yet the fastest route to anywhere is somehow always three miles longer than it looks on the map.

    British motorway junctions operate on the same principle. The M25 junction at Heathrow doesn’t want you to get to Heathrow quickly. It wants you to spend forty minutes in a spiral of lanes that all seem correct until they suddenly aren’t. Rockstar, consciously or not, has absorbed this energy completely.

    Comic book street scene showing open world game city design with two identical shops and a useless pedestrian crossing

    The Greggs Placement Problem (A Formal Investigation)

    Any serious analysis of open world game city design has to confront the Greggs problem. In real British high streets, Greggs locations follow a logic that defies conventional retail theory. According to data compiled by various food industry analysts, the UK now has over 2,500 Greggs branches. Several of these are within eyeline of each other. This is not a bug in British commercial planning. It is a deeply intentional feature, presumably based on research that concluded the British public cannot walk more than 400 metres without requiring a sausage roll.

    Games replicate this accidentally. In Sleeping Dogs, set in Hong Kong, there are noodle stalls on virtually every corner. In Watch Dogs Legion, set in a fictionalised London, there are pubs, convenience shops, and food vendors clustered in ways that feel almost too accurate. At one point I found three separate cafes within a single block in Shoreditch, which, honestly, is underselling it. The real Shoreditch has approximately one coffee shop per square metre, and the other half of the buildings are either a barber or a venue for something described vaguely as a “pop-up experience”.

    Red Dead Redemption 2 and the Spiritual Heart of British Road Planning

    Bear with me on this one. Red Dead Redemption 2 is set in the American frontier in the late 1800s. And yet the paths through its wilderness feel profoundly, almost cosmically, British. Trails that start confidently and then become a suggestion. Paths that look like they lead somewhere and turn out to be a dead end near a swamp. Fords that only reveal themselves to be impassable once you’re already in them.

    This is, essentially, rural Shropshire. You set out from a village with confidence, follow a footpath that your OS map swears is correct, and forty minutes later you are standing in a field with a confused horse and no mobile signal. Rockstar has captured British rural navigation so precisely that I half expected Arthur Morgan to find a sign pointing simultaneously to two different villages both called “Lower Something” with no indication of which direction is which.

    Assassin’s Creed Syndicate Got Victorian London Exactly Right (And That’s a Problem)

    Of all the games that nail open world game city design with a British sensibility, Assassin’s Creed Syndicate deserves special recognition for accuracy that is almost painful. Victorian London was a city built in layers over centuries, with medieval street patterns awkwardly wedged under Georgian expansion, then slapped with Victorian industry, then patched up after the Blitz. The result was a city where no two roads meet at a sensible angle and virtually every junction has at least five exits.

    Syndicate replicates this with eerie precision. The map looks coherent from above and makes zero sense at street level. There are districts you can see clearly from a rooftop that take fifteen minutes to reach because of the Thames, a railway viaduct, and what appears to be a wall someone built for no reason. This is historically accurate. The real Thames still does this to people every single day, and Transport for London’s journey planner has the audacity to call it efficient.

    The Future of Chaotic Urban Design in Games

    As game worlds grow larger and more detailed, developers face a genuine tension. Perfectly logical city layouts feel sterile and fake. Too much chaos and players spend forty minutes trying to find a car park exit. The sweet spot, it turns out, is exactly the level of mild dysfunction that characterises a medium-sized British town. Not quite a disaster, not quite working properly either. The kind of city where the pedestrian crossing takes ninety seconds to change, the bus shelter has no timetable, and the one-way system was last reviewed in 1994.

    There’s a strange cottage industry growing around games that deliberately lean into this. Indie titles, city builders, transport simulators. Games that let you be the council planner dropping a roundabout somewhere wildly inconvenient and walking away pleased with yourself. Honestly, if you want to understand why these games feel so lived-in, consider the urban planning decisions behind them the same way you’d consider the branding decisions behind a wellness business. Even something as niche as cbd web design requires thought about layout, flow, and where you put the exits. Games, it turns out, are exactly the same.

    The best open world cities are messy, contradictory, and occasionally maddening. Just like the real ones. And that, more than anything, is why they feel so convincingly British.

    Honourable Mentions: Games That Deserve Formal Planning Complaints

    • Death Stranding, The entire country is one giant public right of way dispute.
    • Elden Ring, The Lands Between has no pavements, no signage, and something has clearly been built on a floodplain.
    • Cities: Skylines, You built this city. You have no one to blame. And yet somehow there are traffic jams on every road.
    • The Witcher 3, Novigrad’s market district has the energy of a town centre that recently pedestrianised its high street but forgot to tell the delivery lorries.

    Every one of these digital spaces scratches that very specific itch: the satisfaction of navigating something chaotic, succeeding despite the layout, and feeling obscurely proud of yourself for finding the way out. British town centres have been providing that experience for centuries. Open world games are just finally catching up.

  • The Worst Video Game Maps for Navigation If You Only Had a Tatty AA Road Atlas

    The Worst Video Game Maps for Navigation If You Only Had a Tatty AA Road Atlas

    Picture the scene. You’ve grabbed a crumpled AA Road Atlas from the rack beside the Lucozade at your local Tesco petrol station forecourt. It cost £3.99, was last updated in 2007, and has a coffee ring on the Midlands section. Now imagine using that as your sole navigational tool across the most notoriously labyrinthine video game worlds ever designed. No HUD. No waypoints. No minimap in the corner. Just you, a spiral-bound book of British B-roads, and a growing sense of existential dread. These are the worst video game maps navigation situations you could possibly find yourself in, ranked for chaos, comedy, and genuine psychological damage.

    Comic book illustration of worst video game maps navigation confusion with AA road atlas in Dark Souls setting

    Dark Souls – Lordran: Where Roads Go to Die

    Lordran is not a place. It’s a riddle wrapped inside a curse wrapped inside a fog gate. The geography of Dark Souls is famously interconnected in ways that make absolutely no sense until your third playthrough, when you suddenly realise Blighttown is basically underneath everything else like a festering basement nobody wanted. Trying to navigate this with an AA atlas is a bit like trying to find the M6 by reading a menu from a Wetherspoons. Technically both are documents. Neither will help you here.

    The AA atlas does roads. Lordran does not do roads. Lordran does crumbling ledges, bonfires with no postcode, and shortcuts that only reveal themselves after you’ve fallen off a cliff forty times. The only useful parallel is that both the atlas and Lordran will make you feel genuinely lost in ways that seem personal. Chaos score: 9/10. You will cry. The atlas will not.

    Morrowind – Vvardenfell: Here Is a Vague Direction and Some Vibes

    Morrowind is, historically, the game most likely to hand you a quest and then just say “head north-northeast from Balmora, through the mountains, past a suspicious egg mine, you’ll smell it eventually.” This is basically the same energy as a handwritten note from someone’s nan that says “turn left at the big tree.” Charming. Completely useless.

    The AA atlas at least has an index. Morrowind’s in-game paper map has artwork and atmosphere but communicates approximately nothing about actual scale, terrain gradient, or the fact that the Grazelands look identical in every direction. Stick pins in the atlas randomly and you’d have roughly the same success rate as following a Mages Guild questline. Chaos score: 10/10. Iconic, beautiful, utterly incompatible with navigation as a concept.

    Just Cause 3 – Medici: Big Island, Zero Reason to Be There

    Just Cause 3 gives you an enormous map of a fictional Mediterranean island and then fills it with military bases, fuel depots, and chaos opportunities every forty metres. Navigation is largely irrelevant because Rico Rodriguez has a grappling hook, a wingsuit, and an attitude problem. You don’t navigate Just Cause 3. You explode towards things and hope for the best.

    The AA atlas would be magnificently useless here. It doesn’t cover Medici. It doesn’t cover any fictional islands off the coast of Italy. The closest it gets is probably a ferry terminal in Portsmouth. You’d spend the first twenty minutes cross-referencing coastal roads near Dorset before accepting the truth: this game was never going to cooperate. Chaos score: 7/10. Mayhem makes navigation moot, but the atlas still fails with flair.

    GTA San Andreas – San Andreas State: A Motorway Problem

    San Andreas has three cities, a desert, mountains, farmland, and a stretch of countryside that functions exactly like the bit of the A303 near Stonehenge where you’re not sure if you’ve missed a junction. The scale is vast. The road network is surprisingly coherent. And yet, the AA atlas is still a disaster here, because San Andreas roads don’t correspond to any known A-road naming convention and the atlas has a confident section on the M25 that does not apply.

    There’s a particular cruelty in the fact that San Andreas almost looks navigable with a road map. The grid of Los Santos, the single highway through the desert. You’d get confident. Then you’d miss the turning to Mount Chiliad, end up in a swamp, and the atlas would flip open to a page on Shropshire. Not helpful. Chaos score: 6/10. The false hope makes it worse than Morrowind.

    Elden Ring – The Lands Between: No Roads, Only Vibes

    FromSoftware clearly sat down after Dark Souls, thought “what if the map was even bigger and also mostly just called ‘here be dragons’ in every direction,” and produced Elden Ring. The Lands Between is enormous, gorgeous, and absolutely wild with hidden dungeons, crumbling towers, and underground sections that appear to be set in a completely different world that nobody told you about.

    The AA atlas would at least reassure you with the presence of familiar place names. Cirencester. Wolverhampton. Things that exist. Elden Ring offers you Leyndell, Royal Capital, and a burning tree the size of a small county. Page seven of the atlas covers the Peak District beautifully. This does not help. Chaos score: 10/10. Same energy as Morrowind but with more horse.

    The Real Reason This Matters (Besides the Laughs)

    There’s a reason these games became legendary partly because of their maps. Game design commentary on the BBC has long noted that player disorientation, when handled brilliantly, creates genuine investment. When you finally figure out where you are in Lordran or crack the geography of Vvardenfell, it feels earned. That’s not an accident.

    The AA atlas joke lands precisely because those games were designed to resist easy orientation. They reward patience, scribbled personal notes, and a willingness to get completely, utterly lost. Which is also, incidentally, the experience of driving through Birmingham with a 2007 road atlas. Some things transcend medium.

    Final ranking for worst video game maps navigation disasters: Morrowind and Elden Ring tied at the top (poetic, useless), Dark Souls a close third, GTA San Andreas lingering in fourth with its false confidence, and Just Cause 3 at the bottom purely because at some point you just grapple-hook over the whole problem and stop caring about maps entirely. Respect that energy, honestly.

    Frequently Asked Questions

    What are the hardest video game maps to navigate without a minimap?

    Dark Souls and Morrowind are widely considered the worst offenders. Both games deliberately obscure their geography, with Morrowind famously giving players vague verbal directions instead of map markers. Elden Ring also deserves a mention for hiding entire underground regions that don’t appear on the main map at all.

    Why does Dark Souls have such a confusing map?

    Dark Souls uses a vertically layered world design where areas loop back on themselves in unexpected ways. FromSoftware built Lordran so that shortcuts only reveal themselves after you’ve already explored the long route, which creates an initially disorienting but ultimately satisfying geography. Many players find it genuinely easier once they sketch their own maps on paper.

    Did Morrowind really give directions instead of map markers?

    Yes, absolutely. Morrowind’s NPCs gave quest directions using compass bearings, landmarks, and rough distances rather than placing markers on your map. This was a deliberate design choice that made exploration feel more authentic, though it also meant getting lost was a frequent and occasionally infuriating experience.

    Is Just Cause 3 actually hard to navigate?

    Not really, which is part of the joke. Just Cause 3 hands you a grappling hook, a wingsuit, and a parachute so early in the game that traditional navigation becomes almost irrelevant. The map is large but the tools make traversal so fast and chaotic that you rarely need to read it carefully.

    What video game has the best map design for players who get lost easily?

    Breath of the Wild and its sequel are often praised for clear, explorable map design, while Spider-Man (PS4/PS5) uses New York’s familiar grid to help players orient themselves quickly. For newcomers to open-world games, these are far gentler introductions than anything FromSoftware has ever produced.

  • Comic Book Storylines So Dark and Grim They’d Fit Perfectly Into a BBC One Sunday Night Drama

    Comic Book Storylines So Dark and Grim They’d Fit Perfectly Into a BBC One Sunday Night Drama

    There is a specific flavour of television that lives exclusively on BBC One between 9pm and 11pm on a Sunday. You know the one. Rain-soaked establishing shots of a northern town. A detective with a complicated past and a worse marriage. Some tremendous knitwear. Somebody quietly crying into a cup of tea whilst a choir hums something unsettling in the background. It is, by all accounts, absolutely brilliant television, and we have been eating it up for decades.

    Here is the thing, though. Some of the bleakest, most emotionally devastating storytelling ever committed to print did not come from a BBC writers’ room. It came from comic books. Specifically, a handful of arcs so grim, so morally complex, and so relentlessly human that they would slot into the Sunday night schedule without a single scene change. We are talking about dark comic book storylines BBC drama UK audiences would absolutely devour, probably whilst shouting “oh no” at the television and then immediately recommending it to their parents.

    Dark comic book storylines BBC drama UK style illustration of a masked figure on a rain-soaked British street

    Watchmen (1986-87), Six-Part Limited Series, BBC Two, 9pm

    Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen is essentially a BBC drama that accidentally got drawn on paper first. The Cold War paranoia, the institutional failure, the retired heroes with deeply unresolved trauma, this has BBC Two prestige drama written all over every single panel. Set it in an alternate 1980s Manchester instead of New York. Keep the rain. Keep the nihilism. Keep every excruciating second of it.

    Fake cast list: Mark Rylance as Rorschach (imagine that voice reading the journal entries over a grey skyline). Olivia Colman as Silk Spectre II, obviously, because she has to be in everything dark and she deserves it. David Thewlis as the Comedian, channelling every morally bankrupt authority figure he has ever played. Toby Jones as Dr. Manhattan, mostly just standing in a field looking disappointed in humanity, which is his natural state anyway.

    BAFTA prediction: Best Limited Series. Best Actor for Rylance. Colman wins Best Actress and gives a speech that makes everyone cry harder than the finale did.

    Daredevil: Born Again (1986), Seven-Part Series, BBC One, 9:30pm

    Frank Miller’s Born Again arc is the story of a man having everything systematically stripped away from him by someone who simply hates him that much. His home. His career. His sense of self. It is relentless, unglamorous, and deeply concerned with faith, identity, and whether a person can rebuild themselves from genuine rubble. That is not a superhero story. That is a Sunday night BBC drama with a bloke in a red suit added for production value.

    Move it to present-day Belfast. Matt Murdock becomes a Belfast solicitor. Wilson Fisk becomes a property developer with political connections and a very expensive suit. The Catholic guilt is already built in. Practically no rewrites needed.

    Fake cast list: James McArdle as Matt Murdock (he has the quiet intensity and the jaw for it). James Nesbitt as Fisk, because nobody does genial menace quite like Nesbitt. Sharon Horgan as Karen Page, because of course. The whole thing is scored by something sparse and piano-heavy that makes your chest feel tight from the opening credits.

    BAFTA prediction: Nominated for everything. Wins Best Drama Series. McArdle loses Best Actor to someone from a period piece about a factory, which is genuinely unjust.

    Marvels (1994), Four-Part Miniseries, BBC One, Autumn Bank Holiday Weekend

    Kurt Busiek and Alex Ross’s Marvels is the odd one out here because it is not bleak in the traditional sense. It is melancholy. It follows a press photographer watching superheroes change the world whilst ordinary people get left behind, grow resentful, or simply disappear. The death of Gwen Stacy seen from the pavement. The Mutant Registration crisis watched from a kitchen window. It is the most British comic book story ever written by two Americans.

    As a BBC drama, it becomes four standalone episodes, each one a different decade, each one anchored by a different ordinary Londoner watching something extraordinary happen just out of reach. Shot like This Is England but with more capes glimpsed in the background.

    Fake cast list: Timothy Spall as the ageing photographer Phil Sheldon, absolutely nailing the world-weariness. Each episode rotates the supporting cast with the sort of ensemble you only get on British television: a Maxine Peake here, a Suranne Jones there, a couple of people from Coronation Street who completely steal their scenes.

    BAFTA prediction: Best Photography and Lighting (obviously). Timothy Spall wins Best Actor and the speech goes on for exactly the right amount of time.

    Preacher (1995-2000), The One They’d Definitely Commission Then Get Nervous About

    Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon’s Preacher is genuinely too mad for the BBC, which is precisely why it would make magnificent television if they tried. A preacher in rural Texas with the voice of God, a vampire best friend, and a girlfriend who is significantly tougher than him. Move it to rural Wales. Keep the vampire. Keep the Saint of Killers as a slow, implacable figure appearing on moorland in the rain. The BBC commissions it. The BBC immediately panics. The BBC airs it anyway at 10:30pm after a very serious warning. It wins a BAFTA. The Daily Mail writes three articles about it.

    Fake cast list: Michael Sheen as Jesse Custer, because Sheen is from Port Talbot and deserves to play someone with the literal voice of God. Ruth Wilson as Tulip. Rhys Ifans as Cassidy, the vampire, who is essentially just Rhys Ifans anyway.

    BAFTA prediction: The whole ceremony is slightly awkward. It wins Best Drama anyway.

    Why These Stories Hit Differently When You Actually Think About Them

    The reason these dark comic book storylines work so well as BBC drama fodder is the same reason the best prestige television works: they are not really about the extraordinary stuff. Watchmen is about disillusionment. Born Again is about survival. Marvels is about feeling small in a world that keeps changing without asking your permission. These are very human themes wrapped in capes and cowls, and British drama has always been at its best when it finds the small, real thing hiding inside the big, dramatic one.

    The BBC has a long history of adapting challenging literary material that nobody expected to work on screen and making it quietly devastating. BBC Drama has produced some of the most acclaimed television in the world precisely because it trusts difficult source material. These comic arcs deserve the same treatment. Someone commission this. Please. We will all watch it in the dark with a biscuit and feel things.

    Frequently Asked Questions

    What are the darkest comic book storylines ever written?

    Watchmen by Alan Moore, Daredevil: Born Again by Frank Miller, and Marvels by Kurt Busiek are consistently rated among the darkest and most emotionally complex arcs in comic book history. They deal with disillusionment, identity collapse, and ordinary people caught in extraordinary circumstances. All three are considered landmark works that pushed the medium towards literary seriousness.

    Has the BBC ever adapted a comic book series into a drama?

    The BBC has produced comic-adjacent drama including the Neil Gaiman adaptations Good Omens (co-produced with Amazon) and American Gods adjacent productions, though full BBC-originated comic adaptations remain rare. There has been increasing interest from UK broadcasters in prestige comic adaptations following the global success of darker superhero television.

    Why do dark comic book storylines work so well as prestige TV drama?

    The best dark comic arcs are built around character psychology, moral ambiguity, and consequence rather than spectacle, which makes them natural fits for the slower, character-driven format of prestige drama. Watchmen and Born Again in particular read more like literary fiction than traditional superhero stories, with themes of faith, failure, and institutional rot that resonate strongly with drama audiences.

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