Disturbing news for every right-thinking geek here, as Bryan Singer looks set to direct a big-screen ‘reboot’ of Battlestar Galactica, set to screen in 2011. Aside from the fact that if there was ever a word that gave me an insatiable desire to drown kittens then ‘reboot’ is it, this enrages me (and apparently a whole lot of other angry internet men) for two reasons:

1. Battlestar Galactica finished its multi-Emmy award winning run a mere six months ago; the culmination of four impeccable seasons of politically-enlightened, intensely dark and sheer-frakking-genius space-satire. Not to mention the fact that the previous incarnation was itself a ‘reboot’, to even think about ripping it up and starting again (in it’s original cheese-fest in space form, no less) just to provide some Universal studio execs with another swimming pool filled with gold is tantamount to locking Ronald D Moore and his entire team in a shed and using an industrial hose to spray them with liquid shit.

2. Bryan Singer. Really? Now, I’ve been something of an apologist for his Superman Returns, and long held out hope that, given a sequel, (which ain’t gonna happen) he might not include such a shitty Lex Luthor plotline and, y’know, not make Supes such a fucking emo. Sure, X-Men was alright, but handing the king of spangly superhero drama the keys to a franchise that’s just laboured for 5 hard years to clear its reputation of being ‘the camp space drama with the robot dog’ is akin to hiring the Carry On team to spruce up the Diary of Anne Frank.

Funny how things balance out, isn’t it? For every yin there’s a yang; for every tin of Branston baked beans there’s a tin of those 3p ones you pick up at Lidl that resemble pebbly baby dragon shit; and for every new episode of the almighty Peep Show there’s an episode of How Not To Live Your Life on BBC Three.

Actually, scratch that. Peep Show is that rare example of a TV comedy that enters its sixth season as strong (if not more so) as it entered its first. None of that ‘leave it alone after twelve episodes’ from writers Jesse Armstrong and Sam Bain – they, and the commissioners at Channel 4, know when they’re onto a good thing.

Highlights of the season six opener (Friday, 10.30, Channel 4) included Jez’s yelp of “Bloody hell, Mark. Get your elbows in. It’s all gone Backdraft!” on realising the JLB fire alarm wasn’t a drill, and Mark’s inevitable encounter with his German überführer while sporting a marker-pen Hitler ‘tache; “Did Goethe have a moustache, I wonder?” But I won’t waste the effort on writing a proper review. You know it’s brilliant, and in case you missed it, you can watch it here, or download it from the intertube piracy site of your choice, if you’re into that kind of thing.

But, just as an imaginary deity rewarded Noah’s boat-building skills with a massive tit-off flood (making for a fantastic yachting holiday, but with the unfortunate side effect of having to shovel twelve metric fucktonnes of assorted animal faeces over the side each morning), so the gods of TV commissioning decide that if we’re going to have a new series of Peep Show, we must also have a new series of How Not To Live Your Life; which, in case you missed it, was splashed all over BBC Three last week like semen on an Army barracks’ communal FHM.

I can only describe How Not To Live Your Life (Tuesday, 10.30, BBC Three) as a Nathan Barley for people who didn’t get Nathan Barley, albeit minus the medialand parody. It shares the central tenet of Charlie Brooker’s first proper foray into television by following the adventures of Don, a swaggering cock-about-town of imbecilic proportions; cavorting his way through the usual succession of comedy ‘adventures’; deciding between a stripper or a student for his new flatmate; failing to grasp the basics of adult life, and so on and so-fucking-predictable. The gags are poor, the writing even worse, and you can’t help but feel you’ve seen the same shit 18,000 times before.

Of course, Peep Show and How Not To Live… share an essentially similar conceit; they both focus on baffled losers showing us, well, how not to live our lives. But the difference is that Mark and Jeremy are well-written and rounded characters – they have hearts; we feel for them, and even as they dig themselves into deeper and deeper shit, we know that they’re never going to be happy (because to be so would ruin the fundamental dynamic of the show), but there’s always that element of hope – maybe, just maybe, this time they’ll turn things around. Don, however, is an empty vessel – sure, he encounters misfortune, but at the end of the day he’s so unlikeable that you can’t help but reason that it’s all his own fault for being such a massive preening cock.

And that’s the confusing thing about How Not To Live…; it’s impossible to judge its tone. It aims for high farce, but everything about it feels so pedestrian they may as well paint black and white stripes on it and stick it the middle of the high street. Are we meant to care about this guy? Feel sorry for him? Or just laugh at the next ‘hilariously’ imbecilic thing to come out of his mouth? But I guess that’s the thing about BBC Three – for every ‘The Wrong Door’ or ‘Gavin and Stacey’, there’s a ‘Two Pints of Lager’ or a ‘Coming of Age’. Talk about balance.

And…

• Lucasarts reissue the Jedi Knight/Dark Forces series. My inner late-90s PC gamer explodes with glee.

Fail.

Maybe somewhat out of date this one, having first screened on FX in January, but I recently rewatched it on DVD, and it’s definitely worth tossing out a few hundred words. Why? Because Generation Kill is hands-down one of the finest television dramas of recent years. Yeah, you heard me. It’s up there with The Wire.

Which shouldn’t come as a surprise really, because it comes from exactly the same brains; namely journalist David Simon and his Wire co-creator and former Baltimore cop Ed Burns. But rather than the slow decay of the American dream, this time the pair are tackling a more focussed (but no less tricky) subject; the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Set during the first 3 weeks of the war (ie. the time it took the yanks to capture Baghdad, but before they started to properly fuck things up), the 7-part miniseries follows the Marines of the elite 1st Recon battalion as they tear across the desert in a convoy of battered Humvees.

So far, so Black Hawk Down, you’d be forgiven for thinking. But there you’d be wrong. Like The Wire, Generation Kill is superbly, painfully authentic. The viewer is plunged into a world of overlapping military jargon and identikit Marines in desert fatigues. It’ll likely take you a couple of episodes to even begin to tell which is which. Also like The Wire (I’ll stop mentioning it soon, honest) it demands your concentration; zone out for a few minutes and you’ll likely end up completely lost. And that’s the intention; when talking about that other show, David Simon once said “Fuck the average viewer.” It’s an ethos Generation Kill sticks to religiously.

But once you’re in, you’re in, and as the Marines blast their way through Iraq, things become clearer as a core of main characters begin to take shape. Our main viewfinder into this strange world is through the eyes of Evan Wright – a Rolling Stone journalist embedded with the Marines for the duration of their tour, on whose memoir the series is based. He plays the foil throughout; explaining the troop’s more exotic dialect and practices – from deciphering the constant stream of semi-rascist banter to questioning the continual non-appearance of Saddam’s feared WMDs.

Other characters begin to shape up too; Sergeant Brad ‘Iceman’ Colbert is the Afghanistan veteran constantly at a loss as to the army’s methods in Iraq; Corporal Ray Pearson is the motormouth driver, reliant on uppers to keep him going over the endless desert miles. As the personalities start to form, so Generation Kill plays its trump card; it is frequently, unexpectedly hilarious. From a sub-plot involving a photograph of the reporter’s girlfriend becoming a masturbatory bargaining tool, to the constant foul-mouthed banter between troops trapped in wheeled metal boxes for hours on end with little to do but talk, the dialogue is never less than exceptional. Heightening the sense of realism is the complete absence of a soundtrack – save for the constant chatter of the military radios, and occasional a cappella humvee singalongs.

You can detect a real warmth for the troops (mainly) on Simon’s and Burns’ part. But that’s not to say Generation Kill lacks any of the commentary that made the Wire such an acclaimed masterpiece. From the military hierarchy to the administration’s reasons for invading, there are no easy answers – and the road trip that Burns and Simon take you on will leave you alternately saddened, perplexed, bamboozled, enlightened, and, occasionally, fucking terrified. It’s a savagely, bafflingly complex show; one that’ll make you fight for every ounce of understanding gained. But it’s completely, utterly worth it. Like they say: Fuck the average viewer.

Tom: So, just how sick are you of being known as the man who’s trying to meet every Dave Gorman in the world?

Dave: Erm…heartily sick. It was never true. It’s actually never ever been factually accurate ever. It’s just this popular misconception. The show always said I was trying to meet fifty-four, episodes one to six said I’m trying to meet fifty-four, in episode six I meet fifty-four. To me that would make it more obvious than anything could be that it’s over, but the day after that sixth episode went out I got two thousand emails from people saying ‘hey, i’ve found fifty Dave Gormans, when are you coming to meet them?’. I can’t do anything about this, and journalists keep repeating the phrase so…

Tom:  A casual google does seem to reveal that it’s used an awful lot…

Dave: Yeah, yeah. Not that big a deal but just a bit weird.

Tom: How do you find living with its legacy, as it were?

Dave: It’s alright – can’t complain. I don’t like it when I hear bands doing that kind of  ‘I only want to do my new material’ thing. If people remember it then they remember it, and I’m happy.

Tom: Would it be fair to say then that America Unchained represents an attempt to break away from that googlewhack guy persona? Or is more just a casual evolving of interests?

Dave: It’s more ‘casual evolving of interests’ I think. There’s quite a long time between projects. One of the things that happened, and this has happened to me for years now, is whenever I do a project I get inundated with offers to do things that are very very similar to the thing i’ve just done, none of which interest me. Years ago I did a small show called Reasons to Be Cheerful, about the lyrics to the song Reasons To Be Cheerful, and I was immediately inundated with offers to do with doing things related to songs. People going ‘why don’t you do a show called Fifty Ways to Leave your Lover’?, ‘why don’t you do…Baggy Trousers?’, all these weird ideas came in. And I don’t want to do them because I think ‘I’ve already done that’. I do Googlewhack and all of a sudden the moment I appear on any new thing online I get emails from people going ‘are you doing a show about this?’, ‘I think you should do a show about Flickr’, ‘Why don’t you do a show about Wikipedia?’ Not interested. I just want to do a new thing every time, I don’t want to repeat tricks. If you look at are you Dave Gorman, Googlewhack and unchained America, Are You Dave Gorman is me being that twat, Googlewhack is me screaming ‘I don’t want to be that twat any more’ and America Unchained is me not being that twat. I like them all, I’m proud of them all – I don’t mean that to be dismissive – but you’re a different person and you grow and you do different things. And I still do things like Genius [on Radio 4] which is full of silliness. It’s not like I’m being a tortured artist and demanding to be taken care of.

Tom: You’ve been labelled with this tag of ‘documentary commentary’ – do you think it gives a fair impression of what you do? Or has it changed with America Unchained?

Dave: Personally, I don’t feel the need for any labels. I wish people could just take it project by project, and enjoy what they enjoy and not what they don’t, you know. A.L. Kennedy does stand-up and that make’s her a stand-up comedian; she will forever be novelist-turned-standup. I haven’t actually done a live show now for three years, but I’m forever a comedian, because that’s what the world has decided that I am. I think when you’re writing a book you’re an Author, when you’re on stage you’re a comic and when you’re making a documentary you’re a documentary maker and so on. I don’t feel penned in by these things, but the journalistic profession especially likes to have labels for things…

Tom: Yes, we are notorious for it…

Dave: I can see why someone came up with the phrase documentary comedy – it was a guy from the Times who came up with it – I think one of the reasons it has acquired that name is that there are now lots of other people doing similar things, and it now seems to exist as a genre; it gave life to the genre by giving it a label, when really it was just a man telling some stories.

Tom: So where did the inspiration for America Unchained really come from then?

Dave: Erm…it’s in the book and mentioned in passing in the film. I toured America with Googlewhack and was on the road for four months, did eight shows a week and I fucking hated it. All I saw was airports, breakfast radio studios, theatres and chain hotels, and every high street looked like every other high street. There’s positives and negatives to touring, and the negatives are that you’re away from home, you’re away from friends and family, you’re away from your loved ones. The positives are you’re travelling, you’re seeing the world, you’re performing, enjoying the thing you do  for a living. Four months is a long time to be away from home, especially with that show which toured for three years – away from home eight months of the year for three years. Which is going to put a serious dent in your social life – or more that you don’t have one any more and your friends forget you exist, and taking on a four month tour  and adding that on at the end was like ‘do I want to do this or don’t I?’ And the reason I took it was that I thought ‘what a great way to see a foreign country – what a thing to do, tour for four months in America – life on the road that’ll be exciting. And then I got there and it didn’t feel like I was travelling, it felt like I could of seen America in two weeks. And it was thoroughly depressing, because the one thing that was meant to be the positive to make up for it didn’t seem to exist. I think America Unchained was an attempt to, um, go back and find the thing that I hoped was there and to sort fix my broken relationship with America.

Tom: So, the obvious question… did you find it?

Dave: Yeah, I did. Its diminishing I think, but it’s definitely there, but more importantly for me, I liked America this time. And I think if you make a little effort and you dig beneath the surface you’ll find something really lovely there. I’ve had so many emails since from Americans saying ‘thank you’, that’s really nice. Half of them, from people over here, were like ‘I’m not sure I wanted to watch it because I’m used to seeing America how it’s portrayed on TV as A, B, C or D, but I decided I would watch it, and oh what a relief that someone’s finally shown the America that I recognise’. Which is really encouraging, because you know, if someone American came to England and said  ‘I’ve made a documentary about your country’ we’d be like ‘Oh yeah, come on then’. So it’s nice to have the approval as it were of Americans generally.

Tom: So how did this idea of a very personal journey then go on to evolve into the documentary and book?

Dave: I always thought I might end up doing a book about it. But the thing about doing a book about it is that you don’t need to know in advance you’re going to do it. Basically, it was quite an affordable idea – go off for a few weeks by myself, find a car and sell it – it would be cheaper than hiring a car, you know…I reckon I can afford to do it. I sold my car over here, I bought an airline ticket, I’d raised the money to have this trip of a lifetime. And I thought ‘there’s probably a book in that, but i’ll see. So that was always sort of on the agenda. Having got quite far in the planning of it I then had, obviously two or three of my friends knew about it and people I worked with knew about it and whatever, and they started saying ‘I think you should do a film about it’, and there has been a thing where, partly I think maybe because of the documentary-comedy tag…from journalists [inaudible grumble]. Hold on, i’m going to tell this story very badly. A few years ago when I was doing Googlewhack in Aspen, Colorado at the comedy festival there, people kept telling me about this film they thought I’d really love; I couldn’t see it because they had like a film festival going on at the same time and it kept clashing with my performances. Then one night I was in one of the hotel bars and got chatting to this woman and she was going ‘aw, you’re Dave Gorman – everyone keeps coming and telling me that I would love your show, but I can’t come and see it because my husband’s film is on at the same time’. And I went, right ‘I suspect everyone keeps telling me that I would love your husband’s film.’. Basically, it was Morgan Spurlock with Supersize Me.  We had a drink I the bar together, and basically we had spent the entire festival with people recommending each other to each other. And people could see a connection between what I do and what he does. I think with Morgan Spurlock, and other emerging, documentaries like Spellbound doing quite well…suddenly documentary is a bit…people have gone ‘oh, actually people are interested in documentaries again.’ And immediately when they do that, I was sort of on their radar, because they thought ‘well, he’s been doing documentaries for years, just not actually filming them’. When this actually, like I say part-planned, I had people encouraging me that it should be a film and I also had people saying ‘what are you doing next? We’d quite like to be involved’, and More4 were amongst those people, and, unlike light entertainment people – basically if I’d gone into a light entertainment meeting and said ‘I’m going to go across America and try and not use the chains’ they’d have said ‘and then what’s going to happen?’ And it annoyed the fuck out of me, because the answer is ‘I don’t know’. That’s the point – I’m going to find out what happens, and if I can tell you then it means it not true because it means I’m planning it, and that’s fake. But light entertainment doesn’t like spending money on things it doesn’t understand the outcome of. Then I had the meeting with More4, and they said ‘what’s the idea?’ Cross America, try not to give money to the chains and so on… they went ‘Great! I wonder what’ll happen?’ I thought, oh brilliant, I like you, and because they agreed to not have it made with a crew following me in another vehicle and all that kind of fakery that tends to go with documentaries – I don’t mean fakery in an Ant n Dec phone-in kind of way – it just means it’s not quite the authentic experience on film. I still really cared about doing the trip properly for myself, I didn’t want to make a TV show especially, and because they were happy to have it made by one person in a car with a camera, it was quite easy to come to an arrangement with them.

Tom: Writing as I do for [Withheld to protect the innocent], which tends to be lots of gadgets and motors and stuff – couldn’t help but notice that you picked a rather gnarled Ford Turino Station Wagon to make the trip in – care to explain the thinking?

Dave: It was always going to have to be an old car. It’s not this piece of agit-prop political thing, and it was never meant to be – it’s a nostalgic motivation more than anything else. It was a ‘we think it used to be like this and we want to find if its still there… you can’t do that in a three year old Hyundai, you know– that’s so obviously wrong. I kind of had a benchmark in my head that it should be a car that’s older than I am. So we got to LA (the original plan was to go from LA to New York) and we started looking around for a second hand car place, and all you could get were loads of three year old Hyudais and showboating Cadillacs and apart from the fact that it’s a cliché and I want to do a Route 66 in an open top Caddy, we’ve seen that movie before, but its actually an impractical car – it’s really great for  maybe the Nevada Desert, for maybe down by the boardwalk, but it’s really not  great car for going over the mountain, it’s not a very practical vehicle. And it just had to have that kind of dogged old car feel – it had to be something you wouldn’t buy because  you’re making a documentary. Basically we couldn’t find one in LA, but I saw an advert for the car in San Diego, and basically I saw the car and fell in love with it. It screams America, with the timber panels down the side.

Tom: Did you plan your route at all?

Dave: Not in the slightest. The only plan was to buy a car and then we go. It tool eight weeks in the end, having ballooned from three or four.

Tom: Do you feel that there was a particular high point to the trip?

Dave: There’s a kind of holistic high point. You can’t put you’re finger on exactly when it happened but there’s loads of moments when you’re driving – for me, and given the reasons why I wanted to do it in the first place; when you turn a corner and you look down the road and its ramrod straight, and disappears all the way to the horizon,  and there’s no other cars and no buildings, literally just you and the landscape – there’s something utterly, genuinely magical about that – you can’t get that in Britain, you can never be that alone, never be that isolated, and certainly in like the Nevada desert there are bits where the landscape doesn’t even look like earth – its just so alien. You don’t realise how much information you’re getting when you look at any scene…if you walked out onto the street now, you’d be confident you could date that as early twenty-first century, you know. But when you’re in that landscape you look around and go ‘actually there’s nothing telling me whether this is the nineteen thirties, fourties, fifties, sixties – there’s no clue. I just loved that feeling of being disconnected.

Tom: Were there any points where you just got sick of it?

Dave: Oh, thoroughly and massively sick of it as we got into Utah, but that was more to do with the fact that the director was getting ill, and so I felt like I was having my journey taken from me, where this thing I really wanted to do was now becoming me driving to the chiropractors, going to cities we hadn’t wanted to go to in the first place. And I had to do it, and don’t begrudge her the fact that she was ill, but  the fact that I’d sort of ummed and arred about whether I should let the film happen, I just felt like I’d screwed up by agreeing to do it, because the whole point was just to get in the car and go.

Tom: So, having travelled its breadth, what would you consider to be the best and worst aspects of modern America?

Dave: The best aspect is absolutely the people. We have a horribly prejudiced view of Americans in this country. I have a great eal of sympathy for them. They are largely incredibly friendly and incredibly helpful people. They work longer hours than we do for less money than we do, have less holidays than we do. Middle class people in America are working two jobs to put their kids through school – they have this amazing attitude of family being so important and they will work to make things right for their family and this that and the other, and then the world hates them, and its not their fault. I think you’ve got to separate global politics from the individuals because they couldn’t be more helpful. The number of times our car broke down and every single time we were a hundred yards away from a man who wanted to help and was able to help. I don’t think that happens here. They have a kind of civic pride that says if you’re in their town they would have liked you to have enjoyed it, whereas we have an attitude of really if you’re in our town you’re kind of in our way. Get out. We’re horribly unwelcoming and unfriendly I find, yet is the opposite over there; it would offend them if you came away not having have had a great time. The worst side of it is what I was trying to avoid, which is the homogenous nature of it, and the fact that some towns are becoming clones of each other. When I was touring and I’d get on a plane and fly two thousand miles across America and I’d land and feel like I hadn’t travelled at all, because the towns look the same. Every hotel room was the same. It makes you think that this isn’t really what it’s about.

Tom: Its safe to say you’ve met some nutters in your time. Which was the most memorable, or indeed the scariest?

Dave: I don’t think of them as that particularly – there aren’t any people I’d go ‘yeah, you’re a nutter’.

Tom: It may be a tad harsh…

Dave: This is one of the things where a different way of making this documentary would have had researchers finding telegenic nutters.  But they end being the kind of ‘I’m a bit mad, me’ wanker who I have no time for, and I don’t want to put on television, and they’re not an authentic reflection of what you find when you go there. Whereas the people you actually meet are a completely fair reflection of what you find when you go there. There are people who’ve got some eccentricity to them, but their world is very rational and their worldview is very rational. The scariest thing, and this wasn’t on this trip, turned out to be a guy messing with my head, and isn’t anywhere near as scary as you think its going to be. There was a guy who decided we were going to go on a day trip to Mexico, and when I got in his car in Texas he revealed his gun to me and told me we were going to buy coke. Now that’s a very very scary thing, but actually that guy and me are still friends and he was actually buying Coca-cola because they still make it with sugar in, rather than the Corn Syrup they use in America, and he had a gun because he’s Texan. So I don’t know that I’ve met anyone who I’d go ‘yeah, you’re a scary nutter’. The woman in the gas station in Alabama or one of the southern states was a religious nutter who had all the pamphlets telling us we’re going to go to hell, but she’d only be really scary if she were a politician or a teacher, but not when she’s a mad woman running a gas station. If anything you knid of go ‘tick, that’s what we kind of expect Americans to be’, like an I-Spy book, when go ‘ah, good I’ve seen one of those religious nutters they’ve got’.

Tom: Googlewhack was a show that had technology at it’s core – would you consider yourself a techno-geek, or just view it as a tool?

Dave: I wouldn’t, I’m using what I use, I’ve got a computer and an iPod and a mobile phone and a camera and the stuff that I guess falls under the category of gadget, but you know – hasn’t everyone? People go ‘ooo, you internet geek’, but they’ve all got the internet – my mum sends me emails. That’s normal now. Someone told me that one of my book’s was the first book they’ve ever read where someone sends a text message. What a weird thing. All books should have people sending text messages in nowadays, because that’s one of the ways in which we communicate. I find that kind of thing odd. It might be a reflection of the times I’m living in more anything – I’m definitely not at the cutting edge – I’ve never downloaded a film, I’m not sure what I’m doing

Tom: So you’re not glued to the blogs watching for Apple announcements then?

Dave: No, no. I’m not one of those must-have guys. I’ve just sort of got what I need to get by in life.  I’m maybe a bit old-fashioned in that I want my camera to be my camera and my phone to be my phone and my iPod to be my iPod – I can’t abide the idea of one gadget doing all of them for me, it doesn’t seem like an advantage to me, it just makes life more confusing. I quite like my life in little boxes.

Welcome to Sofa Bastard. Good luck.