Corners have had to be cut in the transition to the screen and the film occasionally resorts to cliché. Show me a political thriller and I'll show you an underground car park at night. But it is so tightly written that one finds oneself concluding that maybe the original series was, in fact, rather long-winded.

This is a movie which has been made with a guiding intelligence and adult viewers in its sights, and that's one of the highest compliments you can pay contemporary Hollywood. For a good couple of hours, it very effectively takes us away from a world of 88p bath-plugs.

Those of you who get worked up at the way in which films distort history for their own ends should stay well away from Richard Curtis's latest effort, The Boat That Rocked. This crude comedy starring Bill Nighy, about a pirate pop radio station in the 1960s, loosely based on Radio Caroline, asks us to believe that the whole country was being deprived of the pirates' brand of cultural contraband by nasty, repressive establishment types determined to stamp out such free-spiritedness. In fact, the campaign against Caroline was conducted by a Labour government and spearheaded by the then postmaster-general, that famously uptight reactionary, Anthony Wedgwood Benn.