The Guardian from London, Greater London, England • 28

Cops and robbers Screenwriter ALAN PLATER has walked the mean streets of crime fiction adaptation and lived to spill the beans the wrong time of year. A Clubbable Woman is set around Christmas but was shot in last year's higher than average high summer. Consequently we had to take the advice of Alan Rickman's Sheriff of Nottingham and cancel Christmas. One of the main set-pieces in An Advancement Of Learning is a cricket match but we were filming in October at a location without a cricket pitch so logistics stopped play. And the hawk-eyed will have observed that Hill's title An April Shroud has become An ITISatruth universally at any rate by moat that invitations to dramatise novels provoke some of the most ignoble reactions in the halls of creativity: from outright lies I will of course need time to re-read Trollope before I commit myself ') to uncompromising hostility should I give that best-selling bastard the kiss of Beyond that, as a longtime thriller freak I've always been game for a whack at any writer I admire: Conan Doyle, Margery Allingham, Agatha Christie and, most recently, RuthRendell.

The Dalziel And Pascoe invitation from the BBC was easy to handle. I have been reading Reginald Hill's books as fast as he can write them since they first appeared in 1970. Set in. Yorkshire, the novels are about therelatlonship between a senior CID officer called Andy Dalziel pronounced Dee-Ell and, according to the man himself, the only name in the English language pronounced by using only Its first and last letters and Peter Pascoe, a young graduate cop and therefore an obvious target for Dalziel's venom. The cooler critics are bound to call the relationship symbiotic, so remember: you read it here first.

All the best fictional detectives work in twos so they can talk to each other and we can share the deductive process: from Holmes and Watson to Morse and Lewis and, my personal favourites, Nick and Nora Charles in The Thin Man, key influences on the Trevor Chaplin and Jill Swinburne of The Beiderbecke Trilogy. To be sure, Philip Marlowe walked the mean streets alone, but he had Chandler's first-person narrative to keep him company and sustain the voyage of discovery. There is a major Nora Charles Myma Loy element in Reginald Hill's books. Her name is Ellie, initially Pascoe's girlfriend, later his wife and mother of their child. She is also a high-flying academic who later becomes a successful novelist and, inevitably, is dragged into several of the investigations.

In many ways, she is the toughest of the three main protagonists. As an old lag who served part of his 1960s apprenticeship on the original Cars programme, I have a ragbag of theories about the cop-show form. The central idea is that audiences are 20 times more interested in spending time in the company of characters they care about than they are in the minutiae of deduction. Nobody really gives a damn about the fingerprints on the wineglass. The simple secret of every plot, as Ed McBain pointed out, is that something happens to disturb the equilibrium of a particular universe, whereupon the police ride into town and restore that equilibrium, with a few capers along the way.

Reginald Hill brings various highly personal and sometimes idiosyncratic elements to the classic form, notably a strong sense of the community in which the police operate. In the first book, A Clubbable Woman, the focus is the local rugby union club: in the second, An Advancement Of Learning, a minor university campus. There are also traces of what the symbiotically inclined might call intertextua: lity: a homage to the country-house murder in An April Shroud and to the great Patricia Highsmith in Deadheads. He also permits even encourageshis characters to be changed by their experiences. Unlike Holmes and Watson, who remain unaltered throughout all their adventures, Pascoe and Ellie grow up, and Dalziel matures, without ever becoming soft and cuddly.

In our opening episode he describes himself to EUie thus: "I use foul and abusive langauge. I pick my nose and scratch my balls. I fart louder than is biologically necessary. And I do it all in public. I've got sod all to hide, more's the pity.

I do my job, collect my wages, go home and have my tea. Generally in the middle of the night. And I don't know any funny handshakes." Throughout the books runs a gently subversive quality. The crimes are rarely pure and never simple; the resolutions frequently ambiguous and contradictory. The humour is simultaneously raw antl sophisticated.

The verbals are good, too. A single-bladed knife for pruning roses is described as a In translating the books into the language of the small screen, we took two simple but crucial decisions. The first was to tell the stories, as far as possible, in their natural chronological order. The second is more unusual. Because each of the novels has a flavour unique to itself, we made no attempt to impose a house style.

The brief to the directors was to find the truth of the tale and work outwards, rather than arrive on the set with a suitcase full of this week's Tarantino licks. This being so, A Clubbable Woman, directed by Ross Devinish, is simple and on-the-nose like the rugby scrum that sets thetoneat the top of the show; An Advancement Of Learning, directed by Maurice Phillips, nods to the film noir tradition, with a homage to Carol Reed specially requested by the screenwriter; and An Autumn Shroud, directed by Richard Standeven from a screenplay by Malcolm Bradbury, is a subtle mix of country-house mayhem and mist over the marshes. The long-term plan is to make three films a year until the audience grows weary or until the end of recorded history, whichever is the earlier. There were, naturally enough, a few wobbles along the way. The shooting schedule meant that all three stories were on location at precisely Hard men and true Dalziel (Warren Clarke) and Pascoe (Colin Buchanan) in Plater's TV adaptation of Reginald Hill For too long arts have been dominated by the visual.

Now radio is getting its own back The sound of silence MICHAEL BILUNGTON on Theatre de Complicrte's ambitious new work, Foe Staging the unstageable Autumn Shroud in our version another inevitable seasonal adjustment, but the shroud is intact. We have also tried to convey the visual quality of Yorkshire without setting foot msiae the county boundaries. These three books were written in the early 1970s but updating presented fewer problems than we might have anticipated. Professionalism has arrived in rugby union and student occupations have gone out of fashion, but the underlying attitudes remain sound and true, and Ellie is an emancipated woman well ahead of her time. One of the sweeter by-products of the adventure has been a first-time professional association with Malcolm Bradbury.

We first met in Hull around 1960. He was a bright young academic and promising novelist who'd taken a job on the campus, succeeding another bright young chap called Richard Hoggart. I was a scuffling, apathetic architect with a couple of radio plays hiding under the drawing board. We have shared the joyful task of dramatising the Reginald Hill books, and aside from an alarming tendency to deliver his scripts ahead of time, the lad Malcolm's done great. With almost a century of writing experience between the two of us and Reg, the inescapable conclusion is that win, lose or draw, this is as good as it's ever likely to be.

Dalziel And Pascoe begins March 16, on BBC1, 8.05pm dons the writer's furred guild-robes. But Foe, lacking much interplay of character, is theatrical without being dramatic and cannot match the shock-effect of the novel, in which we are finally reminded that Coetzee is the controlling authorial voice who has all along been telling the story. It's all done with great style but Complicite have simply chosen an unstageable book. At West Yorkshire Playhouse (0113-244-2111) until March 30. then on tour.

ally every number has the word "love" in its title. When A Man Loves A Woman, Love Is A Wonderful Thing, To Love Somebody he did 'em ail, and how we swooned when he held notes for minutes at a time. If there was a singing Olympics, Bolton would walk away with gold. Not only that, if there was a category for Brashest Would-Be Soul Group, the backing band would also be in fora medal. They provide the horsepower without sharing in the glory; in retribution, they pump up every note as if it's the last they'll ever play.

One unforgettable number had the guitarist actually playing two instruments together one around his neck, the other propped on a stand. Rock'n'roll! The set was divided between Bolton originals and Bolton's beloved sixties soul covers, all linked by the belief that more is more. Inexplicably, this approach has helped to sell 40 million records, and also attracted the patronage of Luciano Pavarotti, with whom he once duetted. That figures, when you think about it who else could make the maestro seem delicate? Caroline Sullivan Anne Karpf INVITED to free-associate with the word few of us would come up with the word The fact that, to many, art connotes the visual reflects the low place in the hierarchy of senses that hearing occupies in Western countries like taste and smell, it's almost invariably ranked after sight, even though it's one of the most evocative of senses. Anthropologist Richard Thorn gave his students a questionnaire that asked them to identify the two or three dominant sound markers from their childhood: they all came up with deeply emotional and personal associationsthe scraping of Dad's razor or Mum singing in the kitchen while cooking produced a powerful remembered sense of security.

Cast adrift (left to right) Patrice Naiambana, Hannes Flaschberger and Kathryn Hunter photo: neil libbert And yet, though the 1970s and 1980s saw the emergence of successful artists like Brian Eno and Laurie Anderson experimenting with the aural and oral, we still don't have a cultural theory of sound that parallels the visual. One reason is that sound artists come from many different discourses acoustic composers and producers of computer-generated music on the one hand, and on the other installation artists and visual artists moving into sound. Both kinds appropriate bits of original or found sound and reconstruct them into a new whole. Some have ventured into Warholian excess: the Canadian station Jupiter once ran a five-hour broadcast of the sound of paper being torn. This month at an international symposium organised by Northern Arts and the University of Sunderland, British sound artists played examples of their work.

Katharine Norman's digitally produced montage uses silence to make the comedy either makes you laugh or leaves your face frozen. Annie's Bar is a noble specimen of the latter, and has the added effect of making any armchair you're sitting in suddenly feel as though it's full of lumps of cement and broken springs. You're in much safer hands Ted's triumph three-hour "live-mix" nighttime show on KPFA made by an experimental group called Negativland. They recycle audio material into an improvised new mix, and invite listeners to participate via the telephone. Callers-in can get directly on to air without screening or time delay and deposit ideas and sounds into the mix musicians can phone in with their own music or elaborate tapes, and Don Joyce brews it all together, sometimes putting opposing callers in the left and right stereo channels, and ruthlessly cutting those who aren't interesting, who are then free to call in again.

The end result is strangely compelling. So far most British experimental audio work has been off rather than on air. But with the growth in ambient music, more inventive DJs, sampling and surfing, audiences are becoming increasingly familiar with this kind of work. And from May 14 till 19, the Sound Works Exchange is running a five-day event in which British and German sound artists, experimental composers and DJs will explore total immersion in sound through discussions and performances in London. The sonic is clearly booming.

For more information contact The Arts Depot, 26 Pancras Road, London NW1 2TB. looked out of the window through binoculars and saw herds of vvildeheest charging across the veldt. Ted rang Father Larry on his mobile phone, causing Larry's car to plunge over a cliff. Bloody good laugh, actually. And for those of you who like comedy, there's sport or there should have been, with England's cricketers only a few hours away from embarrassing defeat by Sri Lanka in the World Cup quarter-finals, and the new Formula 1 season starting in Melbourne in the early hours of tomorrow morning.

On Sky Sports, the World Cup hasn't been a great sporting event yet, but it has provided a fascinating parallel universe of political intrigue and culture-shocks, especially Kenya's drubbing of West Indies. But there has been nothing at all to watch on our terrestrial networks. Armageddon in TV sports coverage creeps closer. But, hey, our top TV technocrats can still churn out a fine whodunit. ITV's latest Ruth Rendell Mystery is The Secret House Of Death, starring perpetually panic-stricken Amanda Redman as a frustrated single mother 1 iving on a pricey but claustrophobic housing estate, and getting unwisely embroiled with next-door neighbours Bob and Louise.

When she finds Louise hideously dead, her descent into nightmare begins Ren-dell's gift is her ability to cloak whopping genre cliches in minutely observed trappings of middle-class conformity. It works every time, nearly. listener stop and ponder in a way no traditional radio producer would dare risk. Bill Furlong, the doyen of British audio artists, records people answering banal questions like "where do you come from?" and then edits their answers to bring out an abstract quality that "operates more like colours in a painting. You stop hearing the literal meaning of the words and start to hear something more expressive." And it works.

In other countries sound art is to be found in community radio stations. In the 1980s Japan experienced a boom in "mini FM" stations, "narrow-casting" to a 100 metre radius, which didn't require a licence because of the weakness of their signal. Tetsuo Kogawa argued that such "block radio" could reactivate areas and empower people and, to show how simple the technology was, managed in 15 minutes to construct part of a transmitter. In Berkeley, California, Over The Edge is a weekly with Father Ted (C4). The first series made everybody laugh except the Mail On Sunday orang-utan could produce something and on the evidence of last night's new episode, Hell, the second series will too.

Encouragingly, Father Ted remains virtually indescribable. Dissecting TV comedy is like painting the Golden Gate bridge you don't know when to stop, you wish you'd never started and you suddenly discover you've lost your sense of humour but Ted offers succour to the critic by conforming to nothing: it resembles other classic comedies only by being unprecedented. Not even the fact that Channel 4 are testing Father Ted to destruction by dumping it into the Friday night morass of comedy and pitiful "youth" programmes can conceal the fact that writers Graham Llnehan and Arthur Mathews have created an original. The main characters are still there, ieTed himself, the disgusting and deranged Father Jack, Ardal O'Hanlon's idiotic Father Dougal, and the joke housekeeper Mrs Doyle. But the genius of Father Ted is the way its spirit can be transported to the most irrational settings.

This week, the men went on holiday In a squalid, storm-blasted caravan somewhere in Ireland. Desperate for something to do, Ted and Dougal watched the kettle boil. "The kettle's boiled there, Ted. Will I put more water in and turn it on again?" asked Dougal. "No," said Ted, "I liked it best the first time." Dougal IS ONE a friend of Foe? Watching Theatre de Complicity's version of Coetzee's novel of that name, premiered at the West Yorkshire Playhouse, I found it difficult to get enthused.

In their versions of stories by John Berger and Bruno Schulz, Complicite brilliantly married physical expressiveness with powerful fables: here they are wrestling with the intractable problem of turning a multi-layered novel about storytelling into a piece of gripping theatre. The ideas themselves are interesting. To whom do stories belong? Is silence as potent as language? Is there any such thing as historical truth? The adapter, Mark Wheatley, plays fair with Coetzee's basic intent. He shows a desert island castaway, Susan Barton, encountering the shipwrecked Cruso and his mute black companion, Friday, and, once back in London, telling her story to the writer Daniel Foe (the original family name). Because Cruso has OPERA Cavalleria RustlcanaPagllacel Cardiff THE WELSH National Opera is celebrating its golden jubilee with the twinned Italian operas by Mascagni and Leoncavallo that launched the company in 1946.

The double bill is a showcase for the best Welsh tenor of the day Dennis O'Neill, doubling as Turiddu and Canio. The stagings by Elijah Mo-shinsky with Michael Year-gan's designs are conventional. For Cavalleria Rusticana, we have pretty village pictures not going anywhere, a homage to the narrative conservatism of a John Copley or Zeffirelli that doesn't focus the acting at all. Pagliacci, musically the more distinctive work, gets a less cynical response from Moshinsky. There are more clowns than usual and large crowds of interested audience milling around.

The lighting is dramatic, the basic set a dusty featureless yard. The passions attempt Anna Magnani-like conviction but the denouement is muddled and unsubtle. died on the voyage home and Friday's tongue has been cut out, Susan inescapably appropriates their stories just as Foe manipulates hers. As in a way does Coetzee himself. The novel works both as a hall-of-mirrors Borgesian conundrum and a political metaphor for the author's native South Africa: in particular for the way the dis-empowered are, literally, rendered speechless.

But inevitably it undergoes a sea-change when staged. The inverted commas, in which Susan's story is permanently told, are submerged. Characterisation is simplified so that Foe, by paying someone to impersonate Susan's lost daughter, hecomes more nakedly exploitative. And gnomic utterances, such as "Writing is not doomed tobetheshadow of begin to sound like exam discussion-topics. The production by Annie Castledine and Marcello Magni strains every nerve to give the story theatrical life.

The desert-island section, with its masterslave Canio's revenge seems sordid and petty rather than metaphysically consequent. Moshinsky 's Welsh staging is a good, solid account of what most people expect to see in this highly theatrical pairing. But he never breaks through into a level of genuine excitement. Carlo Rizzi's rather self-satisfied conducting was a handicap, too heavy and coarse, and the WNO orchestra had slipshod moments. O'Neill had about two lines of pleasing mezza voce but mostly belted with a good sense of style and an increasingly welcome ring in his timbre.

A better director would have pushed him further. Anne-Marie Owens made a powerful Santuzza with thrilling higher register. But her emotion-laden responses seemed generalised rather than specially apt. Peter Sid-horn was a formidable Alfio, his resentment snarling and invasive. The most credible performers were Rosalind Sutherland's plump persuasive Nedda, singing with a soft-edged bell-like sweetness, and Jason Howard's robust, compulsive, handsome Silvio.

At the Bristol Hippodrome on March 12 and 15; CoventGardan, March 20 and 22, then touring. TomSutclife Adam Sweeting 'HEY say music comes in two types, good and bad. By the same token, relationship and bolts of thunder and lightning, is like a compressed Tempest. Foe's London is evoked through a towering desk and chair precariously perched on Peter Mumford's fissured mud-caked stage. And the acting is never less than good.

Kathryn Hunter's Susan has the desperate urgency ofa woman with a story to tell who finds herself confronted by the insatiable demands of fiction. Patrice Naiambana hauntingly implies both Friday's silent strength and belated access of power when he POP Michael Bolton Wembley Arena The last time Michael Bolton play ed Wembley, there were so few men there that the gents' toilets were opened to the ladies. This time, on the first oftwosold-out nights, there were more males around, presumably to keep a wary eye on pop's most unlikely sex god. Unlikely is definitely the word. Bolton is not just 40-ish and blow-dried of coiffure, he is also to go by this show the least sexy creature ever to steamroll through a love song.

In fairness to the lounge-suited American, he never set out to be Rod Stewart, and such expectations fluster him. He barely glanced at the young woman he pulled onstage during an aria from Pagliacci (yes, Mike sings opera too). He plainly sees the sex symbol business as a pesky distraction from his real vocation, emoting MOR ballads by the yard. And considering the utter lack of subtlety of his booming voice, one wonders why women do find him so attractive. Perhaps it's because virtu Can New Labor DeOver? For the first time In a generation the Labour Party elands on the brink of power.

This book comes at a time when people are hungry to know mors about Tony Blair's New Labour Party: what it offers, what makes Its leaders tick and how it will govern. This book paints a picture of the kind of Britain that Labour wants to create: It presents a radical, exciting vision, and focuses on the practical difference that the government will make to people's lives. Order your copy for 7.99 With FREE delivery Please send me copies of 'Blair I enclose a cheque for to Guardian Books or debit my AccessMsaDeltaMastercard i i i i i i i I I I I I I I I Mrs Ms I Mr AddisSS- Expirydate Signature Postcode JfiL Post In: Guardian Books, 29 Pall Mall Dsposlt, Barlby Rd, London W10 SDL, Offer UK Only. E-Mail bldmall.bogo.co.uk riPlaMado not aand any further mailing from clhgf carefully aalactod CQmpanlM.