If this latest screen adaptation of Charles Dickens novella doesn’t get you in the mood for Christmas, very little will. This is also one of many films being released in 3D at the moment (and interestingly the DVD is on Amazon as A Christmas Carol 3D). We saw UP earlier in the year and the technology does appear to be coming of age, to the extent that you are able to forget that the film is 3D (in the way you forget its in colour) and simply accept it.

This adaptation is a heart warming spectacular, that successfully keeps kids engrossed for however long it is, although Scrooge is so very easily converted by the ghosts of Christmas which will leave sceptics feeling something’s missing.

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One of the most intriguing stories of 2009 has been that of Simon Mann, the British mercenary most famous for getting caught trying to organise a coup in Equatorial Guinea, who was pardoned in November.

I didn’t go to school where kids had nicknames like Smelly and Scratcher (still less know anyone who would still use such names aged 57) and Boys Own tales of daring do, do little for me. But it was interesting to learn what a player Mark Thatcher, son of Maggie, still is even without the UK’s overseas aid budget behind him. (It’s worth noting that Scratcher is not his schoolboy nickname, that was Thickie Mork.)

Poor Mark Thatcher may not enter the USA because he has been convicted of a terrorism related offence as a result of the part he played in this attempted coup. That’s a bit of bummer for him as his ex-wife is shacked up with the kids and a millionaire god botherer in Texas.

That punishment is not enough for embittered Simon Mann, who aching to have Mark Thatcher prosecuted in the UK. So I watched BBC4’s Simon Mann’s African Coup with great interest.

It would be a gross exaggeration to say that my sympathies changed over the course of the programme, but it seemed to me that Simon Mann was not such a great mercenary. A great many people knew of the coup plot; the plotters had informed various countries’ intelligence services themselves. Mann reckons the authorities were incompetent because they waited until the eleventh-hour to step in, but I reckon capturing the team red-handed may well have been a good move, as that must have made it easier to convict. Simon Mann and Co weren’t really a serious threat to anyone after all.

But what really stands out is that Simon Mann didn’t get it when Mark Thatcher and his friend Smelly told him that if it went wrong he was on his own. Mann reckons you don’t ‘leave a man on the mountainside,’ but in endeavours like this, you probably do. When Smelly and Scratcher said, ‘we’ll deny everything,’ they were being upfront and honest.

Simon Mann should gave taken his punishment like a man, instead he squealed.

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Perhaps the Coen Brothers at their least accessible, as evidenced by a number of confused looking walk-outs, A Serious Man is, nevertheless, a superb meditation on the uselessness of religion.

A Serious Man can frustrate by appearing to go nowhere, just like the parables its weak willed protagonist is offered, and ends on a moment of the highest drama that would normally mark a Hollywood blockbuster’s beginning.

The protagonist, a mathematics professor, is a man whose life is defined by the certainty he finds in his work and the comfort he receives from his faith. When he suddenly finds his life floundering, he naturally turns to the latter for answers and becomes obsessed with the idea that if only he could get a few minutes with the chief rabbi, answers would be revealed to him. We viewers, with our God’s eye view, know better.

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Probably coincidentally, former special advisor to Hazel Blears, Paul Richards, and founding editor of the Independent, Andreas Whittam Smith, are today worrying about the constitutional implications of self-styled royal dissident Prince Charles continuing to lobby government.

Paul Richards reckons the royal lobbyist is getting carried away while Andreas Whittam Smith reckons a constitutional crisis looms.

The flaw in Whittam Smith’s argument is that Britain’s constitution — being unwritten — is remarkably nebulous. Constitutional experts like to bang on about precedents and Whittam Smith quotes letters from Asquith that say ‘this is how it’s been for 70 years’ and so on, but in truth the monarchy is more than happy to make things up as it goes along when it suits. A prime example of this being the title of the Charles’ wife. She’s not the Princess of Wales not because of anything the constitution might say, but because it might upset Diana fans.

Charles has been allowed to speak out while Prince of Wales and popped up in Copenhagen. He may have said something sensible on that occasion — I wasn’t listening — but he does have a track record for talking nonsense. His defence of alternative medicine makes him a quack who shouldn’t be taken seriously in any arena where science is key.

In the past the environment, along with architecture and some other stuff, wasn’t seen as that important by elected governments so they tolerated Price Charles speaking out from time to time. It gave him something to do. But now he won’t get back in his box.

With the environment the defining issue of our times, the next monarch finds himself centre stage and loving it. Paul Richards reports that he has views on almost everything and expects ministers to listen to his every thought.

As king Charles is unlikely to shut up and will make a mockery of British democracy.

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As the rest of the country was watching a mediocre performer crowned short-lived celebrity on X Factor, Salford’s Islington Mill was playing host to a Twin Peaks night, booked as the perfect Christmas do for those of us who attended a short course examining the work David Lynch at Cornerhouse a little while ago.

But what to expect… we had no idea. And yet our expectations were surpassed all the same.

Islington Mill is a former cotton spinning mill, a few minutes walk into Salford from Manchester city centre, that has been transformed into a kind of artists’ colony packed with workshops and studios. It also has generous performance spaces which for this night were dressed as Twin Peaks. It could have been terribly naff, but it was actually quite wonderful.

Many attendees – not in my more conservative party – were in fancy dress as actors mingled and attempted, with various degrees of success, to bring key characters to life. Some were great; especially the Sarah Palmer, Audrey Horne, Log Lady and Maddy Ferguson. Major Briggs looked the part, but didn’t have the strange mix of stiff formality and mysticism of the real Major. Sadly the key male characters were the weakest. The Agent Cooper was anaemic, while the Leland didn’t appear to have made any effort to look the part (he looked more like Bobby) and the one-armed man gave up on only have one arm very early on.

Nevertheless, key moments from the series were brought to life with aplomb. The announcement of Laura’s death was spot on, with the Sarah Palmer receiving the phone call so well it at first seemed she was miming to the soundtrack.

Trips to the woods and one-eyed jacks (where we gambled and danced with the girls) made the night complete. I was gutted to somehow miss out on the red room, but hey.

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Director Michael Haneke has a well deserved reputation for disturbing cinema, mostly after Funny Games, and The White Ribbon is a dark disturbing film too, but for very different reasons.

The story of a small village blighted by incidents – the doctor’s horse brought down by trip wire, children abducted and beaten – provides a strong, but conventional horror narrative. Linking horror to religion is conventional too, but this is not a film about mystical demons to be driven out at the sight of a cross.

These demons are far more real, the conspirators cold, calculating and somehow logical. The righteous are to blame, of course, but will never be exposed.

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London to Brighton does a fantastic job of blending the social realism British cinema does so well with gangsters, as it examines the fate of a twelve-year-old runaway picked off London’s streets and sold on.

That description makes London to Brighton sound like hard, difficult and unpleasant viewing, but while it can be hard to watch at time, it is much more than that. This is a well made film of solid performances portraying characters you’ll believe.

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I’ve never been convinced that the Conservatives have already won the next general election, so much can happen between then and now and we’ve all been waiting so eagerly to hear what David Cameron might actually do.

But I am surprised at how easily the Tories have wobbled over their opinion poll lead narrowing to eight per cent, especially when we’re at a point where new opinion polls seem to be published at least weekly. The Times, whose poll this was, put a brave face on things – David Cameron rides out Labour’s ‘toff’ attack – but others suggested the election is coming to life. The Times thundered in its editorial that drifting into power on the back of Labour’s unpopularity ‘will not provide a mandate to govern’. Perhaps more predictably John Harris wrote in the Guardian that, …criticisms of David Cameron’s background and his party’s political inconsistency have hit home. Now the prospect of a Conservative landslide seems to have disappeared,’ a view backed by some apparently smart money going on a hung parliament.

Suddenly the chattering classes’ most popular phrase is Cameron has ‘not sealed the deal’.

This has provided those in the Conservative party who have not been entirely convinced by Cameron an opportunity to speak up. ConservativeHome complains: ‘We are not seeing the best of David Cameron… neglecting the base of the Conservative Party… not setting a clear direction on deficit reduction… deliver[ing] too many forgettable speeches.’

And this is why the Tories are wobbling. When Cameron is ahead in the polls, nobody can criticise him. He appears to be winning, so is obviously right. But the Conservative Party is a complex beast and not everyone is entirely behind Cameron’s project, whatever that may be.

Talk of using all-women shortlists to modernise the Tory party made many shudder and just as many were gutted by his standing down on the Lisbon Treaty. These people are aching to assert themselves over this putative Conservative Government, desperate for an opportunity to get their thoughts into the manifesto.

A wobble in the polls provides them with an opportunity to offer advice. The danger for Cameron is that all this advice will spark public rows that rock the boat still further. To avoid that he needs to articulate a clear vision that his people can believe in; a vision so strong that it crowds out debate. But he may be too late.

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As the UN Climate Change Conference opens in Copenhagen (complete with official Twitter tag: #COP15), I feel a need to state firmly that I don’t believe in climate change.

To say you believe in climate change is a bit like saying you believe in arithmetic (and I don’t believe in that either). To say you believe in something is to imply that you are driven by faith rather than reason. I believe that two plus two equals four, not as an act of faith, but because the evidence I’ve come across overwhelmingly supports that claim.

Climate science is far more complex and I believe that climate change is occurring and that human activity contributes to it. I believe that mostly because it’s clearly the scientific consensus, with 97.5 per cent of climatologists thinking that way. I believe them not because I believe in them, not as an act of faith, but because I recognise their expertise. Ninety per cent of those guys have PhDs; I’m never going to be that well qualified a climatologist. I know that you don’t get to be that well qualified, you don’t get to call yourself a scientist, without being totally committed to scientific method, which is a human invention, not an act of faith, designed to promote reason and discover truths without prejudice.

Yet this idea of believing in climate change has taken off to a dangerous degree. Alarmingly an employment tribunal judge recently agreed that a belief in climate change can be akin to a religion, setting up climate change activists for the charge that are trying to replace the established faiths.

The point is well illustrated by Tory MEP Roger Helmer. Surprisingly, Helmer has a scientific background, but prefers to frame the debate in terms of a war of faiths rather than reasoned scientific discussion. He recently warned that the Church of England has, ‘abandoned religious faith entirely and taken up the new religion of climate change alarmism instead.’

I don’t imagine Helmer’s right, but if he were this would be an undesirable development. Faiths are chosen or, more often, born into. They are followed because they provide comfort to the believer; confirming their prejudices, providing support and social networks and so on.

It may be that human beings are hardwired to think this way, but that doesn’t make it right. Asking people to believe in climate change, rather than to believe that human activity is changing the climate, inevitably devalues the science and creates a nonsensical battle between climatologists and religion.

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It’s probably fair to say that since going free in Manchester city centre, the Manchester Evening News has become a more reasoned, less populist, newspaper – there was a time when it appeared to be written by would-be Daily Mail types – so it’s all the more disappointing when it runs a rubbish front page splash like Friday’s, ‘Prisoners let out of jail to empty your bins.’

The print headline talks of convicts being let out ‘for the day’ as if working on the bins is some special treat, while a not-online editorial thunders, ‘Binmen prisoners are a step too far.’

This populism is always disappointing as its obvious even from this story that convicts who are emptying Manchester’s bins are men near the end of their sentences who are soon to be released back into the community where they can do as they please.

Yet what is most cringe worthy, is that the Manchester Evening News knows better than to whip up populist hysteria in the hope of giving away a few extra copies. According to the editorial one in ten ex-cons will go on to reoffend within three months of release, a re-offending rate this scheme halves. Without schemes to reintegrate prisoners into society, the totally confused Manchester Evening News says, ‘…the law abiding public are more likely to become victims. No one wins.’

It seems the Manchester Evening News wants to have it both ways; to run populist rubbish on its front page and then come over all reasonable in its editorial.

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