Television - Andrew Billen finds the TV version of Guy Ritchie's film slightly more palatable

Before watching the first, feature-length outing of Channel 4's new series, Lock, Stock (Mondays, 9pm), I troubled to get out Guy Ritchie's 1998 movie. I didn't like Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels at the time, and I liked it even less on reacquaintance. It's not a moronic film. Its plotting, class analysis and visual style make it a very clever one. But its morality panders to morons. Halfway through, the least vile of the gangs discovers a concussed traffic warden in the back of its van. "I fucking hate traffic wardens," remembers Eddy, our hero, and leaps into the back to beat him up, presumably to the delinquent applause of the cinema audience. Earlier this year, I was at an awards dinner where I sat next to Vinnie Jones, who played Big Chris in the film. He confided that the warden scene was his favourite.

The TV spin-off is a weaker brew and, for my palate, all the better for it. Nevertheless, the series only modifies an existing recipe. Although none of the original characters survives (not even those few left extant by the end of the film), each has a correlative here - nominal, racial or follicular. Jason Statham's Bacon, so called because, in his youth, he spent so much time at the cop shop that people thought he was a "pig" himself, here rematerialises as the black actor Shaun Parkes. In the film, Soap (Dexter Fletcher) earned a rare honest crust as a chef. In the series, the precious cook is Moon (Dan Caltagirone). Lenny McLean, who played the henchman Barry the Baptist, died before the film's release, but is reincarnated as Ralph Brown's equally slap-headed Mr Big, the wonderfully named Miami Vice. Ethnically, Nick the Greek is reborn as the Bubble porn-trader "Nefarious", played as a kind of Mini-Me by George Yiasoumi ("Idz nod gay izzit?"). The bungling Scouse duo in the film, meanwhile, have been replaced by a pair of permanently stoned Dutch crooks.

Visually, the pilot proved as brilliant as the film, at least initially; later, its invention seemed to flag. Sequences were fast-forwarded, flash-backed, quick-cut against one another, the screen cut into four ver- tical strips or fro- zen. Subtitles flashed up. Faces were frequently seen in grotesque close-up (how I sympathised, at one moment of tension, when a thug answered his colleague's request to buy him a creme egg with "Not if I have to watch you eat it"). Verbally, the low swear-count actually seemed to have prompted the writers, Ritchie, Andrew Day and Chris Baker, to greater heights. For example, Miami Vice's watch, its hands a pair of penises, was known reverently as "a custom-made erotic time piece". The plotting was close on as intricate as that of the original, too, with the advantage of being rather more comprehensible, and there was nice structural layering: the main plot (as the episode's subtitle, And Four Stolen Hooves, suggested) concerned a racehorse; the subplot was about a consignment of hard-porn videos and equine exertions of another sort.

But also in place was the basic and pernicious mentality of the original: the idea that violence is acceptable - and entertaining - if inflicted by the violent upon the violent. As in the film, the various gangs in this series go round robbing and killing each other in a mini-economy of crime. Stray into this world's shadowy margins and you are fair game. Miami Vice, for instance, put the frighteners on his accountant, but the assault was rendered "forgivable" because we discovered that this "respectable" man was also a consumer of his client's videos.

But the violence has been toned down - the first killing came an hour in - and so has the language, so no "cunts" or "mother-fuckers", just some adjectival "fuckings" (the episode was appropriately followed by a documentary: A Brief History of the F-Word). Call me a prig, but I had hoped that we could get through the evening without the equivalent of a traffic warden getting beaten up. Sadly, however, we were invited to laugh at an act of random violence against a Big Issue seller that ended with a rolled-up copy of the magazine being stuffed into his mouth (at least I hope that was the orifice in question).

On the whole, however, Lock, Stock looks like being a lot less hateful than its inspiration. If, at times, it seems that its lead characters are considered superior to the world they move in only by virtue of their youth and their tailors (Miami Vice is locked into a style nightmare that predates even his namesake programme), they are humanised by our knowledge that they met at nursery school and have, therefore, at least a capacity for friendship. And they are not themselves killers.

The seven-part series was apparently dreamed up one night by Guy Ritchie and Chris Evans during a drinking session, and Evans's production company is half responsible for it. It was a night well misspent. The glamorisation of gangsters and the forgiveness that comedy bestows makes me uneasy, and Lock, Stock's superficiality is painful when placed against the maturity of HBO's The Sopranos. As TV, however, it works. By going a little easy on the smoking barrels, it is mercifully more Minder than Reservoir Dogs.

Andrew Billen is a staff writer on the London Evening Standard

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