review

The first scene in Nervous Energy is a fogged come-on in a pub - "Why don't you stop staring and come over here". This boy has watched Lauren Bacall, obviously. But is the haze merely cigarette smoke or the sweet myopia of flashback? The latter, as it turns out. Ira Moss, American writer-broadcaster is recalling his first encounter with Tom, his Scottish lover, now dying of Aids. From here on in the drama is to be fractured by these moments of soft-focus recollection, setting an account of disease into a context of remembered health. I'm not sure about this device, and not simply because it has been worn thin by cinema - you might want the blurred edges of the image to suggest a memory beginning its unstoppable decay into forgetfulness but you can't easily purge the device of its history of sentiment, its casual use to suggest eyes dazzled by tears. What's more, if the past was this easily retrieved - if we were just an edit away from such vivid resurrection - then grief would be a very different thing.

The problem may be a complicated one. All of Nervous Energy is an act of commemoration (Schuman, an American writer-broadcaster also had a Scottish lover, who died of Aids), and you can understand that the lover in Schuman might have fought the writer in him, insisting on a right to reply to the bleaker part of the drama, an account of a crisis in Tom's illness. This is flashback too, at a different level, but what separates it from the coded memories in the film is its sharp clarity of vision. The best of Nervous Energy is its acute, funny account of the strange embarrassments of mortality. Schuman makes it clear, for example, that if having Aids makes people no less lovable, then it has no power to make them more lovable, either.

The early sections of the film are excellent about the difficulty of living with someone you're reluctant to row with, the draining effort of being continually understanding. In his manic phase Tom lives his life at a speed double that of everyone around him, a derangement which is also a register of his real plight; he has less time left for pleasure than anyone else in the film. But pleasure can't be hurried. The most painful scenes in the film take place during Tom's reckless return to Glasgow, to visit his family and the friends who have neglected him. He is a terminally ill man doing a desperate impression of his former vitality - a far more poignant and truthful reminder of the past than the gilded blur of all those the flashbacks.

Channel 4's Soap Weekend offered many pleasures, including a canny documentary about a real Salford Coronation Street, a film which demonstrated just how fantastically detached its fictional namesake has become. There was also a touching little tribute to those who had laid down their careers for the cause (Requiescat in Pace Rod Corkhill, Alan Bradley and the Unknown Walk-on), as well as an instructive behind-the-scenes account of EastEnders and Brookside. But the most sublimely comic contribution was Ray Gosling's The Coronation Street Years, a hilarious sermon from the Nonconformist Bishop of Northern Nostalgia. Gosling wanted to use The Street as a register of three decades of social change, hampered only by the fact that although the series began by acknowledging social change, it has spent the past 25 years in a world of its own.

No matter. In "Thought for the Day" style, Gosling made the best of it: Fire in the Rovers? - the Brixton riots ("And then the light from flame of riot revealed another nation"). Hilda Ogden's wonky "mural"? - British patriotism ("Straight or bent, the picture we hung on to by 1981 was optimistic enough"). Raquel being taught French by Ken Barlow? - the Heysel Stadium tragedy.

I was laughing too much by this point to make a note of how he managed the last one, but I promise you I'm not making it up.