Miroslav Balka at the Tate Modern

It's all about the moment you have to walk forward. A gaping metal gangway up into a large rusty metal container, which echoes unnaturally dully. Only dim, pale shapes that do not appear as people are visible in the gloom. As you move forward, the motion of the shapes begins to resemble the hesitant rise-and-fall of walking. Sounds are faint and fuzzy at the edges. The slightly more confident shuffle of people emerging from the darkness is a reproach, a challenge to have to guts to step forwards into a profoundly unpredictable and unknowable place. Like all the best of the Unilever Commissions at the Tate Mod, it works by radically redefining the space of the Turbine Hall, rather than by trying to fill the space with new material. Its a genuinely disturbing moment, best experienced alone.

Make It Really Mechanically Tricksy

Last night, we pedalled our way in the gloom from Shadwell to Dalston, where the fine people of the Turkish community helpfully provided us with some lovely spinach and cheese pastries. Even a brief-ish French knockabout comedy drama would be too much for a pair of mostly empty stomachs.

MicMacs is a rarity in the French cinema that I'm used to: A straightforward politically motivated revenge drama, propelled by some very matter-of-fact slapdash physical capers.

It feels like a faint echo of the dreadfully enjoyable doom of Delicatessen, but retained a sepia, timeless visual element.

The best scene involved the simple matter of distracting, or otherwise incapacitating a security guard. Our gang of misfit heroes and heroines (the young woman with the unrequited crush was named Calculator) decided that the best plan was this: Contact a couple who live in the apartment block opposite, and arrange to meet them in a cafe. Bribe them with fake Thierry Henry football shirts to have very visible and extended sex at their window the following night. With the security guard training him cameras on the couple, send a contortionist in through the ventilation system, where she will lower a sugar cube laced with knockout drops, on a string, through the vent and down into the security guard's coffee. When he is exhausted from watching the extended rogering, he takes a sip from his coffee, and is unconscious moments later.

How simple!

Not The TV Show

It's a very passionately written story of a young woman arriving, spitting angry, in the mental health system, and her gradual socialisation. There are some jokes that ring true ("MAD money", the monolithic benefit system for the mentally ill; the names given to the doctors and the drugs evoking the casually hellish, archaic and demonic- "Phlegyapam", "Cerberum", "Dr Diabolus", "Dr Azazel") but too many of them are repeated too often. There's a sense of endless repetition about the book as a whole, which gives it a powerful air of realism- evoking the endless chain of cigarettes, waits for medication, waits for appointments, the predictable and deadening routines of out-patient mental health care. But it is also absolutely exhausting to read, and owes too big a debt to the comedy of Catch 22 and the central conceit of ' One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest'. I'd like to have read a slightly different novel, that spent more time drawing the environment of the parallel-universe Camden and Chalk Farm, the Darkwoods Estate. This might have given the paranoia-political subplot a world to live in.

I've no idea if the TV version is any good, mind you.