I have a feeling that I’m heading toward a criticism of how AI tries to write, but really what’s on my mind is how stories are more than plot — and the examples I’m thinking of were entirely human-written.

Follow. Earlier this week my friend Mark Braxton on Radio Times mentioned that 2025 is the 40th anniversary of “Edge of Darkness” by Troy Kennedy Martin. It’s a six-part BBC television drama that, if you had to tell someone who hadn’t heard of it, you’d probably say was about a police officer trying to find out who murdered his daughter.

But if you know the show, what you’re thinking as you’re saying all of this is that it’s actually about a detective who nearly becomes a tree.

Look at that difference, right there. First it sounds like an ordinary thriller, then it sounds insane. The truth of “Edge of Darkness” is that it’s somewhere between the two, especially since Troy Kennedy Martin was talked out of the whole arboreal ending, but also because the series is much richer than a police procedural.

The thing is, you can prove that. It’s demonstrable, because the story has been told twice, to very different effect, and that difference is all in the telling.

For the 1985 TV series starring Bob Peck was remade in 2010 as a film starring Mel Gibson. Okay, yes. But the TV series had music, in part, by Eric Clapton. So nothing’s safe. That said, Clapton’s theme music was exceptional and Gibson’s acting, in my opinion, was functional.

The two productions are the same story and, curiously, they’re both directed by Martin Campbell.

Mark tells me, though, that Campbell has said he doesn’t think the film works. There are specific story points and particular characters from the original that are not in the film, but overall it is really that there is just a functional feel to it.

The film is about who killed this woman.

The TV show is about Knights Templar and the Teutonic knights of the Marches and a battle waged over hundreds of years, now being played out against 1980s Thatcherism, Reaganism and the proliferation of nuclear weapons.

The thing is, only that last bit about nuclear weapons is on the surface of “Edge of Darkness”. Yet that, plus all of the rest, informs the characters and what happens to them, it informs how things happen, and it truly informs the drama.

Now, I have a slight problem in that I loved the TV show. (I skipped out of revising for exams in order to see Troy Kennedy Martin at a day-long screening of the whole series in a cinema.) I loved it so much that I could not make myself watch the film.

But.

When Mark said this about the anniversary, I wanted to re-read the show’s scripts and couldn’t because my copy is in a box somewhere in the debris of my office. So instead, I braved it and I read the script of the film — because you can now find online.

It’s fine. Screenwriters William Monahan and Andrew Bovell have written a thriller that works fine.

Unfortunately for them, it turns out that Troy Kennedy Martin’s published script book is available to read online in the Internet Archive.

I read the the whole series scripts, then I watched the start of the film and the first episode of the TV show.

Same characters. Same plot. But the film is a puzzle, the TV series is a story.

And in both cases they are what they are because of the words that were used and the words that were not used — but which inform the show and are absent from the film.