I’ve just started watching the BBC’s new sci-fi drama series Outcasts set in a colony 35 years hence on a planet far, far from earth called Carpathia (which looks suspiciously like South Africa). Among the cast is Hermione Norris playing… well, playing Hermione Norris as characterised by the producers of Spooks – emotionally stunted, as tightly coiled as a high-tension spring and clearly very angry about something. (I really hope and pray that she’s not like this real life – I suspect not.) Now this blog is not a plea to Ms Norris’s manager to think carefully before accepting further roles in the enforcement business (spies, assassins, police etc), but rather to question one of her interests in the new series, opera. Partway through the first episode she settles back in some kind of contraption for reading the mind, and listens to a chunk of La traviata. The sub-text: whacko!

My point? Why, when you have to create a character who stands apart from the herd – innocently like a brilliant but maverick cop, or more sinisterly, like a psychopath – do film and TV directors turn to opera. Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs loves opera, Senator Palpatine in Star Wars adores it, and both Morse and Kurt Wallander listen to their opera CDs. And it was surely not just the setting that had the baddies all assembling on the floating opera stage of the Bregenz Festival at the dénouement of the James Bond movie, Quantum of Solace. And is it any surprise that both Don Ozvaldo “Ozzie” Altobello, quite the most unsavoury character in The Godfather Part 3, or Al Capone, in The Untouchables, are also partial to a little opera (but then aren’t most Mafiosi?) 

Why opera? The extravagance (decadence? megalomania?) of the art form… The dislocation from reality, perhaps… The larger than life characters… The ease with which people slip into an obsessive passion for the form… The gruesomeness of so many of the plots… It’s a pretty potent mix, I'll concede!