Clive James: Alan Whicker's way with words Nevertheless she was good about the British canals and tunnels that did not get built, and I was enchanted to hear that someone in the 19th century had an idea for a train to Australia. In the coming British winter I would relish a few weeks in my original home, but an airliner's cabin has too little oxygen for my ruined lungs, and a journey by ship would take twice as long as I am allowed away from the immune-system booster unit at Addenbrooke's hospital in Cambridge. It would be very handy to catch a train. Failing the train, I will have to walk. Serving his time in Spandau, Albert Speer, having measured his paces around the prison yard, walked to Heidelberg. After that, he walked to Istanbul. My own exercise regime includes half an hour's walking inside the house every day. In a predictable stretch of time I could walk to Sydney, while still being able to watch television. Nowadays, television includes the movies. Even the most celebrated movies appear on Film4 sooner rather than later. In the last fortnight I have seen The Social Network twice, hoping that a second viewing would bring clarity to some of the dialogue that sped past my slow ears the first time. Aaron Sorkin, who wrote the movie, had already made life difficult for me with the speed of the dialogue in The West Wing, but here, instead of dealing with normal people speaking quickly, he was dealing with genius techno-nerds speaking quickly. The chief techno-nerd, Mark Zuckerberg, invented Facebook. Young people who had been under the impression that they were inventing it along with him, and could therefore expect to share in the profits, found themselves deep in litigation. I found the leading character difficult to like or even tolerate - the actor flaunted a pout that begged to be slapped - but the brainy excitement of the story sent me back to Sorkin's series The Newsroom to see if I had been wrong to get sick of it so quickly. The second season of The Newsroom starts on Sky next week. Meanwhile, for purposes of background research, I have been watching the whole of the first season as a boxed set. I didn't get sick of it quite so quickly this time, but I still found its format to be misconceived, both in its story and its physical layout. For all their welcome cleverness, there is something obtuse about how Sorkin and his creative team fail to realise that the show furthers the uniquely American notion of anchor worship, by which some journalist, almost always a male with ageless hair, attains living immortality just for sitting in front of the cameras every night. Always floating around in the titles of the show, or hanging from the walls of the office, are the faces of Walter Cronkite and similar worthy mediocrities. Played by Jeff Daniels, whose classical profile goes all the way around his head, Will McAvoy is clearly meant to count as one of the holy soldiers of his profession. But with Will McAvoy in the world of fiction, as with, say, Dan Rather in real life, it's a clear case of misplaced gravitas. These guys were just never worth that much attention. There is something servile about the way that Sorkin gets as excited in their presence as his female characters. Emily Mortimer's voice must be in shreds after so much screaming. And the screaming is done in a huge circular office, where scores of supernumerary characters must pretend not to hear it. You would have thought that Sorkin would have learned his lesson from Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, which also spent most of its time looking unbelievable. Sorkin's unbeatably fluent talk-walk dialogue needs corridors, not wide open spaces. But I'll be watching the second season of The Newsroom, because I love his words even as they go supersonic. Vince Gilligan, interviewed about his marvellous creation Breaking Bad, bravely traced its central idea to "wish fufilment." If he himself had not spent "50 years jumping at shadows," he would never have been driven to inventing a pale character who becomes a master criminal. Perhaps it is time to reveal that I, too, have decided to go into the drug business. The medicos give me so many pills that I might as well get out there and hustle them. It's remarkable that my big adventures should all be happening so late in my life: binge-watching boxed sets on the weekends, translating the Divine Comedy, walking to Australia. TS Eliot once said "old men ought to be explorers." An encouraging thought, although he himself never really made it as a drug dealer.