Ladykillers - was that Graham Linehan getting all Father Jack on Radio 4 this morning?

Graham Linehan, the creator of Father Ted, The IT Crowd and some of the best bits of Black Books on TV, has adapted the 1950s Ealing film comedy The Ladykillers for the stage.

It's opening in Liverpool with a cracking cast which includes The Thick of It's Peter Capaldi as the Professor, the role Alec Guinness took in the original and Tom Hanks in the Coen Brothers remake a few years ago.

I've not seen the Coen Bros version, but the original is lovely, a funny witty dark comedy that captures the despair and grimness of post war Britain.

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But Linehan got into a fluster with the Today presenter because he didn't want to have to justify everything he's been doing over the past year adapting the film for the stage, for the sake of a polarised soundbite for the BBC. You can listen to the interview by following this link to the BBC website.

He had been paired with Michael Billington, the theatre critic, whose stance was that theatre should be original, not adapting ideas from movies that have already had their moment.

Billington had his point but the elephant in the room was money and neither interviewer or either of the interviewees alluded to it directly. Theatre needs the pulling power of a movie brand to bring in big audiences (and big audiences pay for productions). We have Legally Blonde, Shrek etc on the stage because of the profile these subjects have, not because they are inherently worthy. Now Ladykillers.

If Linehan didn't want to justify his work in a few minutes he shouldn't have agreed to appear on Today, which only ever gives a few minutes each to every subject. He should have insisted on a half hour documentary all to himself later in the day (and would probably have got it).

If he thinks Ladykillers is relevant to British culture of 2011, why didn't he explain why? If on the other hand he was imply offered a large amount of money to come up with a script for a new adaptation, why not be honest and say that?

One glance at a cast photo for Ladykillers and I was sold on wanting to see the show. But if all it is about is nostalgia, then fine, I can live with that. Unlike Michael Billington I can see a point in nostalgia. Theatre is itself a nostalgic medium and going to the theatre is surely a throwback to an earlier time when the only way we had of telling stories in a dramatic way was to sit and watch a group of travelling players stumble over their lines.

Perhaps the real scandal, the even bigger elephant in the room in this discussion wasn't the relevance of Ladykillers in 2011 but the fact that most theatre these days, original or otherwise, is like watching bad TV. The actors aren't quite as good looking, the sets less believable, the plots and dialogue not quite so convincing. (Also, you can't put it on pause so you can get up and go to the loo or fetch a cup of tea.) So why not get an accomplished TV writer like Linehan to help improve it a bit?

Patrick DeWitt and the Sisters Brothers ride for the first time

I interviewed Patrick DeWitt last week, an Oregon based Canadian whose second novel The Sisters Brothers is out in the UK as a Granta paperback this month.

It's a great read. Very funny, pretty clever, and reminiscent of the kind of western the Coen brothers make for the cinema.

The Sisters are ruthless killers: Eli and Charlie. Eli is the fat one, bit dim and sensitive. Charlie is the snake, a killer to his boots. There's a trailer for the book on YouTube.

I spoke to Patrick via Skype allowing me to both see and hear him. He's a charmer: a great long drink of a man, as skinny as a goalpost, who takes a long time over his sentences and clearly thinks a lot about everything.

Now I said Sisters is a western, but it isn't a western in the way Lonesome Dove is a western.

As DeWitt explained: "I think I've [only] read two [westerns], its not something im drawn to. I'm not drawn to genre writing... I knew the basic tenents of a western ... I knew people ride horses... they smelled worse... I didn't do much research [and that] was liberating. I would recommend that if you are writing a historical novel because research kills those books. Knowing nothing was great. I got to fill in the blanks with imagination instead of Wikipedia..."

His first novel, Ablutions, is quite different to the Sisters. While the Sisters reads just like a western should - with action and anecdote, violence and stupidity - Ablutions is an internalised monologue of someone suffering from alcoholism as he works in a bar.

With his blond hair and square jaw, DeWitt looks like a member of the Master Race, but he's actually a Canadian high school drop out, a former punk, who never even got a High School diploma, let alone a degree in Creative Writing from one of the Better Universities.

I loved hearing him talk about that: he really wanted to be a writer. His father, a carpenter, was a keen but unpublished author and an enthusiastic reader who introduced him to the Beat poets. But somehow Patrick never figured out how you actually became a writer, except by following one of his heroes, Jack Kerouac: which is to say, he roamed around the country doing odd jobs while writing a lot of short stories and reading everything you could lay your hands on.

DeWitt got there in the end. He has a modern, filmic quality to his writing which I liked - and perhaps it isn't so surprising to learn that he has scripted a movie too, which is out in the US in the summer, Terri, directed by a friend of his, Azazel Jacobs.

His comment on that about summed him up. Apparently he'd shown a draft of an unfinished book to Jacobs, who had liked one of the characters enough to suggest turning it into a film. Jacobs put the project together while DeWitt whittled down the pages into a script. I think he was genuinely amazed when the film got the green light and they signed a genuine star - the pockmarked John C Reilly - as the lead.

*My full interview with Patrick DeWitt appears in this week's Big Issue, go buy it from a vendor