TV REVIEW/Shane Hegarty: The fifth series of The Sopranos ended where it began, with a large, hairy animal emerging from the New Jersey woods into the back yard. It was not the bear this time, but Tony freshly escaped from a trap that was not laid for him. The Feds had bagged Johnny Sack and the New York family and, as has sometimes been the way of these things, Tony's rivals dissipated like his cigar smoke.
It was a curiously convenient conclusion to a series built on a messy feud and Tony sloughing away of the rotting flesh in his family. During this series, more people went into the woods than returned. The level of the Hudson must have risen such has been the number of bodies building up on its bed.
Much of the plot was concerned with crumbling ego and empire as Tony became isolated from those he rules and those to whom he is closest. From this crisis of leadership, however, came re-affirmation of his ruthlessness and a reminder to us that the hero is no good guy. When this week he emerged around a corner, shotgun high on his shoulder, to take out his beloved cousin Tony B (Steve Buscemi), it epitomised the complexity of a character who must be both all-seeing and blind at the same time, as well as James Gandolfini's continued ability to portray that with staggering force.
It also cleared the decks for the next and final series. Its creator, David Chase, had originally promised that The Sopranos would end after series five. That deadline has passed, but it seems that the 10 episodes of the sixth series will be the last.
Very soon, Tony Soprano is going to go into those woods and not come back.
For The Keith Barret Show, Rob Brydon's tragi-comic creation has stepped from his car again. He really shouldn't. Each time he does, he stumbles; the space of the wider world proving to be exhausting for a character who has always been best when in the tight, claustrophobic environment of his taxi and, more pertinently, his self-delusion.
Brydon's character was the centre of Marion and Geoff, in which he played a taxi driver and estranged father. The skewed view of his life came from a camera on the dashboard of his car. Its subtle, bleak humour sometimes said more about the state of the modern male than you could sometimes bear. However, when a couple of years ago he took a brief diversion into his ex-wife's home for the one-off A Small Summer Party, the fresh air asphyxiated the premise.
Now, the BBC has given Keith his own mock chat show, around the theme of relationships, and its theme tune is hardly enough to drown out his final gasps.
The BBC has gone backwards in this. Previously, Steve Coogan's Alan Partridge and Caroline Ahern's Mrs Merton bloomed when taken from the brightly-lit studios and into their own sitcoms. But Keith Barret looks diminished and even panicked. Comedy that was so successful when delivered solo, whittled in the unscripted repartee with his guests Richard and Judy and when he went on a speed-dating evening. Things lifted a little when it had Keith struggle with the demands of the talk show, especially when asking for questions from the floor and then having to scuttle awkwardly through the audience to get to them. But for most of its half-hour Brydon's Keith looks too much like an animal longing to be returned to his cage.
DES CAHIL'S pub-argument-converted-into-television-show, Play it Again, Des, asks sports personalities to choose favourite sporting moments from the RTÉ archives. This week, Des gave the entire show to Eamon Dunphy. Please pick Ireland v Cameroon.
Go on.
No such luck. Instead he included Dawn Run's double, Mickelson's major win, Kevin Moran scything through the Kerry defence and Paul McGrath disarming the Italian attack in 1994. Finally, there was Dunphy on a pitch, although that clip was foisted upon him. Dunphy is fresh from a few weeks work during the Euro 2004 football championships, during which he reconfirmed that he is indispensable to one of the things that RÉE does best. Long after the British stations had chuckled their way home, smug in their own banality, Dunphy, John Giles, Liam Brady and Bill O'Herlihy would still be deep in philosophical debates on the meaning of football. The lights of Montrose would be turning off, the studio going dark, the night watch man swinging his keys impatiently.
Meanwhile, they were still on air, constructing new ontological constructs around the formation of the Greek back four. And knitted through his general angst over the state of the game, Dunphy had sewn a solid thread in self-deprecation. "Me? I was a rubbish player," it would normally go. "But these men, Giles and Brady, they were giants, legends, Gods. It's them I will weep for tonight." Play It Again, Des ended with footage of Dunphy and Giles playing for Ireland in the days before colour television could do full justice to Dunphy's landslide features. "We're going here from the sublime to the very, very ordinary," decided Dunphy.
He set up one goal ("I mis-kicked it") and was integral to another ("I got a touch out on the touch-line"). Dunphy played 23 games for Ireland. Only two of those were victories. Dunphy said that Giles has already pointed out the maths. "That just about sums up my sporting career. But I'm a great fan." You have to worry about this streak of self-criticism. Perhaps it has been brought about by recent career setbacks. He shouldn't be so harsh on himself. Some day, someone will make a programme which asks TV personalities to choose a few favourite TV moments from the RTÉ archives, and Eamon Dunphy will most probably feature regularly.
City Folk began its series of documentaries from around Europe with one featuring some Dubliners. A series of vignettes looked into the lives of four people. Most notably, we met a pair of identical twins, Gemma and Triona. Their thoughts babbled forward in stereo. They are so close they married the same man. They have each recently pledged their virginity to Christ in an act of consecration at the Pro-Cathedral. Together, they were wedded to God. The honeymoon, of course, took place in Rome.
By the way, one of the twins is a social welfare inspector. They showed her calling to a door and flashing her identification. But she's an identical twin, so what proof is photo ID? There's a 50/50 chance it's not her at all. Dole spongers, next time this inspector calls, insist on a DNA test before you let her past your door.
It was a curious story, and as worthy of a few minutes as any. As were those of Regina, an African woman on dialysis, and Pat, a self-published children's writer. Channel 4 broadcasts such vignettes every evening after the news and those five minutes are often an absorbing treat. City Folk, though, was terribly clumsy. Each tale was like joining a story mid-paragraph before being herded out again mid-sentence. It's a city of 1,000 stories, perhaps, but it only takes one person to tell them badly.
In O'Gorman's Summer, we get more slivers of life. This week, Paddy O'Gorman was hanging around in Mother Hubbard's Truck Stop, asking questions of passing truckers, bikers, concert roadies and one medium. Asking them how long they have been in the business, do they mind the long-hours, do they miss home, are they going to finish that sausage? It was just him and a film crew. We knew it was him and a film crew because every few minutes we were given a shot of them all huddled around an interviewee, as if we needed confirmation that there was a camera there, and that it was not some voodoo magic bringing these pictures into your homes.
O'Gorman has made a living from approaching the public and asking impertinent questions in a gentle manner. This does not aim a heavy social punch, but is instead a gentle trawl through everyday lives. In all, he must have interviewed thousands by now. It's only a matter of time before he approaches you in the queue at the local shop and asks earnestly, "Would you often feel the need to buy low-fat milk?" We learnt that truckers keep on trucking and bikers keep on biking. O'Gorman became particularly absorbed with the idea of long-distance lorry drivers travelling with their partners, most notably the dynamics of two squeezing into the narrow bottom bunk in the cab. "I'm just trying to imagine it, physically." Which meant that, over our dinners, so were the rest of us. For whatever reason, O'Gorman's Summer is made by a department called RTÉ Diversity. The cultural integrity of the trucker community, perhaps, needs preserving. They should widen those bottom bunks before it dies out altogether.