TV Review: In 1967, The Daily Telegraph mischievously commissioned Philip Larkin, a conservative on jazz matters as on so much else, to write an obituary of the pioneering saxophonist, John Coltrane.
His mean-spirited diatribe, which even that famously reactionary newspaper felt itself unable to publish, concluded with the following words: "I regret Coltrane's death, as I regret the death of any man, but I can't conceal that it leaves in jazz a vast, blessed silence."
I mention this because I cannot pretend to have ever been a great admirer of the Liverpudlian Punch-and-Judy show, Brookside, which, to borrow a phrase from Harry Enfield's well-known parody, finally calmed down for good last week. For 21 years, those of us immune to the show's charms have unsuccessfully fought to block out the ambient drone of misery - fires, murders, incest - that seeped in from Channel 4 as we tried to concentrate on University Challenge or Tomorrow's World. A vast, blessed silence has now fallen on Merseyside.
Never having watched an entire episode of the show before, I approached the feature-length finale on Tuesday night as a fellow who had never tasted fish might approach a bowl of anchovies garnished with cod roe. This was a great deal of Scouse mayhem to absorb in one sitting.
A man who I knew to be Jimmy Corkhill had been kidnapped by a man who I learned to be Barry Grant and driven to Newcastle. It seems that Barry wished to marry Jimmy's daughter, played by that Clare Sweeney, and had staged the abduction as a novel, not to say unhinged, way of raising the issue with his potential father-in-law. Jimmy, unsurprisingly for a man whose ability to attract disaster bears comparison with that of Jessica Fletcher from Murder, She Wrote, took it all with stoic good humour.
Back at Brookside, the residents were facing twin crises. An incineration company was seeking to buy up the unhappy neighbourhood and many of the residents were minded to take the money and skedaddle. Meanwhile, a drug dealer named Jack Michaelson - a complicated joke this, in that the Michael Jackson alluded to is more likely the former controller of Channel 4 than the whey-faced baby dangler - was instilling terror in his neighbours. So, a typical week at the Close then.
The main pleasure for the uninitiated was derived from the casual asides in which the residents calmly catalogued a series of past catastrophes that could comfortably have sat together in one of the more eventful books of the Old Testament.
"This is the guy who was once daft enough to get a truckload of concrete poured over himself," Jimmy said of himself. "Do you remember the time I set fire to that place with the whole family inside?" somebody said. "Don't you remember what happened to your son, when he died in your arms?" somebody else said. "It's bad enough me being bi-polar, without all this," Jimmy said, shortly before the milkman found Michaelson hanging by his neck from an upstairs window.
It all ended with our Jimmy sitting outside in a tattered armchair doing what it is Liverpudlians do best: whingeing about southerners. In a tirade that recalled Peter Finch in Network, the balding malcontent mouthed off about lifestyle television, our over-reliance on supermarkets and - though not in so many words - the way a bunch of Soho fops who had never worn a shell-suit in their lives had axed Britain's greatest-ever TV show.
"I can remember when the telly meant something," he said. "You watched a documentary, you watched a drama and they made you think about life, not whether you had the right wallpaper to match your kecks."
Which brings us neatly to RTÉ's The Underworld, a much-trailered documentary series about organised crime in Ireland. Surely, this would be just the sort of show Jimmy Corkhill was looking for: a sober, thoughtful programme which, considering last week's events at the Central Criminal Court, could not be more timely in its concerns. Well, not exactly.
As we might have expected from the distinguished documentarist, Liam McGrath, the first programme (each episode has a different director) was well-researched and featured a compelling, often frightening series of testimonies. The worryingly bulky Jemmi Gantley, who now describes himself as an ex-criminal (and I'm taking his word for it), had been shot several times by rival villains, but was taking it well.
"I actually feel a bit sorry for them," the man sometimes known as The Whale said of his attackers. "I felt like buying them a drink for being such brutal shots."
Grimmer, more moving stories appeared throughout The Underworld, but the programme's aggressively hip style made it hard to treat any of them with the seriousness they deserved. For no good reason, dance music throbbed beneath every scene and shots were sometimes selected for their prettiness - sunsets seemed particularly popular - rather than any relevance they might have to the subject-matter. Exactly how the melodic thrum that accompanied Michael McDowell's musings on the substantial resources available to the Garda Síochána was supposed to colour the Minister's words was not clear.
"The danger is it becomes almost glamorous," the Finglas-based priest, Father Seamus Ahern, said of the continuing violence. Well, quite.
To be fair, RTÉ was not the only broadcaster bringing the grammar of the movie thriller to serious news stories last week. With staggering vulgarity, the BBC began its coverage of the trial of Ian Huntley and Maxine Carr on Wednesday's Lunchtime News by positioning Anna Ford beneath what appeared to be a poster advertising a movie named "The Soham Trial". The two defendants were tastefully lit and carefully positioned. The typeface was suavely insistent. "Coming to a cinema near you soon!" it didn't quite say.
But, of course, what Jimmy Corkhill was really raving about was shows like Channel 4's delightful orgy of Schadenfreude, No Going Back. Has the malign influence of Peter Mayle become so pervasive that it is now possible to fashion an entire series around people who can't boil an egg setting up hotels in collapsing mansions beneath the olive line? It appears so.
The first episode of the new season followed William and Miranda, a slightly frosty couple from Herefordshire, as they sought to turn a heap of Tuscan rocks into luxury apartments. Again the researchers had done their job brilliantly and found two people carrying such a weight of awful karma from a previous life that even Jessica Fletcher might be surprised by their talent for calamity. Previous episodes have highlighted the complexities of Italian planning regulations, which again caused delays, but never before have we seen a participant suffer a partial decapitation. Early on in the adventure, William fell off a tractor and onto a strip of corrugated iron. The laceration to his larynx was so severe that the doctors felt he may never speak normally again. Thankfully, he recovered, but so dreadful were the setbacks that followed that one almost began wishing the cock-eyed optimists would succeed. Almost.
Where does Channel 4 find these people? How do they guarantee disaster? Do they approach apparently accident-prone folk wearing bandages on unlikely parts of the body and casually begin discussing sunsets in Catalonia? Or is the truth more sinister? Perhaps the station has little armies of agents scattered about the Mediterranean waiting to push people from Herefordshire off their tractors.
A word in closing about the Irish Film and Television Awards which, disappointingly, were rather more competently handled than we had expected and thus much less amusing. The highlight came when pathologically winky presenter James Nesbitt found himself introducing the award for Best Achievement in the Irish Language. James - whose surname, as I may have mentioned, is Nesbitt - joked that he couldn't understand a word of the nominated shows because he was "from County Antrim" - a euphemism if ever I heard one. On glided the divine Grainne Seoige, whose facility for the Irish language is demonstrated every time she says the word "gardaí", and breathes a complex vowel sound that those of us "from County Antrim" only use after catching something pink and sensitive in a zipper.
"Thank you very much, Seamus," the treacle-haired newsreader said. Her eyes were smiling, but, for just a nanosecond, a whiff of malevolence hung in the air.
