IT'S A DAD'S LIFE:Tony Soprano's commitment to family cannot be in doubt, despite his dubious parenting skills
THERE'S BEEN something missing from my life, some niggling itch that won't quite reveal itself.
I have been getting crankier than usual for no apparent reason, then beating myself up for my crotchety responses. I have been craving more respect and less attitude from my family, a bit of acknowledgement for the quiet, hard yards I put in every week to keep this wagon rolling.
Then Don't Stop Believin'by Journey came on the radio and in a eureka moment everything was clear - I miss Tony.
Don't Stop Believin'provided the soundtrack to the last scene in the final episode of The Sopranos, spawned a Journey revival and set up a whole new strand for conspiracy theorists to pull at as they attempted to figure out just what happened.
Did Tony die or not? At the time, I thought it was a stroke of TV genius. The family gather in a diner, random characters move around made menacing by the growing tempo of the music, there's friendly banter between son AJ and parents Tony and Carmella as they await daughter Meadow's arrival.
A potential assassin strolls by on his way to the bathroom. We witness Meadow struggle with reverse parking outside, the music grows, finally she aligns the car, runs across the road and places her hand on the door to enter the restaurant.
Then blackness and silence for an interminable moment. Roll credits.
You what? Apparently the night HBO aired the show in the States the networks were inundated with calls in seconds claiming that sets had gone kaput and the last seconds had been missed. But no, we were left in a vacuum to mull over the most ambiguous finale in television history.
And, as with many bereavements, the first few weeks after the loss you feel somewhat elated in your grief due to the drama unfolding around you. It's only with time that you notice the emptiness left by the person who has departed.
For eight years I had The Sopranosto anticipate, relish, critique, then anticipate again. Now, nothing, an empty void in front of me with inadequate closure behind.
I had seen Tony rise from Capo to Boss, witnessed Carmella kick him out and take him back, felt the teen anguish of their kids growing up and experienced a voyeuristic kick at the random and calculated acts of violence paraded across the screen.
In the same time I got married and started my own family but never missed an episode. Me 'n' Tone, we go way back.
Tony buzzed me. Due to the nature of his "family" commitments, he often neglected his actual family, returning like a wrecking ball to get involved in dilemmas long after he had any right to. When Meadow comes home from college with a black boyfriend, Tony warns him off, telling him to stick to his own.
When AJ is reluctant to take a job Tony has arranged for him, Tony takes a baseball bat to the windscreen of his son's SUV. This is not touchy-feely parenting - but you would expect nothing less from someone who has to consider body count when making business decisions.
The killer is you like this racist psychopath. In fact you don't just like him, you love him, and it's this ambivalent attitude to violence and hatred mirrored in our regard for him that always engaged the viewer in this series.
We can watch all the Supernanny we want, but we'd much rather hang out with Tone, and we'd probably take his parenting advice over hers too. "What happened to the Gary Cooper type?" he mused in the first series, wondering at why a man can't just be strong and silent anymore but instead has to engage with his feelings to be accepted in his family and society. Feelings, pah!
The Sopranos'spiritual successor is Mad Men, a sharp look at life in a Madison Avenue advertising agency in 1960. It also focuses on a powerful, male figure, a man for whom women yearn, and whom other men fear and respect.
Don Draper has a dangerous aura about him that both his superiors and minions respond to. He is married with children, has numerous affairs and a mysterious past.
This programme attempts to highlight the fact that, although set less than 50 years ago, these characters are in a period piece and are products of their time - yet all these years later we have Tony Soprano, an adulterous homicidal maniac we, in some respects, can't help but admire.
The Sopranos, as a family, worked. I can't imagine getting away with his parenting techniques but I can aspire to the strength of his connections with the people closest to him. There are rumblings of a film in the post, some sort of prequel. Marvellous! They could market it as a pre-parenting course.