Several drinks too many, and Louis Theroux was under the hostess. Holding the journalist in a drunken clinch was Christine Hamilton - one head of the hydra that is she and her disgraced, ex-minister husband Neil. She pushed her mouth closer to his ear.
"I like you," she whispered, like Dick Emery's woman-on-the-street come to life. This was taking place in the days immediately after the couple had been arrested on rape charges. A more sober man might have bolted straight out of there, pausing only to leap through the window-pane to escape.
But he didn't bolt - he's more likely to hug back - and was rewarded with a documentary that was creepy and compelling. When Louis Met The Hamiltons was everything you want from Louis Theroux, but don't always get. He was playing the wide-eyed, wide-grinned na∩f and finding that somebody actually wanted to adopt him. "I feel like their visiting son, Louis Hamilton," he said after being greeted by Christine, bearing a cup of tea and a kiss as he shaved while wearing only a towel. You could see the shiver sprint up his naked spine.
When Louis Met The Hamiltons was quite similar to the recent Meet The Kilshaws, another fly-on-the-wall about an odd couple sparring with the press only to find themselves sent back to the canvas every time they stood up. What could have been a stilted Lives of the Bankrupt and Infamous turned into something altogether different, with the couple called in by the police on the (since dropped) accusations of sexual abuse of a young girl at a party. From there, it pulled away the curtain to reveal the machinery of a scandal. The inside of the car as flashbulbs light up the window. The scrum of the street press conference. Journalists gathered like pack hounds at the gate of the Cheshire home, constantly calling the Hamilton's home and mobile phones. The couple watching live reports from outside the house they are sitting in.
The difference with When Louis Met The Hamiltons was Theroux, who by the end found himself answering the phones for them, receiving visitors at the door and acting as their PR adviser. More than that, the press became interested in his involvement in all of this, to the point that he found his photo in a tabloid above the headline "Rape Quiz". In the movies, his editor would have taken him off the story long ago. You're too involved, Louis. Go home and take a bath.
The Hamiltons are not a couple over-burdened with friends, which may explain their comfort in having him and his cameraman around at a time of intense personal humiliation. They are not averse to attention, though. "We are professional objects of curiosity," explained Neil in one of his many moments of bathos. The couple exist as a public plaything, a couple bred for the political life but who found that, when toppled by scandal, notoriety was the only thing they were good at. What was so fascinating about their predicament was how normal it seemed to them. Christine only cried when it was suggested that she didn't look as upset about it as she might. They were so obliging to the press it was absurd. But they are also touchingly devoted to each other, and have an amazing belief in their own innocence in the Cash-for-Questions affair. Their yearning for the limelight seems to come from their hope of stumbling upon a scandal they can be found innocent of as much as any need to earn a living.
Christine Hamilton spent most of the piece with a glass of Chardonnay in one hand, Louis in the other and her eyes closed as she made yet another point about "how orful" their lives had become. She is painted as the manipulator, but if she is, then she is hardly a master of the art. The Hamiltons do not live a life they might always have dreamt of. Even over her husband, her hold seemed more maternal than dominatrix. There is a weakness to Neil Hamilton that is written in the thinness of his lips, the paleness of his skin and the way he tucks his shirts so far down his trousers that the tails almost pop out at the shoes while the belt pinches at his armpits. He has a sort of doe-eyed innocence that proved a little difficult to resist. He walks, as Theroux described, like a marionette. He is full of bad ideas at bad moments, wanting to do one press call in the aftermath of the sex scandal while standing in front of a banner for his website. He does gallows humour like someone who's spent half his life standing over a trap door. After the graphic accusations are levelled at them, he tells his semi-drunken wife that she needs to eat. "I hesitate to say you need to get something inside you."
Life has spent an inordinate amount of time taking the mickey out of Neil, so he should know better than to give the gods any further ideas. "It's been a permanent source of regret for me that the one thing I haven't been involved in is a sex scandal," he said before the accusations where made. And, as if by magic . . .
He needs constant minding, like a child raising the paintbrush to his open mouth. Leaving the police station, the first call to his mobile came from the man at the Guardian. It was that newspaper that broke the cash-for-questions scandal, that chased the Hamiltons into the dark, surreal alley where they now feed off the bones of their own reputation. He chatted away to the Guardian as if on the blower to his mother, until Christine realised, insisted he hang up and then practically swiped the mobile from his hand. "Well, I'm helpful by nature, amn't I," he shrugged, all irony lost on him.
The Sopranos finishes its third series next week, with a double episode that will have to sustain us for nine months. The Sopranos currently exists on a level so far above most television drama that anything that ascends to meet it will have to sit at its right-hand side. It goes far beyond mere television. Have a cast member switch a light on and off every five seconds and you can call it art.
The themes of this series - ghosts, informers, Tony's ishoos with his mudda - are similar to those of the previous two series. Some plots - most especially the cuckoo in the nest that is amoral, viscous Ralph Cifaretto (the outstanding Joe Pantoliano) - are almost re-runs of others that have gone before. Loose ends swing in the New Jersey breeze. But there is writing and acting and cinematography so perfect that you could spend from now until September watching repeats of this series and still not catch everything in time for the next.
The genius of The Sopranos comes in the details. There is hardly a moment that doesn't have a ton weight of brilliance in it. Paulie - one of Tony's closest captains - has become the finest detail of all, a character of tightly-knit one-liners, facial tics and mannerisms. In a drama always heavy on the dark humour, he has developed into the scariest clown of them all.
This week, Paulie and Tony's nephew, Christopher, turned up to collect some cash from Slava the Russian. They ended up trying to kill him, only to find out that he just didn't want to die. Twice he was felled. Twice he got up and ran away. "He's ****ing Rasputin." It all led to high farce in a deep, snowy forest.
With Tony trying to keep wife, in-laws and mistress happy back in New Jersey, the bad phone line did not help with communication. Slava the Russian, it turns out, had a history.
Tony: "He killed 16 Chechen rebels. He worked for the Russian interior ministry or something."
The line goes dead.
Paulie: "You're not gonna believe this. The guy killed 16 Czechoslovakians with his bare hands. He's an interior decorator."
Christopher: "Really? His apartment always looks like shit."
They decided to leave Slava be. "Let's go. The squirrels will eat him anyway." Paulie and Christopher got lost. Arctic explorers dressed in finest Italian leathers, within hours they were subsisting on ketchup sachets found in an abandoned truck and riffing on murderous paranoia. Paulie, who had started the day getting a satin finish to his nails, ended it looking like a clown in a child's nightmare. His hair a haystack hit by a tornado, his language riper than a week-old crate of bananas and a piece of carpet substituting for his missing shoe. "You've got mayonnaise on your chin. Wipe it off," scolded Tony after rescuing them.
Paulie had enough of Tony's attitude. They drove home through the crisp snow, his chin clenched so hard his face could have shattered in the cold. The music was Cecilia Bartoli singing Vivaldi's Sposa son disprezzata, which translates as "I am a scorned wife". She sings of how she is "faithful, yet insulted". The genius is in the details.