So farewell, then, Larry Sanders, we'll miss you. We'll miss your false smile, your dead eyes and your fear that your hair doesn't look right. We'll miss Hank's desperate sycophancy and pathetic backstabbing, and Artie's breezy insouciance. We'll even shed a little tear as you turn to the camera and say: "God bless you. And you may now flip". For some of us, it will be a far sadder moment than any part of Gay Byrne's long, long goodbye.
In tomorrow's night final double helping, Larry is desperate to fill his farewell show with appropriately big names to bid him a tearful adieu. Despite being turned down by Warren Beatty, and thinking he's having another pass made at him by The X Files's David Duchovny (Larry believes that Duchovny's been after him for years), not to mention being attacked by Jim Carrey, it's a moment of great sentiment for Larry, particularly as the lights go down for the last time on his two great henchmen, the magnificent Rip Torn as producer Artie, and the brilliant Jeffrey Tambor as sidekick Hank. Also showing their faces are Jerry Seinfeld, Ellen De Generes and Sean Penn. But the show has never been short of famous faces willing to pay homage to the king of chat.
It's hard to explain the sheer genius of The Larry Sanders Show to those who haven't seen it - the huge majority of the population, after all, due to the programme's perverse scheduling on BBC 2 and RTE 1. Those of us bitten by the bug find ourselves staying up until the early hours of the morning, checking our listings pages to find out what ungodly hour it's on at this week in order to set our VCRs, telling complete strangers that they have to upset their sleep patterns to watch some obscure American sitcom about a chat show.
Well, we won't have to do it any more. For the past month, the BBC has been giving us double doses every Sunday night of the show's final season (it actually reached the end of its run in the US more than a year ago). It's almost been too much - a full hour of Larry every week - but it's been a lot better than previous years, when BBC2 would unceremoniously shove the programme aside every time there was a snooker tournament to be covered.
When talking about The Larry Sanders Show, it's difficult sometimes to distinguish between the fictional programme and the real thing. The divide is signalled by switching from film (backstage) to video (on-air), but there's the question of the HBO programme itself, which apparently was just as backstabbing and neurotic as its fictional counterpart. After all, Shandling has more than a little experience of hosting a "real" show, standing in on a regular basis for Johnny Carson on the Tonight Show in the early 1990s. When the great talk show reshuffle followed Carson's retirement, Shandling was reputedly offered $5 million to take over David Letterman's slot on NBC, but he preferred to launch himself as the fictional Larry Sanders over on the cable channel, HBO. Since then, there have been backstage ructions and shenanigans which wouldn't have been out of place on the show itself, culminating in a $100 million lawsuit taken by Shandling against his manager and former friend, Brad Grey, for "triple-dipping" into his earnings. Grey counter-sued, claiming Shandling had breached his contract by failing to produce some episodes and indiscriminately firing writing and production staff on a whim (the pair finally settled out of court earlier this month).
How far is the real Shandling from his creation? Well, earlier this year, his long-time girlfriend and a regular on the show, returned his engagement ring and filed a sexual harassment suit against him, claiming she'd been fired because she was no longer his girlfriend.
Being on HBO meant that Shandling could cut far closer to the bone than would ever be permitted on network television. One of the problems, admittedly, for the British and Irish channels has been finding a late-night slot on which expletives can remain so cheerfully undeleted. But it's not just the ripe language and explicit subject matter which make the show stand out. Shandling understands that, in a media and fame-obsessed era, the television industry is the perfect mirror to show human weaknesses in heightened form: greed; insecurity; self-love; self-hatred. . . In lesser hands, a satire on such an obvious target as prime time television would just poke fun at the broadest targets.
The genius of Larry Sanders is not just that we feel pity for the loathsome, pathetic Hank; we can see ourselves in him too. And what other satire is clever enough to create a bona fide hero? In the hands of Rip Torn, Artie is the producer we'd all like to have in our lives, swatting away problems, effortlessly placating swollen egos, and doing it all with a cunning smile that suggests he knows how ridiculous the whole thing is.
But how can you distinguish between fantasy and reality when, at the press conference following the recording of the final episode, Tambor says of Shandling that: "This guy really cares, heaping praise on everyone else and taking very little for himself?" Could Hank have put it any better? And remember, no flipping. . .
The last episodes of The Larry Sanders Show are on BBC 2 tomorrow at 10.55 p.m. An earlier series is on RTE 1 on Thursday nights.