Scriptwriters reject the 'Curse of Comedy'

Are all comics tragic clowns, as BBC Four suggests? Ray Galton and Alan Simpson- the men who wrote for Hancock and Howerd- beg to differ...

The generic title of this series for BBC Four is The Curse of Comedy, featuring the off-stage misery and emotional problems of Frankie Howerd, Tony Hancock and Hughie Green plus Harry H. Corbett and Wilfrid Brambell, aka Steptoe and Son.

Seeing as we wrote everything that Tony Hancock did for nearly ten years including more than 100 radio half-hours, 60 TV half-hours, a film, a stage show and a Command Performance, created and wrote every episode of Steptoe and Son, and wrote several series for Frankie Howerd one cannot but wonder, "Did we drive them to it?" But then, as nearly all of these problems took place after we stopped writing for them, should we feel guilty? After all there is nothing wrong with us. There isn't, there isn't!

We are both very suspicious of the “laugh clown laugh” concept, the Pagliacci syndrome that underneath the motley all comedians are miserable bastards. In our experience the most miserable comics were the rotten ones and thus had plenty to be miserable about. For instance Frankie Howerd, off stage, providing he was talking about himself, was the happiest man you could meet. Wonderful company and a genuinely funny man, which is all that matters. His private life had nothing to do with you, us, or anybody else. His demise wasn't sad; he achieved more than his allotted three score years and ten and could have carried on carrying on for years. There wasn't a grey hair in his wig. As Frank would have said, the only tragedy was that it had to come to an end.

Tony Hancock was a slightly different kettle of fish. Let's face it, to be a comedian you've got to have a lot of chutzpah. To stand up in front of crowds of people making a fool of yourself takes determination. Take Adolf Hitler. Even with his silly haircut and funny moustache and with an audience of 20,000 stormtroopers he did all those Nuremberg rallies and didn't get one laugh. Like them all, he put it down to his writers, blamed the audience, and went on to almost take over the world.

Unlike Tony, whose dark night of the soul was the first house on Monday night at the Glasgow Empire. He never enjoyed the theatre but found his niche on radio and TV. Due to his reputation of gloom, the public conception of him is of a man who makes Jack Dee look like the Laughing Policeman. This is totally at odds with our experience. Firstly, he was the greatest laugher you could imagine. If something tickled him in a read-through he would collapse in hysterics and roll around on the floor clutching his sides helplessly. This would make Sidney James, Bill Kerr and Kenneth Williams, three other notorious guffawers, join in and we would sit there embarrassed that we had caused all this incontinence.

Tony was a joy to work with. His interpretation and timing of a joke were always nigh perfect. His only problem was learning the lines. He worked at it endlessly. He would be up all night with a recording machine. It was his Achilles' heel. His future battles with the bottle were not yet in evidence. He never drank before or during a performance, only afterwards did he relax and allow himself a few bottles of brandy. He went from strength to strength, culminating in the last series we did with him, which included some of his best work. The turning point came during the rehearsals of perhaps his most famous piece, The Blood Donor. He was involved in a car accident and suffered a mild concussion that prevented him from learning his lines. The BBC offered him the choice between postponing the recording or bringing in teleprompters. He chose the latter. It was like handing him the keys of the prison. He was free. The misery and tedium had gone. It was the worst mistake of his life. He never learnt another line, his performances suffered, the bottle gradually took over and a slow descent began, culminating in his suicide at the ludicrously early age of 44. The most important and influential comedian of the postwar era was gone.

Part 2; Part 3

Steptoe and Son was different again. It was the product of something we had wanted to do for a long time. Work with actors. There was a simple reasoning behind this. If, for instance, your main character was an anarchistic atheist with a penchant for "the love that dare not speak its name", there wasn't a comic in the country who would have said, "Yeah that's me, I'll do that." Whereas an actor would jump at the opportunity, providing the character had a repository of even darker tendencies to be revealed as the series progressed and if the money was right. With Steptoe we were lucky to get one of the most talked-about actors in the profession in Harry H. Corbett and a middle- aged actor who specialised in playing old men. Wilfrid Brambell doing what Moore Marriott had done 30 years earlier with Will Hay. Then followed eight series over 12 years during which the audience peaked at 28,500,000, a figure that has since been claimed by several shows, but ours was genuine. Oh yes it was!

During this entire period we were unaware of any conflict between the actors save from the occasional gritting of Wilfrid's false teeth when Harry had the perceived audacity to give him a little direction. At all other times they were the acme of professionalism. True they didn't mix socially, being entirely different animals. Wilfrid was the typical actor-laddie, immaculately dressed, overcoat draped over the shoulders, trousers with knife-edge creases, highly shined shoes, gold top cane, but for the part he would have a two- day growth of beard and put on the rags from the wardrobe department along with a rendered-down set of teeth, blackened and chipped. After the show he would change back and emerge from his dressing room like a peacock - totally unrecognisable to the extent that one evening we had a call from the commissionaire at the entrance to the BBC Club saying that a man was trying to get in claiming to be Wilfrid Brambell and he won't go away. Harry had no such problem. He was dressed better as Harold Steptoe than Harry Corbett.

And so to the biopics. They are all about parts of their lives to which we were not privy, so as to the content we cannot possibly comment. They are all dead now so neither can they. Suffice to say that they all left a great body of work behind them, which in the final analysis is the only thing that matters. The first thing that struck us was how well the films are directed, reminiscent of Ingmar Bergman at his best, and they are also beautifully played. That's what we meant earlier about actors: fiendishly clever they are, the originals couldn't have done any better. And we must not forget the writers - everyone else does. Well done lads.

Finally, on a personal note, a word about the two actors playing us in the Steptoe film. We are both 6ft 4in and they're not. But at least they sound like us. The previous time we were portrayed, in a play about Hancock, one of us was broad Scots and the other was Australian. It's not right.

BBC Four's The Curse of Comedy season of dramas begins on Wed, March 19 with The Curse of Steptoe, and continues each week with Hancock and Joan; Hughie Green, Most Sincerely; and Frankie Howerd - Rather You Than Me.

New faces at comedy's top table

The award-winning BBC sitcom Gavin and Stacey is about to return. Its creators tell Jasper Rees what inspired it...

'When we met those girls on the train the other day they went, 'Oh yeah, what's that thing you did? Kevin and Tracey or something?'" Ruth Jones is sanguine about the impact of Gavin and Stacey. The comedy series, which Jones co-wrote and appeared in, about a whirlwind romance between a sweet Welsh girl from Barry and a nice Essex boy from Billericay, may recently have won two British Comedy awards and a South Bank Show award.

But the fact that it was shown on BBC3 meant that, after its first outing, most people didn't know Gavin and Stacey from Adam and Eve. "I kind of feel that the show doesn't exclude anyone," says Jones's co-writer James Corden, "and that people up and down the country could watch it." But then, as he ruefully admits: "A lot of them haven't." However, a week ago, Corden's dream of mass exposure came true.

To pave the way for the relaunch of BBC3, which the second series of Gavin and Stacey will be leading, BBC2 set aside three hours for the transmission of the entire first series. If you had the stamina, this was a stroke of scheduling genius. Swallowing the show in one chunk brought out flavours rarely tasted in half-hour comedy: a propulsive plot and a capacity to tug unmanipulatively at the heart strings. This comedy is also brave enough to field two main characters, winningly played by Matthew Horne and Joanna Page, who barely raise a laugh between them.

But Gavin and Stacey is immoderately funny too. The performers take a fair whack of the credit, not just Alison Steadman as Gavin's neurotic Essex mum with her bizarre Camilla fetish and Rob Brydon as Stacey's well-meaning and deeply closeted uncle, but also Corden and Jones as the central couple's amorously challenged best friends Nessa and Smithy. But it's their work as debutant writers that gives the cast the tools for the job. Jones, 41, was previously best known as Myfanwy, the lesbian barmaid in Little Britain's 'Only Gay in the Village' sketches. Corden, 27, has had his greatest success on stage and screen as one of the pupils in The History Boys.

The pair met in 2000 when cast in Fat Friends, the ITV drama set in and around a slimmers' club, and discovered a shared taste for The Royle Family, Cold Feet and Mike Leigh (Corden was in Leigh's film All or Nothing). "I remember thinking how talented he was for such a young person," says Jones.

During the third series of Fat Friends the idea for a comedy about a cross-border wedding was floated by Corden in the pub, based on the story of a friend who had to call a woman daily for work, started flirting and ended up marrying her. He was called Gavin. But Corden insists it was Jones who got it down on paper. "I would have completely forgotten about this but Ruth's determination just drove it through. I remember her going, 'We've got to write this down. We'll bang out this treatment and we'll send it off.'" The characters and back stories were fleshed out, and BBC3 commissioned a whole series straight off.

"We looked back on the treatment the other day," says Jones, "and it's not as warm; there's a lot of swearing in it, which we now don't have." It's the warmth that is captivating, that makes you care about the characters. That includes the pair played by the writers, whose generous proportions are unsparingly mined for both laughs and pathos.

Corden plays Smithy as a matey extrovert whose terror of women finds him tied by the apron strings to an unseen girlfriend who's just shy of 18. As Nessa, Jones has the distrustful carapace of the serially wounded sexual adventuress. Among her previous conquests Nessa lists John Prescott, Nigel Havers and two al-Fayeds (though she hasn't heard from the latter in a while).

Where Gavin and Stacey fall in love on their first date up in London, their sidekicks in the adjoining suite noisily and unknowingly put a bun in the oven. In the daringly unfunny final scene of the first series, she nearly tells him, then decides against it. The romance comes from Corden, who says he wanted to tap into "that vulnerability that guys have when they fall in love. There are many many times when you double-check yourself and think, as a man I shouldn't be driving for four hours just to kiss someone. And yet we all do it."

In the second series (which comes to BBC3 this month) Stacey goes to live with Gavin and his parents - look out for a painfully embarrassing breakfast scene with bedsprings squeaking rhythmically overhead - while Nessa's pregnancy needs to be resolved. There will also be a long-planned Christmas special. Beyond that, the writers are not sure. "We always wanted to see these characters at Christmas," says Jones. "But it would be a shame to find people saying, 'Oh God, they're playing the same note over and over again. You've got that problem with contriving the two worlds coming together. How long can you really convince people that that could happen?"

Corden likes the idea of writing a spin-off series starring Brydon as uncle Bryn. "There's like a whole world behind him. You hand this stuff over to an actor like Rob and it just gets better." As for other writing, together they're also adapting Cinderella as a modern-day musical adaptation for the BBC, while Jones has completed the first draft of a drama for BBC1 on her own and Corden is writing a sketch show with Horne, who was once part of stand-up duo Mat and Mackinnon.

And what of the original Gavin? What does he make of his friend's dramatisation of his courtship? "When I told him on the phone," says Corden, "at every point he'd go, 'Oh fuck off… Oh fuck off… Oh fuck off… I can't believe this!'" The reason Gavin and Stacey works is that everyone else can believe it.

Gavin and Stacey returns to British screens on BBC3, Sun March 16 at 9pm.

The Wire resists sentimentality

Usually, scenes in HBO's The Wire hold almost equal weight muses Matthew Gilbert. When the anarchic anti-hero Omar was killed a few weeks back, it wasn't a flaming sweeps-styled moment, an event fraught with foreshadowing and pumped up with soundtrack. A central character for all five seasons of the series, Omar was shot from behind by a kid. Next scene.

Thankfully, the series finale operates in a similar fashion. Remember the stylistic manipulations that David Chase so boldly toyed with in the closing minutes of The Sopranos? There's none of that string-pulling in this 93-minute episode, which airs Sunday at 9. Creator David Simon continues to let the accumulated drama of each character speak for itself, adding only hints of final-episode momentousness and sentiment around the edges. We can bring our own emotions and surmises to our last glimpses of Jimmy McNulty (Dominic West), Bubbles (Andre Royo), Lester (Clarke Peters), and even Prez (Jim True-Frost), without having to compete with dramatic pyrotechnics.

On Sunday night, Simon gives almost every character a final telling moment, an instant of character revelation that is poetic and small. There are, of course, more obvious plot wrap-ups afoot, in terms of the Marlo Stanfield (Jamie Hector) investigation, and whether or not the evidence against the drug lord will survive the system. Does Baltimore Sun reporter Scott Templeton (Tom McCarthy) get exposed for fabrication? Who will fall when McNulty's fake serial-killer case is fully exposed? The big answers are provided, in all their outrageousness, irony, cruelty, ambiguity, and justice.

But the "Wire" finale is most powerful in its smaller flourishes, the ones that sink in later, that will keep sinking in after the series is long gone. The model came last week, when Michael (Tristan Wilds) shot Snoop (Felicia Pearson), and it was handed to us as just another point in time. The sheer ordinariness of Snoop's demise is one of the moments of "The Wire" that will haunt me long after the show is gone. "How my hair look?" she asks Michael before he pulls the trigger. "It look good, girl," he says, a last gift before goodbye.

The Sopranos had a mythic sensibility, and its ending suited its life, as we obsessed over the fate of one larger-than-life family. The Wire has thrived on a more distanced perspective - it's about Baltimore and its systems as much as it's about specific characters. We've been spying on the action as if through one of the show's many closed-circuit cameras or ceiling mirrors. Kudos to Simon for leaving that distance intact right to the very end. As much as we've been following kids and cops and politicians over the years, we've really been looking at the social, economic, legal, governmental, educational, and penal systems from afar.

And those systems are still up and running. for good but mostly for ill, when we last look at the show's Baltimore. Bubbles may be on the road to recovery, but Dukie (Jermaine Crawford) is on the road to becoming another Bubbles. Omar is gone, but is there a new Omar on the horizon? The city is still failing to save its neediest, the media is still emphasizing the wrong things, the statistics are still being doctored. Well-intentioned individuals like McNulty are still getting crushed by greater forces.

And yet for all the failures there are small successes when all is said and done - fragments of truth in the Sun's coverage, small victories by the under-funded police department, an endangered kid who makes it onto the debate team. Like everything about The Wire, the finale is sweet as well as bitter, but mostly bitter.

The rerun of the repressed

Watching the Israeli TV show Be’Tipul, on which HBO based its captivating new melodrama In Treatment, is like subjecting the American program to psychotherapy suggests Virginia Heffernan. You get to witness the formative inner workings of a mysterious and seductive patient. You gaze directly into its unconscious, from which all its weird habits and preoccupations and virtues and torments presumably arise. Be’Tipul makes clear that In Treatment is American only on the surface. Its psyche is entirely Israeli.

Soon after its premiere in Israel in August 2005, Be’Tipul won a huge audience and critical beatification. Each episode offers a single fictional psychodynamic therapy session — essentially, a one-act, two-person play. In force are the beguiling, if antiquated, first principles of psychoanalysis. Freud’s elegant theories of repression, family romance and erotic transference may seem dated or irrelevant to contemporary American audiences, but they also offer intense narrative pleasures, like those of well-composed science fiction. Just as the cybernetic Cylons on Battlestar Galactica have certain defining strengths and limitations, so the perfectly Freudian mortals on Be’Tipul — a shrink and his patients — come equipped with features (complexes, neuroses, hysteria) as much as full-fledged personalities.

In January, In Treatment made its debut in the United States. It was a risk for HBO. Americans don’t typically embrace psychological hocus-pocus, served straight and unsatirically; therapy sessions on The Sopranos, for example, were notable for their futility. And yet even sceptics who take a drag of In Treatment can find real intoxication. Self-assured, rule-bound, ritualistic dramas that don’t purport to be realism — Lost, Mad Men, Big Love, game and reality shows — are just what I want from television. I love In Treatment. I’d forgotten how exciting the whole bizarre Freudian drama can be.

But are Americans and Israelis watching the same show?

Yes and, of course, no. In Treatment represents an extremely faithful— not to say lazy — nearly word-for-word adaptation of Be’Tipul. The dialogue on the American show is really little more than a straight translation of the Hebrew. Not surprisingly, though, the production values have been increased for HBO. The shrink’s threadbare linoleum-tiled office is now heavily threaded; rough complexions have been buffed and polished with premium-cable makeup; the show’s sound mix has been sweetened, turning the acoustics of the shrink’s office from those of a police interrogation room to those of a private library.

Everything looks and sounds, in short, richer on HBO — especially the beleaguered therapist. In Be’Tipul, Reuven (the brilliant Assi Dayan) is rumpled, sweaty and overweight. On In Treatment, he’s Gabriel Byrne as the dashing and fit Paul, sumptuously dressed in clothes rumpled only enough to make it clear they’re not permanent press. The décor of Paul’s office is vintage shrink-magisterial: Tabriz rugs, soft inherited sofas and walls of impressive books and collectibles.

To hear Paul, in Byrne’s apparently irrepressible Irish brogue, deliver lines originally uttered by Reuven — in Israel — is to ask your brain to make several adjustments. Why does Paul, for instance, offer coffee and tea to his patients? And why does he so regularly provide blankets, hugs, changes of clothing? All this seems way too intimate and lawsuit-baiting for a therapist in the United States. On a show about psychotherapy, and only about psychotherapy, this lapse from verisimilitude must be significant. Isn’t that the point — that there are no accidents?

To make sense of the coffee, for instance, I changed my picture of Paul (he serves his patients abjectly, like a flight attendant, which also encourages dependence) when it seems, from the looks of Be’Tipul, that I may simply not have understood the conventions of Israeli therapists. And when it comes to Paul’s patient Alex — a Navy pilot who accidentally bombed a madrassa in Iraq — the cultural collisions become even more problematic. Alex (Blair Underwood) is the American answer to Yadin (Lior Ashkenazi), a swaggering soldier who, in Be’Tipul, has accidentally injured some children in Ramallah. Alex is being treated in part for his repressed guilt. At first, the analogy seems to track: both Alex’s and Yadin’s nations contend with ambivalence over their conflicts with Muslim populations. But when Alex resolves (preposterously) to pop over to Iraq to find closure by seeing his victims (just as Yadin has visited Ramallah for the same reason), the differences between the Israeli and American circumstances come into relief. America’s war is so far off as to seem, often, abstract. Israel’s war — and enemy — is only a day trip away.

Another awkward adaptation involves a couple who come to Paul in anguish over a pregnancy. The man wants to keep the baby; the woman wants an abortion. In the Israeli version, the couple have to make a presentation before what the English subtitles call an “abortion committee” in order to justify a decision to terminate the pregnancy. Planning this presentation consumes the pregnant woman’s first few sessions. But on In Treatment, the “committee” is only Paul himself. Too bad. How hard would it have been to introduce an anti-abortion family or community sitting in judgement on this couple? Perhaps that would have raised American religious and class issues that In Treatment was not prepared to explore.

At the same time, these cultural incongruities also produce an effect that suits In Treatment: they turn it eerie. The words and problems and solutions of another nation — one passably like ours, but different in both details and moral emphasis — are ventriloquized by people dressed up to look American. This body-snatching is disconcerting, but ultimately ingenious, as it magnifies the hall-of-mirrors aspect of classical therapy, in which the patient is talking to the therapist (who is really her father) who is thinking about his own therapist (who is really his wife).

So on In Treatment we actually see Israelis, posing as Americans, speaking about their hearts, minds and even violence in the Middle East. And it’s all ours to analyse. Is the violence the patients speak of projected internal violence? The violence within — or even between — America and Israel? Or is it the violence of translation?

Too few were plugged in, but The Wire was electric

Too few were plugged in, but HBO's The Wire was electric says Roberto Bianco in USA Today.

If a great series ends and nobody watches, is it really over? For HBO's The Wire, sad to say, the answer is yes. After five critically acclaimed, scaldingly brilliant seasons, David Simon's Baltimore-set classic airs its final episode Sunday (9 ET/PT), no doubt to far fewer viewers than it deserves. Never a huge audience draw, peaking at about 4 million viewers, The Wire has seen its numbers dip below 1 million this season — sometimes so far below that they barely registered on the ratings scale.

On the bright side, those who tune in for the extended 90-minute finale are likely to be satisfied with a conclusion in which justice is served to the extent possible without violating the series' commitment to realism. And while any newcomer probably would be perplexed by the plot, even a first-time viewer could not fail to be impressed by Dominic West, Wendell Pierce, Andre Royo, Lance Reddick, Sonja Sohn, Clarke Peters and Deirdre Lovejoy, Emmy contenders all. Just be sorry you missed the now-departed Michael K. Williams and hope the voters didn't.

From start to finish, The Wire has been one of the best series ever produced for American television, one in which the commitment to honesty and authenticity has never wavered. Despite that quality, its subject matter — nothing less than the failure of the world's most powerful nation to solve the fundamental problems of its urban centres — was never likely to pull in a mass, casual audience.

Still, when a show this good does this poorly, it is worth pausing to consider what happened.

One thing the falling numbers can tell you is that The Wire simply went on too long, outrunning its audience's interest. It's wonderful to have the luxury and ability to structure your series like a novel, and then stretch it out over a six-year span. But if Simon wanted viewers to get to the end of the story, he clearly needed to get there faster himself. He might also have considered skipping this year's detour into the troubles of Baltimore's The Sun, the series' weakest and worst-acted subplot. It didn't detract much from the season as a whole, thanks to the strength of the other stories and actors, but it didn't help much either.

Of course, most of the original viewers had already left before the season started, probably out of exhaustion. Despite what you may have heard or feared, The Wire was not hard to follow, but it did require close, weekly attention. Many viewers were just unwilling to make that kind of commitment, particularly to a show that, by the very nature of its focus on wrenching social issues, could only promise an ambivalent ending at best.

Yet while the show may bear part of the blame for a ratings decline, they would not have collapsed if HBO had not collapsed as well. As any other network would have known, The Wire was never going to be a stand-alone success; it needed the nurturing and protection only a lead-in hit could provide. And that is something an indulgent but not helpful HBO, long past the ratings glory days of The Sopranos and Sex and the City, has been unable to offer.

Still, for The Wire, failure may just be a temporary condition. This is a series that will live on through repeats, on DVDs and in whatever form the future holds. And it's one that is sure to grow in reputation with each new viewer's discovery. Which means we can answer one more question, this one from The Wire's James McNulty, who asks near Sunday's end, "It was worth it, wasn't it?"

Damn right it was.

Gavin & Stacey to be given US remake

A sitcom dreamt up at a wedding is set to become the next trans-Atlantic hit after NBC bought the rights to remake the BBC series Gavin & Stacey. The story of a whirlwind romance between an Essex boy and a Welsh girl became a cult hit on BBC Three and won British Comedy Awards for its writer-stars. Critics praised the show, which featured a cast, including Rob Brydon and Alison Steadman, for its observant writing and the programme was swiftly promoted to BBC Two.

NBC, which turned The Office into a prime-time US hit, has acquired the rights to remake Gavin & Stacey from Baby Cow, the production company run by Steve Coogan. The Alan Partridge star will oversee the US production along with its creators, James Corden, who took a leading role in Alan Bennet’s The History Boys, and Ruth Jones, who appeared in Little Britain. Corden, 29, told The Times: "It’s really exciting. The idea is that Gavin will come from New Jersey, which has the same relation to New York as Essex does to London. Stacey will be from South Carolina. They meet in Times Square. I hope they keep the British names but they may have to change them."

In the BBC show, the protagonists decide to get married within weeks of meeting on a blind date. Corden and Jones play their unreliable friends. But the chaos caused by Gavin & Stacey’s parents as they prepare for the wedding plays an equal role. The idea came to Corden during a wedding reception. "I suddenly saw the whole event framed like a picture," he said. "I wanted to know the stories behind the couple, friends and families." Corden and Welsh actress Jones, 41, who met on the ITV drama series Fat Friends, submitted the idea as a one-off play to the BBC but the corporation immediately demanded a full series.

BBC Three has high hopes for the second series which begins this month. Although the £90 million channel was created for a "youth" audience, Gavin & Stacey, which largely avoids bad language, has attracted a cross-generational audience. Jones and Corden both won Best Comedy Newcomer (female and male) at the British Comedy Awards last December. The second series deals with post-wedding blues and pregnancy.

Corden said he expected Gavin & Stacey to conclude with a Christmas special. But NBC, which extended The Office beyond the original 12 episodes with Ricky Gervais’ approval, is seeking a long-running hit to match its retired classics Friends and Frasier. The BBC has now asked Corden and Jones to create a sketch show and they are considering film screenwriting offers. With stardom beckoning, auditions are becoming a memory. Corden said: "It’s great that I don’t have to read lines for jobs I don’t want anymore."

Sopranos movie in the works?

The manager of Satin Dolls, known to fans as the infamous Bada Bing, says Tony Soprano and his crew could be smoking cigars at their favourite gentleman’s club once again – to film a Sopranos movie. Giving credence to the long whispered rumour, Nick D’Urso, the manager, said renovations at “The Bing” were put on hold after the club received a phone call about plans for a feature film version of New Jersey’s favorite crime family. Unwilling to break his vow of omerta, D’Urso refused to say who contacted him, but he insists the information is legit.

“I got an inside tip that they’re going to do a movie, so I don’t want to make any major changes,” D’Urso said Wednesday. “I’m not going to reveal my sources, but we got a call from somebody (working) on the script.” An HBO spokeswoman replied to D’Urso’s claims with a firm “no comment.”

With Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believing” playing in the background, the Emmy-winning series cut to black last June after 86 episodes and more than eight years filled with bloody murders, epic mob feuds, racy extra-marital affairs and good old-fashioned family bonding. After all the hype, the series finale was somewhat anticlimactic, as Tony, his wife, Carmela, and children, Meadow and A.J., sat at a diner table as a suspicious character in a “Members Only” jacket lurked at the counter. In the last few moments, as fans’ hearts were ready to burst out of their chests, the screen went black and creator David Chase seemed to get the last laugh, leaving fans wondering whether Tony “caught one” at the diner.



Satin Dolls, which served as the filming location for the Bada Bing, consiglieri Silvio Dante’s strip club and Tony’s favorite hangout, had planned to finally renovate the building when The Sopranos wrapped up. D’Urso said blueprints had already been drawn up for major changes to the building’s interior, but after getting the call, he’s not taking any chances. “If we remodelled it, they could always spend the money to recreate it the way they want to, but why bother?” D’Urso said. “Even if it’s all for naught, I’d rather wait. We did some painting and refurbishing, but we certainly weren’t going to tear the place down and sell the building blocks.”

The club did cash in on a few “Sopranos” relics during the summer, when it sold two stripper poles on eBay. “We didn’t make much money off it if you count the expense of tearing down the poles and shipping them, but it was fun and we left all the fingerprints intact,” D’Urso said.

The possibility of a Sopranos movie is no surprise to fan Sue Sadik – widely known as “Soprano Sue,” a self-made locations expert who befriended cast and crew members. Her website is devoted to the show’s filming locations. “As soon as the finale ended, I got a call from somebody on the crew who said, ‘We’re going to make a movie,’” she said, adding, “You can tell just by looking at the series finale.” An extra in an episode, 'The Ride,' Sadik also showed up in extreme temperatures to watch more than 100 tapings. She even trekked in the snow for the famous 'Pine Barrens' episode. “I’m no fair-weather fan; I stood out there on the hottest day of the year and the coldest day of the year and I’ll be there when they film the movie,” said Sadik, who watched the series finale at Satin Dolls.

Calls to representatives for several of the show’s actors, including Lorraine Bracco, who played Tony’s psychiatrist, Dr. Melfi, and Dominic Chianese, who portrayed Uncle Junior, as well as Chase’s production company, were not returned. A publicist for Edie Falco, who played Carmela Soprano, said she was unavailable for comment.

Whether a movie materializes or not, D’Urso said he’d play host to the Sopranos cast any time. “We had a good relationship with them; we respected all their wishes, and they were happy with us,” he said. And after eight years with Tony, Paulie 'Walnuts' and Silvio, Satin Dolls may be building its own cast of characters. D’Urso said the club has been approached several times by reality television producers. “If the right show comes along our way, we might be interested.”

Of course, HBO have shown already demonstrated a worrying liking for the show to film idea ...

24 prequel may air in fall

Fans of FOX's 24 may not have received their dose of Jack Bauer this year, but they may not need to wait until next January for new adventures. According to The Hollywood Reporter, 24 producers are developing a two-hour prequel to bridge the gap between the show's sixth and seventh seasons. The trade says that the prequel would air in the fall ahead of the expected January 2009 premier for the new season.

That means that 2008 wouldn't be entirely Bauer-free after all, which seemed like a strong possibility after the now-settled writers strike halted production on the new season just eight episodes in. Rather than split the highly serialized drama into chunks, FOX made a quick post-strike announcement that there would be a two-year gap between the broadcast of original 24 seasons. Since the show's fourth season in 2005, 24 has premiered in January and aired 24 episodes without repeats through May, a strategic shift that has proved a boon for the show's ratings.

The prequel would be able to lay the groundwork for what is expected to be a very different season of 24. The seventh season will move the action from Los Angeles to Washington and will force Kiefer Sutherland's Bauer to operate without his familiar CTU backdrop. Among the new characters to be introduced are Tony winner Cherry Jones as the first female President of the United States.

The trade paper has no word on when the prequel would be produced and which actors might participate. Writing has resumed on the seventh season of 24 with veteran showrunner Howard Gordon in charge. The series had a bit of a creative shake-up in February when co-creator and long-time executive producer Joel Surnow left the show to go work on other projects.

The Wire's war on the drug war

The writers of The Wire have used the latest issue of Time magazine to plead for greater leniency for non-violent drug cases...

We write a television show. Measured against more thoughtful and meaningful occupations, this is not the best seat from which to argue public policy or social justice. Still, those viewers who followed The Wire — our HBO drama that tried to portray all sides of inner-city collapse, including the drug war, with as much detail and as little judgment as we could muster — tell us they've invested in the fates of our characters. They worry or grieve for Bubbles, Bodie or Wallace, certain that these characters are fictional yet knowing they are rooted in the reality of the other America, the one rarely acknowledged by anything so overt as a TV drama.

These viewers, admittedly a small shard of the TV universe, deluge us with one question: What can we do? If there are two Americas — separate and unequal — and if the drug war has helped produce a psychic chasm between them, how can well-meaning, well-intentioned people begin to bridge those worlds?

And for five seasons, we answered lamely, offering arguments about economic priorities or drug policy, debating theoreticals within our tangled little drama. We were storytellers, not advocates; we ducked the question as best we could.

Yet this war grinds on, flooding our prisons, devouring resources, turning city neighborhoods into free-fire zones. To what end? State and federal prisons are packed with victims of the drug conflict. A new report by the Pew Center shows that 1 of every 100 adults in the U.S. — and 1 in 15 black men over 18 — is currently incarcerated. That's the world's highest rate of imprisonment.

The drug war has ravaged law enforcement too. In cities where police agencies commit the most resources to arresting their way out of their drug problems, the arrest rates for violent crime — murder, rape, aggravated assault — have declined. In Baltimore, where we set The Wire, drug arrests have skyrocketed over the past three decades, yet in that same span, arrest rates for murder have gone from 80% and 90% to half that. Lost in an unwinnable drug war, a new generation of law officers is no longer capable of investigating crime properly, having learned only to make court pay by grabbing cheap, meaningless drug arrests off the nearest corner.

What the drugs themselves have not destroyed, the warfare against them has. And what once began, perhaps, as a battle against dangerous substances long ago transformed itself into a venal war on our underclass. Since declaring war on drugs nearly 40 years ago, we've been demonizing our most desperate citizens, isolating and incarcerating them and otherwise denying them a role in the American collective. All to no purpose. The prison population doubles and doubles again; the drugs remain.

Our leaders? There aren't any politicians — Democrat or Republican — willing to speak truth on this. Instead, politicians compete to prove themselves more draconian than thou, to embrace America's most profound and enduring policy failure.

"A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right," wrote Thomas Paine when he called for civil disobedience against monarchy — the flawed national policy of his day. In a similar spirit, we offer a small idea that is, perhaps, no small idea. It will not solve the drug problem, nor will it heal all civic wounds. It does not yet address questions of how the resources spent warring with our poor over drug use might be better spent on treatment or education or job training, or anything else that might begin to restore those places in America where the only economic engine remaining is the illegal drug economy. It doesn't resolve the myriad complexities that a retreat from war to sanity will require. All it does is open a range of intricate, paradoxical issues. But this is what we can do — and what we will do.

If asked to serve on a jury deliberating a violation of state or federal drug laws, we will vote to acquit, regardless of the evidence presented. Save for a prosecution in which acts of violence or intended violence are alleged, we will — to borrow Justice Harry Blackmun's manifesto against the death penalty — no longer tinker with the machinery of the drug war. No longer can we collaborate with a government that uses nonviolent drug offenses to fill prisons with its poorest, most damaged and most desperate citizens.

Jury nullification is American dissent, as old and as heralded as the 1735 trial of John Peter Zenger, who was acquitted of seditious libel against the royal governor of New York, and absent a government capable of repairing injustices, it is legitimate protest. If some few episodes of a television entertainment have caused others to reflect on the war zones we have created in our cities and the human beings stranded there, we ask that those people might also consider their conscience. And when the lawyers or the judge or your fellow jurors seek explanation, think for a moment on Bubbles or Bodie or Wallace. And remember that the lives being held in the balance aren't fictional.

The authors- Ed Burns, Dennis Lehane, George Pelecanos, Richard Price and David Simon are all members of the writing staff of HBO's The Wire, which concludes its five-year run on March 9.

Notes from a Craggy Island

Ten years, and a million DVDs since his demise, Father Ted has spawned a fully-fledged cult. John Walsh slips on his dog collar and joins the faithful...

I think it was the moment when a sardine sandwich, flung by a chap in a Pink Panther suit, went whizzing past my ear, and a furry gorilla flew through the air and cannoned into Joe the MC, that I finally grasped the long-term ramifications a television show can produce in our me-too culture.

It was hard, mind you, trying to follow a serious train of thought when, onstage before me, a whole line of Lovely Girls were doing their final, virginal twirl before an audience of yelling, whistling and over-stimulated priests, nuns, bishops, housekeepers, Elvis impersonators, milkmen, hairy babies, monks and giant rabbits. I'm not sure the island of Inishmore has seen anything like it. But, for a few hundred deranged fans, this isn't Inishmore. It's Craggy Island and, though it started life as a fictional location, it's as real to them as their bricks-and-mortar homes in Dublin, London, Cardiff, Edinburgh, Ottawa and Tokyo.

Perhaps I should explain. I was in the west of Ireland, attending TedFest II, the second celebration of Father Ted, a TV sitcom that filmed its final instalment 10 years ago. The show, written by Graham Linehan and Arthur Mathews, ran on Channel 4 for three series (plus one extended Christmas Special, set in the lingerie section of a department store) between April 1995 and May 1998; it was popular at the time, but, thanks to frequent repeats, acquired a massive following after its demise; more than 1 million DVD box sets have been sold.

A year ago, Welsh film-maker Peter Phillips met Irish film editor Fergal McGrath in Sri Lanka on a children's therapy project. The former had set up the successful Elvis Festival in Porthcawl, and the two men discussed doing the same for Father Ted. "We didn't want it to be a TV-watching festival," says Phillips. "We wanted to create Craggy Island with a few like-minded people."

The Friends of Father Ted festival was born, in a storm of drink, fancy dress and sporting events. This year's marked a poignant anniversary. The star, Dermot Morgan, who played Ted, died 10 years ago last week: he suffered a fatal heart attack the day after they filmed the final episode. It was spookily well-timed. No further series had been planned, nor could any be planned now, since no one could take Morgan's place.

It's easy to see why the sitcom became so cultish: viewers feel they could, without much trouble, step inside the action, visit the "parochial house" on Craggy Island and meet the inhabitants: Father Ted Crilly, genial, 40-ish, grey-haired and ambitious who, behind his worldly demeanour, lies and schemes like Sergeant Bilko; Father Dougal McGuire (played by Ardal O'Hanlon), a wide-eyed, 20-something halfwit in a variety of knitted jumpers who fails to grasp basic facts about the world ("This cow," Ted tells him, holding up a plastic toy, "is small. Those cows [real ones, seen through a window, grazing in the distance] are far away"); and Father Jack Hackett (Frank Kelly,) red-faced, wild-haired, catatonic, drool-stained, voraciously alcoholic and foul-mouthed; "Drink!", "Arse!", "Feck!", "Girls!" constitute almost his whole conversational repertoire. Then there's their housekeeper is Mrs Doyle (Pauline McLynn,) a middle-aged, much-exploited slattern with a large mole on her lip. Psychotically hospitable, she regales priests and visitors with gallons of tea, hills of sandwiches and mountain ranges of cake, which she urges them to consume with cries of "Go on, go on, go on, go on, go on, go on..."

We learn that they've been sent to the island, out of harm's way, after a number of scandals involving money, nuns and unspeakable damage. They're never seen performing religious duties but while away the hours plotting to win the All-Priests' Stars in Their Eyes Lookalike Competition, or fending off the irruptions of unpleasant strangers to their peaceful home, whether stroppy women rock stars (a wounding dig at Sinead O'Connor), sinister oddball clerics, or the ghastly pop star Eoin McLove.

Theirs is a world of moth-eaten innocence and surreal anarchy. The only moral action they ever take is to picket a rude foreign film at the cinema, where they carry meek placards bearing the legends "Careful, Now" and "Down With This Type of Thing," thus making it the most popular film in Craggy Island's history.

TedFest II started last week with a gathering of fans in Kilfenora, Co Clare, where much of the show's external footage was shot, and climaxed on Inishmore, the largest of the Aran Islands. None of the action was shot on the Arans, but the opening credit sequence is an air-shot of Inisheer, the smallest of the three. Clear? Last year, Inisheer objected to Inishmore's giving itself airs as "the real Craggy Island", and they held a football match to decide who had the right to the title. Inishmore won.

The island's residents may wonder if this was the happiest outcome, as they watch revellers arrive by every ferry, and cram every B&B, hotel room, lodging-house digs or tent, transforming their bleak limestone citadel into the setting for the biggest, silliest and probably booziest fancy dress party in what's left of Christendom.

My first sight on landing at Inishmore was a small scurrying figure on the quayside in a tweed jacket, woolly hat and apron, bearing a tray of teacups and cardboard egg sandwiches. It was the first of several dozen Mrs Doyles (male and female) I was to see during the day.

I fell into step beside Aisling, 23, a hazel-eyed beauty from Dublin pulling a builder's brick on a string leash. (Do keep up – Father Jack briefly adopts a brick in the episode "Speed 3" and makes it a pet.) Aisling recently graduated from Trinity in Politics and Sociology and drove across the country with two friends at 5am, fortified only by Buckfast Abbey Tonic Wine, the Dublin alkie's tipple. None had a ticket, but the security, she says, is "a pile of shite because, if you're in a costume, nobody checks". The girls had a brilliant time last year. Their ambitions are "to have a few drinks and a laugh and maybe hop up on a priest."

In Paitin (ie Poteen, or Irish moonshine) Jack's Bar at the Ostan Arann, the only hotel on Inishmore, a handsome, three-star establishment run by PJ O'Flaherty in a dog-collar, the Bishop from the ferry is on his second Guinness, talking to a small boy with a dog; the kid is weighed down a by a huge cross around his neck, as heavy as an albatross.

Aisling and her friends are at a table with a Pat Mustard, one of several incarnations of the lecherous milkman who, in the show, has sex with all the Craggy Island housewives and sends Mrs Doyle into a delirium of flirtatiousness. He is hairy, ear-ringed, has a chain round his neck; he has single-handedly populated the island with hairy babies. I worry about Aisling. Will her innate virtue be eroded by an excess of Buckfast Tonic, or an excess of Mustard?

The bar fills up with nuns. They come in all configurations, but seem startlingly young to be fans of a show that packed up a decade ago. Marie and Bernadette are twin sisters, aged 23, from Limerick; they're here with their neighbour and friend Sarah, 25. "We just love the programme," said Marie. "We know all the lines. Give us any line from the three series, we'll tell you where it's from." Not since the heyday of Monty Python have so many people memorised the lines of comic sketches. "I'm surprised people get the humour," said Bernadette. "It seems very Irish to me."

"Sometimes, for Irish people," said Marie, "it's like watching a documentary." They explained that, for girls at TedFest, the choice is to dress as Mrs Doyle, a nun or a Lovely Girl. Bernadette bought their costumes from a shop in Camden, north London. There had, she explained, been some saucy, mini-nuns' outfits, "but," she said, "I'm bein' quite blasphemous enough as it is without wearin' the tarty version."

Blasphemous? Was she serious? Probably. In an economically booming, successfully Europeanised, post-punt, post-emigrant and almost post-Catholic culture, this dressing-up as the clergy who ran the country in their parents' and grandparents' days is clearly a form of rebellion, but some vestigial guilt remains. "When she heard Dermot Morgan was dead," one girl told me, "me mam said, 'I'm not a bit surprised. That's what you get for cheekin' the priests.'"

I can't hang around the bar, though, because the five-a-side football is under way near the harbour. At the pitch – a small, indescribably muddy field whose goals must have been bought in a toyshop – I'm surprised to discover the real-life Sicilian five-a-side footie team gracefully warming up.

What are the Italians doing here? It's a piece of Irish logic. The Craggy Island World Cup, sponsored by Paddy Power, the bookies, is open to all "islands off the coast of Ireland". Teams have been fielded from two of the Arans, plus Clare Island, Tory Island, Rathlin Island, Inishbofin and a few others. Then last month, Giovanni Trapattoni, the Italian football coach, signed up to become the Irish national team's manager, starting this May, and the Craggy Island organisers asked the island of Sicily – certainly "an island off the coast of Ireland", though it's 1472 miles "off" – to send a five-a-side team.Which is why there are five well-groomed, wavy-haired (or fashionably shaven-headed) Italian Adonises on the muddy pitch alongside the hard men from Inisheer.

Scores of nuns press forward for a better view of the Sicilians' thighs. (Even the man from BBC Sport Northern Ireland is in full habit.) The first Mrs Doyle from the jetty is there, re-doing her jammy smudge of lipstick, beside a dispirited chap in a gorilla suit. Italian macaroons are handed round as a gesture of friendship. Despite being 10/11 favourites, the Sicilians lose to the islandmen, 4-2 on a penalty shootout. Four games later, the final sees the host island, Inishmore, playing Inishbofin for World Cup glory. The commentator is hilarious. "Inishbofin is playing into the – no wait, both teams are playing into the wind," he says. "The ball is cleared by No 4 there, the man with the highlights, obviously done at home by his cousin... The atmosphere is electric – like a hairdryer in the bath." When a goal is scored, a ragged cry goes up from the home supporters, outnumbered though they are by be-mitred bishops and hirsute milkmen. "I don't know how to say this," says the commentator, "but I just heard a nun behind me say 'Fookin' hell'..."

Back at the hotel, I discover that I've been invited to be one of the judges at the Lovely Girls beauty contest this evening. I am stunned by the honour (and when I ring the children in London to tell them the news, a note of genuine respect enters their voices for perhaps the first time ever).

In the bar I celebrate with a glass of Burgundy. The bar is crammed with lunching clergymen, red-faced monks and a contingent of Lovely Girls, chosen from local heats around the country. The girls drink gin and tonics, simper, flirt and take snaps of each other on their mobiles. One explains how much she likes "the humour of the fancy dress, because it's so subtle. It just creeps up on you, and you see something and say, 'Oh God, yes.' Like Eileen there, with her fake arms." I'm mystified. What arms? What is she talking about? "Eileen," she says, "show John the arms, willya?" A sweet-faced teenager, at a table of friends, displays two fleshy plastic forearms, attached to her wrists.

"I don't remember a Father Ted episode with fake arms," I say, stupidly. "When was that?"

As one woman, the six girls take a collectively aghast deep breath; one clamps a horrified hand to her mouth. I have made the most appalling gaffe. (The fake arms feature, of course, in "Escape From Victory", when Ted cheats at a football match.) A history professor announcing at high table that he'd never heard of the Franco-Prussian War would have felt less of a fool and an imposter. Will I be thrown out on my ear?

I retreat swiftly, to find the Sicilians surveying their lunch with distaste. On Saturday afternoons, many Irish people lunch on "soup and a sambo" (ie sandwich); perhaps the nomenclature confuses the stylish Italians. Their steely manager sips a pint of Guinness and grimaces.

Struggling through the mass of T-shirts saying, "Careful Now" and "I Love My Brick" and "It's A Priest Thing – You Wouldn't Understand", I discover Ken Robertson, head of communications at Paddy Power, the sponsors, who have shelled out £5,000 for the winner of the football, and a "significant" sum to get their name on the TedFest literature and T-shirts.

"It's the bizarreness of the event that attracted us," he says. "We like to get involved in unusual sports. Two years ago, we held the biggest ever strip-poker event with 400 players at the Café Royal, and this year we're supporting the Bingham Cup, the gay rugby world cup, which will be the biggest sporting event held in Ireland this year. We're really getting behind it, excuse the pun."

By the door, the glum Italians are leaving. "Can we just say goodbye to the Sicilian team?" says Peter Philips, the organiser, "who lost the tournament but brought us some lovely cakes?" The departing players beam at the wild cheers this provokes.

By teatime, the crowds have swelled even more, for an hour of Buckeroo Speed Dating, which involves silver-tongued men pressing their attentions on scornful young women, while loading a plastic donkey with buckets and ropes until it kicks them all off.

In the bar, extra Lovely Girls have been drafted in for tonight's contest, by a Wild Card system. One is Lisa Smith, a dark-haired, hyperactive management consultant from Galway, with a fondness for "touch rugby." Around us the costumes are getting sillier. One man is dressed as a six-foot bottle of beer. One is dressed as Henry Sellers, a walk-on TV personality with a fondness for sherry in an early episode. There's a score of men in silver-grey Ted wigs. People in rabbit heads wander past (Bishop Brennan suffers an infestation of rabbits at the parish house in "The Plague") and a very sensible-looking girl called Sarah, in pearls, pleated skirt and wimple says, "Sure, what else is there to do than be extremely silly sometimes?"

Huge amounts of drink have been consumed since 11am, but nobody seems actually drunk; the lecherous Pat Mustards redouble their hairy seduction attempts over more Bulmers. Urgent canoodlings in the corridors suggest there may be a high incidence of priest-hopping before the evening is over. It occurs to me that few people have dressed up as the decrepit Father Jack – but I suppose it makes it harder to pull, when your shirt-front is covered in drool, vomit and dribble. What about the Mrs Doyles, in their aprons and picture hats? They seem, surprisingly, to be much in demand among the boys. There must be some atavistic (can it be Oedipal?) impulse in young Irishmen to part these decent, God-fearing, pinafored ladies from their foundation garments. I'm almost sure I felt a twinge myself, once or twice.

The climax of the weekend is the Lovely Girls beauty contest, in which nine prime examples of Irish womanhood are put through their paces in the island's small but glamorous dance-hall. Talent, everyone explains to me, is not the point. Nor are good looks. What's important is loveliness. My fellow judges, Ken and Maria, explain that we're judging "the concept of loveliness of a bygone age".

This contest is a piss-take of the Rose of Tralee Festival, Ireland's hilariously old-fashioned beauty contest, whose entrants must display such things as moral rigour, respect for their parents and an interest in charitable works, as well as have an acceptable figure, in order to win. You can bet the Rose of Tralee girls have never faced such a howling mob of desperadoes as the Lovelies face tonight. One is dressed in a Pink Panther suit (the connection? There's a passing mention, in "Are You Right There, Father Ted?" of Kato, Peter Sellers's domestic manservant/assailant in the Pink Panther movies) and a two-man horse can be seen in the crowd. The Limerick nuns are at the front, plus a slew of disruptive hardnuts dressed as sheep (uh-oh).

We judges take our seats, to much barracking. The compère Joe Rooney (who played Dougal's disruptive young pal Father Damo in one episode) brings on the girls. One by one, they must walk, or sway, successfully around traffic cones to show off their lovely bottoms (I'm sorry, but the word "bottoms" is right there in the Rules) and talk about their dreams of domestic virtue and marital servitude.

Madeleine, in a fetching green beret, explains that the women in the audience shouldn't be out tonight, but "at home, cooking supper for our husbands". If they had need of a job, it should be "doing the little drawings in a parish newsletter". Katie from Kilfenora, a brazen minx with dyed black hair, carries on a pottery hen, extracts plastic eggs and sends them flying over the first 10 rows. Lots of girls bring domestic props – scone-making mix, copies of The Irish Catholic, scrubbers, kitchen tools, holy water bottles – and cakes. One cake is shaped like a Toilet Duck. One is a gigantic scone, from inside which Miss Belfast Lovely Girl – Bridie O'Reilly – extracts a woolly jumper.

My heart is stolen away by the favourite, Miss Cork, a care worker called Tess Marnane, 21, and far too beautiful to be merely Lovely, who performed a charming feather-duster dance; but Miss Galway was also strongly favoured, because of her hand-knitted bloomers. You know Aran sweaters and their thick, white-ribbed material? She recommended Aran knickers as a corrective to the skimpy thong abominations in modern shops, and had brought along a pair, which she pulled on beneath her skirt, to roars from the crowd. "What's this little pocket at the front for?" asked the compere. "It's where I keep my rosary beads," said the girl. "Are they the kind that vibrate?" countered the wicked Mr Rooney.

As a final test, the Lovely Girls were required to make sandwiches in a sudden-death play-off. Each was given a tray of white sliced bread, Kerrygold butter and a tin of sardines and the resulting sandwiches were minutely examined with magnifying glasses, tape measures, calibrated forceps. One girl, disgusted by her efforts, hurled a slice of bread over her shoulder into the crowd. So did another. Soon they came hurtling back on to the stage, along with other, unrelated items of food, and soft toys...

But this is where we came in. I'm not sure what the TedFest says about Irish culture, the preoccupations of the young, the role of the priesthood, or the desire of young men to dress up as rabbits. To some extent, it's the spectacle of modern Ireland unburdening itself of its excessively religious past and embracing a world of anarchy in which identities don't matter. Then again, it's a colossal fancy dress party, where total strangers can admire each other's efforts, and there's no host except a fictional priest impersonated by a charismatic, grey-haired actor who died 10 years ago. A deliciously bogus celebration of churchy virtue and old-fashioned decency, it's the closest thing I know to a pagan saturnalia. As Ted himself might have written on his placard: Up With This Type Of Thing.

The Wire: David Simon on journalism's fatal flaws

David Simon found himself Monday afternoon bunkered down in the bowels of the law school building on the USC campus, discussing the demise of journalism as it relates to the fifth -- and sadly, final -- season of "The Wire." To summarize Simon's thoughts on the fall of newspapers and how the show weaves that depressing topic into politics, crime, corruption and, basically, the decay of civilization, he addressed it this way: "Everyday human beings matter less. The game is rigged. The house odds are against you."

Never the optimist, Simon said the foundation for The Wire was built upon the Greek tragedies -- "Both Stringer and Omar had to die. There was never a doubt." -- and the film Paths of Glory, directed by Stanley Kubrick and starring Kirk Douglas, which he called the only important political film of all time, except for 10 minutes of The Candidate with Robert Redford. Simon, still a Baltimore resident, toiled at the Sun for seven years, which included some time off to focus on his books Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets and The Corner, both of which were turned into TV projects, the former a critically beloved but low-rated series for NBC, and the latter a miniseries for HBO. He still loves the paper and it kills him to see it decimated by lay-offs that ultimately followed the Sun's local ownership to that of the Tribune company.

"I'm heartbroken at what's happened to the Sun," he said, and even though he's much more well known now for his TV work, he still considers himself a newspaperman (and can be seen in a cameo in the Wire finale, slaving away in a newsroom cubicle). "The Sun went from being a paper trying to get it right to a flashier, dynamic paper that knew less of the city than before (Tribune took over)."

When asking the assembled students what was the overriding theme of this season in regards to what happens at the fictional Sun, he shoots down many theories: Yeah, Templeton's making up of sources and quotes play a part but it's not the overriding theme that Simon wants to get out, and, no, it's not just about the strive for Pulitzers. Rather, it's the "do more with less" theory that managing editor Thomas Klebanow asks his writers and editors at the beginning of the season. It failed miserably.

"The whole season of The Wire is about what didn't happen," he explains. "The governor cooking the stats didn't get in the paper. The No Child Left Behind stories that didn't get in, and Prop Joe's death is just a brief."

With management's mantra to make the Sun a Pulitzer Prize-grabbing operation, the Sun's already limited resources can't find the time -- and the paper certainly doesn't have the manpower -- to adequately address the real needs of Baltimore; such as why the schools are failing the city's children, why the police can't make a dent on crime, the backroom politics and decisions that can, ultimately, make a difference in people's lives. Instead, the paper focuses on the homeless. Not an unworthy topic certainly, but not at the expense of everything else.

Remember the scene early on this season when Gus looks out the window and sees a fire blazing in East Baltimore and nobody's covering it? Simon said it was a metaphor for journalism burning to the ground. He recalled being on the newspaper staff and watching in horror, under the tenure of Sun editor John Carroll, as the paper spent hundreds of column inches on the ills of lead paint poisoning, blaming it for the increased drug trade, kids dropping out of school, overcrowding in the city's jails, the Orioles falling to last place... OK, not so much the O's descent into baseball oblivion, but you get the point. And, Simon said, when a Sun reporter met with the governor and the paper's self-obsessed topic of lead paint poisoning didn't come up, the writer falsely included a conversation with the governor anyway into his piece. At that point, Simon walked away from the paper, disgusted as hell.

Simon's other diatribe was mounted against the Internet. Not so much against the vast availability of information, but how that information is given away for free and that there's no regulation of bloggers, the vast majority of them ill-concerned about truth and news gathering. He partly blames newspapers themselves for their current predicament, for not charging readers to access stories online and that readers get what they pay for. It's easy to post comments about the coverage of the war in Iraq, and to use the news gathered there for your own blogging, but he warns that online readers don't have the moral ground to criticize a paper's coverage unless they're footing the bill. You want to do your own reporting in the Middle East and express your own opinions? Fine, he says, just make sure you pay the tab for what it costs to send journalists over there.

The session ended with more Wire-related questions. One student was blown away by the revelation that Cheese is Randy's father (though maybe that shouldn't have been all that surprising consider their surnames are both Wagstaff). Another asked why there's no music in the show -- except for the opening and closing credits -- and Simon said it's because he hates a score and believes it's meant to manipulate the audience. Also, he still considers himself a novice on the set and leaves most of the film-making decisions to his production team, and keeps his focus on the script.

Finally, Simon said he was grateful for the 10.5 hours HBO gave him to conclude the series -- the final episode was only supposed to be an hour but HBO's Carolyn Strauss gave him the OK for an extra 30 minutes when Simon wasn't able to wrap up the series in the allotted time -- and that if he had a full 12 episodes, more would've been shown about the Randy-Cheese relationship and a plot-line about Cutty -- the former gangster who did time and then came back to the neighbourhood to run a makeshift boxing gym -- could've been explored.

But, as The Wire ends its glorious run, this is no time to get greedy or ask what could've been. What viewers have received for five season is pure manna, a gift from the TV gods. Where we're normally given "The Housewives of Orange County" and "The Hills," here we were offered a study on the rise and fall of America's free-market system seen through the eyes of the entrepreneurs of the media, the warriors of the drug trade and the politicians from where it all trickles down.

All that, and Omar too.

The Frog Prince

Paul Giamatti’s John Adams is no swashbuckler, but the HBO show rises like a hot-air balloon says New York Magazine's John Leonard...

Short, fat, and cranky were the adjectives that came to David McCullough’s mind when he was asked to describe the hero of his Pulitzer Prize–winning biography of our very first vice-president. As brilliant as John Adams may have been, he was nowhere near the American masculine ideal of a cowboy or a quarterback. Still, how many of our Founding Fathers can we realistically expect to have looked as matinee melancholy and romantic as Thomas Jefferson? And we needed every one of that extraordinary bunch, from cracker-barrel Ben Franklin to narcoleptic George Washington, to dream up and nail down the nascent republic.

So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Adams, in the seven-part HBO mini-series adapted from McCullough, is played by Paul Giamatti and therefore looks mostly like a frog. For those of us who remember George Grizzard as the farmer-lawyer from Massachusetts in the thirteen-part The Adams Chronicles on public television 32 years ago, or William Daniels singing and prancing through the Continental Congress in the musical 1776, this takes some getting used to, especially considering how often Giamatti must doff and don his wig, as if to telegraph with blinding light from a bald dome. Perhaps we are being asked to see Adams through the indulgent eyes of his wife, Abigail. Since Abigail is played by Laura Linney, there can be no better vantage. Anyone who’s dipped into the thousand letters that passed between John and Abigail during their 54 years of marriage knows that Abigail was at least as smart as James Madison. Anyone familiar with Linney knows that she can be as smart as the situation needs—and simultaneously exasperated.

We’re in excellent company, from the Boston Massacre to the Declaration of Independence to Adams’s plenipotentiary missions to Versailles and the Court of St. James to his unsought but extremely gratifying vice-presidency in the first Washington administration. As Jefferson, Stephen Dillane broods upon liberty with a gothic passion. Tom Wilkinson’s Franklin fills us with impatience and intends to. David Morse as George W. seems taxidermic, a huge stuffed squirrel of secrets. Zeljko Ivanek as the Pennsylvania delegate John Dickinson makes a remarkably eloquent case for Quaker pacifism. Scriptwriter Kirk Ellis (Into the West) and director Tom Hooper (Longford) are equally interested in ideas and personalities. And their camera, whether on location in Colonial Williamsburg or in Budapest pretending to be Paris, likes to point as much at peach trees, bullet molds, smallpox victims, and warships as it does at French gardens, despondent faces, and flags like bloody bandages. On one gruesome hand, the tarring and feathering of a British officer; on another, the thrilling levitation from Paris of the Montgolfiers’ hot-air balloon.

When this balloon goes up, a skeptical Adams turns rapturous. Here is a metaphor for his republic. You may recall that Simon Schama, in his tendentious account of the French Revolution, Citizens, also made hot-air metaphors out of these eighteenth-century balloons. By establishing a direct, unmediated relationship with enormous multitudes of ordinary French, balloonists robbed Louis XVI of his control of spectacle, injuring the king in his ceremonial mystique. According to Schama, a balloon in the air belonged not to the hierarchical world of the monarch, but to the democratic people. Well, up the republic, with flags and flutes for this worthy mini-series, too. Yet as we watch, we’d do well to remember the words of the late Molly Ivins, who once suggested, “It is possible to read the history of this country as one long struggle to extend the liberties established in our Constitution to everyone in America.” No doubt the equally estimable Abigail Adams and Laura Linney would both agree.

John Adams starts March 16 on HBO.

Mad Men, and why we love 1960

The sexist mores of Mad Men, the latest American television hit, are shocking – so why does a period piece set in 1960 look so seductive? Because the people it shows were the masters of the modern universe argues Bryan Appleyard.

"This place," observes Don Draper, creative director of the Madison Avenue advertising agency Sterling Cooper, “has more failed artists and intellectuals than the Third Reich.” It is 1960, and although the Sterling Cooper staff may have failed as artists and intellectuals, as ad men they are masters of the universe. And that is exactly why they were all invented by Matthew Weiner for his television-drama series Mad Men. It was, Weiner has said, “an amazing year”, and advertising was an amazing business. “The truth is, I think an advertising agency is one of the last places in the world where, if you bring in a big client, you’re in charge. There’s complete mobility, and it’s a model for the United States.”

The year is crucial. Nixon is about to lose to Kennedy, and America is feeling pretty good about herself. They liked Ike, the paranoia of the immediate postwar years had begun to subside and the suburbs had become happy havens of prosperity, and, for when they weren’t, the tranquilliser Librium, the Prozac of the age, had just come on the market. Best of all, the year before, the ad agency Doyle Dane Bernbach (DDB) had produced what was, in 1999, to be voted the greatest ad campaign of all time. It nicknamed Volkswagen’s little car the Beetle and showed it almost lost in a blank white page, with the slogan “Think Small”. Everything about this ad went against conventional wisdom: it wasted space, it sold a car as small when Americans liked big and it gave it an apparently demeaning name. Yet it turned Volkswagen into one of the world’s biggest car-makers. The concept of the ad man as a creative genius, not just a salesman, had been born.


He was also world-transforming. The idea that capitalism needs the manipulation of the mass mind to ensure that people will buy products even when - or especially when - they don’t need them was an old one, even by then. Edward Bernays, the nephew of Sigmund Freud, had sold the subconscious as the malleable source of all our impulses to the Americans in the 1920s. Deliberately influencing the subconscious was not only good for business, it was, claimed Bernays, necessary for the workings of democracy. Advertising and public relations soothed and managed the rage, aspirations, suffering and happiness of the masses.

Amid the relative peace and absolute prosperity of the 1950s, this was an idea whose time had come. Democracy and the good life meant consumption - something we could do much better than the Soviets. In order to consume, you needed to be told what to consume. Advertising would win the cold war. No wonder Weiner’s Mad Men think they are the centre of the world. They are. Weiner wrote his first script for the series seven years ago and sent it to David Chase, creator of The Sopranos. Chase at once hired him to work on The Sops. Then, with that show finally out of the way, Weiner was free to go back to Mad Men. First aired in America in July last year, it has already picked up two Golden Globes and several other awards.

Apart from a few old ad men grumbling “It wasn’t like that”, the series has been universally acclaimed. But what, exactly, it’s about is puzzling. There are two views. Most of the American coverage has focused on how different Weiner’s 1960 seems from the way we live now. It is a costume drama, a period piece. On the other hand, Weiner himself has insisted that this is not merely a condescending look back at a quaint and distant past. “You tell me if this is a period piece,” he has said. “The men are asking, ‘Is this it?’ The women are asking, ‘What’s wrong with me?’ You tell me if that sounds like it’s 1960 or 2007.” Mad Men is not a window onto the past, it’s a mirror of the present. It’s the tension between these two views that makes the show so enthralling.

It’s a tension within Weiner himself, for the truth is he’s being more than a little disingenuous in denying the period quality of the show. In fact, Mad Men bends over backwards to draw your attention to the differences between then and now. “There were seven deadly sins practised at the dawn of the 1960s,” wrote Alessandra Stanley in The New York Times. “Smoking, drinking, adultery, sexism, homophobia, antisemitism and racism. In its first few minutes, Mad Men... taps into all of them.”

Weiner plainly delights in shocking us with the sights and sounds of a different world. A Jewish client is a big problem for the agency - they have to seek out the one Jew they employ to make her feel at home. They hit the booze tray from late morning onwards. Gays are invisible, in the closet; and the girls are grateful there are men at IBM smart enough to design an electric typewriter simple enough for women to use. The perception of risk is downright weird. A little girl walks in with a plastic laundry bag over her head and gets told off by her mother for messing up her wardrobe.

But the really big shockers are the cigarettes. Everybody smokes all the time, including a doctor while conducting a gynaecological examination. When the hands of the hero, the creative director Don Draper (Jon Hamm), are in shot, they’re holding a fag; when they’re not, his trousers appear to be on fire. One of the agency’s top accounts is Lucky Strike, and this presents the ad men with a problem. Reader’s Digest - which, another period touch, everybody reads - has said smoking causes cancer, and the authorities won’t allow agencies to claim there are safer brands. "Four out of five dead people smoke your brand,” is not, Draper observes, the best possible caption. But Draper is brilliant, up there with the DDB VW team. He gets round the death problem by saying of the tobacco in Luckies, “It’s toasted!”. All cigarette tobacco is toasted. But so what? It’s a nice, warm, safe word.

Draper’s monstrous genius is, in fact, too big to be locked in the ad world of 1960. Flogging Luckies as toasted may be quaint. But he is also looking after the Right Guard deodorant account. In a moment of subtle drama, he is lying in bed after being told by his mistress he stinks, asking himself Freud’s old question: what do women want? He gets it in one - “Any excuse to get closer” - and a brand is born. The Right Guard slogan, with its psychological intimacy and authenticity, is way ahead of its time. Authenticity was to take over from domestic comfort and bourgeois aspiration as the central advertising theme in the later, summer-of-love 1960s.

But the twist in the tale of all this period detail is the same as the twist in our own Life on Mars: in some fundamental sense, “then”, for all its faults, seems more attractive than “now”. At one level, this is simply about the gorgeous look of the show. The styling derives its power from the hard-surfaced abstraction of the architecture and interior design of the time. A book could be written on the credit sequence alone, with its overtones of Saul Bass, Hitch-cock and Scorsese, and its use of silhouetted linearity. It’s all about alienation, of course, but it’s beautiful and as eerily romantic as the deep-buttoned booths and vodka gimlets in the restaurants.

The clothes, meanwhile, are not just good, they are downright catwalk-fashionable. Ever since the unstructured 1980s, men’s suits have been getting sharper, to the point where the average male silhouette is now more or less back where it was in 1960. Women, meanwhile, have been racing back to what The New York Times’s Ruth La Ferla calls the “meticulously tailored look that evokes the White House of Jacqueline Kennedy”. She adds: “Some of Seventh Avenue’s most influential taste-makers are invoking in their latest collections the proprieties, the seamless appearances and the toney aspirations of midcentury Middle America. They are, in short, going bourgeois to the core.” La Ferla quotes an art director, Sam Shahid: “Things are timeless right now ...” But then he adds, with deadly poignancy: “Or you want them to be.” So, like the 1970s in Life on Mars, 1960 in Mad Men is being seen as both horrifying and seductive. Draper’s wife is going mad in suburbia, but she looks great while she’s doing it, and so, come to that, does suburbia.

It would, however, be a big mistake to see Mad Men as a prolonged wallow in moral dismay and fashionista nostalgia. I know exactly why Weiner insisted this wasn’t a period piece. Primarily, like Chase in The Sopranos, he wants us to be objective. This involves denying us any easy moralising about the characters. Tony Soprano, like Don Draper, does what he does, and, if we keep stepping back and judging, we won’t understand.

In fact, this antimoralistic, high-objectivity stance is now all over the best American television. Both the great current cop shows, The Wire and The Shield, work, not because of simple amorality, but because of a deep awareness that no consistent moral posture can ever work. By setting his Mad Men amid the alien mores of 1960, Weiner distances them, making us watch them as if they were goldfish in a bowl of plate glass and stainless steel. We see them in a little world, they see themselves as the whole world; and, in doing so, we realise that we might also be goldfish. Like Brecht, Weiner understands that emotional distance - alienation - can intensify our engagement with what is really going on.

And finally, there is the whole issue of work itself. The Office, in both its American and British versions, and Joshua Ferris’s highly successful novel Then We Came to the End have indicated a strong contemporary awareness of the oddity of the working - specifically the clerical - life. What was banal has suddenly become exotic. Mad Men goes back to the time when the modern office, with its cubicles, geometric furniture and translucent glass, was born. It revels in the drama this creates. A refused handshake becomes, in this stark, demanding environment, a terrible frozen moment. And there’s a wonderful shot down the facade of the building, the stainless-steel mullions diving down towards the suited figures scurrying into the entrance.

The office had become the great exposer of all human weakness, as well as the centre of all human power. And advertising had begun its long march to world domination. It was 48 years ago, but it seems like tomorrow.

Mad Men hits British screens on BBC4 tonight at 10pm.