The shows where everyone knows your name

Picture: Paramount

In the history of television’s greatest shows reaching the end, there’s an accepted list of those that bowed out with the right mixture of pathos, completion and even a little intrigue. Leading this parade is The Sopranos - not only the best series ever to grace the small screen, but one which ended with brilliant, ambiguous flourish: mobster Tony Soprano, long-suffering wife Carmela and their children Meadow and Anthony Jr taking their seats in a New Jersey diner, its front door opens and Tony looks up, slightly pensively...before fading to black, and Journey’s Don’t Stop Believing cuts in to lower the curtain on a modern masterpiece.

Just as The Godfather is regarded as one of the greatest pieces of 20th Century film-making, with Goodfellas its rightful heir, The Sopranos dipped into the same gene pool, coming to be universally thought of as the catalyst of a golden era of cinematic storytelling in television, on a scale never previously achieved. Over six seasons, the epic HBO show coincided with the emergence of non-broadcast platforms and the artistic boldness that new players like Netflix would approach televised drama, giving us programming that was less formulaic gogglebox fodder as compelling novels in video form. 

Concurrent with The Sopranos, we had The West Wing, followed by the expansive arced narratives of The Wire, Breaking Bad and its spinoff Better Call Saul, the latter of which both ended with epic finales of their own. All are indebted to The Sopranos and, in particular, its 2007 finale. While such shows invariably carried a grim subtext (murder, drug dealing, violence, etc), they had a wit about them that television drama had rarely displayed before. Moreover, they could be compared to sitcoms for their depiction of strong, memorable and clearly defined characters. 

The best sitcoms are those with which we enjoy kindred familiarity (or aversion) with the cast, their on-screen personas and the situations they find themselves in. And the best sitcoms, too, concluded with a tear and a knowing look. It’s also why they have been televisual events. 

In 1983 105 million Americans tuned in to watch ‘Goodbye, Farewell And Amen’, the final episode of M*A*S*H, the series that had combined comedy with a moral conscience (having been spun out of Robert Altman’s anti-war film of the same name which, despite being set during the Korean conflict was clearly a statement on the contemporary battle raging in Vietnam). Over 11 seasons, viewers adhered to Hawkeye, BJ, Hotlips, Klinger, Colonel Potter and Charles Winchester with a sense of in-the-trenches camaraderie as they wisecracked their way through the horrors of an attritional war. The finale was as perfect an ending as those 11 years deserved. Obvious comparisons can be drawn with the ending of another war comedy, Blackadder Goes Forth, set amid the senseless slaughter of 1917 France, which signed off with that poignant ‘over-the-top’ order, before dissolving to a field of towering poppies.

Only Fools And Horses embedded itself in British national culture, with its cast, characters and their catchphrases acquiring a familiarity that made them extended members of our own households. Fools will forever be prefixed by the phrase “much loved”. No wonder its final episode, on Christmas Day 2003, attracted more than 24 million viewers - the highest recorded audience in the UK for a comedy, and roughly half the country’s viewing population at the time. The difference between Fools and American sitcoms is that it was written by just one person, John Sullivan. US shows tend to be written by squads of writers, but the effect is much the same, with the characters and their catchphrases becoming our own friends. Which inevitably leads me to Friends, which ended in 2004 with ‘The Last One’, concluding ten years of fun with the six New Yorkers who became, well, friends to all of us. In so many ways Friends was a spiritual successor to Seinfeld which, a few years earlier, had also focused on an equally dysfunctioning group of New York apartment-dwelling chums, their insecurities and mania, in a show that had prided itself on being about nothing at all. Over two episodes - the show’s 179th and 180th, respectively - ‘The Finale’  drew a US audience of 76 million.

Most of us will never be members of a New Jersey crime family, but many can identify with the ordinariness of suburban life at Casa Soprano (yeah, I know we don’t all have a stash of Uzis in the loft, but we have taken teenagers on tours of potential colleges, albeit without a rival being ‘whacked’ along the way). Ultimately, this affinity comes from the discernible gallery of individuals with whom we whom we might associate ourselves either partially or completely. Sitcoms, generally, bae this game easier to play: are you more Chandler than Joey? More Monica than Rachel? Del Boy or Rodney? George or Kramer?

Arguably the greatest example of sitcom ensemble casting reached its own finale 30 years ago today, when time was called on Cheers. I hold a particular affection for this show as, over its 11 series, it became the anchor of my Friday night viewing here in the UK, thanks to Channel 4. Even when I wouldn’t have been old enough to buy a pint in a British pub, let alone an American bar, Cheers was - and remains - the perfect half hour of gags and characters you couldn’t help love.

TV & Satellite Week, 18 May 1993

When it ended in 1993 I wrote a piece for TV & Satellite Week magazine in which I drew on Cheers’ status as the wittiest, most intelligent, most sophisticated television comedy of its time. And, possibly, since. This reverence, I argued, had much to do with the way it challenged the established order of sitcoms, being comprised of a group of somewhat disparate people linked by locale, not family. 

Cheers redefined the sitcom, abandoning the safe predictability of wholesome domesticity (i.e. The Cosby Show, Family Ties, et al), by abandoning the home to set itself in a downtown bar (the original concept was for the show to be set in a hotel as a US version of Fawlty Towers). 

In this setting, where punters went to escape their home life, Cheers presented a gallery of distinct personalities, generating laughs by exploiting these personas, either to prick the lasciviousness of Ted Danson’s Sam Malone, the pretentiousness of Shelly Long’s Diane Chambers, the slovenliness of George Wendt’s Norm Peterson, the dullness of John Ratzenberger’s Cliff Clavin, the naivety of Woody Harrelson’s Woody, the causticity of Rhea Perlmann’s Carla, the pomposity of Kelsey Grammer’s Dr. Frasier Crane, and latterly, the unfulfilled ambition of Kirstie Alley’s Rebecca Howe. But more than just being a platform for jokes about or from these characters, humour came from pitching their interactions - Sam’s pursuit of Diane, Norm’s bafflingly interdependent bromance with Cliff, Carla’s inverse bullying of everyone, Woody’s apprenticeship of adulthood with all of them, and so on.

Sexual and even social tension became a constant theme on Cheers, again in sharp contrast to the confected safety of American network television’s usual conservatism. The show also made much of the fact that it was set in a place of both work and recreation. Although many episodes featured scenes set away from the titular Boston bar, most were concentrated in the one set, giving the show a theatre-like environment. 

Not for nothing, Cheers won 28 Emmy Awards (and was nominated for a colossal 111). In its final episode, Sam would fix his final date; Carla would dish out her last barb; Cliff would regurgitate his one unused irrelevant fact; Woody would draw on his only remaining recollection of life “back in Hanover”; and Norm would down his last beer, though there is no record of him finally settling his bar tab (over 273 episodes he managed to avoid paying for a single drop of beer). 

That it got to that point after 11 years, growing to regularly commanding audiences of 83 million a week in the US, is testament to the perseverance by the US network NBC that ran it. Its first season, in 1982, suffered from poor ratings, but winning five Emmys, coupled with critical acclaim kept it going.

Picture: Netflix

What finished the show was Danson’s desire to concentrate on his film career, but also the intention to quit while Cheers was still at its peak (he was also earning a then-record $450,000 an episode). Most of the principle cast would go on to enjoy significant success elsewhere, though arguably it was ‘new boy’ Harrelson who would have the most critically successful career. Following Danson’s decision, the remaining cast members contemplated making a 12th series without him but they, too, concluded that Cheers would never be better.

Grammer, of course, would take his character Frasier Crane into his own eponymous sitcom which, for UK viewers, would also find a home in Channel 4’s Friday night fixture. It too - in its original run - enjoyed an 11-year run of ratings success, adopting both the traditional domestic formula with Cheers’ workplace setting. Frasier gave a somewhat lesser Cheers character a life of his own - in Seattle - creating with brother Niles, father Martin and his carer Daphne, radio producer Roz and standout star Eddie the dog another beloved ensemble (with Niles’ social-climbing but never seen wife Maris repeating the gag established by Norm’s Vera in Cheers).

‘Event’ finales like those of Friends, M*A*S*H and Cheers are unlikely to ever occur again. TV consumption has changed out of all recognition. 30 years ago, Cheers’ final episode became the 1983 season’s most watched show with over 93 million Americans watching it - some 40% of the entire US population. This had been partly engineered by clever marketing by NBC, which had promoted the episode as “the television event of a lifetime“ and television’s “greatest night”. Others got in on the act: Massachusetts governor William Weld (in the manner of The Simpsons’ publicity opportunity-seeking Mayor Quimby) declared 20 May 1993 the state’s ‘Cheers Day’. In the show’s fictional home, giant video screens were set up on Boston Common so crowds could watch the finale. Jay Leno even broadcast a live episode of his Tonight Show from the city’s Bull & Finch pub, the Cheers bar’s supposed location (the show was, of course, shot in Los Angeles). NBC devoted most of its programming that evening to Cheers, leading right up to the ‘One For The Road’ episode.

Just as the Friends finale would do a decade later, Cheers concluded with character closure. Woody entered public life as a Boston city councillor, getting Norm an accountancy job at City Hall in the process. Cliff got a promotion at the post office. Rebecca finally achieved her ambition of marrying a rich man. And TV’s greatest will-they, won’t-they romance, between Sam and Diane was revived…briefly, before calling last orders on one of the best sitcoms of all time by remaining, like that Sopranos ending, delightfully, ambiguously unresolved.

Let them eat cake

On top of a filing cabinet at my company’s offices there is regularly an open tub of chocolates, inviting anyone passing to dip in and grab themselves an Orange Creme, a Golden Barrel, a Mini Flake, or all three. I pass the chocolates en route to the office kitchen to make myself a cup of tea. However, I don’t partake. It’s not that I don’t appreciate the gesture, but for at least the last three years I’ve been Type 2 diabetic and therefore chocolate in all its forms, along with bread, pasta and almost all the foods containing ‘complex’ carbs, are no longer my friend. 

It’s my own fault: I indulged too much in such things and gained a lot of weight that clogged up my pancreas until it stopped working properly. That’s the broad science of it. Now, like an alcoholic never touching another drop for fear of returning to addiction, I mostly avoid carbs to prevent myself going blind, losing my feet or needing kidney dialysis if I let blood sugar levels return to where they were when I was first diagnosed.

You can’t survive by not consuming carbohydrate, however. It’s just that I have to look out for things that contain too much of it and not eat them. Occasionally I’ll have a pint of Guinness, but I’ll stick to just the one before moving on to water or a diet drink. It doesn’t bother me. I can still be sociable, it’s just that I’d prefer to remain sociable for as long as I can. I don’t get resentful, either: I’ve grown used to my own family consuming chocolate around me (usually around nine in the evening), in much the same way as I’ve long rejected any envy over people eating sandwiches, pasta or naan bread in front of me. I know what it can do to me, so I let it go.

However, the chairwoman of Britain’s leading food watchdog has another view. People bringing things like cake into the office for colleagues should be considered, she says, as harmful to their health as passive smoking. “We all like to think we’re rational, intelligent, educated people who make informed choices the whole time,” Professor Susan Jebb of the Food Standards Agency said, speaking in a personal capacity. “I have made a choice, but people were making a choice to go into a smoky pub.”

Whilst not saying the two issues are completely identical, she has combined them into the same thinking. The Times reported her as saying: “With smoking, after a very long time, we have got to a place where we understand that individuals have to make some effort but that we can make their efforts more successful by having a supportive environment. But we still don’t feel like that about food.”

Frankly, I’ve never equated smoking and someone leaving a birthday cake in a communal area at work, even in working cultures where someone is always bringing in confectionary. As an ex-smoker, too, I’m also conscious of what my fumes did for those I worked with when I last smoked, almost 30 years ago (including - ugh - in a small office with two non-smokers). 

I get the point, though. Two-thirds of adults in the UK are classed as overweight and a quarter obese. Worse, Type 2 diabetes now accounts for one-in-twelve UK adults, with cases in children and young adults quadrupling in Britain since 1990 - a faster increase than anywhere else in the world (rubbishing the idea that it is a condition of middle-age). Type 2 diabetes is mostly lifestyle-induced, too and - to some extent - self-inflicted. And I’m more than conscious that my own lack of self-restraint now contributes to the £6 billion obesity-related health conditions cost the NHS.

Politicians have argued for and against other measures to curb unhealthy lifestyles, such as banning the advertising of junk food, much as cigarette marketing was outlawed years ago, or stopping retailers from offering two-for-one deals on treats. Jebb, too, has added to this debate, telling The Times: “Advertising means that the businesses with the most money have the biggest influence on people’s behaviour. That’s not fair. At the moment we allow advertising for commercial gain with no health controls on it whatsoever and we’ve ended up with a complete market failure because what you get advertised is chocolate and not cauliflower.”

At the end of the day it is all about choice. And that choice requires strength of discipline. The brain is also very clever in prompting temptation, or forgetfulness. We can too easily mindlessly graze our way through a plate of biscuits left in a meeting room, or that box of Celebrations passed around without thinking - if we let ourselves, that is. 

Food brands are obliged these days to include nutritional facts on their packaging, which for someone like me who has to make a smart decision is extremely helpful. But is the solution that bad foods should be outlawed altogether? Of course not. Even I can have that occasional Guinness, though with 18g of carbs per pint, your granny was right in calling it a meal in a glass. Moderation is key which, I know, is often easier said than done. Harder is finding healthier food choices when eating out, and here is where I’d like to see the hospitality industry do more. Some pubs and restaurants do understand: asking to remove potatoes or chips from an order and replace them with salad is increasingly easier. More and more establishments get the idea of ‘bunless burgers’ or ‘burritos-in-a-bowl’, too. But I appreciate that as a  diabetic I remain in the minority. Plus, you can’t vouch for the sugar and salt used in recipes - avoidance is, I’ve accepted, only a mitigation.

Actually, the worst place I’ve ever experienced for food is, counter-intuitively, a hospital. When I spent time as in-patient for a diabetes-related condition a couple of years ago my breakfast choices would either be cereal or scrambled egg on white toast. Every morning. I chose a small dollop of the egg every day, with the only bonus being an added sausage on Sundays. Dinner would be whatever meat and vegetables I could extract from a lasagne. 

While I’ve got on top of things, and smugly lost weight to, now, manage my condition, others aren’t so diligent. Obesity and overeating are diseases in their own right. There are psychological reasons why some people eat themselves into being overweight, despite longstanding public information about the risks. But a nanny state is not the answer. Of course, the NHS could be more interventionist, but given pressures on the health service and GP surgeries in general, for a doctor to instruct someone to lose weight probably requires an in-person appointment, and would usually only come about because the individual is there for something else. No one, I suspect, rings up their GP to say “I’m fat - help me”.

“If a doctor comes across somebody with high blood pressure, they would feel, culturally, by training, by guidelines, by practice, that they must offer this patient treatment for their high blood pressure and explain to them why it was important,” Susan Jebb told The Times. “At the moment, if a doctor comes across a patient who is overweight, they mostly ignore it. The status in medicine comes from treating rare diseases with very expensive medicine and technology, and obesity isn’t either of those.”

She has a point. Obesity has, weirdly, been accepted culturally. I used to watch the American sitcom Roseanne and never once thought that Roseanne Barr’s titular character or her screen husband John Goodman were putting their health at risk by being large people. It almost seemed like a blue collar badge of honour. The Sopranos was, more or less, about hefty, masculine men who ate mounds of spaghetti-and-clams, wore oversized untucked shirts, and were more likely to die from a rival’s 9mm bullet than heart failure. Thanks to these cultural references I, too, embraced the large untucked shirt look because they allowed me to be fat without, apparently, consequences. 

When I lived in America, and on my many visits there since, I embraced the drive-through culture that put me literally at arms-length reach of a supersized burger-and-fries combo from the comfort of a car. The contradiction here, though, is that in America there are, actually, plenty of healthy food choices, and healthy lifestyle opportunities are everywhere. In California, where I lived, you worked alongside trim-looking joggers, gym-goers and outdoor junkies whose cars had bike and ski racks permanently mounted on them. Even in “overweight America”, you had a clear choice.

I’ve clearly made some bad ones, and didn’t realise that I had. But today, I walk past that open tub of Roses because I can. It’s another choice. It just shouldn’t have to be everybody else’s.

Opening up the window on the world

Picture: Channel 5/ITN Productions/Jaimie Gramston

Let me share a personal secret with you. Some years ago, while living in Paris, I visited a therapist every other Saturday morning for a while. It was no biggie. There was no personal crisis that led me to those hour-long chats. There were, though, two triggers for seeking a friendly ear: I’d only recently moved to France from the Netherlands, separating from my-then girlfriend in the process. I was in a new and somewhat pressured job, while getting my head around a new town and a new language. I wasn’t struggling - living in Paris had been a long-held aspiration (blame a lot of Inspector Clouseau and Alain Delon films) and I revelled in it, but with a lot to process, and no local friends to unload on (and I wasn’t going to burden my new colleagues with any of this), I needed an outlet. On top of all that, The Sopranos had shown that it was OK to talk about ’stuff’, not that I was trying to equate myself with Tony Soprano, or that I harboured any latent desire for my therapist.

So the point of bearing my soul here is that one of the themes that came up regularly in my hour-long Saturday morning chats in the 20th Arrondissement was ‘escape’. To be clear, I wasn’t looking to escape the very city I’d dreamed of living in, but whenever I looked up and saw a plane above Paris it triggered a form of FOMO. I wanted to be on that plane, going somewhere – anywhere. We never did get to the bottom of this wanderlust, and to be honest, newly single I didn’t do badly for travel. 

Whether business trips to New York and Miami, or private weekends in Milan, Hamburg or back home in London, the Air Miles added up. But when I look back on all of that travel, nothing could be classed as adventurous. Even though a week spent driving Route 66, from Chicago to Los Angeles, was a marathon that took me through states and cities I wouldn’t have otherwise found time for, it was America. Familiarity. Chain hotels and drive-throughs, classic rock on the radio.

I never did find out which branch of pyschotherapy my therapist subscribed to (Freudians and Jungists don’t tend to telegraph their associations) but I’m sure she would have readily concluded that I’m a creature of both habit and familiarity. When it comes to travel, I probably still am. Language, culture and now, thanks to a health condition, food seem to present too many barriers. Which, I know, are all ridiculous reasons not to go somewhere in the modern age, and after centuries of human exploration. 

I genuinely wish I could be more dauntless. Television doesn’t help: I’ll watch Simon Reeve nosing around a Brazilian favela and wonder ‘why couldn’t I do that’? The answer is that, probably, I couldn’t. Television makes it look easy. Even if Reeve has the look of a backpacking student, he’ll be accompanied by a film crew, and probably hired security, interpreters, and that sort of thing. But television, to quote Lord Reith, really does provide a window on the world. The trouble is that, in the midst of all the endless celebrity travelogues, few really do open it. 

The exception is surely Michael Palin. For a comic actor many of us still associate with Monty Python, his travel series - ever since his own version of Around The World In 80 Days in 1989, have been compelling, engaging and truly educational without being preachy. And unlike many comedian-driven travelogues, free of over-wry ‘look at that thing!’ wackiness. From travelling between the North and South poles or encircling the planet’s middle, to the Sahara, the Himalayas, Eastern Europe, Brazil and North Korea, Palin has conducted the journeys most of us would or could never do, either because we don’t have the means, or the inclination.

Picture: ITN Productions/Jaimie Gramston

His latest, Michael Palin: Into Iraq, has done it again. Beneath an undoubted affability, Palin found humanity thriving in a country which has a claim to being the cradle of civilisation, and yet has been scarred by frequent bouts of humankind’s destructiveness. The narrative of Iraq for at least the 30 years since the first Gulf War is that it has been one of the world’s great basket cases, much like Afghanistan. But despite the seemingly perpetual turmoil – war with neighbouring Iran, then the first Gulf War and its sequel, followed by the post-Saddam collapse into tribalism and the rise of ISIS - humanity has prevailed. As Palin showed, Iraq is not a bombed out desert land. Travelling the length of the Tigris, from just over the border in Turkey to Basra, one of those names we now only know for its place in conflict, Palin found Iraq’s beauty, its stunning architecture, the culture that made it the centre of the civilised world at one point in history, and most importantly, its people.

The experience had a profound effect on him: “By the end of March we were back from battle-hardened Iraq having travelled for almost three weeks and seen things, people and places the like of which I’d never seen before in all my travels,” he wrote in a blog post. “The scenes weren’t always happy. Many of them reflected the violence of the past few decades when Iraq was disfigured by war and the threat of war. But we met some souls who’d been through it all and whose resilience was an inspiration.”

Indeed, amongst the still-chaotic administration, and latent dangers that prevail in areas where the Western military is still present, Palin found reassuring normality. The flamboyant tailor in Erbil running up a smart suit, the café society that draws both men and (surprisingly) women out for tea in the evenings, and the children on a bombed out street in Mosul that reduced the normally genial presenter to blurt out “Fuck me!” at their stoicism. In a classroom, eloquent school kids spoke in perfect English of their desire for Iraq to be treated as a ‘normal’ country, like those in Europe. It was a truly levelling moment.

This, though, is still the contemporary narrative, and here’s what drew me in. Palin admits to having been fascinated by Iraq since childhood, when he was given a copy of Arabian Nights. It’s this connection to history – real history – that should spur us into visiting places that might be unfashionable, that don’t have McDonald’s drive-throughs and familiarities, but which may have contributed more to the world than, to quote Harold Shand in The Long Good Friday, “an ’ot dog.”

Palin’s “relentless optimism” in the Iraq series wasn’t meant to airbrush out the turmoil, and it certainly wasn’t a glorified advert for the country’s tourist authority. In one scene he visits the site of the Camp Speicher massacre in 2014, in which 1,500 Iraqi cadets were killed by ISIS. The undoubted gloom of Iraq’s recent past can’t be undone, but Palin showed that, actually, there should be plenty for tourists to come and see for themselves, if they’re willing and able. 

The people, first. Simplistic to say, I know, but they’re not all Kalashnikov-wielding monsters. They are young, aspirational, ambitious, thriving, even. There is wealth and prosperity amid the prevailing dysfunction. I can’t help feeling that it would be nice to contribute to it, as a Western tourist. Perhaps, for now, we have to accept that modest adventures are our limit, and let television be our gateway to more exotic or harder to reach places. One day, though. One day.

Goodman in a storm: an epic television journey

Picture: Greg Lewis/AMC/Sony Pictures Television

So that was Better Call Saul. Six captivating seasons of television charting the back story of shady lawyer Jimmy McGill and his metamorphosis into even shadier lawyer Saul Goodman (and, then, apparently unassuming Omaha, Nebraska, Cinnabon branch manager, Gene Takovic). Goodman (“It’s all good, man!”) was only meant to be a sub-character in Breaking Bad, introduced in its second season for a four-episode run, only to be developed into a more pivotal character in the universe and then, over the last seven years, the focus of Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould’s brilliantly written, intelligently directed, utterly compelling series. 

Much of the show’s strength has been drawn from Bob Odenkirk’s performances as the serial scammer McGill/Goodman/Takovic, an enlarged version of the exaggerated lawyers you see advertising on American local TV (“Been in a car crash? Then I’m the guy for you! Let ME fight your corner!”), making him protagonist of a wider landscape of Mexican drug gangs in and around Albuquerque, the thread running through both Better Call Saul and Breaking Bad. 

To some extent, Saul has been about plugging gaps in the Breaking Bad universe, filling in the back story of how McGill became Goodman, and thus became mixed up in the cartel that turned high school chemistry teacher Walter White (Bryan Cranston) into the drug kingpin Heisenberg. Saul, however, has never been about tying up loose ends, instead presenting something of a Bonnie & Clyde love story between McGill and fellow lawyer Kim Wexler (Rhea Seehorn), as they engage in an ever-increasing spiral of capers which eventually end in tragedies and tragic separation.

Vince Gilligan (middle) with Bob Odenirk (right) and Michael McKean as Chuck McGill (left)
Picture: Greg Lewis/AMC/Sony Pictures Television

Common to both Breaking Bad and Saul are moments of subtle comedy mixed with arch violence, at perverse odds with the murky nature of plotlines, such as Jonathan Banks’ Mike Ehrmantraut - the cynical ex-cop-turned enforcer for fried chicken supremo/meth magnate Gus Fring - challenging Odenkirk for the wriest lines, and for a good half of Saul’s sixth season Tony Dalton as the Dick Dastardly-esque moustache-twirling smiling psycho Lalo Salamanca, easily one of the finest small screen villains I’ve seen in years. 

“When we first started concocting the idea of doing a spinoff, we literally thought it’d be a half-hour show,” Gilligan recently told Rolling Stone. “It’d be something akin to Dr Katz [animated Comedy Central sitcom from the late ’90s] where it’s basically Saul Goodman in his crazy office with the styrofoam columns and he’s visited every week by a different stand-up comic. It was basically, I guess, legal problems. We talked about that for a day or two. And then Peter Gould and I realised, we don’t know anything about the half-hour idiom. And then we thought, okay, well, so it’s an hour … but it’s going to be a really funny hour. I said, ‘Breaking Bad is about 25-percent humour, 75-percent drama and maybe this will be the reverse of that.’ Well this thing [Saul], especially in Season Four, is every bit as dramatic as Breaking Bad ever was. I just didn’t see any of that coming. I didn’t know how good it would all be. I really didn’t.

Throw in, then, large dollops of irony, the consistently oblique opening sequences to each episode [such as the brilliant Point & Shoot, which begins with the Pacific dreamily washing over a beach, a lone black shoe bobbing in the brine, and followed by a tracking shot that leads to an abandoned car - a future flashback to Ehrmantraut’s deception of how the murdered Hamlin’s body was never found). Add to that exquisite cinematography and smartly unpredictable direction, and Saul will make an immediate entry into the great pantheon of formidable TV series that have enthralled us over the last decade or two. 

Saul’s final season, spread out over 13 episodes (with a mid-season break caused by Odenkirk’s absence from filming due to an on-set heart attack), took arcing narrative to a new level of sophistication and creative licence. Just as Breaking Bad charted White’s transition to Heisenberg, Saul charted McGill’s less linear path from Chicago con artist to his reinvention as Goodman, and then - cleverly shot in black and white - eventual denouement as Takovic (presumably living a new life in Nebraska away from the murderous events in Albuquerque but finding the temptation to scam too much to let go, leading - in last night’s finale - to his past catching up with him). 

It is not altogether, a feelgood end. There is a hint of mild redemption, as McGill settles in for an 86-year stretch at an extreme federal prison in Montrose, Colorado, where fellow hardcore inmates respect him for his ‘Better Call Saul!’ TV ad persona. There is even something of a reconciliation between Jimmy and the now estranged Kim, long after their scamming and its intersection with Lalo Salamanca led to the violent death of smarmy lawyer Howard Hamlin and indeed Salamanca himself.

Picture: Greg Lewis/AMC/Sony Pictures Television

The received wisdom is that we have been - and still are - in a golden age of television. Better Call Saul, and Breaking Bad are both entries in a library of shows that have, with each iteration, challenged the conventions and formulas that, in particular, American-made network television shows took during my childhood. The arrival of, first, the cable channels and then, more recently, the streamers threw off the shackles of network regulation. An hour of television suddenly became an hour of cinematic television. The Sopranos (still for me the greatest television show of all time) in 1999 can lay claim to being the catalyst, leading to shows like The Wire, Mad Men, Homeland, Game Of Thrones and almost every other ‘appointment’ drama you’ve ever been recommended. Even network shows, like House or Grey’s Anatomy benefitted from the narrative-driven approach that the cable and streaming series generated.

I know all of these examples are American, and there have been plenty of similarly intelligently-written series elsewhere (from acclaimed Scandi-dramas to Line Of Duty), but the US has cornered the market for event programming to schedule your life around, rather than simply have on. You could say, I know, that few of these shows were based on new concepts: there was The Godfather before The Sopranos, political dramas before The West Wing and Hill Street Blues before The Wire, but none were allowed the space and creative licence to explore the plots and themes that they pursued, challenging ‘cookie cutter’ depictions of nuclear families, urban living, social behaviour or the criminal underworld.

Arguably, though, the biggest strength of all of them - and Better Call Saul has been the prime example - is pace. Like its ‘sequel’ Breaking Bad, Saul was deliberately slow to get cooking. Gilligan and Gould were in no rush to establish Jimmy McGill as the vengeful rogue, slowly building his ascent to become Saul Goodman by creating a long-form rivalry with slick lawyer Howard Hamlin (whose own arc crossed streams with Lalo’s in tragic circumstances in this final season), leaving victims in his wake, such as his own brother Chuck and eventual wife Kim. Saul doesn’t ask for our view on the morality of it all, much as The Sopranos didn’t ask for our opinion on the casual violence and the almost organised infidelity of the principle characters. And so, McGill cons and fleeces his way through scam after scam, becoming Goodman and latterly Takovic. None of this happened overnight. And it was better for it.

Tony Dalton as Lalo Salamanca
Picture: Greg Lewis/AMC/Sony Pictures Television

The quality is courage: The Sopranos wasn’t afraid to bump off Soprano crew stalwart Salvatore ‘Big Pussy’ Bonpensiero in just the second series and there have been similar ‘Well that just happened…!’ moments in all of the shows it sired, from Idris Elba’s Stringer Bell in The Wire to Bryan Cranston’s Walter White in Breaking Bad itself). Even in Better Call Saul, Lalo met his end midway through this final series, despite appearing to be set up as chief antagonist for its entire length. That is the brilliance of this sort of television. Predictability just won’t cut it.

Seinfeld proved, too, that you could fill a half hour with nothing at all, as long as it was witty. Gilligan and Gould have done something similar with their two series set, more or less, in the fairly uninspiring New Mexico city of Albuquerque. Who else could make five minutes of McGill/Goodman bouncing a tennis ball off his office wall while he contemplates his own divorce, riotously entertaining? In an industry - especially the American television industry - where every second of airtime has to count, less can definitely mean more.

Of course, some of the credit for this must go to the non-linear channels like HBO, Netflix, AppleTV, Disney Plus, AMC and others that now dominate our viewing choices. They’ve enabled the proliferation of television length, cinema-scale creativity, some of which is attracting some of the most talented directors in the industry. Disney’s acquisition of the Star Wars universe, with spinoffs like The Mandalorian and Obi-Wan Kenobi, may not have won over all of the fanboys, but they’ve literally chopped up a cinema product and made it bingeworthy telly. 

Better Call Saul’s ending will probably end the Breaking Bad universe. Gilligan says they’ve had other ideas, but his focus now will be on something completely new. “It’s a lot of pressure. It’s very scary. A lot of sweaty palms. A lot of sleepless nights,”, Gilligans’s creative partner, Peter Gould said of Saul’s ending during a Television Critics Association presentation. “I think, ‘Who are we going to please?’ I think we know. I think those of us on the show are very happy with where it ended. I hope everybody else agrees.”. 

Over the course of 62 episodes of Breaking Bad, 63 episodes of Saul, and the post-Breaking Bad film El Camino, Gilligan (who previously worked on The X Files) and Gould have sealed themselves firmly in the great library of epic television shows. While they haven’t reinvented the medium, they’ve injected something of wit and intelligence to the hour-long format. One day, I’ve promised myself to rewatch The Sopranos in its entirety. I can see these entertaining tales of morally reprehensible behaviour in Albuquerque getting another airing as well. I’d just need to find ten uninterrupted days to binge my way through all of it.

Picture: Greg Lewis/AMC/Sony Pictures Television

The iPod at 20: the one that started it all

Apple provided an unsolicited reminder on Monday of just how much disposable income I’ve channeled its way over the last 20 years. It wasn’t pretty. The company’s latest Event (grandiose capital E intended) opened with a slick video of a bespectacled youth in his garage (Silicon Valley, we presume) firing up old Apple devices to sample their start-up chimes, thumbwheel clicks and even the snap of an AirPods case being closed. The samples were then combined into a piece of vibrant groove music with which to fanfare CEO Tim Cook, apparently standing in a field outside the Apple campus in Cupertino, for his introduction to the company’s presentation of new MacBooks for, mostly, creatives.

As the 90-second clip spun past, I caught sight of an original ‘jelly-coloured’ iMac, and the first iPod, which was launched 20 years ago today. These were the gateway drugs that hooked me on Apple, committing me to at least three generations of iMac, four iPods and their natural successor, the iPhone, along with iPads, MacBooks-numerous, a MacMini, and an entire drawer full of accessories for all of them. All in the space of 20 years. I shudder to think how much it has all cost.

To go back a little further, I started using Apple products professionally in the early 1990s, learning the art of desktop publishing and layout work for magazines and print advertising on the job thanks to intuitive hardware and software that made it so easy. On my first morning in Sky TV’s Creative Services department I was sat in front of a Mac, shown how to use QuarkXPress and Adobe Illustrator, and six weeks later I was driving past a 96-sheet billboard for The Simpsons on the A3 that I’d designed myself. I would subsequently spend hours drooling at Apple laptops in the window of a high-end computer dealer in Chiswick, like Mike Myers coveting the white Stratocaster in Wayne’s World. Alas, they were all well beyond my pay packet. Then, in 1998, Apple launched the iMac, and instantly made home computer ownership fun, accessible and, to a certain extent, affordable. I eventually bought one in early 2001 when I moved to Silicon Valley myself. My apartment was a 10-minute straight-line drive from the Apple HQ in Cupertino, which meant that I was soon drinking the local Kool-Aid. 

Armed with a relocation allowance, I bought an iMac from the local Fry’s Electronics toy shed, the very first PC I’d ever owned that hadn’t been provided for me by an employer. By acquiring that iMac I’d bought into the “digital lifestyle” that Steve Jobs had started pitching. “Rather than just hear about megahertz and megabytes,” an Apple press release for the iMac trilled at the time, “customers can now learn and experience the things they can actually do with a computer, like make movies, burn custom music CDs, and publish their digital photos on a personal website.” In other words, a ‘digital hub’. All these things were still embryonic (especially the idea of uploading anything to this new-fangled thing called ‘the Internet’), but Jobs had the uncanny ability of envisaging the technology people needed - or didn’t know they needed yet - and unlike most major figures in the tech world, had the charisma to sell it to them. 

Even in 2001, some time after the Dot Com bubble had burst, Jobs was able to apply his quasi-rock star appeal (well, as close to rock star as a technology leader could resemble) to turning the functional business tool that most PCs were into a desirable piece of a consumer electronics. Key to this was a shift in connectivity that Jobs had foreseen, particularly enabled by the emergence of FireWire technology that could attach digital cameras and other peripherals to PCs, enabling content to be quickly extracted and then, with easy-to-use software, turned into something creative. Thus, he commenced the ‘consumerisation’ of professional applications, turning applications like Final Cut Pro into iMovie, which enabled anyone to make something polished of their holiday videos (the same philosophy was applied to making music with GarageBand, launched in 2004, providing anyone with a Mac - and, now, even an iPhone and an iPad - with the means to record their own compositions).

2001 was a significant year in many ways. Whether it was the arrival of the actual year of Stanley Kubrick’s Space Odyssey, or the first year-proper of the 21st century, in technology terms, it was the year that Apple moved into fifth gear. When I arrived in California in March that year, the previous decades consumer tech boom was already giving way to other things, like biotech and healthtech (“Tech of all kinds – we already sound like 15th century Mexico,”, if I can borrow Boris Johnson’s dad joke the other day…). Apple, however, was laying the foundations of the imperiousness that, by 2020, made it the first US company to exceed a market cap of $2 trillion. Today it has a higher value than the GDP of Russia, Canada, South Korea and Italy.

On 9 January, 2001, Jobs announced iTunes, an app partly purloined from elsewhere (SoundJam) which, in a music industry-baiting move, enabled CDs to be ripped using the latest version of the iMac’s optical drive, making it easy to build-up a personal digital music library, eventually allowing it to burn compilation CDs like mix tapes. I’d previously seen music stored digitally on a PC at former Skids frontman and TV presenter Richard Jobson’s house, and was enamoured by the idea of a digital jukebox. I didn’t care, particularly, about any perceived loss of sound quality from listening to compressed digital music as I just loved the simplicity of clickable access to music. 

What was missing, however, was portability. By the mid-1990s, the travelling music fan still had to pack CDs and even cassettes to listen to on clunky portable players. Sony’s MiniDisc at least attempted to miniaturise music into a smaller form factor, while Philips’ failed Digital Compact Cassette was merely a means of extending patent revenue from the humble magnetic tape with the addition of digital recording. Audiophiles gave both DCC and MiniDisc a notable swerve. The advent of the MP3 digital audio standard in 1994 led to various companies launching players, like Diamond’s Rio in 1998. Most, Steve Jobs told his executive team, according to biographer Walter Isaacson, “truly sucked”, and tasked Apple to produce one of its own. 

Jobs pulled together a team that included former Philips manager Tony Fadell (who’d worked on the Velo and Nino Windows CE devices I helped launch in the UK) and Apple’s hardware engineering lead, Jon Rubinstein, to come up with something better, challenging them to have something ready for an October unveiling ahead of the Christmas sales season. Isaacson’s seminal (and substantial) authorised biography Steve Jobs explains in forensic detail the process that saw the product take shape, with Jobs himself giving - as was his tendency - fastidious daily feedback on what he, as a music fan, wanted from the device, prescribing his desire to make the product simple to use, with navigation restricted to a “three clicks” maximum. Another of Jobs’ insights was that the device had to work with the iTunes app on the iMac, making the computer the primary interface for music library management. Further discussions were held, with Jobs now adding his views on the minutiae of things like the colour of the accompanying headphones, with Apple design chief Jonny Ive throwing in his thoughts on the product’s white-and-polished stainless steel colour scheme. Then came a back-and-forth about the device’s marketing, with the eventual execution of “1,000 songs in your pocket” emanating from one of the Apple CEO’s encounters with Toshiba in Japan, who first flagged the idea of a 5-gigabyte hard drive that could store such an amount of music.

On 23 October 2001, the result of all this rapid endeavour was revealed. Barely a month after 9/11, a world numbed by the atrocity was introduced to the iPod. This would be the device which, arguably, set in train Apple’s evolution and light the touch paper of a technology-led transformation of cultural life and even social behaviour. Journalists had been invited to Cupertino for what was, by today’s standards, a relatively modest Apple event, but one in which they’d been teased cryptically - “Hint: it’s not a Mac.” On stage, Jobs theatrically produced from his jeans a small white device to which he  declared: “This amazing little device holds a thousand songs, and it goes right in my pocket.” 

Compared to the 160GB capacity iPods Apple would later offer, the 5GB hard drive of that first model seems modest now, but surely a music player capable of storing 1,000 songs had instant appeal? Not, according to some critics, who branded the device too expensive at $399 and limited in what it could do. Some even went as far as suggesting that Jobs and Apple had, once again, bitten off more than the brand could chew, the last time being the failed Newton PDA. But Jobs stuck to his conviction: “Music is a part of everyone’s life,” he said, “and because it’s a part of everyone’s life, it’s a very large target market all around the world. It knows no boundaries.” 

We didn’t know it at the time, but this was a very loaded statement about where Apple would go as it broadened out of being just the ‘cool’ computer brand. Sales of that first iPod, and the quickly added second, 10GB, model weren’t stellar, but in the months after 9/11 the world understandably had other things on its mind. Apple, though, had done it again, introducing something that already existed and created a category out of it. History has been more kind to the first iPods, with many believing that it was the first truly great MP3 player. Jobs’ instincts about the digital music player field had been right. The iPod was a milestone in portable audio, but more importantly, it sparked Apple’s transformation from relatively esoteric computer brand, somewhat secretly - and smugly - coveted by creative professionals, to become one of the biggest companies on the planet. 

That first iPod and its many descendants would ultimately give way to the iPhone (the iPod Touch is even a hybrid of both), in which Apple repeated the principle all over again and reinvented the nascent smartphone category which, in turn, would turbocharge the digital lifestyle Jobs had imagined with the iMac to begin with. It’s worth remembering that in October 2001 there was no social media as we know it today, and Napster had been a relatively momentary irritation to the music industry, so the idea of a pocket device that could connect to always-on streaming services over super-fast, low-latency mobile networks was a long, long way off. Facebook was, back then, just a college dorm idea, so people weren’t uploading their holiday photographs to the Internet as they do now. Television was still linear, so in 2001, the notion of binge-watching an entire season of, say, The Sopranos, while sitting on the top deck of a bus was, frankly, not even a concept.

The iPhone has, of course, coalesced many functionalities into one platform - music, camera, television, cinema, e-mail, Web browsing and so on - but without the iPod to begin with, Apple might not have gone anywhere near phones, AirPods, iPads, TV set-top boxes or any one of the myriad product lines that I seem to have spent a stupid amount of my hard-earned on over 20 years. And you know what? I don’t regret a single penny of it. At one point in time I had the crazy idea of buying several iPod Shuffles, the inch-square music players with a 2GB capacity that were available in six colours. The idea was to have different genres of music on each of them, to be chosen per occasion or mood, like Thunderbirds’ Virgil Tracy choosing a pod (that word again) for Thunderbird 2 to fit the mission. Ludicrous, I know, but this is Apple’s marketing strength for you. While I resisted that idea, I’ve certainly succumbed to the iPod’s appeal, owning four. 

© Simon Poulter 2021

At the beginning of September I was digging around in that drawer of Apple bits-and-pieces and found the second iPod I owned - a third-generation, 30GB model from 2003, a fifth-generation model with a whopping 80GB capacity, a 16GB fourth-generation iPod Nano bought, on a whim, in Los Angeles, and a even cuter seventh-generation Nano bought, again, on a US trip in 2012. While hardly Indiana Jones stumbling across the Lost Ark, the discovery of that later Nano found its way into my pocket for the start of my return to office commuting. The firmware or the Bluetooth or some such aspect of its performance needs upgrading, but it still works. That, though, wasn’t the attraction of reviving it: it was the fact that the neat little music player, just 9cm long and weighing little more than a stack of credit cards, was such a sexy piece of technology, with its anodised aluminium casing and flash memory replacing the weighty hard drive of the original iPod.

When the definitive history of Apple Computer gets written, it will no doubt be the iPhone that commands the most attention, but the iPod deserves its place. In fact, more than that - it deserves acknowledgement for its singular contribution to culture. It has become, according to Leander Kahney, who wrote The Cult Of Mac, “the signature technology of the digital music era” and “profoundly” changed music culture. While Apple’s appeal until the iPod and certainly the iMac had certainly been amongst professional creatives, the iPod had a universal appeal. The Queen, it is claimed, has owned one, and the late German fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld reportedly possessed more than 70 containing his entire CD collection, transporting them around the world in their own suitcase. “We had no idea this thing would get this huge,” Apple marketing executive Phil Schiller once told USA Today. 

In his book, Kahney draws attention to how the iPod would impact music listening in general, arguing that it ripped up the decades-old custom of listening to entire albums from start to finish and (even if ageing hipsters like me have embraced the vinyl revival), and that record ownership could only be visualised by shelved libraries of albums on various formats. Apart from anything else, Kahney says, with those white headphones plugged in, and the library stored on that hard drive, no-one needed to know what you were listening to, though as we all know, aggravating sound leakage from headphones readily gives away someone’s musical tastes, especially on public transport. Kaheny does, though, make the interesting point that the iPod may have even opened up musical tastes as people started experimenting with genres they’d previously not dipped into. The iPod also became a replacement for radio programming; ‘podcasts’ derived their name from the device, becoming an online sub-culture in their own right, with professional and amateur productions of all kinds covering every possible niche and mainstream interest; DJs took iPods into clubs to play tracks from them instead of turntables, mixing between multiple devices; and you could say that the iPod proliferated the entire business of music being available legally online. 

Whether Steve Jobs’ intention, in 1998 when he unveiled the iMac, was to turn Apple into the giant it is today is not fully known. The iPod, though, gave that process a significant kick, although compared with today’s marketing expenditure for Apple products, the company only spent $25 million on launching the first player in 2001, building its market share largely through word of mouth. Experts agree that the iPod’s appeal grew somewhat organically - an incongruous point given how Apple markets its products today. But whether by instinct or design, Jobs revelled in the “disruption” that technology wizards like talking about. 

Apple started out challenging the notion that computers could only be beige, and that managing them had to be clunky. Steve Jobs saw that technology offered something more rewarding in people’s lives - ironically, a vision that has proven stupendously rewarding for Apple itself.  The iPod was, perhaps, the point of origin for that vision, and I don’t think it hyperbolic to say that has directly influenced much of Apple’s product development history over the last 20 years. I don’t think it hyperbolic, either, to claim that the iPod and its lineage has contributed to a single-handed transformation of modern life. Which, I know, is quite a claim.

Calm yourself fella - it's just telly!

There was a time when the man on the Clapham omnibus was the gauge of popular arbitration, but today that role is taken by Twitter. Which is why, barely minutes after last night’s Line Of Duty finale, the show was trending like a particularly virulent rash. 

To say the ending of Jed Mercurio’s police procedural met with a mixed response would be something of an understatement, but on reflection, it had been building to a denouement that could have gone in any direction. Even if TV logic is that the crowd must always be pleased, and any whodunnit ends with a big reveal and a belligerent “I would have got away with it if it wasn't for you meddling kids”, Mercurio's masterpiece has consistently defied convention and gone out of its way to baffle and, even, infuriate.

After seven, utterly compelling weeks, he ended our collective misery by somewhat resolving not only the sixth season, but the many spaghetti strands that had threaded unanswered through all six series of, arguably, the most addictive television series in a generation. Crucially, however, several ends were left open. In the process, there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth as the big reveal, the unmasking of the super villain supposedly orchestrating all the bad stuff for nine years turned out to be monumental dimwit Buckells. As Steve Arnott remarks when the so-called fourth “H” is finally identified, he'd been “hiding in plain sight”. “All the time we were sitting here thinking we were chasing a criminal mastermind, but no,” says Ted Hastings. “Your corruption was mistaken for incompetence.”

There is some precedent for such a character: Gus Frings, Giancarlo Esposito’s character in Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, manages to be a mild-mannered fried chicken chain manager by day and an utterly ruthless methamphetamine kingpin by night. See also Keyser Söze in The Usual Suspects. Buckells, on the other hand, managed to be so incredibly stupid that it was hard to imagine how he’d risen through the ranks to become a superintendent without someone’s guiding hand. After all, you’d question whether his serial misspelling of “definately” would have escaped the notice of his performance reviewers. Even though, during his interrogation scene last night (Mercurio and director Jennie Darnell top-trolling us with with Buckells' long drawn-out arrival at AC-12 in which we only saw someone in a prison sweatshirt and handcuffs, and a lot of knowing glances as he approached the ‘glass box’), he went from nervous “no comment” responses to a more confident assertion: “You lot treat everyone like mugs. Who’s the mug now?”. Still, though, there was no sense that Buckells wasn’t anything more than a muppet being played by some higher authority. Just think of that scene in his prison cell when slimy lawyer Jimmy Lakewell was garrotted in front of him, to his clear distress. That was not the response of a ruthless, cat-stroking, hollowed out volcano-dwelling master villain.

Public Dimwit No.1 - Ian Buckells
Picture: BBC

And here’s where there is justification to the claims that Mercurio failed to resolve Line Of Duty in any meaningful way last night. If Buckells was the OCG's supremo, then we’ve all been wasting our time over multiple series. More aggravation was to come with absolutely no revelation about dodgy Chief Constable Philip Osborne, whose possible guilt had been alluded to from the outset of Season 6 with some of the pre-publicity, or indeed his wouldn’t-trust-them-as-far-as-you-could-throw-them underlings, Deputy Chief Constable Andrea Wise, or the insanely passive-aggressive Patricia Carmichael. But here, though, is where I strongly believe that Mercurio has been quite royally taking the piss. And it’s also why people shouldn’t be losing their sense of humour, either. Because if you take a somewhat perverse view of it, Line Of Duty has, simply, been ridiculous fun. Yes, it has, on final reflection, felt like something of a parable to contemporary events, with the undercurrent of murky goings on at the very top, but at the end of the day, it has always been a police procedural. Not since the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s has real police corruption been as institutionalised as Line Of Duty has portrayed (BBC2’s excellent series, Bent Coppers: Crossing The Line Of Duty, which ran concurrently, skillfully documented just how bad things once got within the Met), but then that wasn’t the point. This was Cluedo, Columbo and The Masked Singer on a different scale. Each week, Mercurio applied more twists and turns than the Nürburgring, throwing in red herrings and intricate plot combinations that related to a master story arc that has spanned all six seasons. He was, in many respects, just messing with us.

And still is. The absence of full resolution last night has enticingly left things open for a seventh series. No one - Mercurio, the cast, the BBC - is yet talking about one (The Sun today claims that Martin Compston is only halfway-through a new two-series contract for the show) - but with so many planted seeds left unflowered, you wouldn’t bet against ultimate resolution being addressed. Not only to see Osborne, Wise or Carmichael brought down, but the role of widow Steph Corbett made more clear, or the possibility of potentially iffy detective Chris Lomax unveiled as another OCG plant, or even more to be made of Jimmy Nesbitt’s bizarre photographic turn-only as corrupt ex-copper Marcus Thurwell. And what about junior detective Chloe Bishop? The AC-12 member who actually seemed to do most of the hard work, and yet so little is known of her, least of which whether she could still be the Chloe who was the eldest daughter of DCI Tony Gates, chief antagonist of Season 1.

There is a chance that Mercurio left things so infuriatingly up in the air deliberately. Why is obviously unknown. One theory (well, my theory) is that he simply wants us to make up our own minds. This is how David Chase ended The Sopranos: Tony, Carmela, Meadow and Anthony Jr. meeting in a diner, the door opens, Tony looks up and the scene fades to black, followed by Journey’s Don’t Stop Believin’. Pound-for-pound, television’s greatest series ended with television’s greatest ever scene. Line Of Duty appeared to conclude with somewhat similar ambiguity. A few minutes before the end, the mood changed. Steve and Kate met for a pint. And then the epilogue revealed Jo Davidson to be in witness protection with a new lover and a dog, living in a generously-proportioned chocolate box house in the wilds of somewhere. The cuckooed Terry Boyle was moved into to a home. The wronged Farida Jatri returned to duty at that notorious nest of vipers, Hillside Lane nick (yep, another “H”...). Darren Hunter was finally brought in for the racist murder of Lawrence Christopher. Closure, but not quite. Hastings took the down elevator to retirement, the guilt of causing John Corbett’s brutal murder unloaded onto Patricia Carmichael, now the empress of anti-corruption and yet with a lot of questions to answer about her own motivation. 

Most heinous of all, Osborne - the nasty piece of work from Season 1, who, as a Chief Inspector, had instructed his officers to lie over a mistaken police shooting - is still swanning about as top cop of Central Police. “I give you my personal assurance that any failings in the original inquiry will be thoroughly investigated,” he gloats to the TV cameras on the steps of police headquarters. “Lessons will be learned. Throughout my career, whenever I’ve encountered wrongdoing, I’ve acted. But let me be clear: these are the misdeeds of a few rotten apples. And to invoke institutionalised police corruption is an outrageous lie and an insult to my officers. The public don’t want police officers to be held to account for every little thing they’re meant to have done. They want us to get on with the job, and that’s what we will do.” As he says this, Hastings looks crestfallen. Even Carmichael looks conflicted. “Currently AC-12’s powers to curb wrongdoings in public office have never been weaker,” is the simple strapline running across the screen as the title music and end credits roll. Ambiguous with a capital A. “Currently”. Think about that.

Picture: BBC

If there is to be a seventh series, there would clearly be much to end it with. My view is that Mercurio has effectively left the BBC with no other option than to commission one more run, such are the number of open ends to be resolved to the public’s satisfaction, and to possibly avoid civil unrest. Trial by Twitter is a terrible thing, but whatever the opinion on last night’s finale, there’s no denying that Line Of Duty has got the nation talking. That’s no idle remark. Newspapers don’t devote acres of space to something if it’s not of public interest, so when you even get the broadsheets devoting copious column inches to writing about the show, you know that it has achieved maximum Zeitgeist. Even the curmudgeons moaning about everyone going on about the final episode can’t ignore the fact that…everyone is going on about the final episode. The BBC has a very unique property on his hands, and with audience numbers weekly reaching more than 50% of the viewership at 9pm on a Sunday night, even an underwhelming final episode has generated insane amounts of publicity that most other drama series can only dream of. It would do well to think carefully about its next move.

Line Of Duty began in 2012 on BBC2 as an obscure midweek drama. In its sixth series, whose production was interrupted by the pandemic, it has provided further escapist claustrophobia at a time when the nation is just starting to emerge from lockdown. It would be a bold claim to say that it has brought the country together, but there’s no denying that it has, over the past seven Sundays, elicited a mass conversation amongst families, friends, WhatsApp groups and strangers alike. Whatever your opinion of the finale, can you remember anything that has brought so many of us together in collective discourse, frothing over what was, at the end of the day, just a bit of Sunday night telly? Absurd when you think about it. But what a lot of fun it’s been.

A little bit more than a ’ot dog

I've put money in all your pockets. 

I've treated you well, even when you was out of order, right?! 

One lunchtime, not so long ago (actually, quite some time ago, in the days when there were things called offices) and when I had a job near London’s Tower Bridge, I left my desk to go for a stroll around the historic backstreets of Wapping. What began as a cathartic midday plod in the late summer sunshine soon became a literal walk down Memory Lane, as I mooched about streets I hadn’t visited in 30 years, not since the days when I had to visit the offices of The Sun and Sunday Times while working for Sky TV. 

Rupert Murdoch had, not long before I joined Sky, decamped his newspapers from Fleet Street to ‘Fortress Wapping’, a divisive move that changed British newspaper publishing forever, as the tycoon belligerently took on the print unions in an acrimonious and, at times, violent period of media history. Like much of Wapping, the area around News International’s site at the junction of Virginia and Pennington streets had once been staunch working class, populated by dockers and their families. Today, Murdoch's presence is long gone, with the newspaper industry undergoing further schism in the online age (with News International losing, along the way, the News Of The World, a victim of its own dubious practice).

Walking back to St. Katherine’s Dock, which my then-office overlooked, I ambled close to the river on Wapping High Street. Making a turn, I found myself in Scandrett Street, where I was confronted by a typical canyon of newish brick buildings, designed to resemble the warehouses that once lined the area, and now a testament to rampant gentrification. It was then that it struck me that this was precisely the vision that fictional mobster Harold Shand had had at the end of the 1970s when he had the idea to do something about the dilapidated streets of E1. 

This, then, is the basis of The Long Good Friday, one of the finest British films ever made, and which was released 40 years ago this week. “This is the decade in which London will become Europe's capital, having cleared away the out-dated,” Shand pronounces on the deck of his gleaming yacht, moored in front of the Tower of London, as he tries to convince an American mafia delegation to come in on his project to regenerate the East End. “We've got mile after mile or acre after acre of land for our future prosperity,” he continues. “No other city in the world has got, right at its centre, such an opportunity for profitable progress.” He was incredibly prophetic. After decades of post-war wrangling about what to do with the area, in the same year that The Long Good Friday was released, Michael Heseltine created the London Docklands Development Corporation. By the end of the 80s and the start of the 90s, Docklands itself was transformed. Post-Big Bang, the banks and their bankers moved east. Canary Wharf was built on the Isle of Dogs, and continues to grow to this day, with gleaming spire after gleaming spire springing up like cocktail sticks planted on a Cream Cracker. Today it might be quieter due to the lack of office workers, but it is no less a powerful symbol of the economic aspiration that stretches out of several boroughs spreading east down the Thames from Tower Bridge.

But back to Scandrett Street, which plays a notorious role in The Long Good Friday: as I stood there, staring at faux history clad in modernity, I felt a shiver of familiarity, despite having never been in that place before. Opposite the new developments was a wrought iron fence surrounding the garden of St. John’s Church. For East End authenticity, it could have been Albert Square itself, but something told me that I had seen that fence in some other context. Sometime later, reading up on the production of The Long Good Friday, I discovered what had been there before - at the end of that street (and now long gone, the result of modernistic development) was The Lion & Unicorn pub, the East End boozer blown up by - at the outset of the film - hoodlums on Good Friday.

The John Mackenzie-directed thriller remains one of the greatest British films ever made, but its use of London locations, in particular, made it so rich. It was also uncompromising. Appearing a year or so after the comedic Minder arrived on British TV screens, itself a distant descendent from The Sweeney, and around the same time that Only Fools And Horses made its debut, The Long Good Friday was an equally colourful depiction of shady London life, but with an infinitely deeper agenda. Barrie Keefe’s bristling story combined IRA terrorism, a mafia plot, a prototype yuppie (in Shand) before the term had ever been used, and was populated with a cast of cracking British talent. 

Bob Hoskins remains throughout a mesmerising, Napoleonic figure, with his boxer’s nose and street-smart belligerence, trying to understand who and why anyone would be trying to derail his grand vision, unaware that one of his gang has become embroiled in a dodgy deal with terrorists in Belfast, who exact their revenge on Shand’s empire in startling form. Shand’s quotes throughout the film are legend, especially the “I’ve put money in all your pockets!” near-soliloquy at the top of this post, but also his admonishment of the American mafiosi as they renege on their agreement inside The Savoy hotel: “What I’m looking for is someone who can contribute to what England has given to the world: culture, sophistication, genius. A little bit more than a ’ot dog, know what I mean?” he quips, with tongue not entirely in cheek. “I’m glad I found out in time just what a partnership with a pair of wankers like you would’ve been,” he thunders on, probably not grasping the fact that Americans wouldn’t know what sort of an insult that was.

Critics have tried to analyse The Long Good Friday, even attempting to make parallels to The Godfather, given both films’ levels of brutality and their central figures of gangsters trying to change their business models. Like Mario Puzo’s somewhat Shakespearian tragedy, quintessentially a New York tale, The Long Good Friday is pure London, as the list of filming locations pertains. Nothing has come close since, not Guy Ritchie’s geezerfests or anything in Danny Dyer’s canon. It works because London’s Docklands were bleak at the beginning of the 1980s and, even now, if you look closely, still are. It’s just that the converted warehouses that line the river, housing London’s new urban elite, have given it a respectable polish, the kind of aspiration that Shand himself had envisioned. Paul Barber (who played ‘Errol the Ponce’, mutilated in his kitchen by Shand henchman 'Razors'), this week likened Hoskins’ character to the principle character in Only Fools And Horses, in which he also appeared: “The thing that got me was Harold’s speech on the boat [at St. Katherine’s Dock],” Barber told The Guardian this week. “Think about it now: it has all happened. It was the Thatcher era and he was like the young Del Boy.”

“Nobody had done a movie like that as far as I can recollect,” Helen Mirren, who played Shand’s moll-like wife Victoria, also told The Guardian. “It broke ground,” she said, saying that she was blown away from the outset by Keefe’s script. “It was like a piece of literature, and movie scripts don’t tend to be like that. This one you read like a novel. With the exception that my female character was terrible – she was very, very dull.” That may have been the case - and I’m sure Mirren wouldn’t deny that Victoria serves as little more than window dressing to the piece - but the film is certainly novel-like, as Shand questions why things are going increasingly wrong with his grand plan. And, of course, it ends so brilliantly without conclusion: as Shand exits The Savoy for a rendezvous with Victoria, he jumps into his chauffeur-driven ride, only to see his wife being hauled off in the opposite direction under duress. As he realises the unfolding situation, a figure - Pierce Brosnan in his film debut - pops up in the front seat wielding a silenced pistol. Much like the final scene of The Sopranos, it’s up to you to decide what happens next. But whereas Tony Soprano’s fate is subtly ambiguous, the elongated closing sequence of The Long Good Friday, set to Francis Monkman’s driving score, sees Shand gazing out of the Jag’s window, seemingly accepting his fate.

It was, without doubt, the film that planted Hoskins in our consciousness. He’d made his breakthrough a couple of years before in the BBC’s adaptation of Dennis Potter's Pennies From Heaven, and he would sort of return to the Shand character five years later in Mona Lisa. In The Long Good Friday, Hoskins is the focal point of a fascinating essay about Britain at the beginning of the 1980s. Keefe has appeared to shy away from casting it as a great sociological snapshot, with director Mackenzie calling it just “a damned good gangster movie”. But 40 years on, as we address many contemporary issues about morality, race and even patriotism, The Long Good Friday holds up on so many levels, not the least being that it’s British film making at its very best.

The longest road accident in history - and it’s not over yet

Picture: BBC

It is Friday, by my reckoning, which means it is now a week since news surfaced that Prince Andrew, Duke of York, KG, GCVO, CD, ADC(P) and Vice-Admiral, Royal Navy, had granted the BBC an interview that would hopefully clarify his relationship with the now-deceased paedophile Jeffrey Epstein. One week on, the news cycle shows no signs of abatement. In the interim, Andrew’s interview with Newsnight’s Emily Maitlis has gone to air and, rather than quelling interest in his association with Epstein, has opened up a whole world of hurt about the duke’s lifestyle, expenditure, domestic arrangements and health, and afforded Woking a publicity jaunt that it was rather hoping would have just been provided by the launch of the Beeb’s new dramatisation of The War Of The Worlds, which kicks off just outside the Surrey town.

Standard Operating Procedure for anyone in the PR business is that when a reputational crisis breaks, you do all you can to reduce its impact, to diminish its effect, to get a grip on the news agenda and hopefully tackle the subject matter so that it runs out of steam of its own accord. Well, that’s the theory. What has happened with Prince Andrew is the media equivalent of an Atlantic hurricane gaining strength and even acquiring new energy somewhere over the Azores. The big difference is that normally such storms are reduced to torrential rain and winds causing disruption to the rail network by the time they reach British shores. In the case of Andrew, this tropical depression has spiralled out of control.

As someone who has spent the last 25 years (bar the last month or two...) in corporate communications it’s easy to be the ‘Monday morning quarterback’ on a story like this. But, sometimes, a crisis is so heaving that it never goes away. That is probably where we are in the case of Prince Andrew. Those of us who ply their trade in PR will have been in nodding unison over the last seven days at how all of the best-practice wisdoms of the industry have been blown into the gutter like autumn leaves as Andrew's attempt to repair his reputation backfired spectacularly. Indeed, anyone (including me) who has crowbarred into a PowerPoint presentation Warren Buffet's much used quote about reputations taking 20 years to build and 20 minutes to destroy will have been grinning sagely at the smarts of such a notion of the fragility of public perception.

It must start with the decision in the first place to do the interview with Maitlis. 2019 is clearly turning out to be another annus horribilis for the Royal Family, what with the Duke of Edinburgh’s automotive tribulations, his grandson Harry’s self-declared war on the media (somewhat justified, given the weirdly obsessive attention afforded he and Meghan by the Mail group turning themselves inside-out to find another angle) and the reporting of a certain froideur between the Cambridge and Sussex households. The last thing the 93-year-old Queen needed was her somewhat casual second (and, it is rumoured, favourite) son becoming embroiled in an association with a particularly repellent individual like Epstein, replete with compromising photographs of the duke with his arm apparently around the waist of Virginia Guiffre, née Roberts, who, she alleges, was trafficked by Epstein for the sexual gratification of his associates (“He knows what he has done,” she has said of Andrew, whose own comment on the alleged incident was: “It didn’t happen. I can absolutely categorically tell you it never happened”). In the words of Dickie Arbiter, the veteran royal correspondent and former Buckingham Palace spokesperson, it was an “excruciating” interview. “My guess is that he bulldozed his way in and decided he was going to do it himself without any advice,” he told the BBC. “Any sensible-thinking person in the PR business would have thrown their hands up in horror.”

Picture: BBC

This is not the first time that a member of the royal family has been embroiled in foul matters of the flesh (and that story about the true identity of Jack The Ripper has never really gone away), and given the track record of all our monarchs and their scions over the centuries, ‘Randy’ Andy’s alleged behaviour as the party prince will probably pale by historic comparison. Not that I’m endorsing or apologising for anything he is supposed to have done. But moral judgements aside, the bit I’m most interested in is the decision to take up the BBC’s offer of an interview to begin with. Ever since the first stories appeared of Andrew’s relationship with Epstein, there wouldn’t have been a television channel, radio station, newspaper, magazine or website that wouldn’t have wanted an opportunity to ask the prince to explain himself on the record. But even with the interest - and coverage - reaching cacophony level in recent weeks, even giving Harry and Meghan some respite from their own battles with the press, there was still no reason to cave in. 

Rightly or wrongly, the royals are never like us. They’re not meant to be approachable, accessible. They’re meant to exist as noble national figureheads. The accountability that other public figures - politicians, business leaders, senior clergy - are expected to provide has never been in the royal brief. So, whatever internal PR advice within Buckingham Palace was being offered or even imposed, someone - perhaps Andrew himself - stupidly ignored it and mistakenly agreed to sit down with Maitlis, some months, we understand, since Newsnight first proposed that they did.

If this was a choice based on the fact that alternatives - the atrocious egomaniac that is Piers Morgan comes immediately to mind - would have given an even more pugilistic encounter, they were patently wrong. In fact, Maitlis, a formidable interviewer, gave Andrew a fairly measured ride. And yet still he messed it up, chortling in some of his replies to serious questions about his friendship with Epstein, and making trite remarks about how he “kicks himself daily” for not ending the relationship sooner. And, still, no contrition at all about those Epstein is alleged to have trafficked and facilitated the abuse of, including the as-yet unexplained relationship with Guiffre-Roberts, who has recorded a BBC Panorama interview that is only going to extend the news cycle into a second full week. 

It was without doubt one of the worst interviews ever given by a public figure trying to extricate himself from scandal. In the meantime, Andrew has been withdrawn/is withdrawing from public duties. To all intents and purposes, his mum has sacked him, albeit - we read - with his elder brother’s influence. Charles, currently on a royal tour in New Zealand, could not have been flying the flag at a worse time. And with the Queen gradually handing over greater responsibility to her heir, it presented him with an opportunity to exert his authority. This might sound like fratricide, or even the sort of Machiavellian politics normally found in an episode of The Sopranos, but it perhaps proves that the House of Windsor has learned from the anni horribiles of 1992 and 1997 - the former being the original of the species, the latter being the year of Princess Diana’s death. As grim as those periods were, the royal family learned vital lessons in how they managed their PR, with the Queen herself proving to be more of a moderniser than anyone gave her credit for. And that includes her appearance with Daniel Craig in that James Bond skit for the London Olympics. 

The Queen’s decisive action to fire her own son is brutal, but effectively smashes the glass to put out a real fire that was in danger of doing serious damage to the entire royal operation. We might have sympathy for Andrew, but ultimately his lifestyle, and seemingly directionless career since he left the Royal Navy in 2001, brought this on himself. Choosing to address it on camera was the mistake that unravelled it. It certainly wouldn’t have been my advice to a CEO, knowing that the media properties of the notoriously republican Murdoch and Rothermere families would have erupted into a feeding frenzy that stupidly even managed to knock a general election no one wanted off the front pages. Actually, make that the front several pages, and counting. A week later.

Last Sunday, the front page headlines chimed in unison: “Not one single word of remorse” (Mail on Sunday), “No sweat . . . no regret” (Sunday Mirror), and “I didn’t have sex with a teen, I was at home after a pizza party” (Observer). A week on and even the normally impassive Times has run ten separate stories today on the duke’s denouement, including new angles and the outcome of a YouGov survey revealing that only 6% of the 1600 people questioned believed Andrew was telling the truth. No wonder corporate sponsors of the duke’s various philanthropic ventures have been quietly and not-so quietly walking away.

Now, that is precisely what Andrew himself needs to do. His brutal removal from frontline royal duties means that he will now be reduced to cameos on the Buckingham Palace balcony during Trooping The Colour, though I imagine plans are already in place to smuggle him in to church on Christmas Day for The Firm’s traditional outing en masse. But, to return to the central premise of this post, it’s about PR, not royal duty. Andrew’s actions have affected the corporate reputation of the royal family, and that, in corporate or regal life, cannot be countenanced. The story isn’t over, still, with the very real risk of US investigators probing Epstein and his associates looming. “If push came to shove and the legal advice was to do so, then I would be duty bound to do so [be investigated],” Andrew told Maitlis in the interview. Again, no contrition, just a man sinking ever further into quicksand that was quite demonstrably signposted.