The greatest moment in the history of television — and one which will surely remain unsurpassed for ever — was the final episode of The Sopranos. Part of its genius was to reward all of us who had stuck with it so loyally for the previous 85 episodes by allowing us to make up our own minds how it ended.
Did Tony get wasted by those hitmen-like figures we saw entering the restaurant where he was having the rapprochement dinner with Carmela? Well, maybe. Or did the Feds finally get their wiretaps and informants properly organised and put Tony away for ever? Or did he — as I prefer not to stop believing — waste all the people who’d come to kill him and then get off, on a technicality, whatever charges the Feds threw at him.
There was much ambiguity about the fate of the minor characters, too. Silvio, for example: the one played by the actor Steven Van Zandt, who looks so like your idea of a real mafioso it comes as rather a shock and disappointment to discover that in real life he’s just a guitarist in Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band. The last we saw of him he was on a life-support machine. Did he croak? Did he pull through? What?
Well, now we have an answer of sorts. He’s not playing exactly the same character in Lilyhammer (BBC4, Tuesday) — that would be wrong; just a really-quite-similar one. In this drama, he’s a senior New York mobster who has to join a witness protection programme after testifying against his boss. The place he chooses to assume his brand-new identity is Lillehammer in Norway because he liked the look of it when he saw it on TV during the 1994 winter Olympics.
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