Sorry, you’re not getting your Christmas present this year. Yes, I know what you want: one of those columns where I avoid TV altogether and just rant madly about myself for 800 words. Well, tough. It’s been one of the crappest, most hateful years of my life and, though I’m not holding you all totally responsible, I do think you must bear your share of the blame. You have not adored me enough. You have not showered me with sufficient — indeed, any — gifts. You have not bought nearly enough copies of Coward on the Beach or How to Be Right as perfect Christmas presents for all your friends. So all I’m going to do for the rest of this column is talk about TV. TV TV TV boring TV. Until you’re sick of it.
By TV, I mean the last-ever episode of The Sopranos (E4, can’t remember when). If you haven’t seen it yet — I’m not sure when it’ll be on Channel 4 — skip the par beginning ‘Here’s where I give the end away…’
Vanity Fair once called The Sopranos ‘perhaps the greatest pop culture masterpiece of its day’, and I’m sure this is true. It was the first drama series to prove what most of us had thought impossible: that, on a good day, TV cannot merely equal the very best that cinema has to offer, but actually beat it.
TV doesn’t, of course, have many natural advantages over cinema. We don’t pay as much for it; we don’t watch it as reverently or silently in as dark a room; we associate it more with vegging out, disposability and cheap commercialism than we do with great art. About the only thing it has in its favour is time.
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