Back in bloody business

TVReview: 'Finally, you're here! I was starting to grow mushrooms out my ass." No, this wasn't (as far as we know) what Mafia boss Bernardo Provenzano said to the Italian investigators who tracked him down this week, with perfect timing, after 40 years in hiding; instead, it was a typically pithy greeting for the late-arriving Tony Soprano.

Yes, finally, The Sopranos is here, back for a sixth and apparently final series, and as all 285lb of mafioso Tony (James Gandolfini) drove through the New Jersey turnpike and cruised the nervy sunlit streets of "the neighbourhood", the nostalgia was as heavy in the air as the smoke from his portly cigar. The series is as wonderful as ever - visceral, dark, emotional and extremely funny - and if you are already a convert your Thursday nights have just got brighter. Even if the previous 65 episodes of life in palookaville have slipped under your radar and nobody bought you the box-set for Christmas, don't be put off. The awful compulsive beauty of The Sopranos lies in the familiar, in the normality of the characters' anxieties and despair.

Tony Soprano - overweight, overwrought, guilt-ridden about his relationship with his deceased mother, anxious about care for his ageing Uncle Junior, losing sleep over his teenage children and cautiously optimistic about his volatile marriage to Carmela (Edie Falco) - could be any successful middle-aged businessman unburdening his woes to his fantastically leggy therapist, Melfi (Lorraine Bracco). It's just that Tony's business is the Mafia, and one assumes that garrotting one's rivals in, say, the frozen chicken business, isn't that prevalent, even in New Jersey.

Episode 66 kicked off with Tony, a recent convert to sushi, advising his son that "family are the only ones you can depend on", and finished with Tony's auspicious and demanding abdomen catching a bullet from his demented Uncle Junior, who, having returned from a trip upstairs to find his false teeth, mistakes his nephew for his long-dead enemy, Pussy Malanga.

The episode also featured a bloody assassination in a fast food joint and the torturously slow suicide of foot-soldier Gene, who Tony had refused permission to retire to Florida and who, we discovered, has been co-operating with the Feds.

And then, of course, there's the banter around the pool table about Vito losing weight.

Vito: "The only problem is that I may have to join Clothing Anonymous."

Ray Curto: "You should have called your sponsor before you bought that jacket."

The indolent brutality, insouciant violence and idiosyncratic images of Mafia life, such as the infant nursing at her mother's garishly tattooed breast, make for viewing bittersweet enough to choke on. Miss it and you're dead.

VITO WASN'T THE the only one shedding pounds. Celebrity Fit Club thankfully ground to a close this week, and its cumulative celebrity weight loss was probably less than all of Anne Diamond, who had previously "stormed off" the show when her secret "gastric band" was rumbled. I don't know what a gastric band is, and I don't care. I don't care how many colours Dale Winton's hair can be in a single series. I don't care if that awful cherub and self-proclaimed "gorgeous Aquarian", Russell Grant, munches his way through Harvey the drill sergeant's bottom. In fact, I'd rather eat all 15 stone of Anne Diamond with or without her gastric band than ever have to watch Celebrity Fit Club again.

For the record, former footballer Mick Quinn got the rosette, having mislaid a quarter of his body weight, and Jeff Rudom, the formerly 30-stone ex-basketball player, cried enormous tears of untrammelled joy over having jettisoned 6 stone. Yeah, yeah - from now on, I'm watching the home-grown masochism. It's much more fun.

FOR ALL THE madness of its conception, Celebrity Jigs 'n' Reels is highly entertaining stuff and, what's more, it's all for charity (whereas Anne Diamond will reportedly make about a quarter of a million quid on her new diet book).

Four judges - dancers Jean Butler and Colin Dunne, broadcaster George Hook, and writer and etiquette guru Robert O'Byrne - sit on a panel and comment on Irish dancing couples, one of which is professional, the other celebrity (although both the terms "celebrity" and "dancing couple" must here be interpreted as loosely as boxer Michael Carruth's drum step). Then there is a public vote to eliminate the least entertaining couple. Public votes are quixotic little monsters, and Carruth, who was unfavourably compared to a JCB in pumps, amazingly survived to fight another day, whereas the only celeb who could dance, TV presenter and refugee from the band Six, Emma O'Driscoll, got voted off for having rhythm.

Somewhere in the vortex of professional dancers who looked like hat-check girls high-kicking around Ardmore Studios (where the show is filmed live) and soap stars with streaks smiling desperately through their blisters, it was remarked that the show was "great for Irish dance". Really? Great crack to see the wannabes "slapping into the floor" and instructive to see Dana applying the same determination to her one-two-threes that she brought to her presidential election campaign, but somehow I don't think this is what Dev envisaged happening at the crossroads.

Next week Colin Dunne wants to see "a dirtier side" of Dana, he wants her "down on the floor in a skirt". It's been a long road for the Derry maid - she's a tenacious presence in the national psyche, and indeed she may look as innocuous as a pretty bun on a doily, but if looks could wither, Dunne would himself be down on the floor croaking for forgiveness. The jollity, orchestrated by the silver calm of Marty Whelan, will continue until Jen Kelly wins and the others are on crutches. Go on, Dana, shake that booty.

'IF I SEE a drama on at nine o'clock on ITV I'd never tune into it because I know it's going to be crap. I've tuned into so much shite over the years. You could say that about nine o'clock on BBC1, too." This fitting mantra for a television critic was coined by veteran scriptwriter Jimmy McGovern, writer of (among other outstanding series) Brookside and Cracker.

So to 9pm on BBC1 this Thursday. McGovern's new drama series, Street, is a six-part interlinked collage about the lives of residents on a working-class street in north-west England. Far from being crap, Street is confidently written and alluringly well acted, a tightly controlled package of pre-sliced realism, much in the vein of Alan Bleasdale's Boys from the Black Stuff, where money is tight and lives are circumscribed by low-level poverty and struggle.

The first episode centred on Angela Quinn (Jane Horrocks) who, after 15 years of marriage to Arthur (Daniel Ryan) - "just a hairy-arsed builder", as he describes himself - embarks on an affair with her neighbour, Peter (Shaun Dooley), a travelling sweet salesman, their chocolatey trysts coming to a violent end when Peter accidentally knocks down Angela's daughter on the road outside her house.

Street is well worth watching, not least for the cumulative talent of the cast, which over the coming weeks features Timothy Spall, Jim Broadbent and Ger Ryan. Gently and skilfully unwrapping the frailty he sees around him, McGovern's writing can be painfully tender, as when Angela, trying to engage her comatose young daughter, reminds her of the time she won a book: "You told your Auntie Jean, 'I've got a thesaurus'. Do you remember? And she said, 'Is it serious?'."

JOHN KELLY KICKED off RTÉ's Beckett Centenary Festival coverage in The View Presents . . ., with an erudite panel discussion on the nature of the festival itself and how the writer, a self-effacing chap obsessed with the futility of existence, might have viewed the celebrations. The Government (which has allocated €500,000 to the proceedings) is hoping, as Karen Fricker pointed out, that the festivities will "enhance cultural tourism", a phrase that would surely have Beckett rotating in Montparnasse. As Anthony Roche said, if the festival becomes "an orgy of self-congratulation, it has failed".

Panellist Peter Sheridan spoke of Ireland in the 1960s - a time when Beckett had hardly made it on to a tea towel - and of bringing Waiting for Godot on the road with his brothers and father, playing to often hostile audiences who viewed Godot as a pagan work. The Sheridans' production, a year after the death of Peter's brother, Frankie, and with his father playing Pozzo, was a cathartic experience.

"Beckett," Sheridan said, "gave words to an experience that I could never articulate."

Tonight on RTÉ2, the Beckett 100 Theme Night, presented by Kelly and featuring Billie Whitelaw, Jack MacGowran and Barry McGovern, among others, promises to be unmissable.