Sopranos reign supreme

TV 2002: Have you had enough of reality yet? The answer, it would appear, is yes. This year will be noted as the one in which television executives panned for gold along the same stretch of river, and the year in which they exhausted the seam. They piled it on the schedules, but by the end of the year the viewers were busy looking for something else to watch. The problem was, they had little choice.

There was the "audition-for-fame-reality" of Pop Idol, Popstars: The Rivals, You're A Star, The Fame Game and Model Behaviour.

The "try-to-live-as-our-ancestors-reality" of Edwardian Country House, The Ship, The Trench and Frontier House.

The "celebrities-pretend-their-ordinary-folk-reality" of Celebrity Big Brother, Celebrity Fat Club and Help, I'm A Celebrity Get Me Out of Here.

ITV's red-top current affairs programme Tonight even tried the "live-out-your-civil-war-for-our-entertainment reality" of Protestants and Catholics from the North sent to a house on the Isle of Man to see how they got on living together. Manipulative and shameful, it was a mixing of mediums that gave ITV a programme it should have burned rather than transmit.

Irish television had its fair share of reality too, but it arrived in the more traditional form of documentary and current affairs. True Lives, Leargas and Would You Believe continue to be excellent series, which are reaping the rewards being brought by digital cameras.

Prime Time has recovered its stride once again, giving RTÉ a programme that has once again become both reactive and investigative. It's a mark of how much impact some of its programmes have made over the course of the year that, by the time it comes around to judging their worth as television programmes, that has already been negated by their worth as news stories in themselves.

At times it was nothing less than explosive in its revelations, most obviously with Cardinal Secrets, in which it revealed the extent to which the church covered up instances of child abuse by priests. It was television that nudged the course of history.

We have turned out to be a nation sitting on a well of unwanted stories that needed to be told, not only through documentary, but through drama too. The series No Tears - based on the fight of the Hepatitis C victims - and the one-off Sinners both rose above their TV-Movie-of-the-Day possibilities by virtue of excellent acting and an empathy with the subjects that just about avoided schmaltz. The latter was to suffer from comparisons with an almost identical project being made at the same time, with Peter Mullan's The Magdalene Sisters ultimately having the kind of impact on the big screen that its small screen cousin couldn't quite match.

Bloody Sunday also found itself providing the script for two productions.

Jimmy McGovern's Sunday and Paul Greengrass's Bloody Sunday were snapshots of the day taken from different angles. McGovern wrote to his strengths in writing on behalf of the victims and their families, while Greengrass went for the verité of confusion and brutality popularised by Spielberg. It paid off not just in terms of its stylistic strengths as a drama, but also in how it has gone on to gain a US cinema distribution deal. It was also the single most memorable piece of British drama of 2002.

It was also one of the growing but still small list of productions to which TV3 could lay some claim. There have been signs of life at the independent station, even if they are irregular beats. Given RTÉ's success with Treasure Island, and the world's success with everything else, you could hardly blame it for leaping on the reality television bandwagon with Haunted House - in which a group of people were terrorised by the cast of Rent-A-Ghost.

Unfortunately it fell off the bandwagon horribly. Wrangling over production costs and the subsequent welter of bad publicity might have been worth it if it had been any good. It wasn't, and the public ignored it.

It's new documentary series, Matters of Fact, promised much with Adrian McCarthy's Living The Revolution, which was a polished and sly documentary following Martin Ferris through the election campaign in Kerry North. They promised it would be an irregular series, however, and that's what they've given us. Living The Revolution was broadcast in October. There hasn't been another home-produced documentary since.

It might be wise to concentrate more on such documentaries. They give the station an identity and a clout it still lacks. TG4 continued to show the way in this regard, making lots of television - even if varying in quality - as cheaply as possible. Amu Amigos confirmed Hector O'hEochagain as Irish television's brightest new star. Rumblings of discontent among independent producers, however, hint that the station's penury may yet go from an asset to a weakness.

Otherwise, TV3 continued to build its foundations on the twin pillars of Granada-produced series and soccer. A foreigner watching TV3 would conclude that the Irish speak with a Mancunian accent. It colluded in the nabbing of the home international matches from RTÉ, but escaped the flak that followed by virtue of the only showing them after Sky had shown them live. There are still weeks, meanwhile, when the wooden Champions League coverage appears never-ending.

RTÉ, though, had the World Cup. And Dunphy. You could not have asked for it to be better. It was as if the station had spent months dissecting the elements that made it so great in 1990, and then decided to re-stage it, only this time bigger, better, more controversial. The fuse on the Roy Keane affair may have been lit by his interview with The Irish Times, but RTÉ provided the iconic image that was the Tommie Gorman interview. Keane, ferocious and unyielding. Gorman practically on his knees, invoking every knobbly-kneed kid with a pigs bladder for a ball this side of the Irish Sea.

Remember, we thought this was the night Keane was going to say sorry and get back on the plane. It was television with the dial set at fever pitch. RTÉ made the decision to show it unedited, and the nation held its breath. God help any foreigners who picked that hour to ring and see how the Irish cousins were doing. Especially if the cousins lived in Cork.

Dunphy picked his moments well. On the morning of the first match he wore a colour scheme he can only have shopped especially for. The Cameroon colours had not been seen in a three-piece suit combination since 1970s Open University. All he could have done to crank up the atmosphere was to turn up with braids in his hair.

He saved the best till later, though, giving the nation the highlight during that evening's highlights programme. He wanted Ireland to lose. Yes. It'll be in all our best interests. A nation exhaled again. Loudly. Down the phone line to the RTÉ switchboard.

The one moment he didn't pick so well was the morning he gave a new lease of life to the euphemism "tired and emotional". The nation awoke to find that he'd been suspended from RTÉ, and wondered, if this really is a man who can party hard then why couldn't he have partied hard enough to last until the afternoon match when we would have all been awake to see his drunken antics.

It was an appearance on someone else's show, however, which may prove most illustrative. His ultimately anti-climactic head-to-head with Pat Kenny on the Late Late Show was the warm up for two men whose reputations will collide head on in 2003. With Kenny at the helm The Late Late continues to sail straight for the rocks. Dunphy has so far proved an underwhelming television presenter, but if his impending chat show can pinch about 200,000 viewers from the Late Late then it could prove a decisive blow for the RTÉ flagship. That night in September Dunphy began the interview with the air of a man awaiting an ambush only to find Kenny unwilling to take him on. A capitulation like that in 2003 and Dunphy will get the last laugh.

In the UK, there were times when it felt as if the stations had begun to operate exchange programmes. Interchangeable costume dramas. The tiring reality shows. Murder mysteries that strangled whole nights of television and in which the twist often appeared to be that the case would simply go on indefinitely. There were few glimmers of quality, although BBC2's Murder, with a remarkable performance from Julie Walters as the mother of a young victim, proved a highlight.

It was, yet again, imported drama which really shone, with Six Feet Under showing that even imperfect US drama is still on a level UK television can only dream of. Curb Your Enthusiasm was bought by TG4, making Larry David's blacker-than-black comedy the best-kept secret of the year while the twist-a-minute brilliance of 24 managed to bring originality to the spy-genre, even while it was revelling in all its clichés.

The Sopranos, meanwhile, really deserves to be reviewed separately each and every week. The episode in which Tony Soprano clobbered and quartered Ralph Cifaretto over that "beautiful, innocent animal" that was their racehorse Pie-Oh-My should be framed and hung in a museum. As the movie posters say, if you watched only one television programme in 2002 . . .