TV Review: Sex and the City is back. Ladies, this season you will be wearing rib-length cardigans, complemented by shoulder-length hair tied with an alice band. Gentlemen, you will be wearing very little at all, writes Shane Hegarty.
The final series began with Carrie hurrying to ring the bell at the New York Stock Exchange, and carried the stocks and bonds metaphor all the way to Samantha's adventure in stockings and bondage. The plot so far: Samantha has met a stockbroker and he possesses the magnificent name of Chip Kilkenny. He lives in her apartment block and she brought him a welcome basket filled with the usual goodies of cheese, prosciutto, condoms and handcuffs. She still has the best lines, although repeating them would cause you to choke on your Frosties.
Carrie has a new man called Jack and, like most of her new men, his smile is in the right place and his jokes strike just the right note. Charlotte is still seeing lawyer Harry Goldenblatt, but he won't marry her because she's not Jewish.
Sex and the City appeals at various levels, split neatly between the sexes, and then further subdivided along sexual preference. Analysis here, though, would be somewhat trite. It would be an analysis of others' analyses, because whatever demographic it aims at, straight, married men are the last to be struck by its resonance, the ones least likely to see beyond the pure comedy. It is the brilliance of its script that appeals, not any cultural current.
Maybe we get a certain insight into how women would like to be.
Maybe we are supposed to be getting a hint at how they would like us to be.
The relationship bits mean little to us, though. Carrie's whole Aidan and Mr Big storyline is an obsession for which we can have no empathy. Aidan appeared here, with baby attached to his chest, and the women watching may have sniffled or sighed, while the men will have prodded the telly in the hope of getting things moving to the next joke.
We can understand Steve, the father of Miranda's child, because he wears ragged sweaters, seems somewhat out of his league and has spent much of his time scrabbling not to get relegated further. Otherwise, it suggests that the New York dating scene has honed many of the city's men into charm machines, and Sex and the City repays them by holding them in quite high esteem. Most men are rippling of body or crackling with wit or both - unlike most men. Sex and the City is wolf-whistling at us, and all we can do is blush manfully and appreciate it while it lasts.
Gods, Faeries and Misty Mountains followed the fortunes of four women too, all of whom uprooted themselves and moved to Donegal, but not, you would presume, in response to rumours of a vibrant dating scene. Nonetheless, the chief surprise didn't come from hearing that there are some foreign women who dream of living in Ireland, but that there are some foreign women who dream of marrying an Irishman. It was a final vindication of years of rolling our jumper sleeves to the elbows and having the hair cut by the mammy. A reward for steadfastly holding out against the supposed dressy sophistication of continental men. Sleep soundly tonight, Daniel O'Donnell. Your work is done.
My Family and Autism featured Jacqui Jackson and her seven children, of whom all four boys have a form of autism. This engaging and enlightening diary of their lives was narrated by one of those boys, Luke, a 14-year-old with Asperger's syndrome who has already written two books on the subject.
The simplest way he can describe it is as "a more extreme version of real life. Sounds seem louder, lights seem brighter, smells seem, well . . . smellier." He sees the world as full of disorder, populated by people moving about "like ants, using strange and inexplicable expressions". Social interaction is a minefield. The nuances of speech are lost on him. If a girl asks him if her bum looks big in this, his immediate reaction is to be honest and say yes, which proves he is not altogether different from other men.
The boys are on a gluten-free diet to ameliorate some of the symptoms. When six-year-old Ben was withdrawing from the foods, his mother found him eating the carpet. Phoning the carpet's manufacturers, she learned that its glue was made with flour. His brother, Joseph, would eat washing-up liquid suds because it contained milk protein. "They can smell 'em, in a way," observed Jacqui.
Joseph suffers from Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, without any great promise that he will calm over time. He steals, hoards, lights fires.
We saw a typical night in the Jackson house, in which Joseph left his bed to cover the bathroom walls in shaving foam and himself in hair wax. It was the only time that Jacqui cried. It is not, she said, a syndrome that leaves a visible handicap, so she lives in a world of disapproving tuts and pitying glances as she chases the boys about the shops, yet finds that escape comes from returning home to the familiarity of the domestic chaos. She seeks out incremental improvements in their behaviour, through diet or coloured glasses for their dyslexia, but smiles at the thought of herself crawling around the house hunting for a turd she knows her son has planted somewhere.
Somehow, she has found time to study for her Masters in Forensic Psychology.
My Family and Autism was a fascinating portrait not only of an unconventional family but also of the boundless love and patience of its matriarch.
Chris Morris's short film, My Wrongs #8245-8249 & 117, was the curtain-raiser for Channel 4's Outside season. For the season's duration a little girl has replaced the continuity announcer. That trick has become a kind of cliché of disconcertion. Spielberg used a child's voice to narrate his recent alien horror nonsense, Taken. Morris had already used the motif to full effect in Jam, his comedy show from the edge of consciousness. In one sketch, a child used her outward innocence to pin a brutal murder on an adult. It was one of the show's lighter moments.
My Wrongs was introduced as a film "with a dog who talks in it", and it is a pity it turned out to be as prosaic as that. Paddy Considine played a man instructed to do and say things by the dog and, later, a baby at a christening. The oblique camera angles and dissonant electronica were familiar. Indeed, the whole thing looked like an off-cut from Jam and, like much of that series, for all its innovation it ultimately left you cold rather than queasy.
Ruby Wax interviewed Jim Carrey on Monday night: tornadoes meeting in a storm. Carrey captured our hearts following a fierce battle during the mid-1990s, and there are some of us now quite anxious that he return them.
As with Robin Williams, interviews with Carrey are predictable affairs in which questions are cues only for episodes of wilful hyperactivity. The edited, scripted and directed performance in the movies gives way to a comedic white noise. It is always exhausting sifting through the accents and gurns, the tics and the antics. It began with him smearing his lips with gloss and ended with him smashing plates. En route, he used Wax as a chaise longue, lay down with her on the floor, danced, yelled, sang, spat, mugged, hollered, fell. Each joke required acting out the encyclopaedia of physical comedy.
There were no quieter moments, only ones not so loud. During these Carrey and Wax managed to compare their respective mothers, both of whom were obsessed with hygiene. Then, as if acting out some dormant adolescent urge, they proceeded to trash the hotel room. He pulled a tablecloth from under a dinner set and took most of the dinner set with it. He swung between contrition and vandalism. They sniggered, kicked more plates, mashed stuff into the floor. Wax's schtick, though, only works when she is the most adolescent one in the room. Here, her competitiveness only fed his behaviour.
It ended with him refusing to leave the interview, returning to the room over and over again for one more tiresome gag, its chief value being to give us a handy metaphor for his moviecareer.