RICH in one-liners and expressing an unkind kind of truth through coarseness, Roseanne used to be sharp and funny. In focusing on a poor American family, with a messy (albeit stylised messy) home, the series broke new ground for US sitcoms. On Wednesday, its 221st and final episode - an hour-long special - was appalling. It was as if some sitcom alchemist had managed to extract essence of Chris Eubank from Fawlty Towers.
No. In fact, it was worse than that because Eubank's ludicrously pontifical cod-philosophy can amuse the crueller parts in all of us. Roseanne's cod- philosophy, on the other hand, was about as much fun as a starched collar rubbing on a ripening boil. "I learned that dreams don't work without action. I learned that no one could stop me but me ... And, most important, I learned that God does exist. He or she is right inside you - underneath the pain, the sorrow and the shame."
Right then, suck on that one for a while. There's more where that came from, including even a Nietzschean twist added to the signature tune: "What doesn't kill us is making us stronger/ We're gonna last longer/ Than the greatest wall in China". And so it went - the sitcom as sermon; jokes reduced to self-satisfied inanities; the star transformed from sassy, blue-collar human-being to Hollywood idiot.
Of course, there have always been three Roseannes rolled, if not quite compressed, into one. There has been Roseanne, the sitcom; Roseanne Conner, the character; and Roseanne Barr, the actress. The lines of distinction were always deliberately blurred, allowing a conveniently ambiguous mix of institution, icon and iconoclast to beguile public attention. Maybe the jumbling was all smartass, postmodern codswallop but, in the end, it was Ms Barr who devoured Ms Conner and reduced Roseanne to rubbish.
The swansong, or, if you wish, crammed turkeysong, written by Ms Barr, but presented as though it were written by Ms Conner, included a final gathering of the Conner clan. The device of writing the character as a writer might have maintained the show's lucrative ambiguity if Ms Barr had managed not to believe her own dope. But she didn't, opting instead to aggrandise her function by turning the episode into a ramble about God and creativity.
"How many people really pray when stuff's going good?" she (Barr, barely pretending to be Conner) asked at one point. For a show which, in its heyday, said much about the dumbing of America, this was, presumably, meant to induce reflection among viewers. But the sitcom as televangelism is not only not funny, it's monstrous. In fact, it's evidence that rampant American trash culture, splendidly portrayed and parodied by the early Roseanne, is so insidious that it even kills its own jokes.
So, after nine years Roseanne has gone to the Great Reruns on Sky (and Super and afternoon and early hours of morning TV). In the end, it was desperately dated. It was always rather joyless and arrogant anyway, a document of its time. But it used to be funny, sometimes. By the end, even before Roseanne Conner won the lottery last year, it should have been shot. Instead, it didn't have even the good grace to go quietly and thank God that, once upon a time, its stuff went good. Wednesday's nonsense ranks among the worst sitcom episodes in history: trash culture making love to itself is no joke.
THE flawed cop is about as dated as it gets for detective series. Kevin Whately plays Jimmy Griffen, The Broker's Man, the latest TV policeman down on his luck and torn between relationships and his work. Griffen used to be a police inspector, but after an affair his wife, Sally, a nurse, threw him out. They have two children - hurt, tug-of-love props - to add industrial-strength emotionalism to the domestic mess.
Griffen has been out of work but has relanded a gig as an insurance investigator, who is contracted to verify large claims in return for a generous slice of the premium. Just to spice things up, he depends upon Gaby, with whom he has had the affair, to get him the jobs. So, in essence, we have flawed cop immersed in sexual chemistry and we've seen it all before. Yet, in spite of its lack of originality - the insurance line is all that is novel - it's well done.
Opening with a docklands heist of a container, it is pacy and ominous. A juggernaut driver is cracked across the skull with a hammer and the nastiness of the moment is neither too stylised nor made gratuitously gory. Griffen is called in to an insurance world not of smarmy Lloyds toffs, but of thuggish brutes in expensive suits and low-rent offices. The main brute is Godzilla, a London street-tough turned insurance executive. He's repulsive, but he gets better lines than Griffen.
"Tell you what Jimbo, you save me two million on this one and I'll have all that graffiti about you and Gabs cleaned off the gents' bog. And if you can hang on to the ransom money for me, I'll even stop writing it," says Godzilla. OK, it's not Harold Pinter, but you really need to see his face as he spits it out, with the sort of cackle that once made Roseanne watchable. Anyway, the characterisation (though too often Gaby looks like she's posing for the cover of a particularly pretentious Enya album) is solid and the early action is well-shot.
Halfway through, however, the genre's cliches come in a deluge. We get switched suitcases, bent coppers, a Dutch blonde in drumskin-tight motorcycle leathers, a docklands chase, people knocked into the water, our hero scrapping a Ia John Wayne, a last-second rescue . . . and so forth. This was a pity. It was more interesting when it concentrated on moody, lingering, night shots.
But it is watchable when it's not trying too hard to thrill. The best scene was in a curry house. Checking out an insurance claimant, who insists that, through an accident, he has lost his sense of taste, Griffen has the waiter give him a curry spiked with "pure, red-hot chilli". The punter gobbles it down like a bowl of melted ice-cream. Though the set-up was, in one sense, preposterous, it struck a telling note about the insurance industry and the conmen within it and outside of it.
BESIDE trash culture and cop opera, Joyce, Yeats And Wilde dealt with rather different material. It was a literary dialogue between Seamus Heaney and the late Richard Ellmann, produced by Sean O Mordha and first screened in 1982. Shown for Bloomsday, it opened on Howth Head, with Heaney, perhaps a mite self-consciously, addressing the understandable unease that the format might seem a little precious.
"What have you got to say to the begrudgers who talk about the Yeats industry and the Joyce industry?" he asked. "It's better than the munitions industry, Seamus," said Ellmann, which was fair enough, but hardly the most noble imprimatur for anything. Even the Irish beef industry is better than the munitions industry. Still, with bona fides established, the lads set off on a trip around Dublin Bay, stopping off at Trinity College, Sandymount Green and Sandycove Martello tower.
Their conversation was happy and rich, full of observations, critical points and celebration. Only once was the criticism more condemning than discursive and that when Heaney plopped George Bernard Shaw into the mix to remark, correctly, that Shaw, unlike Wilde, "heckled" much too much. Between them, they covered a broad sweep of topics: the relationships of the writers to Ireland and the wider world; the quality of language in Yeats's poetry, which distinguishes him from first-rank English poets; the "lrishness" of Wilde; Joyce's support for non-violent Sinn Fein; the three as "national treasures
It was wise of O Mordha not to attempt any film-maker's equivalents of Joyce's cleverness, Yeats's imagery or Wilde's laconisms. The plain style - point a camera at the talking heads, shoot relevant contextual shots for mood and information and let viewers listen, worked well. Elaboration would have stressed the visual over the aural and that would have detracted from the lucidity of the conversation. As it was, the stuff went good, but there can be legitimate criticism of the Yeats and Joyce industries, which ought not be dismissed as mere begrudgery.
THE best documentary of the week made a strong case for believing that, for vileness, the Swiss banking industry ranks up alongside the munitions industry. Nazi Gold - Inside Story Special was quite an investigative nugget, offering compelling, indeed practically conclusive evidence of Swiss collusion with Hitler and his henchmen.
Dinky, little, super-clean, hyper-bourgeois Switzerland is among the wealthiest (perhaps, per capita, the wealthiest) country in the world. As most of the rest of Europe lay in ruins, the Swiss, it seems, yodelled all the way to the bank, stuffing their vaults with Nazi loot. Even the gold teeth and fillings of Holocaust victims were smelted in Berlin and banked in Berne and other Swiss cities. The glorious rule of banking - "we never ask where money comes from" - echoed the "only following orders" standard excuse of willing brutes.
The children of Holocaust victims have been routinely asked for "death certificates" by the suits in the Swiss banks. Wealthy Jews - and it is true that they were many - believed their money was safe in Switzerland. Now, led by billionaire Edgar Bronfman, Jews are suing Swiss banks for $20 billion. Certainly, legalised theft has taken place. But, far worse, Christopher Olgiati's documentary insisted that Switzerland turned Jewish children into the arms of the 55. A shower of bankers
FINALLY, two somewhat less than 24 carat gold programmes, but commendable nonetheless: Breaking The News and The Week In Politics. The former is a new four-parter which tells the history of TV journalism from its beginnings. It concentrates on the United States, the USSR and Britain. Its thrust is that TV news has been used, respectively, as a money-spinner, a tool of the state and a public service in these countries.
Now, this premise is the series's weakest aspect because television news has been used as all three by all three. Indeed, there is a strong case to be made that television news, the world over, is the greatest propaganda tool in history. But, premise aside, the opening episode worked well in talking to reporters, editors and cameramen from the early days. The wonder of those years has long gone, of course. But before barking, F-factor, Sky News yuppies, there was a genuine freshness. Old footage, though it shows the world in shades of grey, will remind you ... if you're old enough.
The Week In Politics whizzed around the country on election day and count day and, unbelievably, managed to make the election seem vibrant and exciting. Given the dullness, indeed immorality, of the "tax and crime" election, this was probably more than it deserved. But the programme did, get out on the road and, with a range of upbeat editing techniques, compressed a long bore into a refreshing, non-hectoring 55 minutes.