HOLY JOE

The state visit of Joseph Ratzinger to Britain has prompted in me some further reflection on religion, just as any Pope worth his salt would hope. The major theme his holiness developed while here was the danger of “aggressive secularism” overtaking these islands. I do not think it unreasonable to suggest that the deliverance of such a critical assessment strays beyond the purview of the good manners traditionally expected of a guest, but that’s the modern world for you.

One does know what he means, of course. The history of aggressive secularism in the west is baleful at best. Think of the Crusades, a succession of vicious attacks by atheists on innocent Moslems. Then there were the Marian Persecutions, perpetrated by non-believers on English Protestants. The Massacre of the Huguenots was conducted by adherents of paganism, the Thirty Years’ War was entirely devoid of religious content and. in our own time, there has been the murderous conflict between Humanists and Rationalists in Northern Ireland. And no one expects the Secular Inquisition.

It was two notably unbelieving leaders who dragged the west into two invasions of Middle East countries, Mr Bush and Mr Blair. The aggressive secularism of these two men has underlined the deplorable absence of Catholicism in the modern world. Nations such as Spain, Italy, France, Poland, Portugal, Germany, the Irish Republic, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Latin America, the South American continent and large swathes of Africa have been wholly purged of Roman influence. Secularism is indeed rampant everywhere.

Ratzinger in working togs

Should we mourn supernatural superstition? I have cogitated on the matter anew but it remains my conviction that the more rational are the people and their leaders, the better is their chance of surviving into the 22nd century. And what is the nature of the dogma to which Ratzinger cleaves? It is, it seems to me, an earnest of a mind’s desire never to grow up. It is a sort of outward show of stunted development. An adult’s delusion about a divinity is a close parallel to a child’s entertainment of the notion of Father Christmas: the main distinction is that parents promulgate the myth of the benign old gentleman in the sky who bestows gifts with a certain amount of tongue in cheek. And of course nations do not go to war over Saint Nicholas (though the only time I seriously came to blows in my childhood was in defence of my Yuletide idol’s honour).

People like Ratzinger, who make a good living out of the supernatural, are – in Catholicism, Buddhism, the Shakers, the Brahmacharya state in the Sannyasa order of Hinduism and so on – celibates. They are in effect pre-pubescent. How can they know anything about life in the world if they have never experienced a full relationship with another adult? No doubt they will counter that their spiritual calling is a greater and purer existence. It isn’t; it’s a safer, smaller and more ignorant existence. We who live in mature relationships know that better than they ever can.

St Peter's Basilica – perhaps a gnat's overstated?

Life in the Vatican is not so much pure and spiritual as opulent, cushioned and self-important, like that of some caliph ruling over a barbaric kingdom. Ratzinger the fabled intellectual may pass his days tickling the ivories in Mozart fantasias, poring over illuminated manuscript and sucking quail’s eggs from between the buttocks of choristers but he doesn’t get to engage with the real world, save by waving from his bullet-proof popemobile and swapping sermons with the heads of rival churches like Rowan Williams. I don’t imagine he takes Private Eye or even The New Yorker. Do you see him reading Philip Roth, Cormac McCarthy or Sarah Waters or indeed Günter Grass, Umberto Eco or (ha ha) Aldo Busi? Has he watched The Sopranos? Has he any idea what the world is like?

“There was a certain rich man,” writes Saint Luke in his Gospel, “which was clothed in purple and fine linen, and fared sumptuously every day” [17:19]. But he goes to hell and the beggar who lies at his gate ascends to heaven. I have no idea whether Ratzinger is in his own right a rich man but he has the papal benefice for life and he will live in splendour all his days. The Catholic church rarely has much to say on the matter of world poverty, probably because of its own conspicuous wealth. No church has ever followed the teaching of Christ in this regard: “Go thy way, sell whatever thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven” [Mark 10:21]. It is from this chapter that the famous homily derives: “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God” [10:25].

Not your neighbourhood library but the one in the Vatican Museum

The entire trick of supernatural delusion was to construct an unverifiable promise of reward in the hereafter, what unionists and other capitalism sceptics traditionally call “jam tomorrow” (actually a phrase of Lewis Carroll’s). The promise was designed to throw a misleading crumb to the underprivileged and deprived while the clerics lived on velvet as their reward from the privileged and depraved for their part in keeping the peasants quiescent. It’s a nifty trick and it clearly still works, even with all that we know about physiognomy and psychology.

What it doesn’t do, though, is address real problems. Having put its philosophical responsibilities in the hands of immature, unworldly men, the Catholic church blithely decides that the only function of the sexual act is procreation and that therefore birth control is “sinful” because it condones unproductive lust; thereby the church condemns countless generations of dogma-fearing peasants to swarms of unwanted children that they cannot afford to feed. The church congratulates itself on swelling its numbers by encouraging its adherents to breed like rabbits.

The crown of the holy Roman expire, a nice little bauble in the Vatican collection

Ratzinger has nothing useful to say about population control, about planned parenthood, about HIV/Aids and other diseases spread by anal penetration of women by men (the customary method of avoiding conception in Africa), or indeed about climate change, globalization, international capital, food distribution, starvation, sub-prime mortgage lending or any of the other pressing concerns on which a papal edict might discomfort the church’s rich friends. And don’t get me started on child abuse. It butters no parsnips for Ratzinger to meet and listen politely to a few carefully chosen “victims” or to express his “sorrow” – the BBC’s James Robbins called it “the Pope’s most outspoken apology to date”, a strange choice of adjective. What the church must do is take responsibility for its own long history of cover-up, to hand offending clerics over to the civil authorities instead of giving them sanctuary, hiding them in obscure parishes and handing them mild penances, and to make practical and substantial reparations to all the victims in a manner that may be seen in some serious way to cost the holy see.

The BEST-REGULATED FAMILIES

Two great television drama serials have just ended their runs. The Sopranos, the New Jersey mob family saga, came to a formal conclusion after six seasons last week on Channel 4 (though it had already run on the satellite channel E4; see below). Shameless, the story of the Gallaghers and their successive neighbours on the fictional Chatsworth Estate in Manchester, finished its fifth run on Channel 4 this week and, while it gave every indication that all was wrapped up and that there was no more to say, a sixth series is evidently already in pre-production. I’m not sure if they shouldn’t call it a day while the going is still good.

In the British show’s finale, the remarkable parallels with The Sopranos were reinforced, quite possibly unconsciously. As Tony Soprano had done in a previous run, the flawed paterfamilias Frank Gallagher suffered a grievous accidental wound that left his survival in doubt. And he too experienced a strange vision of himself in different circumstances while comatose.

Frank and Tony are, along with Homer Simpson, the medium’s greatest modern depictions of family men. Flawed as they are, their characters compel attention and even – or do I mean “especially”? – empathy. All three (though only vocally in Homer’s case) owe a great deal to the acting as well as to the writing and original conception. All have developed in subtle, subterranean ways while staying essentially the same. That’s because they were conceived in a fully rounded state.

It’s the essential difference between, on the one hand, one-off drama and finite serials (what the Americans call mini-series) and, on the other, series (discrete stories about recurring characters) and continuing serials (soap operas and long-time open-ended dramas like the two under consideration). In the former form, a character needs to go on a journey of some kind and to be changed by it. In the latter, a character who is to stay the distance needs to be anchored in stable situations and characteristics. The Simpsons is an oddity here in that it appears to be built like a serial and yet the characters, being cartoons, don’t age and so it functions like a series (which means that in practice you can watch episodes in any order).

Shameless and The Sopranos (The Simpsons too, to a lesser extent) caught the imagination of a large public, I believe, because they both had as their macro-subject the most important and pervasive theme of the early years of this century: the need to take responsibility for what you do. This was never so true as in the last episode of Shameless. Monica, about to give birth, refuses to go to hospital because Frank has promised to accompany her and she believes it is his responsibility as the father to do so. Frank is in fact unable to be there because of the aforementioned accident, thrown from his barstool by an earth tremor, the publican and his wife washing their hands of his fate. Ian, Monica’s gay son by a man other than Frank, manages to be there for her and Frank, learning this and also influenced by his dream, finally embraces him as his own.

Meanwhile, Ian's half-brother Carl, rushing to the hospital, leaves his toddler niece with a girl he barely knows (but fancies) and then has to calculate how to handle the toddler’s mother’s murderous family when the girl absconds with the kid. All ends happily in the sort of expression of communality that, from time to time, Shameless has shamelessly but not over-sentimentally indulged, before a final outrageous joke. This run has contained some of its finest episodes along with some developments that teetered on the edge of being contrived and convenient. But I do feel, until the sixth (inevitably) proves me wrong, that five series have covered it.

How The Sopranos would end was the subject of endless speculation and then endless discussion. No show with such a reputation could possibly just peg out. Would it be a blood bath? Would there be a stunning twist? In fact, it ended at a family diner with daughter Meadow running late and Tony looking up, partly in expectation, partly in apprehension, every time something jangled on the soundtrack. In the last shot, we heard the street door thrown open and saw Tony look up, his face unreadable. We cut hard to black and bottomless silence and this was held long enough for one to begin to fear a break in transmission. Then the credits rolled in silence, though of course the linkman broke in with some irrelevant remark (actually, half the Shameless end-credits also passed in silence but mercifully without interruption; perhaps someone had spoken to Presentation).

Some viewers seem to have felt cheated out of a clear-cut resolution because the end of The Sopranos was, to them, ambiguous. In my view, it’s simple-minded to demand to know “what happened next”. The answer of course is “nothing: that was the end”. What it conveyed, at least to this viewer, was that Tony Soprano would spend the rest of his days looking up in expectation and apprehension every time an intrusive sound caught his attention. And that’s no life. As the credits rolled, I realized that I was rigid with tension. The exemplary editing of that last sequence had created a palpable sense of dread which, concentrated onto Tony’s face in the last shot, ought to have conveyed to all viewers what it conveyed to me.

The last season contained some magnificent episodes, none more than the agonizing scene in which Tony’s son AJ tried to take his own life and Tony, belatedly understanding what was going down, struggled to save him. The intertwining threads on the home stretch plotted Tony’s angry and reluctant withdrawal from analysis – where we started back in 1999 – against the long-awaited showdown with Phil Leotardo’s New York mob (caused by disagreements over asbestos waste: “waste management” was the job description Tony gave to his analyst at the outset) and the aforementioned crisis in AJ’s young life.

Season Six was shown in the States in two bunches with a gap of some months in between. Given how long British viewers had to wait for the beginning of the season, it seemed unnecessary to replicate the mid-season gap on either E4 or Channel 4. I would have watched on E4 where the first episode was screened twice but the second episode’s same-week repeat never materialized (it was listed in Radio Times) and, as I had not seen what would have been the first transmission, I decided to be extremely patient and await the C4 re-run, knowing that friends who were fellow fans would be months ahead of me.

This disruption of series runs is becoming epidemic in British television. ITV launched its new American-made mini-series Pushing Daisies last Saturday but today we learn that the second episode has been summarily dropped. ITV only has eight weeks of slots available before beginning its vitally important coverage of a football tournament that features no British teams. Pushing Daisies has the temerity to run to nine episodes, which ITV would of course have known when it made its Saturday night dispensations.

Naturally you would assume that if any episode had to be delayed it would be the last one. But you would be wrong to make the assumption that contemporary schedulers give a tuppenny damn about the audience. The second episode has been dropped from the schedules altogether. Given that the first episode did not perform as strongly as ITV would have required, the chances are not only that the second episode will never be shown (despite ITV’s vague undertaking to fit it in “in the autumn”) but that the show will anyway be moved out of its prime time slot in short order. In that case, it would have been possible for the nine-part run to be shown in sequence (after all, ITV has four channels to play with) but by then the hiatus will have already occurred. Broadcasters seem not to care whether they alienate their suppliers, never mind the pesky audience. I suspect that there will soon come a time when we will be looking back on the fact that British television showed the likes of The Sopranos and Shameless in any form as the last vestige of a last golden age of broadcasting.

STUDIO PORTRAIT

The most interesting thing on television at present is Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. I’m sure the endgame of The Sopranos on E4 is really the high point of current British transmission but I wasn’t able to tape the first episode of the renewed screenings – it was bizarre of Channel 4 and its satellite channels to break the last series into two chunks – and when I tried to set Sky+ to catch the same-week repeat there was a mysterious block on recording that particular slot on the hard drive. So I let it go. I can wait; I’ll catch it on its C4 screening (in the spring perhaps) and that anyway will be without the disfiguring channel ID in the top left corner of the screen.

Aaron Sorkin’s successor to The West Wing shares that legend’s sensibility. It assumes an unusually literate, educated, liberally-minded and well-informed audience. There are far more allusions in the scripts than on any other programme, often to really quite abstruse matters and people, with a special concentration on British subjects, beginning with Gilbert and Sullivan in the pilot episode.

The milieu of the drama serial is a late-night satire show, televised live across the US from Los Angeles. I worked in and around British television for a quarter of a century, so this of course has a powerful interest for me. There isn’t really much reason to expect it to have wide appeal, however, insofar as viewers on both sides of the Atlantic have never been encouraged by television to take much interest in the background of the medium itself, whereas the behind-camera personalities, industry workings, history and techniques of cinema-making have been meat and drink to television for decades. Accordingly, Studio 60 never did well in the US ratings and seems not to have been inked in for a second series. It picked up five Emmy nominations, an impressive haul, but only won with John Goodman as guest actor.

Studio 60 is, I think, a failure but a most interesting one. Its failings are surprisingly large. By far the least convincing aspect of the show is the show-within-a-show. I know a lot of topical comedy doesn’t travel too well but the glimpses we get of the show that everyone is working on so earnestly are lame in the extreme. I suspect that the writing team – I mean Sorkin’s writing team, not the one depicted in Studio 60 – lacks any old pros from the television comedy game. The young drama-scripting turks, along with Sorkin himself, think they know how to mimic another genre but one of the things television drama gets most wrong is the true smell and feel of non-drama television, whether it’s news, chat shows, game shows or comedy. This is a pity and it undermines Studio 60’s credibility.

The next yawning hole in the show is the lack of a really persuasive or well-realised female character. Amanda Peet is impossibly glamorous and exquisitely clad as the station’s director of programmes. This is not the main reason why she doesn’t begin to convince as a big player in television but it doesn’t help. Sarah Poulson has to try to bring alive a gratingly flaky character as the still-smarting ex of the show’s co-resident genius. This latter is played by top-billed Matthew Perry, not my favourite actor. (One of the reasons I was never attracted to Friends was that, of the six leads, only Lisa Kudrow held any appeal for me).

Another problem is structural. Sorkin clearly made an early and surely a correct decision that he couldn’t have every episode constructed as a filleted week, climaxing with the weekend transmission of the satire show. But he hasn’t found a satisfactory substitute. The episode most recently broadcast here (#9, entitled ‘B-12’ after a virus, the role of which was not at all clear in the plot) suffered badly from what I took to be deliberate continuity shifts back and forth between different days. I say that I took them to be deliberate. More4, which shows Studio 60 here, managed after an ad break to rewind and play a second time several minutes of one segment the other week. It really is time More4 solved its problems in its presentation suite, not least the one that continually mangles its own transmitted sound. That wouldn’t matter if the linkpeople would shut up during the programmes but when they talk over the end credits the music always starts to break up because the sound is now being augmented by the permanent glitch in the presentation suite sound.

Much of Studio 60’s appeal lies in seeing how its inherent problems will be addressed in each episode. Snatches of music by guests, some of them as famous as Sting, seem a little desperate. On the other hand, a running discussion on product placement had me looking for the advertising deals that Sorkin himself has done and one just knew that the fruits of this were being flourished in a spirit of post-modern irony-and-realism mix. In a way, that is the main thing that floors Studio 60. It’s just too self-aware for its own good. Its gestures are there because they’re smart, rather than because they’re germane to story or character. That’s why in the end it’s not as successful as Ugly Betty or Desperate Housewives. But hey, like those invigorating imports, it beats anything home-grown that British television can offer since the end of Green Wing. Unless I am to except The IT Crowd. And I’m not quite sure that I am to …