Since every mafiosi’s favourite movie is Goodfellas and favourite TV programme is The Sopranos, I suppose similar rules apply to Islamic terrorists and Sleeper Cell (Channel 4). Probably, every Wednesday night secretive groups of sinister bearded men all over Britain tune in in the eager hope that this will be the episode when scary Faris Al-Farik (Oded Fehr) finally gets to blow thousands of infidels into a million pieces.
I dare say they will also be watching to see whether American scriptwriters have any useful insights into the Islamic terrorist mindset. If so, they’re going be disappointed. Sleeper Cell is just another generic action-drama series like a cross between The Dirty Dozen and a slightly slower 24. One of the team is blond and all- American; one’s black; one’s happy-go-lucky and kooky; one’s the strong, silent type. This could just as easily be a bank-heist thriller or daring-mission war movie as a terrorist one.
But, then, imagine how boring it would be if they’d made the Sleeper Cell characters like sleeper-cell characters seem to be in real life: the apparently gentle, bearded, prayerful one; the apparently gentle, bearded, prayerful one; the apparently gentle, bearded, prayerful one; and the apparently gentle, bearded prayerful one. (Have you noticed that whenever they arrest a new suspect, one of his mates is always quoted on the news saying: ‘They’ve definitely got the wrong man. He wouldn’t hurt a flea. He’s really gentle.’ Deport all gentle Muslims at once, say I.)
Then again, appearances are deceptive. You’d think that Osama bin Laden was another solemn ascetic, but according to last week’s Pop Bitch — so it must be true — his favourite TV programme is Miami Vice, he’s obsessed with Whitney Houston and he likes his girlfriends to dance naked to ‘Rock Lobster’ by the B52s while he shouts at them: ‘Dance like a Caucasoid girl.’ Well, this is what his former sex slave Kola Boof — Sudanese poet and member of the Sudanese People’s Liberation Army — says, anyway.
I watched the first episode of the new and final series of The Sopranos (E4, Thursday), obviously, because it’s my all-time-favourite programme. It wasn’t the best, by any stretch. Tony got shot at the end by a senile, paranoid Uncle Junior but it’s not as though we don’t know he’s going to make a speedy recovery. (I expect all that fat he has accumulated will have done much to cushion the bullet, and if I were writing the script I’d have Tony use this in future episodes as justification for further gastronomic excess.) Another debt defaulter was blown away in a diner; there was yet another funeral and another scene where Tony goes to visit somebody hideously mashed-up in hospital and has to work out the most diplomatic formula for revenge; Janice was fat and annoying; Dr Melfi psychoanalysed; Carmen did more shopping, etc.
For The Sopranos’ fans who’ve stuck it this far, though, that’s hardly going to be a problem. We don’t mind if the final season takes its time to build because that will only serve to ratchet up the tension, and we know the ending will be as intensely thrilling and bloody as it needs to be because creator David O. Chase won’t allow otherwise. And besides, as happens with a friend you’ve known for over eight years, the familiarity and predictability becomes part of the charm.
This week’s main storyline concerned a footsoldier who’d inherited $2 million from an aunt and wanted Tony’s permission to quit the Mob so he could retire with his family to Florida. You could see a mile off it was going to end up unhappily because in The Sopranos things always do. One of the recurring themes is that loyalty to Family trumps everything, including family.
Maybe that’s the root of The Sopranos’ appeal to so many wage-slaving ABC1 types: it acknowledges the awful truth about modern life which is that your arse is never your own. The big house, the nanny, and the fancy holidays give you the illusion of wealth and freedom, but when it comes down to it you’re still just a grunt, expected to be on the end of the phone, eager to help at whatever time Tony calls.
Sometimes, not very often, but sometimes I feel almost grateful for having a crappo job in an utterly pointless, hideously ill-paid sunset profession where, unlike my rich banker friends, I don’t get called up by my office on holiday and am not expected to spend all day on the mobile. Especially when I have really nice friends who invite me to stay with them on the Ile de Ré and other ones with giant estates in Scotland where I get to shoot my first grouse. Phew, for a nasty moment there I thought I was going to get to the end of this column without vouchsafing a single piece of autobiographical information.
But you know me better than that, don’t you, eh, my loyal reader chums?
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