Marty’s way

Vinyl (Sky Atlantic) — the much-anticipated series, co-produced by Martin Scorsese and Mick Jagger, about the 1970s New York record industry — began on Monday with a two-hour episode directed by Scorsese himself. The result was, as you’d expect, an exhilarating watch. So why did it also create an undeniable feeling of slight disappointment?

One reason, I suppose, could just be that modern TV viewers are spoiled rotten. So many American dramas since The Sopranos have shown such a miraculous mixture of breadth and depth that the problem is no longer believing how ambitious television can be, but simply keeping up with them all. (More bloody golden eggs? Why can’t these people leave us alone to read a book?)

Another reason, mind you, might well be that everything else about Vinyl is pretty much as you’d expect too. In fact, if you’d gone for a drinking game on Monday where you had to glug a shot every time you saw a familiar Scorsese trope, you’d have ended up giving Seventies hedonism a run for its money.

The programme began with the caption ‘New York City 1973’ (glug) and an Italian-American in an extravagantly lapelled jacket and a sleazy part of town scoring some cocaine (glug). He was, he told the dealer, ‘a record man — at least till now’, before heading to a nearby club where the New York Dolls apparently rekindled his love of rock’n’roll. Certainly, he responded like the coked-up equivalent of those old blokes in suits who couldn’t help tapping their toes in Cliff Richard movies.

We then flashed back five days, to when our man was still in good enough shape to deliver a voiceover introducing himself and the other central characters (glug — I’ll stop that now, but you get the idea).