PresentTense:This is not a great way to start off any column, but you might not want to read this one. If you're among the 200,000 or so viewers waiting patiently for the final episode of The Sopranos, then this will not contain any clue as to its outcome.
I haven't seen it. I don't know what happens. But I have a growing idea. And I also know that any mention of the subject is enough to have me fling a newspaper across the room.
The episode was shown several weeks ago in the US, and since then my brain has been set to Sopranos Avoidance Mode. On Tuesday I heard Myles Dungan tell RTÉ Radio 1 that he hadn't seen the end so couldn't spoil anything by talking about it. But there was no point in taking a risk, so I cupped my ears and ran from the room like a man who'd just punched a nest of bees.
This attempt to avoid any reference to the subject has meant me refusing to watch one of the most talked-about media moments of the year - Hillary Clinton's publicity-seeking homage to the final episode - of which I know only that it features Bill Clinton and involves something to do with carrots. This means that I know the final episode also involves something to do with carrots. Precisely what it has to do with carrots, I don't know. Possibly something violent. Possibly something food-related. Or possibly as a metaphor for food-related violence.
Either way, it's one detail too many. Although, by now it is not the only one to leak into my head. There have been enough glimpses of headlines and blurbs and stories across the media that it has been impossible to set up an impregnable mental fortress against the onslaught of people trying to spoil the ending.
This global conspiracy has included many of the better American websites. Slate.com ran weekly discussions after each episode, with its headlines usually coming from some major plot point. Satirical online magazine The Onion currently has a story that gives away an aspect of the conclusion, so I can't get my laughs from that at all this week. The web has been buzzing with spoofs, discussions, suggestions on how it should have ended. I've seen none of them. Instead, I'm like a movie-goer standing in the queue for a showing of The Sixth Sense and desperately hoping that some numbskull coming out of the cinema doesn't exclaim "who'd have guessed he was dead all along?" But what I've noticed most is just how many people I know who have seen it. They didn't want to wait and knew they didn't have to. So they downloaded the episodes online.
Why, they wonder, don't I? It's partly because I'm stuck in an increasingly old-fashioned idea that television is for watching on an actual television, and when the broadcaster schedules it. Because television still has the potential to offer a collective experience unlike any other medium.
That and I'm lazy.
But I fully understand why people increasingly refuse to be patient. While there is a focus on the illegal downloading of music and film, television actually makes for a greater target - especially for those on this side of the Atlantic who are used to must-see TV being must-wait.
In fairness to RTÉ, it tries to run imported series as soon as possible after the American broadcast, but a gap of even a couple of weeks can be too much. RTÉ's ratings appear to have held steady through this run of the mob drama, but given that Channel 4 is waiting what seems like aeons to show the last episodes, it will eventually have fewer viewers than there are characters left alive in the show.
Weekly television episodes encourage a steady unfolding of the narrative not only through the programme itself but also through the media that reports the twists and turns, often as if they were real rather than fictional events. The drip-drip effect can be torturous, especially when tantalised by a true media event such as the end of what is commonly described as the "greatest television show ever made".
And now that media borders have been over-run, it can be frustrating to be considered a separate country as far as television is concerned, yet part of one nation under the web. This is going to be a particular problem for viewers of Lost, because, by the time it concludes in a few years, trying to avoid discovering the outcome prematurely will be almost as impossible as its plot.
It wasn't always like this. For Dallas's famous "who shot JR?" cliffhanger, the tape arrived in London under armed guard. People here genuinely didn't know the answer until they saw the programme. Today, you might as well write the answer across the sky five minutes after the closing credits have rolled in the US.
Finally, I would like, in advance, to thank all those readers who will now be kind enough to send me full Sopranos spoilers. And yes, I have already guessed that it was all a dream in the end.
