TV Review: Having previously lost his arm to a helicopter, Dr Romano lost the rest of his body to one in last Sunday's ER. The irony is that they may only be able to identify him from his prosthetic limb; suggesting that his surgeons' initial error was to not give him a prosthetic body.
Who, though, could have foretold that he would become the victim of a second helicopter accident in the same building in as many years? Of course, Dr Romano (Paul McCrane) had such a mean personality, was so thoroughly rotten to everyone who had ever tried to be nice to him, that he may have upset the karmic balance enough that it finally decided to find for him a particularly sarcastic death.
Watching the helicopter pick up a patient from the hospital roof triggered a flashback to the night whirring blades severed his arm, so Romano had dashed downstairs to take a breath of air at the front entrance. He suddenly found himself caught in an unexpected drizzle of flaming debris and when he looked up it was to find the helicopter plummeting towards him. His scream as he realised his fate was one of horror, but it also carried the unmistakable lilt of ennui. His last thought, perhaps, was to wonder if he had been a surface-to-air missile in a previous life that he had so committed all helicopters to a vendetta against him in this.
As is common to ER, the episode - in fact, the series so far - had been moseying along without too much to raise the blood pressure when it was suddenly startled by catastrophe. The staff of Chicago's County General must really be beginning to wonder about a few things. Their hospital has been blown up, burned down, shot up, crashed into, demolished and blown up again, and was recently infected with a disease eradicated worldwide more than 20 years ago. That screaming you hear is patients begging to be brought somewhere else.
For ingenuity with insults viewers must now rely largely on Dr Cox (John C. McGinley) in the occasional treat that is Scrubs. You could hardly slide a scalpel between his and Romano's characters, despite the difference in genres. Scrubs is a sitcom, following a junior doctor, JD (Zach Braff) and friends. It has an unfortunate saccharine edge to it that means that once you get to the last three minutes you know JD will wander into Wonder Years-type philosophising that gets the jokes nowhere. This week's episode shrivelled up when his voiceover reflected on how "love can give you strength you didn't know you had", and no punchline followed. Nurse! Sick-bag, please.
Which is a pity, because the previous 27 minutes always rattle along, with slick fantasy sequences and great slapstick. It makes great gains from a cast of largely unsympathetic characters: a sadistic janitor, puerile junior doctors and vicious senior ones. At the apex of arrogance is Dr Cox with his encyclopaedic way with insults and his black belt in belittlement.
"I'm sorry, but I think you're mistaking me for someone who gives a damn," he blared this week. "Don't worry, my father made the same mistake - on his deathbed."
There is an entertaining running joke in which Dr Cox casually addresses JD by girls' names. Scrubs once ran a montage of each time he had done this and it ran for nearly the entire episode.
Meanwhile, one of the great American sitcoms, Frasier, is working its way through its final series. This is turning into a year of goodbyes. Sex and the City recently began its valedictory run on TV3, and seems certain to leave a perfect Manola Blahnik heel imprint, having shown the wisdom not to drag its four characters into middle age, where the only outcome would be some sort of undignified likeness of Absolutely Fabulous. Elsewhere, Friends is on its way out, ensuring that it leaves with as little dignity as possible.
It is a sitcom whose shallow well of ideas ran dry long ago. Like Friends, Frasier is based on a few simple ideas; in this case, to do with misplaced snobbery and class and the old-fashioned mix-ups that can result. However, while Friends has stripped bare the bones of old plot-lines, Frasier is still coming up with classic episodes well into its twilight years. Channel 4 is a little behind RTÉ1 and this week aired a wonderful episode in which a mix-up about a pair of squash shorts and a gay bar led the population of Seattle to believe that Frasier Crane (Kelsey Grammer) was gay. Before he knew it, he was being outed on his radio show and waved at by buffed guys in the coffee shop. He had also attracted the attentions of Patrick Stewart's flamboyant and influential opera director; so good, as brother Niles put it, that he "staged a Philip Glass opera last year and nobody left".
As ever, Frasier and Niles spied the opportunity to ingratiate themselves with the city's elite, much to the disgust of Frasier's radio producer, Roz, who watched their brown-nosing with contempt: "Well, that was thorough. Find any polyps up there?"
And, as Burns courted him, Frasier's vanity ("oh, my fatal allure!") and pathetic ambition saw him, for not the first time, sprint blindly into humiliation. All the while Niles watched with a mixture of jealousy and schadenfreude, occasionally pitching in with sardonic asides ("I shouldn't make fun. Your people have been persecuted so much as it is").
The themes may always be familiar, but so is the outcome. Beautifully played-out farce, subtle plotting, pitch-perfect lines. In Friends, the cast has become mechanical and has the look of people with other projects on their minds. The jokes suggest they've been written to fulfil a quota. With Frasier, though, it can be easy to believe that the show is only hitting its stride. It is best that Frasier ends now, at a time when it still seems too good to end.
The title of the latest in the Arts Lives series, It's All Good, came from one of Damien Dempsey's songs, and this documentary of the singer-songwriter was a decent introduction to a voice that suggests there is a deep mine inside his barrel chest.
It is a voice, though, that either warms or freezes, hypnotises or repels. It brings forth pugilistic soul, folk and reggae as it gouges at the air. If you are unprepared for it, it can be quite a shock.
The programme tracked him through the bars from Dublin to New York and back again, and into the large theatres as a support act to Sinead O'Connor. It might be all good for Dempsey, but it is not perfect. This did sell him short, the rapture of the live audiences giving him and the film a rousing finale that was supposed to leave you in no doubt of his power. Yet it took minor detours from hagiography, with suggestions from some as to what he might yet become: either a singer who will always be critically fêted but not commercially successful or a songwriter whose potential might not be fully realised.
Certainly, his lyrics don't always have the force to match the voice. He writes poignantly of Dublin, but other songs are often emigrant anthems sodden in green ink. He can be sublime, but he can be mawkish. Ultimately, It's All Good was a portrait of a work in progress, an artist still to emerge from the cocoon.
On You're A Star, it's 3 a.m. in the karaoke bar. Tomorrow evening's theme will be Beatles songs. You may want to unplug your telly now, just to be safe.
There is a young Dubliner by the name of George Murphy who does a decent Luke Kelly impression, even if the power of this is getting stripped away as the weeks go on and the ballads get blander. Otherwise, the parochialism engendered by the voting has ensured a final line-up so light on talent you might presume it's not there at all. There is a boy-band, Final Four, of whom you would not be surprised if it were revealed that they were genuinely the final four people left on Earth to form a boy-band. There is a country singer from Achill who makes Daniel O'Donnell look edgy.
Of the rest, the standard is so low you have to crouch down and press your ears to the floor; the position from where you can best hear the distant rumble of the rest of Europe laughing.
