TV Review: The staff of ER returned to work on Sunday night, and the first thing they did was check the critical list to see if their own names were on it. Sure enough, within seconds Drs Chen and Pratt were being shot at while driving home from work.
Within a couple of minutes Chen had a bullet in her leg and their car had crashed into a wall and leapt like a landed salmon into the Chicago River. In the 10th minute they were pressing their noses to the upholstered ceiling to avoid the rising waters. By the second ad break they had escaped, only for Pratt to be rushed to emergency surgery with a bleed in his brain that threatened long-term brain damage.
When they go for so much as a coffee break at County General they should do so wearing a suit of armour lined with bubble-wrap.
Meanwhile, as is common to each new series, the interns arrived. One of them looked particularly scared, and held his limbs like they were his only possessions. He should. New cast members arrive nervous but eager, thrilled with the promise of glamour and excitement. They leave a few years later with a history of painful relationships and a helicopter blade in the head.
They don't talk about it too much, but the cast of ER must occasionally ponder the malicious power of their creator. Or at least the negotiating power of their agent.
In the short series, What We Still Don't Know, cosmologist Sir Martin Rees is talking us through the great mysteries of our existence and the universe. Is life a happy accident or imbued with some hidden purpose? Are we alone? Do we really exist? Where did we come from? It's heavy stuff. On a Sunday, of all days. Since when was it a day for big questions?
As it guides us through a universe illustrated through globules of cosmic light and flesh magnified and warped, it encounters many mysteries. Such as, is Sir Martin Rees unusual in being a cosmologist with the appearance of a gentleman thief? Actually, he is so similar to David Copperfield that you might presume him to be the magician's father. I recently read Rees's book, Our Final Century, in which he speculates on the many ways by which the human race, the planet and even the universe might be wiped out over the next hundred years.
Perhaps it is he who will make the universe disappear, deftly replacing it with a bouquet of paper flowers.
Nevertheless, each programme is a trippy, engaging hour in the company of scientists who will tell you what they don't know, but only after first telling you all the things that they do. Such as the perennially magical fact that each of us is made of stardust. Or how astronomers can watch suns explode 10 billion years in the past. And that the early universe was a pleasantly warm but dull place - a cosmic Jersey.
Meanwhile, 85 per cent of the universe is, well, kind of missing. It is probably made up of dark matter that we can't detect, but we know has to be there or else we wouldn't be here. Meanwhile, when we expected the universe to be decelerating, we found that it isn't. This is thanks to dark energy, which we presume exists but can't be sure. So here, it turned out, were some people relying on a little faith to get them through their Sunday.
In The Heist, the big question was one we've all asked ourselves at one time or another. How do you stop a 30ft lorry in broad daylight, rob a £1 million car from its container and smuggle it to Belgium without raising suspicions? This series is the caper movie as reality television. Five ex-cons come together for one big job, this week to rob a prototype TVR sports car. It was entertaining stuff, deliberately populated with stock characters: the hired muscle, computer whizz, Mr Big, crook with German accent and Sir Martin Rees. Sorry, a gentleman thief. The only rule of the series is that they cannot use violence. "Which is a bit of a gutter for me," said the muscle, "because that was my forté." You didn't doubt him. His leg might have been on sideways thanks to a botched bank job getaway, but his face had more angles than a Picasso.
Anyway, they succeeded by setting up a fake roadblock and intercepting the car en route from a motorshow to a warehouse. It was "the perfect crime", the narrator kept telling us. Yes, if you ignore the fact that the boss of TVR knew what was going down and a hired security consultant agreed to overlook a few things to keep things moving along nicely. What would be the perfect crime? To say that you're part of a TV series making a programme about fake heists.
In What Ron Said, the former football manager and pundit continued his very public penance following his comments about Chelsea footballer Marcel Desailly, with this programme following him as he tried to understand if what he said makes him racist or not. Given that it was caught on tape, you'd think there'd be little doubt about what Ron said. But there is doubt with Ron.
"That is when, apparently, I made the alleged remark," he said of the moment.
There was no apparently or alleged about it. He said that Desailly might be described as a "f**king, lazy, thick nigger". Later he denied he had used bad language. One of those interviewed thought he knew what was going on: "I think that he regrets being caught more than saying it." Atkinson remains a picture of genuine confusion. His orange jowls are often rigid with incomprehension.
He went to the US, where the word "nigger" has particular resonance. He is missing the part of the mind that intercepts contradiction. "I'm going there with an open mind . . . I know in my own mind what I feel but I want to hear other opinions." He struggled with the trap-doors in modern language, most obviously the way Afro-Americans have co-opted "nigger" as a term of kinship. The semantics elude him. "I'd sooner be called white. If someone started calling me Caucasian I'd think they were taking the mickey."
He quickly began to tire of this exercise, of having moved from professional TV pundit to professional racist. But every time he seemed to be closer to comprehension, he winced and retreated, reacting with simmering bafflement at how he has "over-apologised", reminding us of how he has black friends and that he championed black footballers during the 1970s. Of how easy it seems to be for someone who grew up in white Britain to now take a wrong step in its multicultural minefield. Of how what he said was an anachronism perhaps, but not deliberately offensive. Journalist Darcus Howe dismissed that gruffly. "You cannot use the barbaric language of the past to say, I belong in the past, let me get away with it now."
Over on RTÉ2, meanwhile, Monday night has offered a refuge from the weightiness of RTÉ1's current affairs schedule. This week, Love Is The Drug wrapped up the first but probably not the last series. Meanwhile The Liffey Laugh is the latest in television's fitful flirtation with Irish stand-up comedy. It is a mix of stage performance and comic interviews. Sometimes it leaves you cold; sometimes you are left wanting more. Which is pretty much how it is in most comedy clubs.
This week's highlight was Dermot Carmody playing the blues as written by a boy from a nice part of Dublin. "I was BORN," he yelped, "in a hospital. There were no major complications."
The Blizzard of Odd, meanwhile, remains a satisfying end to the evening, being either as dumb or as smart as you want it to be. Its highlight remains the weekly television review, with presenter Colin Murphy continuing to hit his targets with satisfying and justified cruelty. It is a reminder of how little television reviews itself, but of how good it can be when it does.
At which I sign off on my final column. I have spent four years filing dispatches from the sofa, but it's about time I got up and went for a walk.
Television is one medium about which, perhaps, we are all experts and all critics. This column has occasionally received correspondence from readers who don't even own a television set; although it could be argued, of course, that they are the ultimate critics. For me, television remains asentertaining, infuriating, enlightening, ephemeral, important and addictive as ever and my enjoyment of writing about it has not diminished, but I'd like to get out before it does. It's time to let someone else have the remote control.