The Observer from London, Greater London, England • 94

16 TV GAMES The Observer Review 18 July 1999 Make it snappy Things just aren't what they a man is having a fling with used to be. The Mafia are on Prozac, i 7 an alligator and Mark Lamarr is funny Television Kathryn Flett James Gandolfini and Tony Ray Rossi in The Sopranos. kicked off with a bust at a terraced house in Gateshead, where he found Ray, a mad beardie, and Patsy, a very large alligator, in bed together. As Badgerwrestled Patsy to the floor and bpund her jaws with Ray, the Nineties' equivalent of old Shep's distraughtemas-ter, hovered on thejlanding looking suitably bereft. When hauled in for questioning, another of Badger's droll sidekicks warned Ray that, 'Next time someone offers you a six-inch reptile with your pint and your Hula-Hoops, just say By the end of the show, we had seen lots of lovely North-umbria, lingering close-ups of deer, dogs, llamasj falcons, foxes, geese, a small, black pig and a timid, method-addled badger; meanwhile, Badger had got to the bottom of a venison-poaching scandal, a peregrine-falcon egg-stealing scandal, a disap-pearing-alligator scandal and, most puzzling of all, had his 4x4 rear-ended by a beautiful blonde in a red sports car.

Puzzling, because, though she turned out to be a daughter he never knew, TVs Mr Potato Head must have wondered how she avoided inheriting any of his genes. Indeed, she is so very pretty she is bound to grow up to be a vet. Written by Kieran Bally-Jassangel Prendiville, Badger is gorgeously photographed, deftly scripted, but gjven that they have already dispensed with an alligator in khelfirst episode, I can't Imagine where it will go, though it will doubtless go there for years and years without starring a single, bovine posterior On the very same night that Badger was suggesting we Just Say No to the temptations of sharing Sa duvet with an alligators Mark Lamarr was urging us to Just Say No to, er, drugs. Surely some mistake? If somebody asked you which one, out of the primetime comedy drama and the cutting-edge, post-watershed, stand-up shows would be advising you not to sleep with alligators, would you choose the one written by Kieran Prendiville? I'd never quite understood the point of Mark Lamarr. Monosyllabically smart-arsed on Shooting Stars, he always looked the uneasy stooge to Vic and Bob's surreal turns and Ulrika's not-so-dumb blondeness, while his role on Never Mind the Buzzcocks came across like second-division Deayton.

But now he's found himself and Leaving the 20th Century is a revelation: 'Just Say No is the second dumbest slogan ever. The first? Fame, Tm Gonna Live Forever, I'm Gonna Learn How to I mean, that's how we lost John The weak spot this week was the Gelebrity chat, which veered dangerously between piss-take and portentousness. Boy George is more than capable of delivering a deft one-liner of his own but, invited to talk about 'My Drug Hell', his understandable earnestness made him an easy target: went into hiding at Richard Branson's house near he admitted of his battle with both heroin and tabloids. Lamarr pounced: 'Now, there a warning to the kids don't do drugs or you'll end up in a hippy stately Ouch. Lamarr is, the occasional lapse notwithstanding, quite brilliant, a funnier, less posturing Ben Elton.

Dare I suggest, however, that a comic exploration of heroin addicts funding their habit by per forming oral sex in phone boxes is a wee bit edgy between 9.30 and 10pm on a Sunday. Thursday night turned out to be Family Viewing Night, or possibly Views of Families' Night. Either way, Andy, a star of Stepkids, had a lot of family to contend with. Divorced from Debbie, who is remarried to Eddie, he is the father of Vicky and Richard. Recently, he has become involved with single mum, Liz, who has a James, a Sarah and an Alice of her own.

Heroically, Andy attempts to do his best for this extended family, bonding with his girl-friend's kids, who patently adore him, and trying to see as much of his own children as he can, but somebody is always getting let down. Debbie phones Andy at Liz's house to tell him that his kids are expecting to see him, so he breaks off a game of football with James ('You don't mind, do you? as the boy avoids eye-contact and shuffles from foot-to-foot, minding desperately). Later, Vicky is filmed trying to be stoic about her dad's new relationship ('I'll be all right. Actually, I don't know if I'll be all right, because I miss With me so far? Andy and Liz get engaged after knowing each other for a mere seven weeks and there is much poring through catalogues, with the kids, in search of a ring ('Look at that it's heart-shaped, it's romantic, it's a suggests Andy, but Liz wants what she wants). This prompts a day out at the seaside with all five kids (at which point we find there are another two children, belonging to Debbie and Eddie, on the sidelines), where they try and get on, wary and needy and suspicious.

Badger BBCl Leaving the20th Century BBC2 Stepkids C4 The Sopranos C4 IT COULDN'T HAPPEN to a vet. A Sunday night meander through the telegenicaDy sun-spattered and cloud-blown Yorkshire Dales interrupted by the occasional dramatic diversion (amiable bloke with one hand up a cow's arse and the other clutching a Tetley's sandwich and a pint of old Hovis; or amiable bloke administering the last rites to a frothy-mouthed Shep while his master weeps all over his favourite ewe) wouldn't cut it on 1990s primetime. Not now the fetish for hamster appendectomies, canine castrations and duck hysterectomies performed by pretty Nordic blondes is catered for on terrestrial channels most nights of the week. Vet porn might once have been the preserve of pay-per-view cable, or the internet, alongside home pages for glove-lovers or collectors of schoolgirls' underwear, but it's no longer a guilty, private pleasure; it's out there, it's mainstream. Clever kids no longer disappear quietly to their rooms with chemistry sets, Fuzzy Felt and C.S.

Lewis; instead, they spend an hour on Doom' followed by three on BlacMe with a scalpel. So, if you want to make a contemporary All Creatures Great and Small, yon nave to work pretty hard. Badger, starring Jerome Flynn as a Northumberland and City Police wildlife liaison officer, 'The laughs inThe Sopranos, buffered by violence and pathos, are neither thick nor fast. This isn't Frasier in sharkskin suits' with gangster cliches which are turned. on their head at every opportunity.

The younger generation, for example, indulge in casual, bungled, messy violence, have no respect for their elders and can't even master the lingo loathsome nephew Christopher complains: 'They're not making any more made guys' while Tony, struggling to take care of business, is in guilty denial about how much he hates his senile mother. The laughs, buffered by violence and pathos, are neither thick nor fast this' isn't Frasier in sharkskin suits. Marred only by C4's tiresomely Mafia-themed pizza and beer ads, The Sopranos is dark, bold and potentially nearly as brilliant as it thinks it is. 'It's hard being popular-like this. I do the best I Andy told the camera, but you knew that his best was never going to be good enough, because the pressure was so extraordinarily intense.

'I hope Mummy and Andy get married and it will all end up happily ever said James; you winced. As the credits rolled, we were told that no date had been set for the wedding and that in the seven weeks since filming finished, Andy had seen his own children, Vicky and Richard, five times. I don't know if this information was intended to be merely informative, but you were left feeling it was also slightly judgmental. Is five visits in seven weeks enough? If not, how hard is Andy really trying to maintain contact with his kids? Is it unreasonable that he should want to spend a lot of time with his fiancee and her children to cement the new relationship? I was easily 10 minutes into the pilot episode of The Sopranos, which followed Stepkids, before I stopped worrying about poor Andy and all those disappointed children. The Sopranos has been widely touted as the most brilliant imported drama series we're likely to see this year, if not ever.

Perhaps it was Andy's fault, but it took me a while to come round to this idea, though fortunately Channel 4 had scheduled another episode to follow the pilot, so we had more than two hours to get to know New Jersey Mafia Don cum-waste-management consultant Tony Soprano (an engaging James Gandolfini) and his horrible family. The dramatic premise for the series is that the modern Mafia is in a kind of moral and ethical decline, resorting to therapy and Prozac. Soprano Snr starts having panic attacks and visits a shrink (glorious Lorraine Bracco) but, given his lifestyle and his trade, the therapy process is never going to come easy. Contemporary neuroses Tub along 100 TV MOMENTS In Screen, pages 8 and 9. Everyman crossword Unhook before you leap Millennial Bestiary Michael Bywater cursor of the modern zip fastener.

A mere 24 years later, Mr Gideon Sundback patented his own version using meshed teeth, just like the sensual lives. Before the zip, there were buttons and hooks and ribbons and laces. The undressing of a lover was an exercise in intimacy -fingers upon sudden flesh, ACROSS 1 A surprise attack made by a doctor on US hospital (6) 4 Ankle was broken in ballet (4,4) 9 Confederates needing everyone that is southern (6) 10 Pudding with cream's no good 14,4) 12 Grass fit for racing at about noon? (9) 13 Set foot on some barren terrain (5) 14 Ever so pretty to look at but its contents may be plain (9-3) 18 First post? It may be for him (6,6) 21 Breezy to the South over in this country (5) I 22 One at party, held by Conservatives out East, provides spiced dishes (9)! 24 A French giri lodging ih London district home (8) 25 Cold loch in valley (6) 26 Foremost of lecturers getting money for knowledge (8) 27 Perry's Delia finds a way (6) I DOWN 1 One volunteers quietly in church if necessary (2,1,5) 2 Something to aim at for wayward golfer at first in a jumper (8) 3 Guide wise man round top of tower (5) 5 Would one go overboard if asked to do and no (4,3.5) 6 First officer's no rum and been at sea? (6,3) 7Yard supports a copper with it sharpness (6) 8 Labour pains (6) 1 1 Fight in Montana, possibly with fashionable sophisticate (3-5-4) 15 Performing, Cage tapped one during an encore (4,5) 16 Frank, on river, makes a proposal (8) 17 High-ranking officer has money on Derby, say (5, 3) 19 Giri is standing over murder victim (6) 1 20 Girl has gun on District Attorney (6) 23 Young bird the Parisian's got in tow, oddly (5) the tiny pinches of impu zips of today. Dr Valerie Steele of the Fashion dent desire and incremental variety. In a five-button fastening, Institute of Technology informs us that the damned you could choose to Everyman No.

2755 15 book tokens for the first five correct solutions opened. Solutions thing caught on (and what it has postmarked not later than Saturday to: caught on since is nobody's business; how undo just the middle two, or the top and bottom, and so tease and prolong; a corset could be undone hook by many harmless young spinsters have been reduced to blushing EVERYMAN No 2753 winners P. Barham, Bromley; D. McConnell, Middlesbrough; R. Place, Robin Hood's Bay, North Yorks; B.

Smith, Skelmoriie, Ayrshire; I.Webb, Ipswich -fypr- hook, or slack Everyman 2755 The Observer P0 Box 6604 Birmingham, B263RW. Name Address verted a prospective engagement into a stringless fling? How many women had yielded, feeling in safe hands, by the calm ease with which an older gentleman 'Oh, had negotiated her bows and hooks and buttons? And now we have zips, with their industrial pinions, their sharpnesses and unreliabilities. Zips, which permit no subtlety but only access on egalitarian terms. Would there have been liaisons dan-gereuses in the age of zips? Would there have been poetry or yearning, in the face of these surgically effective devices, with their cae-sarean imagery of incision and suture? The only benefit of the zip has been, perhaps, a few lives or marriages saved, when discovered adulterers have been able to hurry into their clothes and escape. But the payback is dismal.

For the pre-zip fastenings made dressing afterwards as erotic as undressing. How curious, then, that Erica Jong should have chosen 'zipless' as her favoured adjective, when the truth is quite the reverse. "Things we could have done without in the past 1,000 years 24. THE ZIP FASTENER IF, LIKE ME, you spend far too much time fretting about the degeneration of the erotic if the pornography that lurches down your modem seems harsh and disconnected; if you are bemused by the idea of the faintly rodentine Mr Mrs Tom Cruise starring in an erotic fillum; then, next time you find yourself in Chicago, seek out the grave of Mr Whitcomb L. Judson and dance or spit upon it, according to taste or spriteliness.

For it was Whitcomb L. Judson (and can't you just see him all fob-watch, whiskers, probity and nasty thoughts?) who, in 1893, took out a patent on a hook-and-eye system that was the pre Everyman No. 2754 solution II rnT nrrnrii 22 22 23 I Hill disarray by the sudden despairing cry, in the cricket pavilion, of 'Miss! Miss! I've got my weasel caught in my first in tobacco pouches and gloves, then in First World War flying suits; next in the 'Zipper' boot marketed by the B.F. Goodrich company in 1923; then, by the 1930s, becoming common in everyday clothing. But far from being a simple and convenient means of doing yourself up the zip has acted as a force for the worst kind of attenuation of our ened off with the back-lacing, either above, to free the (hopefully) heaving bosom, or below, to allow a questing hand to slide on to the delirious curve of the small of the back.

Prospective lovers could calibrate the other's expertise. How many experienced women had carefully fumbled with a button to give the impression of trembling ingenuousness? How many men had detected prior adventures when too-skilled fingers plied their prestidigitations, and, at once, con Postcode How many times a month do you buy the Observer? How many times a week do you buy the Guardian? Tick here if you do not wish to receive further information from the Observer or other companies carefully screened by us No enclosures please other than name and address. Results on Sunday week. II 52! is 0 DO tf oQu Sd'Tr ii BPS II 0 $9 0 68 il on (friend'.