Powerpoint: Only the good die young

By FRANCES GRANT

The colour-coded maxi-frocks had a special 70s ghastliness but the horror paled in comparison to the look of fevered optimism in the eyes of Florence Henderson.

Is there anything more tragic, I thought while savouring True Hollywood Stories: The Brady Bunch, than trying to get more mileage out of an ancient old telly show?

There they were, America's favourite sit-com family, transformed into a grotesque parody of themselves as they (years after the original and all ripe for Zimmerframes) desperately tried to squeeze out yet another spin-off from their original show.

Mr Brady's seeming inability to ditch the show after years of suffering — he was a Shakespearean actor — was as poignant as the "documentary's" salacious main point: the man trapped in the role of America's favourite Dad was gay.

Yet everywhere, it seems, there are shows still coming off the production line which should have gone to the wrecker's yard of the True
Stories treatment long ago.

This week we get — yawn — yet another series of that one-enigma show, The X-Files. The truth is out there? Still?

And we learn that Gillian Anderson, once telly's premier It-girl, has been reduced to doing a Brady — continuing with the show next season although she swore she wouldn't once David Duchovny left.

After a few decades of television history, the fundamental laws which govern its nature are becoming clear. Hot TV shows can never be allowed to die, they just hover round in the schedules at temperatures where it is near impossible to detect even a glimmer of their former heat.

How long should the show go on? About 12 episodes, judging by the perfectly formed Fawlty Towers, for example. The John Cleese comedy wrapped so smartly that somehow it seems to stand any amount of replaying.

But this was a strange violation, obviously, of Brady's Law of television show retirement.

Another one, which just squeaks in as an exception, is Seinfeld.

Sure, it was America's longest-running sit-com but somehow Jerry Seinfeld, mustering an admirable sense of discipline, just managed to pull the plug in time.

In the meantime, yesterday's shows grind sadly on. On TV4, Beverly Hills 90210, once so lustrously vapid, is crawling to a conclusion which should have come many series ago.

Is there anybody who still cares, for example, about the lesbian kisses and desperate grabs for attention committed on Ally McBeal, a drama whose heroine literally seems to be fading from view?

How can The Sopranos, which returns this week, hope to repeat the mix of maternal malice and magnification glasses which made its satisfactorily complete first season so unique? Only the good die young.

And what radical new surgical procedure will the makers of ER try to come up with next to make that tired old medical drama rise up and walk again?

Take that paragon of Brady's Law, telly's longest-running show, Coro St and its spin-off. Once it was a happy mix of bunions, gossip and milk stout. Forty years later, determined to hang on, it's all bonking — a screen activity which the pallid, unglamorous northerners just don't seem suited for.

Still, as we draw towards the inevitable disappointment which will come from the latest series of The X-Files and its elderly ilk, it might pay to remember that it is Brady's Law which also makes real life possible.

If everything on telly was new and great, we'd never do anything else.