The real George Costanza

Larry David, 55, multimillionaire, failed stand-up comic and unalloyed genius, is as close as reality gets - which is surely a blessing - to the bald, dishonest, disloyal, cheap, nasty, monstrously selfish, unethical, hateful, whiny, neurotic and short-tempered anti-hero of Seinfeld.

There is good reason for the similarity. David, as co-creator, writer and executive producer of that late great sitcom, was the inspiration for George.

Costanza was, David once said, a "vehicle to act out my baser, sicker thoughts. And there are a lot of these."

Well now, late, late and even more late (why?) on Tuesdays, you can truly enter David's twisted world through his new sitcom, Curb Your Enthusiasm (TV2, 11.30pm).

Some have called this HBO comedy Seinfeld: The Sequel, which is to say if the original was a show about nothing, Curb Your Enthusiasm is a show about less than nothing.

Filmed in a cinema verite (approximately, documentary) style, each episode is roughly a day - make that a bad day - in the life of Larry David as he interacts with his LA world.

Last week he went to the doctor. The week before that he tried to buy a bracelet for his wife. Tonight he tries to have a telephone wire sticking out of his lawn buried.

None of these synopses comes close to describing the sheer stupid mayhem afoot here - much of which is improvised.

Apparently there are no scripts for this show. The actors, most of whom are real-life friends of David (including tonight's guest, Seinfeld's Julia Louis-Dreyfus), are given a scene outline and they shoot from there.

The result is chatty, almost free-form scenes which have a rhythm that sitcoms usually don't have: the rhythm of real life.

As a counterpoint to the ever-decreasing cycles of crisis that seem to surround Larry's life 24-7, the laughless soundtrack features the most bizarrely jaunty music, giving the whole thing the air of a mad, mock opera.

Some of the dialogue is banal, some of it inspired, nearly all will make you cringe as you hoot.

At lunch in a recent episode, David advanced a theory that women are basically offended by men's genitalia. "So they really have to be in love with the man to get involved with their penis," he concludes.

"I'm missing something," says his lunch buddy, comedian Richard Lewis.

"No, it's a good theory," insists David.

"It's a disgusting theory over lunch."

Or dinner. Or anything.

If there are similarities to David's work on Seinfeld (from 1990, he wrote about 60 scripts before quitting in '96; he rewrote countless more), they are the themes that nothing is sacred and no good ever comes from helping one's fellow man.

In one bum-clenchingly funny scene, David and Lewis bumped into a blind guy in the street who wanted help moving a couple of boxes in his new apartment.

David wasn't interested in giving a hand.

"How could you not help a blind man?" asks an exasperated Lewis.

"How could you say 'blind man' in front of a blind man?" sneers David.

Finally they help the guy - and end up spending hours moving and removing his furniture and appliances around the flat.

The big question is how close is the real David to the TV David? Well, here's a telling true story. After he made his millions - Forbes magazine estimates his fortune at more than $200 million - from his work on Seinfeld, this one-time big failure on the Costanza Scale said he had developed an allergy to caviar.

It was, he said, "the perfect metaphor for my life".