I'm not saying I don't like The Sopranos. I enjoy it a lot when it's on (and I did enjoy the start of the new series, which I'll talk about later); I just wasn't jumping up and down with excitement at the prospect of the season-six premiere like most other people seemed to be doing these last few weeks.

So I thought I could find solace in some of the stuff RT�? was airing as its part of the bargain for the Beckett centenary.

Trouble was, I felt strangely outside of events here too. I bet a lot of people feel the same way, and it's not really the fault of RT�?, or any of the other organisers. I'm sure the people behind the Beckett festival have only the best intentions. But I'm also sure that the effect of all the hype about Beckett is that people only become aware of a sheer grey wall. It's a wall that they know is already there but that they don't usually pay any heed to. Except now the dilettantes, the self-appointed arts establishment types, all the usual suspects that stalk the top of this wall, are flinging down rope-ladders, and they're shouting, "This is an amnesty, philistines! This is a rare chance to come on up!" And the net result is that people are just put off; they're intimidated, or they just keep their heads down and they think, not for me thank you.

As an academic called Karen Fricker said about the celebrations on The View Presents. . . Beckett 100 (Monday, RT�? One): "Are we probing something or are we ossifying it and turning it into something that is again impenetrable, super-important, untouchable?

That would be my worry. It's all very grandiose."

Most people see Beckett as someone simply to be proud of, not as someone whose works are to be revelled in; he's another high-achieving Irish person on the world stage, like Brian O'Driscoll, or Bono, or that scientist who came up with Boyle's Law (Doyle or Boole or something). Some people will have recorded those Beckett films aired in graveyard slots on RT�? last week, and they'll be deluding themselves if they think they'll ever watch them. For the majority of people a documentary about Beckett would have sufficed on the matter. They might have switched on to The Man Who Shot Beckett (Tuesday, RT�? One) hoping to learn something, although they wouldn't have got much insight into the Foxrock misery-guts here.

That's not to say that it wasn't an interesting programme in its own right. Photographer John Minihan is the man responsible for the fact that, when we think of Beckett, we think of an old man with a peach-stone face, and not of the young Trinity alumnus with the look of a self-possessed seminarian. The first half-hour of the programme dealt with Minihan's life and his early work, and it felt like an unnecessarily long preamble to the main event.

Only one detail in this section was really significant to what came later: it was on the strength of a series of photos taken by Minihan of people in his native Athy in the 1970s that Beckett invited him to Paris to take his picture in the 1980s.

Elsewhere, a curator of a French archive spoke of his regret that there were so few recordings in existence of Beckett speaking.

By corollary, I thought, there must be recordings in existence of Beckett speaking. It was a pity that we couldn't have heard one, just to get a more palpable sense of the man in the week that was in it.

A motif of last week was people popping up to tell us how hilarious Beckett is. I always get suspicious at this kind of talk. It reminds me of our old Irish teachers who used to tell us we'd find the adventures of Pól agus Niamh so much funnier if only we had a better grasp of the teanga. Back on The View Presents, the playwright Peter Sheridan opined that Beckett is "hysterically funny", that "nobody wrote funnier material in the 20th century". (He's obviously not acquainted with that scene in There's Something About Mary when Ben Stiller gets his knackers caught in his zip. ) A lot of comedians try to dignify their work by drawing a lineage to Beckett. Alastair McGowan was on the BBC's Culture Show the week before last making such a case. But maybe the blacker than black humour on The Sopranos, of all the popular entertainments doing the rounds at the moment, is truest to the spirit of Beckett.

"In the end your friends are gonna let you down. Family - they're the only ones you can depend on, " Tony Soprano said last week to his son AJ. In the next scene, Tony was back in therapy with Dr Melfi. "I find it interesting that you say that, " said Dr Melfi. "You tried to smother your mother with a pillow. . . in the hospital after the stroke." "The f**k I did, " said a flustered Tony. "I grabbed a pillow just to keep my hands occupied." At the end, with his earlier words to AJ having established a theme for the episode, Tony got shot, in a wickedly anarchic plot twist, by his senile Uncle Junior.

The message in the tale, I guess, is that the universe is illogical, and not even your family can make you less alone than you are. Enjoy your chocolate.