REVIEW / Taking the Ha, Ha, Ha out of Roddy Doyle

THE HIGHER Roddy Doyle rises, the deeper his characters sink into the bog. The worst affliction suffered by anyone in the 'Barrytown Trilogy' was the Republic's elimination from the World Cup quarter-finals, and the emotions of stout men flowed as liberally as the stout. In Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha, last year's Booker victor in which a 10-year-old kicked around with his pals while his Da kicked his Ma around , Doyle's comic instincts budged up a bit and made room for something gloomier. We should have known what to expect from his first work written directly for the screen. In Family (BBC 1), an Irish Catholic's tremendously sour contribution to this year's UN festivities, there's still a rich diet of soul music, football and repartee round the kitchen table, but unless the series lightens up a bit we'll fetch up in the heart of darkness.

The dismal urban landscape that is Doyle's patch has always had its consolations: Charlo, the cocksure petty thief and roguish patriarch whose story was told in last night's Part 1, keeps up a sunny disposition, but it is at the expense of all around him - his wife Paula, his four kids and the friend whose other half he's cheating with. In a superbly intensifying scene towards the end of the episode, when Charlo has come in drunk to a cold dinner ('Chips shouldn't bounce]'), he grabs Paula by the scalp and makes to smash her face in. 'Only jokin',' he says, but who's laughing? His son John Paul, up to now a chirpy, starry-eyed father's boy, keeps his eyes down and pulls out his inhaler, brilliantly reminding you that children are younger than they or their parents pretend they are.

The key moment in Charlo's story came when he and his mate Ray had successfully heisted a vanload of blue videos. On an empty beach they lugged the booty into their own car and were about to head off when Charlo uttered a line that could only have come from the pen of Doyle: 'Oi have ter have a shoite.' Not many writers follow their characters into the bathroom; Doyle's don't even use the bathroom. Even when he's not literally opening his bowels, even when a puppy they've nicked is shoiting on him in the getaway car, Charlo is dumping on all and sundry.

Only Doyle's most devout admirers won't have suspected that his novels were scripts all along, because endless pages of speech read as if they had been simply overheard and transcribed. Here, though, you could tell he really did have the screen in his viewfinder. At a party, Charlo and some mates played a game called Beerhunter, in which they each put a can to the temple, crack it open and pray that it isn't the one that's been shaken. The director Michael Winterbottom quotes from Cimino's Vietnam epic with a camera that swoops and jumpcuts restlessly around the men at the table. By the time he's done it a fifth time inside the claustrophobic interiors where most of the drama unfolds you start to feel punchdrunk, but it suits Doyle's dizzying dialogue.

With words like these you'd imagine anyone could do the acting, but the performances are dazzling. Sean McGinley pulls off the almost impossible trick of giving a manifest shoite like Charlo a likeable veneer. As Paula, who changes the locks on him but ends up letting him back in, Ger Ryan flits dexterously between viperishness and a tired dignity. Everything about Family is right, right down to the fact that Paula's only got one tatty little red party frock. If there was one false note in the entire triumph, it was the sight of Charlo doing his own ironing.

Watergate (BBC2), an old, old story told with a new twist, proved that the guilty age more rapidly than the innocent. With impeccable timing, President Nixon recently illustrated this point with telling finality. Liddy, McGruder, Dean - you compared these gnarled and puffed talking heads with the untroubled operatives going about their infamous business in the old footage, and wondered whether it wasn't 30 years ago today.

Thomas Sutcliffe is away