Television - The death of a real-life mobster proves seriously funny, writes Andrew Billen A Gangster's Funeral (Channel 5)

There was a death and a funeral in the latest episode of Shameless, served up with the series's customary disregard for taste, sentiment and political piety. But the Gallaghers of Channel 4 have rivals as representations of life at the lowest rung of Mancunian society. On Monday at 11pm, Channel 5 visited the family Noonan. In their expensive yet ill-fitting Reservoir Dogs suits, the Noonans are the Gallaghers' more stylish neighbours - less lovable but capable of inspiring just as much comedy - and nothing was as funny as the obsequies at the centre of A Gangster's Funeral.

The dead man was Desmond Noonan. We had met Dessie on a previous visit by Channel 5 to the Noonans last year. The best that could be said for him, unless you were family, a "business" associate or the shameless priest who buried him ("Do not hold his deeds against him, for in his heart he desired to do Your will"), was that he had a GSOH. Dessie was, he himself giggled in a soliloquy delivered three months before his death, a good Catholic boy who did not believe in taking lives. Nor - and here the joke would turn out to be on him - did he think anyone would take his life. "If they did there would be some fireworks. I've got a bigger army than the police."

Soon the Boss was stabbed to death by his drug dealer, but he was right about the army. Three thousand foot soldiers turned out for his funeral, walking five miles to the cemetery behind a cortege of horses, 40 limousines, 30 security men and a 25-piece band. Out of "respect" and for safety, motorways, businesses and two Manchester high schools were closed. As the priest muttered his pieties and the top-of-the-range "pieta" coffin was lowered into the ground, his brother's mobile phone went off (as it had during a meet- ing with the undertaker - a death threat). Sean, a 14-year-old tenor bookable for "weddings, funerals and acquittals", sang a lusty version of "My Way".

Not even Paul Abbott could have scripted this scene, and nor did he have to, for A Gangster's Funeral was not a drama but a documentary in Channel 5's Mac-Intyre's Underworld series. Donal MacIntyre has been mocked for setting himself up as the hard man of TV current affairs. His career reached a nadir on BBC1 when he loitered in Brixton hoping to be mugged for his laptop. Here, however, in his first outing as a director, he emerged highly creditably as a fly-on- the-wall documentary-maker in the great tradition of Paul Watson and Roger Graef. In Gangster, MacIntyre's first visit to the Noonan clan, his heroic moment came when he asked Dessie's brother if there was not "a hint of lavender" about him. Dominic, an obese skinhead, having had the question explained to him, responded that everyone knew he was gay. But in this follow-up, the groundwork was kept off-screen along with MacIntyre himself.

It had the three elements that make a documentary riveting: plot, characters and theme. The plot was provided not only by Dessie's murder but by two trials involving Dominic, only the second of which resulted in an obviously much-deserved conviction. Dominic was a compulsively fascinating character to follow: witty and self-aggrandising, a crime lord of misrule who parodically bought old police cars and ambulances to make up the fleet of his new "security" company. He was full of surprises, not just his homosexuality but the fact that he could speak Urdu, enjoyed the company of Asians and took seriously the social services side of his self-imposed community brief. The last time he was in prison he changed his name by deed poll to the acronym "Lattlay Fottfoy". It stands for: Look After Those That Look After You - Fuck On Those That Fuck On You.

Like Tony Soprano, he despaired of the younger generation. "You are embarrassing the fucking family name," he castigated an errant young gangster, and it was this coming generation that emerged as the film's real subject. Dominic's prodigy was 19-year-old Aaron, who fantasised about the day he would take over the business - but when that day came a bit nearer with Dessie's death, he was to be found skulking opposite a church, his thumb in his mouth. Aaron complained that school had left him able to count money but not to read or write.

A few years behind lurk three more pretenders to the Noonan throne: the canary-like Sean, who managed to get an F in his music GCSE; Paul, Dominic's tiny, chain-smoking godson; and Bugsy, his own boy, "sweet and innocent but a little fucking bastard" (in his loving father's words). Barely sustained by their elders' food - sample meal: sausages and chips reheated in the microwave - they were preternaturally short for their ages, although their physical retardation looked dwarfed beside their spiritual stuntedness.

The proceedings were glossily filmed - a camera crane was used to give a godlike overview - and set to contemporary music in the manner of The Sopranos. In doing so, the film did not glamorise the "gangsters", but satirised the image of themselves they held so dear. In an unwise venture into X Factor territory, Dominic took to the drums and sang a self-righteous ballad about being raped by prison warders. Its chorus went: "It's I that stands here naked/ It's you that stands in shame". He, too, may be shameless, but, unlike Frank Gallagher, Lattlay Fottfoy lives not outside a moral code but trapped inside one.

Andrew Billen is a staff writer for the Times

Post your comment

Please note: you will need to login or register before you can comment on the website