There used to be a shop in the centre of Manchester where unreconstructed tobacco addicts could get hold of specialist items like pipe cleaners and Balkan Sobranie cigarettes. These days, predictably enough, it is a branch of Starbucks, whose coffee houses have now replaced real shops in much the same way as Frasier, the house sit-com of the decaf generation, stands in for real comedy.
Sorry, but I hate Frasier with a passion. It is my guilty secret. Like a character in an HM Bateman cartoon, I am The Man Who Admitted To All His Middle-Class Friends That He Hated Frasier.
I have been steering clear of the water cooler all week for fear of having to feign interest in the fate of Niles and Daphne, who jilted their prospective partners at the altar in order to run off together, Graduate-style, at the end of the last series, and returned in last Friday's hour-long special.
An unprecedented 3.6 million viewers, its biggest score ever, tuned in for this opening to the eighth season of Frasier. Channel 4 are cock-a-hoop. It even beat Friends, they told me proudly. (Friends, house sit-com of the decaf generation's kids, is obviously a benchmark for piss-poor comedy in which spurious "sophistication" and a veneer of cleverness is intended to compensate for the lack of any depth of character or truth in the situations).
Actually, that might be unfair to Friends. I just don't get Friends, which is doubtless a generational thing. But Frasier I am receiving loud and clear. I am a middle-aged man working in radio, with a wide and varied selection of neuroses. It could have been made for me. Problem is - and you will thank me for pointing this out when you switch over at 10 tonight to chuckle through a repeat of the Thin Blue Line - it isn't very funny.
It "does" funny, all right. It pretends to be funny, and I'm not denying that one or two of the wry, dry one-liners the teams of writers come up with will make you smile, but it does not have funny bones.
Apart from the dog, that is. Eddie is, by some distance, the most naturally funny character in the programme. A friend, who is something of an expert on dogs, tells me the Jack Russell is your number one comedy breed. Jack Russells apparently like to behave as if they were bigger dogs, and as a result come over as rather pompous, which can be amusing in a small ball of fur. Unfortunately, Eddie did not feature in last week's episode, and it is rumoured that the character is now being acted by a new, less funny dog.
If true, this is bad news for Frasier, whose small comic dog did at least distinguish it from other mordant and vastly superior "modern" American comedies like Seinfeld and Larry Sanders.
The central joke in Frasier is basically the same one which informs Seinfeld and Larry Sanders. Niles and Frasier, like Larry and Jerry, are insufferably self-regarding, unable to act spontaneously and rendered incapable by their peculiarly late 20th-century selfishness of forming a solid loving relationship.
The glory of Seinfeld and Larry Sanders is that those programmes do not shrink from the horror of their central characters' monstrous egotism. The comedy, in fact, stems directly from the mind-boggling, jaw-dropping narcissism of Jerry and Larry, and from their sidekicks George and Hank, living in the slipstream of these monsters, observing the horror at close quarters, yet still aspiring to be them.
It would be unfair, of course, to attack Frasier for not being Seinfeld or Larry Sanders. I have no objection to a soft-centred gag machine. Not all comedy has to be gritty and real. Frasier, though, seems to have convinced a supposedly intelligent and informed audience that it is much more, while allowing its principals to step wildly and repeatedly out of character in the service of questionable one-liners.
Smart and sophisticated are the words usually enlisted to praise Frasier. USA Today calls it "the class act of television". Well, here are two examples of this "sophistication" from last week's episode; Frasier is being sued by Donny for encouraging Daphne to jilt him, while Niles goes through with a mock wedding ceremony, at which father Martin comments, "After Donny gets through with Frasier, you won't be the only one having your nuptials toasted." The photographer, meanwhile, tries to get Niles and his new bride together for a picture. "How about a kiss?" he says. "But I hardly know you," says Niles. Benny Hill, circa 1965.
I wouldn't mind if this desperately weak material were not dressed up in such a crock of pretension, from the gnomic white on black title cards between scenes to the nonsense blues song about tossed salad and scrambled eggs that closes each episode. There is, incidentally, a soundtrack album for Frasier scheduled for release later this month, including "jazz originals and standards performed by some of the world's best-loved jazz greats, such as Dean Martin and Nat King Cole". A coffee table album to accompany a coffee table programme.
Speaking of which, there is one thing Frasier invariably gets spot on. It is the cast's beverage of choice: decaf latte - a large, fancy vessel containing little of any substance, but an awful amount of attractively arranged hot air and froth.
