With due respect to George Best, Bobby Charlton, Roy Keane, David Beckham, Peter Schmeichel and Cristiano Ronaldo, my favourite Manchester United footballer was always Eric Cantona.
hat bad-boy swagger, that haughty dominance of the midfield, those thrilling sidesteps and astonishing goals, even those gnomic utterances about seagulls and trawlers and the like - what was there not to love about Cantona in his 1990s prime?
Then, at the age of 30, he gave it all up and became an actor, and if you watch him in the lead role of Inhuman Resources (Netflix), you'll find that he's just as commanding on screen as he was on the football pitch.
This six-part twisty French thriller, adapted from a bestselling novel by Pierre Lemaitre, features Cantona as Alain Delambre, a middle-aged executive who had been struggling to make ends meet after being made redundant some but is now lured into lucrative recruitment work by a shadowy corporation.
This quickly goes very wrong and Alain finds himself alienated from his wife and daughters and incarcerated in a vicious prison while awaiting trial for attempted murder.
Yet while the storyline sometimes tests your credulity, it's a very watchable drama, held together by Cantona, who, without any of the showboating you might expect, elicits sympathy for a character not always likeable in his treatment of others, especially his family.
Reese Witherspoon is also very good at playing characters who aren't easily likeable and indeed seems intent on cornering the market in uptight middle-class suburban moms. She was the privileged, pushy and meddling do-goodery mom in Big Little Lies (Sky Atlantic) and now she's the privileged, pushy and meddling mom Elena in Little Fires Everywhere (Amazon Prime). She co-produced both shows.
At the outset of this new series, she lays down the law to her husband, who wants to have sex on a Thursday even though she has scheduled such encounters for Tuesdays and Saturdays. "It's so much more fun when we plan it", she tells her frustrated spouse.
Things start to go awry when she meets homeless artist Mia (Kerry Washington) and her teenage daughter Pearl (Lexi Underwood) and invites them first to stay in a house available for rent and then into her own home. This won't end well because at the very start we see that Elena's house has been burned down. The rest of the eight-part series is an extended flashback.
I've only watched the first episode, which was very expertly done, with terrific playing from the leads. In an interesting departure from Celeste Ng's 2017 novel of the same name, Mia and Pearl are African-Americans, which adds a racial frisson to the story. But whether I stay with it, as I didn't with Big Little Lies, remains to be seen.
The same is true of Snowpiercer (Netflix), which is based on a French graphic novel and was adapted into a Bong Joon-ho movie in 2013. This latest update is a post-apocalyptic thriller in which the world has frozen over and survivors live on a 1,000-carriage train that constantly circles the globe - the posh passengers living in luxury upfront while the dregs of the earth are incarcerated at the very back.
Then a killing occurs that threatens the security of the privileged occupants. A homicide detective from the train's rear is tasked with investigating it. From the first two episodes, it seems as if it's going to develop into a steampunk take on Murder on the Orient Express, but so far it's been both pacy and intriguing.
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With the final two episodes yet to come, I'm still loving Normal People (RTÉ1/BBC1), but I'm having doubts about various aspects that didn't really trouble me when reading Sally Rooney's novel.
Maybe it's because the visual immediacy of a screen version, with faces and bodies available for scrutiny, has replaced the coolness of Rooney's prose, but after the first four episodes, I started wondering what exactly Marianne sees in the mopey and dithering Connell. When unable to pay his rent, can't even bring himself to ask if he can stay with her.
I also wondered why, if Marianne's sexual life with Connell has been so intense and fulfilling, she encourages physically violent relations with other men. We're meant to think it has something to do with her damaged upbringing, but so far that has never really been explained, as indeed it wasn't explored in the novel.
And while I'm carping, don't these two people have any fun? When I was in college, there was much earnest philosophical and literary and political debate among undergraduates, but there was also irreverence and piss-taking and awful punning and wild nights and all the exuberant rest of student life.
But you wouldn't get a laugh out of this duo, or even a sense of their supposed intellectual brilliance. Still, I can't wait to see how it all pans out. With a poignant dying fall, I'm guessing.
Elsewhere, there been nothing of any real interest on RTÉ television. On Radio 1, Ryan Tubridy is still winningly upbeat every morning, Des Cahill's desert island teatime slot has been a charming and mostly absorbing addition to the schedules, while over on Lyric FM, George Hamilton has been enhancing our weekend mornings and Ellen Cranitch our weekend nights.