Sex lives happily ever after in city

By FRANCES GRANT

Mr Big has finally learned to commit and swept Carrie off her feet; Charlotte has kissed her frog, turned him into a prince and is rewarded with a baby; and Miranda and Samantha have succumbed and let love into the fortresses of their hard and shiny career women hearts.

The Manhattan princesses have each found their prince, grown up and settled down to live ... aw, shucks, happily ever after in the finale of Sex And The City (last night, TV3, 9.30pm).

Telly's premier girly comedy could have had nothing else but the standard-issue fairytale ending and true to form, no expense was spared in the lavish and glittering two-part wrap, "An American Girl in Paris".

The modern girls' comedy of manners once broke boundaries in its frankness about female sexuality and the often confused world of cosmopolitan relationships.

It then settled into a fantasy of couture, cocktails, impossibly glamorous careers which never required any work and, of course, an endless smorgasbord of cute or suave men. Its biggest star all along was an impossibly rose-tinted New York City.

The show's send-off was a cliche and an entirely satisfactory one, encapsulating its journey from its transgressive glory days to when the gay script-writers took over and it became an oddly retro bit of fluff with great clothes and some good one-liners.

The finale revelled in it all, from its liberal sprinkling of the f and c-words to putting Carrie in outfits fit only for a trip to the Moon on gossamer wings.

Never mind the sex, what about the accessories? The show revelled in rubbing our faces in the many ridiculous trends it kicked off, from saucer-sized fake flowers to silly shoes.

In a welcome touch of self-satire, Carrie took a huge pratfall on her silly heels as she waltzed into Dior.

There was a reminder, too, that this might have been the show which put the c-word on screen, but nothing on it was as shocking as the way Carrie enjoyed smoking.

In Paris, Carrie lit up again with relish - and this from a show which had only just done a plotline about breast cancer.

Recovered from her chemo, Samantha was allowed redemption at the finish with one last cheeky, extraordinarily naked sex romp with toyboy Smith.

And, as always, the gay guy got the best lines. As Charlotte stepped into Chanel, past the fetching security guard, her pet gay man declares: "I'm going to shoplift just so he can feel me up."

We were never going to get away without a cheesy speech or two and, sure enough, it came as Carrie finally saw the light about tedious Russian installation artist Alexandr Petrovsky and gave him the old heave-ho.

Turned out what she wanted all along was good old-fashioned love - "real love, ridiculous, inconvenient, consuming, can't-live-without-you love" - and along came the man ready to deliver it to her, Big-time.

Forget feminism for the new millennium. Sex And The City was firmly in the friends-as-family genre of sitcom, with an eye for the absolutely fabulous.

It was in equal parts an engaging, irritating, escapist fantasy of glitzy consumerism and an endless celebration of the rather dodgy belief that, as Carrie says in the show's closing moments, the "most important relationship you have is with you".