There's no gainsaying the figures, as RTE's Joe Mulholland was quick to point out yesterday. "Despite constant criticism from many media sources, the Rose of Tralee still secures the highest TAM ratings for RTE, and this is a pattern which we expect to continue", he was quoted in a press release issued by the festival office after the first night of this year's Rose clocked up a massive 880,000 viewers.
Who cares that the TAMs were replaced by the Nielsen ratings two years ago - in Roseland, nothing ever changes. Ireland is still a place where anyone might stand up and give you a song at any moment, where Gay Byrne will rule the airwaves in perpetuity, and where there's no such thing as a competitive market in broadcasting.
All right, Gay may be long gone, but Marty Whelan, his light entertainment skills honed by several years in the Siberian wastelands of daytime TV, did a typically competent job, even if many of his jokes were on their third outing by the end of last night's marathon.
"People vote with their feet and watch it in great numbers", asserts Mr Mulholland, offering a startling insight into how the nation operates its remote controls, but there are huge problems with the Rose of Tralee as a TV event, whatever the figures may be.
The show itself has seen off the urban sneerers, the kitsch cultists, the feminists and even the brilliant parody that was the Lovely Girls competition in Father Ted. But no matter how nimbly Marty handled the lacrosse players, bagpipers, drummers and (often hilariously awful) singers over the last two nights, this is still a mind-numbingly boring television programme.
None of your Eurovision fripperies here - the disgracefully lazy retrospective which RTE broadcast last Sunday showed how the programme has barely changed technically in 20 years.
The Rose is light entertainment at its most minimalist, shorn of the on-screen trickery, swooping cameras and videotape inserts that we take for granted on most modern television.
Cutting to the beaming parents in the audience (which happens every 30 seconds or so) is about as daring as it gets.
Instead of public service television, it's civil service television - old, fusty and dull - spiced up with some pretty crass commercial sponsorship: last night's lucky winner got to take away the Eircell torc "emblazoned with the famous Eircell smile".
"What's needed is a complete review of the target market and how we can tap the revenue streams and use the international centres to our best advantage", says the festival's new boss, Noreen Cassidy.
Translated from marketingese, that means ditching the ageing audience and modernising a little. The danger is that once you start tinkering with the formula the whole thing might fall apart.
How do you update an idea so trapped in a certain era - of nice girls with good teeth and shiny hair from fine families who would make good matches. It seems impossible, and maybe it's better to just let the Rose, now that it's 40, fade slowly away.
It must be of some concern to RTE 1's management, though, that so many of the "jewels" in its home-grown schedule are so hopelessly middle-aged.