TVreview: Hector Ó hEochagáin, like a strawberry blonde Tintin on speed, is back and kicking up dust in his new playpen, the Sahara, in the first of a six-part travelogue, Hector San Afraic.
Hector's campaign to conquer Africa began with belly-dancing along the Nile, followed by a 12-hour Jeep ride through the desert ("I almost passed out six times!") to sleep out with a band of Bedouin under a Saharan sky.
Hector's camping skills being limited to a night or two in Bettystown, he delighted in the vivid Bedouin tent erected by his "brothers". "It's like a student flat, lads," he remarked, as rugs and cushions were scattered over the White Desert, an extraordinary landscape covered in mounds of honeycombed sand.
Then they had dinner and a bit of rí-rá around the campfire. "The farting after the kebabs was like a symphony," Hector told us the next morning.
Hector's uniquely noisy and personal vision sets him apart from the usual murmuring anthropological correctness of most khaki-ed television guides. In fact, travelling with him is a bit like being on a school tour with a busload of pubescent boys on day release from the Brothers - great fun if you remembered to pack your whoopee cushion.
Hector's energy, his ability to engage his audience through the Irish language, and the breadth and scope of this new series (which will take him through Ethiopia, Kenya and Zambia, finishing in South Africa) is admirable, and when he hits it he can be very funny. "She's some sandpit, boys," he ruefully admitted, contemplating his journey.
But sometimes the laddishness can feel strained. Hector asked a teacher in the oasis village where his odyssey began if he had kissed and cuddled his wife prior to their marriage. "No," said the benign husband and father. "If you meet her alone, her family kill her." Cue a swift cut to his host's palatial rabbit hutch, where Hector contemplated the fate of a camera-shy bunny. "You're for dinner next Tuesday," he mused. I'd rather not be there for the post-repast symphony.
Timed to coincide with the first Champions League clash between Liverpool and Juventus in 20 years, which fortunately passed off without major incident, Heysel: The Day Football Died examined the tragedy at Heysel Stadium in Brussels in May 1985, when a combination of marauding Liverpool fans and a dilapidated terrace wall led to the deaths of 39 Juventus fans on European Cup Final night. It was a disaster, witnessed by television audiences around the world of more than one billion people, which exposed Thatcher's society-less Britain at its most shameful.
Hooliganism had been a growing problem for a decade, and by the mid-1980s, according to former sports minister David Mellor, football "was yesterday's sport, attended by sub-individuals". Mellor didn't go on to illuminate just what "sub-individuals" were, though presumably he wasn't talking about government ministers chasing their mistresses around wearing a Chelsea kit.
Thatcher, he told us, hated football and would have banned it if she could have got away with it. Football hooliganism, in her view, summed up everything most awful about the English nation and she saw it, according to Mellor, as a "cancerous growth that spread out through the rest of society".
The English FA felt differently, but its view that what was happening in society was polluting football held no sway over the grocer's daughter.
A European ban and four liver-eating years later, the Hillsborough disaster, in which 96 Liverpool fans were crushed to death, emboldened Thatcher to pursue her plans for all-seater stadiums and membership schemes, controversial measures which nonetheless helped give birth to the Premiership era and a lot of unfortunate hairdos.
As well as holding up a mirror to English football's doleful decade, Heysel: The Day Football Died was a reminder of the incalculable suffering of the Italian fans and their families. As photographer Eamonn McCabe, whose images of that tragic day are much in evidence this week, said: "If that's sport, you can have it."
Channel 4's obsession with television archive is starting to get scary. In indecent haste, with The TV They Tried to Ban barely cold, it resuscitated another two hours of cadaverous TV and called it I'll Do Anything To Get On TV. Trawling back to the dark ages of black and white, when women and Dick Emery wore headscarves, we revisited Man Alive, when the gritty documentary programme moved its cameras in with the Wilkins family - a sociological study of alarming moustaches and burnt sausages - and reality TV was born.
In the ensuing quarter of a century or so, the public has been vox-popped and wife-swapped, noses have been restructured and wardrobes trashed, and still it keeps on coming.
Barring an opportunity to hear Vanessa Feltz explain her Celebrity Big Brother breakdown, when she scrawled as many words as she could think of for "incarceration" on the kitchen table while wearing some fetching leopardskin ("I thought everyone would think I had a wonderful vocabulary"), I'll Do Anything To Get On TV was predictably egregious. If you've seen one lonely wannabe submerge themselves in a bath of manure and cow's urine with a scuba pipe in their mouth, you've seen them all.
There were one or two entertaining contributors, however, including the woolly bloke who tried to get you to swap your washing powder for his washing powder, and some interesting observations were made.
We were told that Victorian gentlemen, for a bit of light relief, liked to visit lunatic asylums to watch the deranged derange themselves - obviously because How Clean Is Your House? was still in the planning stages.
Some neuroses, it was suggested, belong in a hospital, not on a television set.
With C-list celebrities battling it out for attention with larger-than-life "real" people who are cheaper (you have to pay Paul Burrell to eat kangaroo balls) and more desperate, there seems no end in sight to the reality-TV takeover - there are, we were told, 173 new shows coming on stream in the next 12 months.
Oh holy Moses, as my granny would say - and that was when they changed the test card.
Nell McCafferty seems as unlikely a candidate for a makeover as you're going to get. Feminist icons, however, as with Germaine Greer in the Big Brother house, seem to be as vulnerable to the calling of reality TV as the rest of us.
McCafferty was caught in Caroline Morahan's tender trap for the last in this series of Off the Rails - and she didn't squirm that hard. McCafferty, who was being dressed by nervy and defiant stylist Celia Holman-Lee for her book tour of the US, told us without batting a baggy eyelid that she looked terrific with no clothes on. Holman-Lee, undaunted, dragged her around the new Dundrum shopping centre and threw her to the skinny lions of the ladies' boutiques, who draped her and shaped her.
The beleaguered McCafferty was then given a vigorous tooth-whitening treatment and seemed a little defeated sitting in the dentist's chair with what looked like a large can-opener in her mouth. Morahan treated her with the playful irreverence of a baby panda and McCafferty endured it.
Afterwards, looking at before-and-after slides of her choppers, she remarked: "I'm looking at my corpse." Not quite: she hadn't yet been plastered in seaweed and wrapped in an electric blanket to encourage the interchange of sweat and minerals.
McCafferty's final hurdles were to meet her hairstylist, Erich, and make-up artist, Roisin, who, with the best intentions in the world and a paltry imagination, made her look like every other over-coiffured, brittly-etched middle-aged woman in the city. All she was short of was an overripe husband to argue with on the way home in the car.
"How was it for you?" asked a gorgeous and likeable Morahan, biting her bottom lip in anticipation of McCafferty's reply. "I've learned," said Nell, through her silting lip gloss, "that I was happier than I realised, being who I was." Phew.
