There are more eventful ways to pass a Friday night. Each of them came into the living room with the harmless deference of a Jehovah's Witness selling salvation. Lots of eye contact, lashings of sincerity, many non-threatening gestures. The Stepford candidates.
Last night's Late Late Show hustings shed little light on the presidential race but plenty of torchlight in the murky shallows of Irish politics. No voices were raised in anger, no tears were shed in despair, no republican skeletons fell out of the cupboard but Eoghan Harris haunted the night like Banquo's ghost.
First the compassion. They have known our pain. Each candidate kicked off with a two-minute face-to-camera pitch from their seats. Sombre stuff. Mary Banotti "came back to Ireland as single mother"; Mary McAleese, the eldest of nine, recalled her "father going barefoot to school"; Derek Nally "ran away to my first job." You'd need a heart of stone not to giggle.
There were some sparklers but no real fireworks. The Gerry Adams endorsement of the Mary McAleese campaign was piously offered up on the altar of free speech and the nearest we got to a spark was when Derek Nally began to explain his association with Eoghan Harris.
Indeed Harris replaced Adams as the great bogeyman of the campaign.
"We have yet to hear from Mary [Banotti] about his involvement . . ." said Mary McAleese sweetly. "He had lunch with John Bruton last Thursday."
"I have never met Eoghan Harris . . ." said Mary Banotti ". . . he has a total antipathy towards me and my sister so we must be doing something right."
Adi Roche whose campaign has been listing like a shipwreck attempted to right things by reiterating her commitment to give half her wage to a children's foundation. Dana announced she would have a problem signing a pro-abortion referendum into the Constitution.
The nearest it came to knuckle-dusters and uppercuts was when Gay Byrne subjected the candidates to the cruel and unusual punishment of audience question time.
The people cut up a bit rough. The candidates were "only in it for the money". A man from the west of Ireland blew some steam about the great livestock diaspora. Lined up in alphabetical order the famous five nodded sympathetically and clarified, qualified, and amplified. Not many laughs. That's the main thing we know about the next Presidency this morning. There will be no laughs. Just huggies given and bridges built.