TV Review: 'They came, they sang and they cowered." Oh no, You're A Star is back. Once again it's time for great big girls in thigh-high boots to belt out their Mariah Carey impersonations and wannabe boybands to stiffen their quiffs.
Only this time we are not looking for sacrificial lambs to the Eurovision slaughter; after the abysmal failure of the last few attempts, the format has changed and the Holy Grail is now cash, equipment and a recording and publishing deal.
The judging panel remains relatively unchanged, Louis Walsh alone has decamped, he is replaced by A&R man Thomas Black. Once again we are to be subjected to Brendan O'Connor and his witless mock-savagery of the contestants, not to mention the pre-festive penance of enduring his blunt and chronically dull hate/hate relationship with co-presenter Linda Martin.
Nauseatingly, O'Connor and Martin's banter, which sizzles like a frozen gnome, is being touted as unrequited passion; personally, I'd rather have 12 French hens tattooed on my backside than even contemplate that particular union.
In the preview programme, which showed some of the highlights of the cruelty to follow, O'Connor - in search of his "little tingle" - distinguished himself by failing "to separate his hormones from his objectivity", resulting in a couple of bushy-tailed 18-year-old lovelies passing the finishing line while their more generously proportioned sisters clutched the Kleenex and vowed revenge.
It was all very predictable. The ill, the depressed, the delusional and the desperate queued in the rain beside the belly-topped optimists - all, presenter Síle Seoige told us with dewy-eyed sincerity, dreaming "the dream they dare not dream".
Doubtless we'll watch the parade in our thousands and, despite the parochial mediocrity of the judging panel and the wearying sameness of the contestants, we'll text our thumbs off, drop our pennies in RTÉ's coffers and wave off yet another media soldier on the first steps in the lonely hike to celebrity. Come back, Six, all is forgiven.
WHAT ARE ANT and Dec? And who tucks them up when the camera is turned off? Toothy, asexual twins or confections from the bowels of the telly laboratory, they are neat and shiny chaps who go well with a cup of tea and are innocuous enough not to invade your dreams.
I'm a Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here has returned for a fifth series and once again the winsome duo are treading the rope bridge to bring news of stomach-churning bush trials to a bunch of near-unknowns and mercifully-forgottens in cork hats.
Jilly "you can't drink wine out of a f**king saucepan" Goolden turned up to quaff some tarantula again (having drained her vintage telly vat dry, she constantly has her nose in celebrity endurance trials), but she won't last - she's extremely bossy, and sooner or later she'll run out of moisturiser.
Besides Goolden, there's a corpulent and senescent Jimmy "awesome" Osmond, an amiable Sid Owen (formerly of EastEnders - put money on him), a handful of blonde vegans, and antique-peddler David "the Duke" Dickinson, who has been voted camp leader (or maybe that's just leader).
And then there's Carol Thatcher, the bumbling, lisping, benign, if slightly dotty, daughter of Margaret, and never has an acorn fallen so far from a tree. It's been 15 years since Maggie Thatcher was defenestrated and about a week since her daughter whipped out of her camp bed, squatted on the camp floor, and micturated - and guess which one of them is in the news?
I'm A Celebrity is a cruel and unusual place to take revenge on the Iron Lady, especially as most of the participants would still have been trying to relinquish their Huggies when the poll tax riots were at their height. But having Thatcher's myopic daughter drive a jeep suspended on a quasi-rope bridge (actually more rope than bridge) across a ravine and then filming her in infra-red having a nocturnal pee feels a bit tough, although maybe it's a picnic if you grew up in the shadow of the grocer's daughter.
Carol ended up swinging on a harness while the jeep plunged into the banana trees. She cites astronomy as her area of interest, and looking at the stars is probably as close to celebrity as she'll get.
Notoriety, however, is a different matter, and doubtless her mother will crucify her with her court shoes when she gets her hands on her.
Meanwhile, Jimmy Osmond crawled around a pen of unpredictable red kangaroos trying to unstick glittering star shapes from their tails in order to earn his campmates some dinner. Did you know a group of roos is called a mob, asked Dent and Ache maliciously. Jimmy didn't.
You get a spooky feeling watching Jimmy crawl around in the sand, his own empty pouch swaying. Earlier, Jimmy had been reprimanded for sneaking some seasoning into camp. "Hell, mother, am I naughty?" he asked, grinning moronically at the bush camera. No, Jimmy, you're certifiable.
Mind you, a previous winner of I'm A Celeb was Kerry Katona, and look what she got out of it: brown hair and a divorce. Keep it up, Jimmy, the world is your oyster.
SEVENTY-FIVE PER cent of veterinary students attending University College Dublin are female; the traditional male domination of the profession is ending. The new series of Vets On Call focuses on Ceithre Cos, an all-female veterinary practice in Tulla, Co Clare, run by Erica Borge and Cathy Beirne.
Lady vets Borge and Beirne ("the tall vet and the small vet", as they are known locally) work with beef cattle, horses, bulls, goats and donkeys, as well as domestic animals.
The first programme of the series saw both women up to their oxters in blood, mucus and excrement. They'll jack-lift your cows off an electric fence, geld your stallion, unblock your moggy's urethra and, as one farmer pointed out, not only are they as good as their male colleagues, they'll also stay around to make sure your animal is well before high-tailing it to the next emergency.
Both women are married to local farmers and have young children. Meeting their husbands over a cow's arse, as they described it, may not be wildly romantic, but then neither is throwing yourself into bed at three in the morning, splattering the sheets and the husband with cow dung after a late-night calving.
Vets On Call is a remarkably refreshing documentary; unobtrusive, observational and gorily fascinating, it makes watching celebrities crawling through ant-heaps seem about as appealing as the pus-filled abscess on the neck of one of Borge's bovine clients.
And it could really take off as a dating game-show when Borge and Beirne take on a locum, Susie Maguire, for their busy spring season. Maguire, a funny, warm, single blonde, is listening to her biological clock tick and is questioning the suitability of her profession in terms of meeting a partner and having children. She may well be in the right place: Tulla, the singles club for vets, as she describes it, is after all the town where love blossoms over an orifice.
"AMANDA PANDA, MORBID obesity correspondent", "Justin Rustin, in Pinner, rounding up the celebrity anorexics", and "Melanie Bellamy with the standing news" are a handful of the hysterically funny newscasters who populate Broken News, a satire on Sky, Fox, CNN et al and their seemingly endless supply of mannequin-like "rolling news" presenters.
Synchronised chair-swivelling, gritted dentures, manic traffic reports and a malevolent celebrity correspondent ("she wracked her brain cell" and "two words: humil- and -iliation") are spliced and cleverly edited together with the live correspondent's nightmare, no news. Reporter "Richard Harbinger" waited and waited for the arrival of Donald Rumsfeld at a press conference, with a live link-up to studio.
"How much more do you know about what you might be able to tell us?" asked the panicking studio host. Sound familiar? Meanwhile, the share price index ran along the bottom of the screen: rent boys . . . spam . . . alfresco sex . . . eggs Benedict . . . Shakespearean dildos . . .
Truly, one not to miss, but it makes the real news difficult to take seriously afterwards. "What more do we know about what we may mean by that?" . . . yeah yeah.
