PresentTense:Watching the final of Charity You're A Star last Sunday night, one thing was quickly apparent. The performance should have convulsed the nation. Ears should have escaped from their lobes; eyes should have popped from their sockets and rolled under the sofa to safety, writes Shane Hegarty.
And once Brendan O'Connor had left the screen, the sight of the contestants was astounding and baffling in equal measure. Is this what passes for light entertainment in a modern country? Two decades after the John Player Tops, is it healthy to have a sudden nostalgia for a forgotten era of dancing management consultants and lollipop ladies doing the death scene from Romeo and Juliet?
But none of these things seems to bother the public - over 600,000 viewers watched last week's finale.
In all, 465,000 more viewers watched this series than the last. It was a smash hit. And it confirmed something about the Irish: we love bad television.
There was a time when almost all Irish television was bad. When sets were wobbly and jokes wobblier. When a new series would shuffle on to your set with an awkwardness that betrayed its utter lack of self-belief. But there was always the hope that Irish TV would some day crawl from the primordial cultural soup and evolve into something strong and handsome.
In a sense, that moment has come. Since the turn of the millennium, RTÉ has been much improved: more creative, confident and sophisticated. And yet, at this moment when it might have presumed we would shake off our television infancy, we instead cling on happily to the safety blanket of badness.
There is, of course, bad television elsewhere. Some countries have nothing but. It is the chief cultural export of Australia. It has been raised to the level of art in Mexico. And you cannot watch Italian television without wondering how this country gave us the Renaissance. If Leonardo da Vinci was around today, he would most likely be hosting a quiz show in which Mona Lisa wears a short dress and gets soaked a lot.
And Britain, which still has the best television on the planet, is far from immune. It is burdened with no-talent shows, hidden-camera hilarity and Davina McCall. And occasionally, it acts as a reminder of when Irish television has got it right. This week, it was announced that ITV newsreaders, who in recent years have been allowed wander the studio in the manner of someone trying on new shoes, will be returned to their desks. RTÉ can feel justified in having resisted such gimmickry, to the point where you presume that Ken Hammond's legs haven't seen light since the late 1980s.
But Britain doesn't have Winning Streak, or Fame and Fortune, or other mind-juggling varieties of the National Lottery quiz shows. Here, the audience members wield slogans scrawled on the inside of Pampers boxes, and yell with such self-conscious glee that you sometimes wonder if they are being held at gunpoint. The contestants, meanwhile, are rocks from which the host must coax blood. They are the prime examples of why it is that the Irish are no good on television, a race of people who still give the impression that the technology is a little supernatural.
Yet, this might also explain its popularity. Its viewers see themselves on the screen. And they see people from their town, or a town close by, or a town close to someone else they know. It exploits the smallness of Ireland, which is why the interviews with the contestants go on for an age. Its popularity certainly cannot be explained by the games themselves, which appear to have been devised by Dali in one of his more mischievous moments.
However, Ireland's loyalty to bad television remains intact when it comes to its biggest show, the redwood of the television landscape: The Late Late Show. It can be argued that it, in so many respects, is the epitome of bad television. In fact, it is argued pretty much every Friday night. But the greatest example comes when the show engages in quiz mode, when the sight of Pat Kenny getting excited by contestants passing thread through needles gives you a sense of just how far it has fallen. And a bafflement at why the viewers continue to prop it up.
Yet, the Irish keep watching, enthralled by badness, thrilled by the terrible. Or maybe it is worse than that; the nightmare of every television critic and right-thinking cultural commentator: perhaps it is good television. After all, if ratings were only about making bad television, then TV3 would be the most-watched channel in the country.