An Spailpín Fánach says a lot of what needs to be said quite brilliantly, but one thing that I thought went softly laden was the fact that although the show was filmed with a studio audience, those in attendance weren’t given the chance to, you know, ask questions.

Surely the best way to make the final show memorable – instead of rolling out clip after clip of Sinn Féin reps refusing to condemn murders – would have been to celebrate the only ever visit by a sitting Taoiseach by allowing the audience the chance to question him the way they no doubt would have wanted?

The premise of the show was about getting public figures into a room and essentially holding them accountable. It will forever be a shame that the final guest, the most powerful the show could ever get hold of, was allowed to break that mould.

Setanta was a wonderfully noble concept. Other satellite channels assumed they could grab the viewers in the hundreds of thousands and make a killing from premium phone lines. Setanta went for the bigger fish: why not try to get hold of the Premier League rights, or emerging fry like UFC?

There’s little to be said of Setanta’s life but thousands of miles of newsprint about the reasons it failed. The financial climate of course played its part, but realistically it came down to numbers. Setanta may only have gotten 69% of the customer base it needed to break even, but it still enticed 1.3m households to say, “yes, this is something I want to buy into”, and that’s no mean feat. What it may mean, though, is that Sky have simply become too big to compete with.

ESPN have swooped in to snap up the Premier League rights, arranging a standalone channel that’ll appear on the Sky platform (among others) and making a point of avoiding Setanta’s model of selling their own subscriptions. Whether the channel will be a pay-per-view effort like the short-lived PremPlus or whether Sky will have to pay ESPN to carry the channel, it’ll face a big uphill challenge trying to crack a monopoly that just keeps on growing and growing.

Will we miss it though? Well, it depends on what you got out of the channel. If you watched it for UFC, it’ll be on Bravo (probably) so things will live on just as they were. If you watched it for more innovative programming like Football Matters, hosted by the actually pretty great James Richardson, you’ll be hoping that some other channel takes back the not-so-groundbreaking-but-still-great formula of taking one fan from each club and putting them all in a room to talk to each other – it’s like Big Brother’s Big Mouth for sane people.

If, though, you watched it for the Premier League, will you miss it? Realistically, probably not. There was something parculiarly vacuous about Setanta’s Premiership coverage. The analysis was equally as bland and braindead as Sky’s (Jamie Redknapp saying Ronaldo is a “quality” player, versus Steve McManaman saying Ronaldo is a “great” player – spot the ball difference) but the actual match coverage seemed void and limp; even simple thinks like the volume of the crowd noise made the broadcasts pub-unfriendly and ultimately every match, no matter how high the Premier League stakes may have been, seemed like a token international friendly with nothing happening on screen, nothing happening in studio, and nothing happening in the subscriptions department.

I’ll miss Setanta, but only for the David versus Goliath notion that it was a pair of Irish lads who started off renting a pub in London to show an Ireland match in Italia 90, versus News Corp, BSkyB, Rupert Murdoch and Jamie fucking Redknapp. The understated approach hasn’t worked; now let’s see just how wrong ESPN get it in judging the tone that sports in Britain sits best in.

Anyway. That’s that, this is how it unfolded (via the self-adulating method of my own Twitter account), and this is how Setanta Sports News wrapped up, a mere 112 minutes after the company slipped away.

PS – credit for the title of this post goes to the hilariously funny Football365 Twitter account, @f365.

It’s not difficult to see that Ronaldo is a footballer of exceptional quality and certainly worth an awful lot of money. 91 goals in the last three seasons, helping Manchester United to a Premiership title in each of the three, and a Champions’ League sandwiched in the middle, are an obvious sign of impact. The fact that the man’s name alone can send adolescent women into fits of involuntary screaming and sell suitcases of cherry red jerseys worldwide is another. The Guardian‘s daily satirical newsletter, The Fiver, referring to Him only with a capitalised pronoun, and similarly naming his new team-to-be as Them, is a third. Certainly he’ll be missed; United, in a matter seemingly overlooked by many, will now find themselves with a major goalscoring vacuum. Ronaldo gone, Tevez surely leaving… it leaves a terrific burden on Dimitar Berbatov (14 goals last season) and Wayne Rooney (20), particularly when the latter has been converted into an unusual attacking midfielder/winger hybrid and forsaken his goalscoring prowess as a result.

But is he worth €94m? In a footballing sense, maybe. He’s a terrific player and will undoubtedly be the star in an underperforming team. Commercially, though, is he really going to be so lucrative? A Nike player now smack in the middle of an Adidas team? An import into a team who’ve already agreed their shirt sponsorship and can’t charge more for all the posters CR94 might now appear on? A team with their TV rights already agreed for years to come? Will he be worth more to Madrid than a Nike-wearing team in Manchester who have squeezed every Champions’ League goal, every shirt sponsorship deal (one can’t help thinking Aon Corp got a raw deal now that there’s no more Ronaldo shirt sales or PR stuff to piggyback onto) out of him, especially when they’ve made a £67m appreciation profit on him too? That’s doubtful. Ronaldo will sell shirts, there’s no doubt about that – but now that the club is back in half a billion worth of debt, one can only guess at how fragile the foundations to Real Madrid’s financial house-of-cards truly are.

And while Perez throws £138m at his team’s underperformance and assumes the talent will solve the problem – these players, after all, are to be managed by the man who nearly got Tottenham Hotspur relegated this season – Newcastle United trundle on, rudderless and ownerless, and – seemingly – with a collective worth roughly equal to 1.25 Cristiano Ronaldoes. One has to feel sorry for Mike Ashley, the local billionaire supporter who had seen the team drift two and fro under total mismanagement, and taking the lessons of Sky One’s Dream Team far too close to heart in assuming a fan could ably run a challenging Premiership team. That’s not to belittle Ashley’s moneymaking ability – you don’t make your way from nil to £700m without financial ubercompetence – but clearly Ashley had gotten so excited about the notion of buying the team, he’d forgotten how Phil Wallis’s tenure as owner of Harchester United had ended: with Wallis impossibly happy at having given the club away in a lottery to the owner of a lucky season ticket.

While Ashley is deserving of some sympathy, the club itself certainly isn’t. A season in which no less than three messiah managers failed to save the club from terminal decline, and a franchise where a litany of failed Chief Executives and Directors of Football have put their own failed personal stamp on the team, which has constantly slipped in every way since it scraped failure from the jaws of Champions League qualification in 2003. A shambolic corporate management system, consistently backed up by shambolic football management system, and topped off by shambolic footballers. Putting your Champions League fate in the hands of everyon’s favourite centre-back, Titus Bramble? Really? The fall from grace will do Newcastle good; a total overhaul and the abolition of the corrupt culture that left such bureaucracy into simple matters like team selection will do the team the world of good. Frankly, the club’s morale could use the inevitable boost that cantering to Championship victory ought to bring.

And amidst all this, Sky Sports’ endless overvaluation of the English footballing life claims another scalp. If Setanta Sports survives, it’ll be in a much tamer incarnation than it currently exists, with its distinctive bumblebee branding sitting on fewer screens, fewer advertising hoardings, and (hopefully) fewer painful stings with referee’s shirts and net sacks full of rugby balls during every ad break. What sort of world do we live in, where one international TV franchise can only command £20m for a 51% stake, and a mightly, albeit sleeping, football club is only worth £100m, yet a petulant Portuguese wunderkind is an £80m prospect, with another £8m in wages – netto – each year? Ronaldo plus Setanta ought to equal Newcastle United, but the ratio of the Setanta/Ronaldo breakdown needs total redress. One might look on with a wry smile in a few years’ time when Real Madrid enter administration and see a compulsory relegation to the Segunda División, while Newcastle United return energised from a stint in the lower leagues to show themselves just what they can do. Fiorentino Pérez might feel like he has to answer to the supporting body who elected him, but it’s surely more responsible to get the club on better footing than to run it into the ground altogether.

Not, of course, that any of the above will stop us all scrambling for tickets to the Tallaght Stadium in the second week of July, to see Him make his debut for Them against Shamrock Rovers. A salient and timely reminder, perhaps when we need it most, that He is just one man, among many, many others.

Anyhoo – I didn’t get to see it last night, having instead brought The Brother to see the Kaiser Chiefs last night (his first gig! Awww!), but last night the world was given the first episodes of RTE’s new series, Dragons’ Den. Now, as outlined, I’ve been living under a rock for the last few weeks, and so I haven’t really been able to gauge public reaction to how the show was received. Nonetheless, it’s one of those occasions we don’t get very often in Ireland: the local premiere of an internationally-sourced franchise. First it was Popstars, and later Who Wants To Be A Millionaire, swiftly followed by a retaliatory Weakest Link. If  memory serves, we were deprived of international formatting until The Apprentice. As if to fulfil scripture, RTE rebound with Dragons’ Den and we quickly get back to wondering when the whole process gets to repeat itself again.

It’s difficult not to accept that one of the driving forces of the increasing homogenisation of the Anglophone world – and beyond, come to think of it – is the cult of superstar TV shows. I don’t mean the Ant & Decs, or the Ryan Seacrest, of the world: I mean the Big Brothers, the Deal or No Deals, and the Pop/American Idols. These are the new Coca-Colas and Microsofts: they are the archetypal global brands of the 21st Century that hold us ransom to their incessant, ominous advertising. They’re nowhere and yet everywhere.

Everywhere except Ireland.

For those of us – and increasingly, in line with the homogenisation, there are more of us – who hold a penchant for international TV, Ireland is a total drought. There are those of us who adore Big Brother, or Pop Idol, or The X-Factor, or Deal or No Deal, but yet wish that Ireland was big and brazen enough not to just be happy it was there, Across The Water. And it is, whether you’ve noticed or not: Ireland’s media still seems to be in adolescence. While Gay Byrne showing the country what a condom looked like was an explosion into the first realms of puberty, and Annie Murphy’s revelation was the gentle coax into sexual activity, Ireland hasn’t really gotten very much farther in its media evolution. The entry of commercial broadcasters is moving to another school; The Dunphy Show vs The Late Late Show is the aggro at the school disco; but Ireland’s media – and certainly its TV – hasn’t grown up yet. We’re happy to let Them Across The Water come up with the money to run Deal or No Deal, or the record deal and bombast to run The X Factor, or to build a bungalow and chuck some cameras into it to run Big Brother. But make them for ourselves? Wisha, poor child, pipe down and do your homework.

There’s no point fooling ourselves. Ireland has only ever imported successful foreign formulas (in the literal sense – we can set up a poxy plagiarism until the cows come home) when there’s money or a threat. Popstars came because Louis Walsh put up the money to run the thing, and some sponsors jumped in to fill the ad breaks. Eircell (God! Remember them? Back when mobile phone numbers starterd with 088 and had six digits?) stuck up the money for Who Wants To Be A Millionaire and lo, TV3 needed to stump up for The Weakest Link to keep up with the publically-funded Joneses. Once Eircell begat Vodafone Ireland, who decided that overpriced 13c text messages didn’t need to fund a TV show, WWTBAM disappeared. TV3 didn’t bother commissioning a second series of The Weakest Link either. Funny that. It’s the same thing now: TV3 scored a hit with The Apprentice so within a month of its premiere, RTE scramble to score its opposite number and BBC Two twin. Watch and see how much longer one series lasts without the other. I’ll lay odds on anything more than six months.

What is it that stops RTE or TV3 (though in going for The Apprentice, at least the latter has at least some foresight and maturity) from taking a chance and pouncing on an international hit? Is it the inevitable mumbling from the licence-payer wondering why their money has to fund the launchpad for the next Alexandra Burke? What else can it be? Nobody expects Belgium to make do with the French version of Big Brother, Loft Story – Belgium gets its own BB and gets on with it.

So why shouldn’t a country with enough character and brashness to produce a thousand songwriters and a million poets, a thousand accents and a million moments, be able to get up off its feet, grow up and do big media projects for itself?

I’ll make the offer to Irish TV companies now – secure the rights to Deal or No Deal and I’ll present it for free. Any takers?

Why? Because it’s nearly 8.30pm and MTV are about to show a new episode of The Hills.

As you probably could guess with remarkable ease, The Hills is something that has always, always perplexed me. Basically the show is a spinoff of an earlier MTV show Laguna Beach, following Lauren Conrad and her pile of somewhat-well-cast group of “friends” playing themselves in a dramatised version of their own lives. The show is billed as Reality TV – but given the fact that there’s curiously always a microphone on a peripheral character who might become pivotal to any particular scene, it’s quite obvious that the show isn’t. The first name in the credits is “Created By”, people!

As a result, I honestly don’t understand the appeal of the show – or certainly its appeal above that of any other teen drama set in California. Remember The O.C., the show that every teenager in the western world lived and breathed by only four years ago? The show that launched the careers of Adam Brody and Mischa Barton – and that Ireland went nuts for when TG4 started showing it on Mondays and Bell x1 had a song played on it over a lesbian kiss? Even if you watched the show religiously, you’d need reminding that it existed. The O.C. was pitched as an actual drama, with actual plots, and the ability to transplant people into cool nightclubs and cooler clothes. Yet The Hills survives with what seems like a vastly more dedicated following – I used to know girls who didn’t watch The O.C.; I have yet to meet even one female individual who doesn’t watch The Hills – without this ability, sufficing merely on the ability to give two characters internships on Teen Vogue or in trendy clothes shops.

Of course, dear viewers. Of course these magazines and shops didn’t pay MTV to cast the stars there. Of course Teen Vogue didn’t see a massive spike in readership after Lauren and Whitney started working there. Of course not. It’s real, of course it is…

Reality TV, despite its detractions, is brilliant when it’s done properly. While it quickly became synonomous with desperate diehards for fame, if you look at Big Brother, the king of reality TV shows, as a social experiment, it’s a remarkable work, and continues to be so. Try and divorce the concept of the show from the trappings of fame that its become so tainted by, and you have a concept so devastatingly simple that it’s a wonder it hadn’t been thought of any earlier than 1999. Stick people in a house, watch how they get on, manipulate living conditions for them and see how they react, have them tell the omnipotent power who they dislike, and the most disliked people face a public vote to be removed. Ultimately one person is left and they win a cash prize. It’s brilliant.

The first series of Big Brother UK is the perfect example – as you could be sure the entrants weren’t too hellbent on seeking fame. Not until the housemates left were they aware of the massive media spectacle that the show had become – and so they lived in a house, amused each other on meagre means and often with very little food, and generally went about their lives, interacting with each other, just as humans do.  We saw how some people interpreted the game as just that – a contest, open to manipulation by its participants – and how ‘Nasty’ Nick Bateman fell foul of his housemates, of the rules and of the public – while everyman builder Craig Phillips stayed genuine and won the public’s affection, donating the prize money to his ill friend.

It was interesting to see how the public latched onto these traits. In a way that hadn’t been seen before, the public became devoted to a TV show, whose main unusual trait was that there was no pretense, no script, no drama: it was just people going about their lives in a deliberately enclosed setting. On another level, the fact that the public almost unanimously chose the honest principles of Craig over the scheming motives of Nick said an enormous amount about what people wanted to see.

Even when the show turns full-circle, having celebrities as housemates instead of punters who want to become celebrities, the show has a function to fulfil. Last year, Celebrity Big Brother spawned the biggest social debate of the year – that of racial integration and tension, and all through rows between Jade Goody and Shilpa Shetty over behaviour in the house. As the show itself has gained profile – this year attracting C-list celebrities like Ulrika Jonsson or Coolio instead of the usual Z-list fare – it becomes even more enthralling, seeing how those who seem so hallowed and revered on the outside world are so… normalised, once you step inside the sealed environment.

The ultimate thing to learn from the all is that humans find real life far more entertaining than drama. People think The Hills is enthralling because they think it’s real. People watch Big Brother and its celebrity equivalient because it is. Maybe it’s a lesson for TV makers: get rid of stuff like Coronation Street - which people watch because it’s fake – and give us more of what we want: ourselves.

Alas. The Hills is over – nothing of great consequence happened, I can heartily assure you – and Dancing on Ice follows. Another day, another dollop of drivel. You live and learn.

Anyway, the site asked me for a single word. I looked around. Television. OK. Now, two words. Sky News.

The reason I’d been on StumbleUpon in the first place was because the TV was boring me. So, ten words: the endlessly repetitive assault of Sky News on my senses. And suddenly, just like that, we have a blog post on our hands.

I wonder if John Logie Baird could see us now; the role that TV has assumed as the prime shaper of first world society, influencing our politics, our humour, our tastes, our wallets. What would Baird have seen as the application of his televisor? Would it be to share events of major national or international importance? Would it be in reserve for governmental broadcast in times of national emergency, as his homeland would too regularly see in the coming decades?

It was in my Sky News-induced monotony that I realised something quite odd. Even in my humble student abode, we have NTL telly with more than a hundred channels, and high-speed wireless internet… and yet, there I was, going “Blah blah, recession, bad news, blah blah”, and reaching for a Bop-It for amusement. Whatever about the intended use of television when it started back between the two World Wars, it’s changed us – frankly we’re too numb now.

When I was only a few years old and my grandfather came back from work (as a postman, so at about 3.30pm) with a copy of that day’s The Star, I’d be thrilled at the ability to read through another two dozen pages of soccer news once homework was done. Now I don’t even have one, but three 24-hour sports news channels… and I have little compulsion to watch any of them, even though my liking for soccer hasn’t waned in the slightest since then.

But there’s too much stuff these days – there is simply too much media choice. James Joyce could write a novel. Granted, he may have needed to send it to a few different publishers before one would take it, but ultimately his work was seen as being of supreme quality and pivotal brilliance – and the work was afforded the respect it deserved as a result. (The example isn’t meant to be specific, by the way – replace Joyce’s name with any.) Now, though, if someone writes a novel, they send it in and it still lands in a slush pile of reading, competing with too many other works to get the attention it might merit. If it gets turned down, it might be sold as an ebook, or created as a blog with new extracts every day – where it has to compete with even more work for the attention of people who ordinarily have too many TV channels to amuse themselves with other matters anyway.

We have mp3 collections, hundreds of TV stations, millions of online videos and radio stations, digital TV, more books than we ever had before … and we’re bored, disaffected, disinterested. Would life have been different if we hadn’t had John Logie Baird around? Would we have nearly as much media as we now do? What would become of the twenty first century if paradox-free time travel could eliminate him and his creation from history? Would we be as bored, as violent, as liberal, as overweight, as educated, as worldly, as well-informed?

Is a short attention span the price we have to pay for circumstantial intelligence? I’d think about trying to answer that, but Dragons’ Den just came on, and I’m too distracted to think about anything else for the moment.

When Wikipedia first became famous, and the battles raged over whether it would ever succeed Encyclopedia Brittanica – or god forbid, Encarta! – in terms of moral standing and infallability, one of things that led me to argue for Wikipedia was its far superior grasp of pop culture, niche interests, and modern media. Quite simply, you’re not likely to find an article like this in Britannica anytime soon – and if you’re looking for details of the next Futurama movie, you’re basically going to be gutted.

What becomes even more unique is when you watch a major international event on Wikipedia. Tom Raftery tells a story about how he was surfing Wikipedia while listening to RTE Radio 1 when the appointment of the new Pope was announced in 2005. Hearing the name ‘Ratzinger’ live from the Vatican, and recognising the name, he went to the Wikipedia entry for Joseph Ratzinger, and saw it changed already – as quickly as an RTE hack could translate it – to that of Pope Benedict XVI.

Well, mix the pop culture abilities, and the live nature, and you a potently hilarious mixture. I won’t try to commentate on them, but while the contestants were entering the house, all of the following were visible on live updates of the show’s Wikipedia entry:

Paul Michael Glaser
Star of the 1970′s show Starsky & Hutch

The person who’s about 1ft tall
A well known American rapper, Part of the MTV Rappers and whites special edition.

STOP PUTTING PEOPLES NAMES ON WHO HAVE NOT ENTERED

Ian Roper
Tarzan-like Luton Town centre-back. Lovely bloke.

The entire supporting cast of the film Good Will Hunting
Works in Mcdonalds on the Old Kent Road, thinks he’s Batman and often barks when nervous

Verne Troyer
It Is Obvious, Hes Going To Win.

Uncle Albert from Only Fools and Horses

Ronald McDonald
Wears white makeup

Arsene Wenger
Can’t take the pace with Arsenal so has legged it in here with the weirdo’s

Z Listers Big Brother 2009 is the sixth series … The programme is jam packed with Z Listers, people who thinks that they are famous but no body has really heard of them, they think they can be ‘famous’ again.

Phill from eastenders
Bald man.

[under Lucy Pinder]
I FINGER MYSELF TILL I BLEED

And my personal favourite, briefly filed under Lucy Pinder’s heading:

She would get my best efforts!

Now let’s see Encyclopedia Brittanica cover that.