Date Published: 21-Mar-2011

Forgive me if I am wrong, but I thought we had gone away from the whole era of candid camera and the likes. This was because they had been done to death and they no longer became funny. No matter who is presenting them or who is the victim, they are just painful to look at simply because their novelty no longer exists.

Back in the black and white days of Murphy’s Golden Movies on RTE, they were mildly humorous simply because this sort of stuff had not been done on our national station before and most of us did not have the luxury of the British channels at the time.

Basically the whole purpose of them is to set people up by presenting them with a set of circumstances which would either frustrate or infuriate them and the more they reacted, the bigger the kick the audience would get out of this form of junk television.

Along came the late Jeremy Beadle and he got quite a number of years out of the candid camera capers but the novelty wore off that as well – but it seems that RTE have not really copped onto the fact that this type of television is just horrendous to watch.

But still we are stuck with a few episodes of Anonymous on RTE 1 which involves half well known people being given a plastic face that looks plausible enough and a wig and are sent out into the world to try and make fools of people. In some parts of RTÉ, this is described as satire . . . more like satdire if you ask me.

Last week we were treated to Gráinne Seoige in a face mask pretending to be a pajamas saleswoman while being prompted on an earpiece by that terribly unfunny comedian Jason Byrne and to say that this was a shocking excuse for television would not be a true reflection of how bad it actually was.

RTÉ are going to extreme lengths to humanise Gráinne Seoige by having her smile on a few more programmes and she even broke into laughter on this one but it was still not enough to revive it. It was as if someone came up with the idea to change the appearance of a celebrity but then did not really know what to do with them.

At one point she went into a photographers in Dalkey claiming to have made a booking. The woman in the photographers knew nothing about this and that is where the clip ended. Byrne was bursting his arse laughing at this as he watched via a hidden camera but there was no sense or reason to any of this.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Sentinel.