Where do all the stars disappear to for the Christmas?

It seems like only yesterday that the yardstick to define a good year for television stations revolved around the battle for Christmas and New Year ratings – but clearly that’s not the case anymore.

There’s still the odd nugget if you dig deep enough through the dross, but you’d need a talent for excavation to get there – as well as a strong stomach for the rubbish you’ll have to digest first.

But it’s a long way from the glory days of Morecambe and Wise or the Two Ronnies or Only Fools and Horses or One Foot in the Grave – even a more few short years ago we still had specials from the Royle Family or Gavin and Stacey or the Vicar of Dibley to keep us glued to the couch on a Christmas night.

Now it’s a schedule dominated by movies you’ve seen already – or if you haven’t seen them, they’re movies you’re unlikely to find a free two hours to watch while granddad snores off his big dinner.

Otherwise it’s a feast of quasi-celebrities dancing or ice-skating in a last desperate bid to rescue what once passed for a career.

New Year’s Eve is much the same, if you take the indefatigable Jools Holland out of the equation.

If it’s not some shtick review of the year through the eyes of an impressionist, it’s a musical extravaganza of wannabes and never weres who wouldn’t get booked for Christmas if they were arrested by the Gardaí.

In fairness to RTÉ, there has been an admirable consistency to their notion on what should welcome in the New Year for the housebound. I can still remember Derek Davis at the helm one year, and another time they gave the witching hour over to the Lotto.

But this year just beat Bannagher; to bring the curtain down on the Gathering, the powers that be decided to host a concert to one side of Leinster House – presumably on the basis that if it was fellas on the fiddle you were looking for, you’d be spoilt for choice.

They continued the theme by importing Madness, a bunch of scallies whose previous highs included a gig from the top of Buckingham Palace – and, if reports are correct, the high experienced wasn’t just the fact they were on the roof.

But this time they mixed it up by including what appeared to be local talent – admittedly we were watching this in the midst of a domestic din, but there appeared to be a little boy playing saxophone at one stage and another bloke in a tail coat dueting with Suggs at another.

Live gigs make for difficult telly at the best of times – it’s only with the help of re-engineering and overdubbing at a later stage that they can be brought up to scratch for transmission. So you’d forgive them the rough edges.

But there are rough edges and rough edges – like the presenters, Daithí Ó Sé and Sinead Kennedy, who were stuck back in a broom cupboard trying to make sense of this whole maelstrom in a language that was all their own.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Sentinel.