I often don't see the appeal of fame, especially being Irish. We Irish are notorious for being a nation of begrudges, in fact we even begrudge ourselves for our only superlative of being the most begrudging nation. But perhaps our cynicism, when it comes to famous people, is well founded. When you observe the great Irish institutions such as government, RTE and the GAA, what can be seen is a wall-to-wall cesspit of talentless narcissistic windbags.
However not all are that bad, sometimes a simpleton makes it big in the Irish celeb culture, one such cretin is Dáithí Ó Sé, I remember Ó Sé being on TV a few years ago whining that the Irish language isn't modern enough, and there are no Irish words for sex toys. At one point he suggests a word for dildo; bod bréagach (lit. false penis). Despite his best intentions, what our hapless cretin failed to realise was that there is already a word in the Irish language for dildo which we are happy with, that word is Dáithí Ó Sé.
We are however fortunate this summer, Ryan Turbridy got himself a summer job with the BBC, hopefully the Brits will fall in love with him before they realise the reason why we were so disillusioned with him as soon as he made the move to TV.
But our TV often takes bizzare format with even more crap prizes for the "lucky winner". Once upon a summer, Marty Whelan presented a lottery gameshow called "Come fly with Marty", where the jackpot was a holiday...... with the presenter and his wife. Sometimes I don't know what these producers are smoking to think such pulp would be a worthwhile distraction from the mundanity of everyday life of a licence payer. Whelan was later replaced by a serial granny molester called Derek Mooney, though they still do occasionally exchange slots as I'm led to believe.
We Irish are often percieved to being good craic and having the gift of the gab, but it's evident with the state of our economy, currently and historically, our best and brightest have left these shores to find greener pastures.
I could go on all day about more, the likes of Amanda Brunker, Jedward, Fair City, Fade Street but I'd rather have a nice cup of tea than switch on the tele and drink the Kool-Aid.
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I gladly went a month without tv after the analogue switch -off, could have done without it permanently but the other half protested.
ReplyDeleteWe do seem to favour stupidity in our celebs - perhaps a remnant of the culture of not questioning things? Intelligence is frowned upon as some form of elitism. it's very sad. As well as extremely irritating.
I think the only person in the country you could consider a public intellectua l would be Michael D.
DeleteIt's rare there is anything interesting or intelligent on RTE, TV3 documentaries are sensationalist, somewhat Daily Mailesque. I do like the stuff Diarmuid Ferriter does when he's on though.