Saturday column: RTÉ’s taxation programme
Taxes, you will not be amazed to hear, are not popular. Politicians spend their careers promising to cut them. People spend their days whingeing about them. When it comes to the television licence fee,...
View ArticleSaturday column: Teeth returned to food critics
During a four-year spell as this newspaper’s TV reviewer, I would get an occasional, but forceful, sense of a subject’s displeasure. I was once called a cretin on live radio. A passing remark about a...
View ArticleSaturday column: Marching to the lifestyle fascists
(Due to technical difficulties, this didn’t appear on Saturday.) * ON WEDNESDAY night, RTÉ1 broadcast a new series, Not Enough Hours, in which a man with a clipboard and a camera crew came to the aid...
View ArticleSaturday column: The percentage game
IF YOU picked up a copy of Metro or Herald AM on your way to work on Wednesday morning, you would have learned this stunning statistic: almost half of women love doing the washing-up. What’s more, 70...
View ArticleSaturday column: Bertie’s big twist
ON WEDNESDAY, it became obvious where Cecelia Ahern had inherited her narrative skills from. Her father, it seems, has passed on not his penchant for tortuous, intricate and confusing plotting, but his...
View ArticleSaturday column: Deathwatch
If you were so inclined, you could get up this morning, turn on the television and watch women giving birth for the rest of the day. You would have a selection of channels on which to watch it, and a...
View ArticleSaturday column: Hopelessly Lost in Lisbon
EVERY ONCE IN a while an issue comes along that is of great importance to the State and its citizens, which must be discussed openly and about which the people will ultimately have their say. But which...
View ArticleSaturday column: History or histrionics?
‘THERE IS, of course, no ending to history,” Bertie Ahern told the joint Houses of Congress on Wednesday. History was a popular word in his speech, mentioned nine times. And history was a word commonly...
View ArticleSaturday column: Pictures and lies
THE NEW YORKER magazine has just run a fascinating profile of Pascal Dangin, the fashion and publishing worlds’ most sought-after retoucher of photographs. In the March issue of Vogue alone, he...
View ArticleSaturday column: Pitching it right
WEDNESDAY NIGHT WAS a long, long night of Champions League football and an even longer night of football coverage, although this applied more to RTÉ than to ITV or Sky Sports. If the stats had popped...
View Article
