The kiss of life and death

TVReview: Question: "Which Australian city is named after the father of evolution?" Answer: "Ehhh . . . Sydney?" (More of this merciless interrogation later.)

If Sophocles were around Dublin these days, hanging out in the smoothie bar after his shamanic dancing class, he might have wondered who he should send his play to and whether he should spend his SSIA on his own funeral (during which, as Eddie Hobbs suggested this week, he could include Chris de Burgh singing Don't Pay the Ferryman). Sophocles might also (assuming he watches Fair City) have felt a little distressed by the wholesale plunder of his plotlines this week. But hell, Oedipus can't hold a candle to the mean streets of Carrigstown, which were awash with blood and tears by the close of Thursday's hour-long special. As Carol (Aisling O'Neill), who is the best thing in the soap, was cradling the head of her deviant son who had shot and been shot by her duplicitous lover (got that?), her crisp white jeans muddying in the fray, there were even darker deeds afoot in the local wine bar.

It was time once again for the lesbian kiss. There is no unwritten telly law that says this now familiar soap opera staple has to be sexy or alluring or provocative, but one can't help wishing for a more imaginative interpretation of a potentially interesting storyline than a tentative lurchette across a sofa and the kind of smacker usually reserved for the Labrador on Christmas morning. With uninspired lines such as "I think I've fallen in love with you, Kay, I just wish you felt the same way", and with actors boxed up inside cardigans which had more electricity than their characters, it's hardly surprising that the scene generated as much of a frisson as the static from an acrylic sleeve.

While any prime-time plotline that allows women with cellulite and lower back pain to have a sex life should be welcomed, such tentative, stilted and predictable efforts are about as empowering as a plaster virgin on the bedhead. Let's hope that, as the relationship between the two women develops, the scriptwriters (who earlier in the programme were responsible for such appalling cliches as "you can run but you cannot hide") sharpen their same-sex pencils and rise to their own challenge.

Question: "Cuckoo and alarm are types of what?" Answer: Ehhh . . . birds?"

MEANWHILE, EDDIE HOBBS was indulging in some frothy stand-up and multi-wig-wearing for 30 Things To Do With Your SSIA, an invaluable pit-stop for those on spending sprees, but a bitter pill for the skint-at-the-time-don't-have-one citizens (such as yours truly) who would have been assessing the potential for other people's money in a state of envy and anxiety about what might have been. However, with the average SSIA worth around €13,000, Hobbs was holding a mirror to the mouth of the Celtic tigress and then wiping the frosted glass to show us how best to invest - and it made for interesting viewing, SSIA or no.

From plastic surgery (pretty people get paid more, apparently) to rehab (13 grand will buy you a month in the Betty Ford Clinic and take you out of the binge-drinking capital of Europe), Hobbs, it appears, is not afraid of looking under the tiger's tail. Planning fiascos, the failure of Government to tackle big business, the abomination of childcare costs, and couples in commuter hell battling to pay the crèche, run the car and fund the mortgage, remain Hobbs's bugbears. As he pointed out, with your offspring costing you 50 grand a throw between their OshKosh and their posh nosh, their "books and their bail money", your 13 grand is up against it if you're planning on investing in "human capital" or if you're looking forward to hearing the pitter-patter of "little energy units" all over your overpriced wooden flooring.

Next week Hobbs investigates pension plans and investment property, but before he signed off this time he had one salient piece of advice: don't die in Dublin, it's too expensive. If you are intent on popping your clogs (or your insanely expensive Masai Barefoot Technology shoes or your lime-green foot-massaging crocodile shoes), it's five grand to shuffle off the mortal coil in the capital and a steal at little more than €2,000 in Mullingar.

"And Deutschland is known as?"

"Ehhh . . . Holland?"

'PSYCHIC POWERS - A blessing or a burden?"

Well, you know what, Joe, I think they must be a blessing, because if I had them I wouldn't have had to soldier through long and tedious hours of Seoige and O'Shea in order to find out that RTÉ's new afternoon chat-show is about as lively and innovative as an aforementioned Mullingar corpse.

Gráinne Seoige and Joe O'Shea host the party and no, it can't be easy to have the weight of the nation's afternoon enjoyment on your shoulders, no matter how prim and well-dressed those bones are. One suspects, however, that after some initial mild interest, viewers will happily flick back to Deal or No Deal or even the dreaded Sharon Osbourne Show, which Seoige and O'Shea are up against.

The programme is just terribly stiff. Seoige is as humourless as she is competent; undoubtedly intelligent and beautiful, she is, however, singularly lacking warmth, the provision of which, one assumes, is the function of co-host O'Shea, who, like a well-intentioned rabbit in her lucid and icy headlights, seems unsure of quite how to proceed. Playing musical chairs on the blue seats and the cream couch, the pair are better on the serious issues - bullying, eating disorders, drugs - than they are when asked to lighten up with a couple of back-combed psychics or an ebullient family going cold turkey without their mobile phones. It's during these items that the stress of hosting a topical daytime family show begins to manifest itself and Seoige's stiffly coiffed persona seems to tighten with suppressed irritation. However, like a couple of seasoned club-class travellers who have been asked to share their banquette, doubtless they'll eventually get used to the gaze of the hoi-polloi.

AND THE BRAINTEASERS above are courtesy of . . .? Ehhh . . . The Box? Correct.

"A city, a square, a glass box" - Ireland's own answer to Big Brother has arrived in the shape of a glasshouse on Dublin's Wolfe Tone Square housing two self-conscious quiz contestants, and, outside in the rain, Keith Duffy on a metal catwalk surrounded by a shower of marauding mammies under telescopic umbrellas and one or two politely indifferent hoodies.

Welcome to The Box, man, or "fáilte romhat go dtí an mbosca . . . man", as Duffy says. Duffy is a genial presence untrammelled by any hint of perfectionism - you feel like you know where you stand with him, he'll give anything a lash if there's a few bob in it. Although he may read his cue cards with the fluency of a six-year-old chewing up a bidding prayer, he appears genuinely at ease horsing around with all the twentysomething contestants in their various shades of monkey hats and tacky lip-gloss. And unlike the sultry and somewhat pompous voiceover who acts as quizmaster and who pronounced (after a moment of panicked hesitation) Taoism as "tay-oh-ism" rather than dow-ism, you feel, with Duffy, that what you see is what you get.

The Box is a weird hybrid. Although it is an ultra-modern, disposable, gladiatorial chamber, it also feels vaguely old-fashioned, like watching Quicksilver play out behind Clerys shop window.

Either way, it has the intellectual rigour of a hamster cage - it is vaguely depressing to realise that these educated youngbloods in khaki pants, lapping blindfolded at plates of guacamole and strawberry cheesecake in an effort to identify the tastes and win 100 bucks for the kitty, are incapable of naming more than two Shakespeare plays but can reel off dozens of characters in The Simpsons.

Oh God, I'm beginning to sound like my mother.