What a swell party this is

TVReview: The national broadcaster has decided, in its wisdom, that the Celtic Tiger was born in 1986, eyes tightly shut and mewling about its lousy bank balance - and who am I to argue?

I can't remember waking up in 1986 to its tinkling growl, but suspect I might if I had been punctured by the kitten's Midas fangs.

The choice of year informed a bunch of programmes over the last week under the banner title, The Time of Our Lives?, an examination of two decades of striped-shirt prosperity which included an excellent talking-heads film, That Was Then, This Is Now. This gave nine contributors a platform from which to discuss their experiences as part of a rapidly changing society - "from banjaxed to bonanza", as journalist John Waters aptly put it.

Waters's airy, amusing and provocative contribution suggested that we scrap spirituality and talk about happiness. He spoke of a generation of young people embracing a guilt-free materialism and suggested that the rest of us too should enjoy the national shopping spree. He even foresaw that when we cease to view the boom as temporary, we may find that churches are the new shopping centres rather than the current perception that shopping is the new religion.

A spiritual being on a human journey is how Fr Brian D'Arcy described his life in the priesthood. D'Arcy made a moving contribution on his struggles to remain in religious life over the last two decades amidst a slew of scandals, telling of his need to redefine his vocation in the light of the realisation that he too had been a victim of abuse. The church, he maintained, can never be forgiven for placing its reputation above the life of a child. He went further, saying he was looking forward to the death of this church and to the resurrection of a more compassionate institution.

We also found out that no citizen of Ireland Inc is complete without a mobile telephone. There are now, Luke Clancy told us in his engagingly high-tech contribution, more mobile phones on the island than there are people, with a staggering 96 per cent of Irish 12-year-olds now in possession of one. We have become, it would seem, an island of ambisexual, iPod-owning digital bloggers Podcasting to each other across acres of vanilla lattes. It is indeed a far cry from 1986, when Temple Bar was earmarked as a bus depot and you couldn't find a telephone north of the Liffey, let alone use it to take a photo of your girlfriend tripping over the cobblestones in her paisley-print Birkenstocks. My, how we've grown.

FIVE KILOS OF moss, 90 kilos of tuna, a truckload of 20-year-old potted Spanish lemon trees (minus the lemons, unfortunately), 300 chickens, 41 chefs, 116 waitresses, 1,000 courgettes and enough champagne to drown in - yep, you've guessed it, Vicky 'n' Dave are having a party.

Full Length and Fabulous: the Beckhams' World Cup Bash invited us mortal viewers to peek at the gods at play. Following on from Goldenballs: the Movie (or whatever last week's homage to England captain Beckham was called), Full Length and Fab allowed us peruse the Becks as they prepared to entertain about 500 celebrity guests at a glittering charity function in their fairytale Hertfordshire home, Beckingham Palace. Wheee! Well, actually, that's not quite true - the guests were housed in a humid marquee in the garden (it rained all day, copiously), which was decorated with hand-made butterflies ("Victoria has a great passion for butterflies," we were told by party organiser Peregrine, in tones usually reserved for dead monarchs). The marquee also housed a mirrored dancefloor ("hope they're all wearing their knickers," squealed butterfly Vicky).

Victoria, we learned, also has a passion for her tiny ankles, her Robert Cavalli dress and her borrowed Asprey diamonds."I'm a real girlie girl," she shared with us, hair extensions all a-flutter as, clutching her rocks, she delicately placed her size-six self in the back of a cavernous Rolls Royce outside the jeweller's (if I was her mother, I'd get her a booster seat). Fair play to Victoria, though - the charity queen and mother of three is getting very good at being Mrs benign Becks, having endured the trauma of her husband sleeping with (apparently, okay? Get that? I said apparently) someone with flesh (more of Mme Loos later). She has bounced back (painfully), taken some self-deprecation classes ("those clowns have more make-up on than me, and that's saying something") and, with the help of some heavy-hitting celebrity mates, is using her stilettos to tattoo a reputation for all-round sweetness on the forehead of anyone who'll keep still long enough to be indented.

It looked like a fun party: helipads, valet parking, Robbie Williams with bags under his eyes, the England squad propping up ambitious girls in designer dresses, sopping wet hacks in the hawthorn bushes and a staggeringly lucrative charity auction hosted by the ubiquitous Graham Norton. And then, of course, there was sunny David, dicky-bow languidly draped, looking like a one-man photo-shoot, who stood up to welcome his guests with his signature fluency, informing the tent full of the too-rich and the too-thin that he'd like to spank his wife for organising the party.

WHAT A SMALL world celebrity inhabits, revolving around the confines of the 26-inch LCD like hamsters on a plastic carousel. No sooner had X Factor judge Sharon Osbourne piled her frazzled daughter and catatonic husband into the back of the taxi after their night out round the Becks', than she was hanging an over-made-up and apparently pantie-less Rebecca Loos out to dry on the first night of X Factor: Battle of the Stars, in which yet another bunch of largely tuneless celebrities (including the duetting Loos and "love rat" James Hewitt) lined up to sing their way out of obscurity in front of a delirious studio audience, Osbourne's magisterial sidekicks Simon Cowell and Louis Walsh, and the millions who tuned in to watch.

Oh my giddy aunt, what a spat. Osbourne, mate of Victoria, who's the wife of David, who's the one-time recipient of personal assistance from Loos that got too personal (if you're following this I'm going to personally write and thank you), spat at Loos on the first night of the competition that if she wore a pair of knickers the next time she appeared on X Factor it might help to warm up her vocal cords.

Considering Osbourne had just told Hewitt that, as an ex- army man, he should be shot for his vocal technique, this piece of advice didn't seem too extreme. Loos, reality TV aficionado and publicist's dream, didn't, however, take it too well.

"I'm doing this for charity," she retorted, ponytail snapping. "Yeah, your own," Osbourne pithily observed, which isn't in fact too far from the truth, with each celebrity reportedly earning £25,000 (€36,500) for gracing our sets and a further £5,000 (€7,300) every time they survive the public vote to sing another day (while their respective charities make 10p every time you call the hotline to have them continue to trampoline on their larynxes).

But why fool ourselves that there is anything at all worthy about this concert; this is absolute LCD (as in lowest common denominator) entertainment. There is, after all, something mesmerically, shiveringly awful about watching two adults, famous for sleeping with other people's spouses, desperately grab at each other's bottoms in lewd and deeply unsexy stage fright while they wail Addicted to Love at each other.

THE SIDE-SPLITTING fraudulence continues over on Channel 4 with Big Brother's Big Brain, in which a "team of psychologists" wearing grown-up clothes analyse the housemates' behaviour. Given that the incarcerated occupants of formicaville are having their numbers topped up with even more incendiary playmates, there is most certainly a need for some monitoring.

Added to the mix this week were Sam, a gay man who lives his life as a straight woman, and a straight woman, Aisleyne, who looks like she's made of plastic and probably has a little knob on her back that you can twist to make her hair grow.

The experts, content with measuring the distance between the contestants' legs when they discuss each other in the diary room, seem to have decided to jettison any principles they may have embraced in their training and are obviously delighted to have found their very own cash cow. As the evictions mount and the peroxide heads roll, their private client list is doubtlessly soaring.