What has happened to Comical Ali? Is he dead? Has he retired to run a discreet guest house in Eastbourne? Or has he opened up as an auctioneer in Ireland? Probably the latter.
Certainly, he would feel perfectly at home here. We have grown used in recent years to seeing estate agents' guide prices being as reliable as Comical Ali observing the arrival of US tanks in the centre of Baghdad and jubilantly declaring that they had fallen into Saddam's cunning trap. We know when an estate agent cheerfully promises that the guide price for the corrugated lean-to in the Dunsink tip-head is three conkers, a length of string, a dead lizard, three furry gobstoppers and an old shilling bit, that it will almost certainly go for the price of two acres of downtown Kuwait City.
No one is surprised any more by this pathological unrelatedness: it is as if in auction rooms one enters a black-hole force-field where nothing is as it was when one entered it. Polar bears grow leaves and sprout pineapples; cactuses develop fins and start talking Finnish; Shinners tearfully warble God Save the Queen; Jacques Chirac dissolves the Académie française and orders the people of France to speak English.
And this is fine - part of the rich, red tapestry of auctioneering life. But what is a little more surreal is what happens when a sale doesn't occur, even though the guide price has been reached and exceeded. Take a property in Meath last week: guide price, €520,000. At auction, the bidding went up to €550,000. At which point the house was withdrawn from the market and not sold, even though the seller was €30,000 better than the officially "expected" price.
In Lansdowne Road, a house had a guide price of €1.7 million. It was withdrawn at auction and is now for sale at €2.55 million. In Cornmarket, a commercial property had a guide price of €2.7 million. The bidding reached €3.2 million, at which point the property was withdrawn, and later sold at a far higher price.
And finally, a house in Castleknock village had a guide price of €1.4 million, and the bidding reached €2.15 million - that is, more than €700,000 above the guide price. Yet even then the sale didn't go through: the house was withdrawn from the market, and sold at a still higher price.
This is Comical Ali-land, where words and promises have no meaning, where a bid 50 per cent higher than the "guide price" will still not secure the property.
So what does "auction" mean in these circumstances? What value may we attach to this risible term "guide price", other than its power to lure a few poor dupes into the auction room? And where are auctioneers finding such amiable fools? There is a limit to the number of simpletons you can thaw out from Ice Age permafrost in Siberia. It seems that soon they will be the only ones who don't know that in Ireland the guide price at auction is to the final selling price what the price of potatoes on Moore Street is to the Andromeda Nebula.
It's not as if these little auction-room excursions are cost-free to the disappointed highest bidder. You can only make a bid at auction if your solicitor is present; and you might just have heard rumour of this, but solicitors like to be paid for their time too, the greedy dogs.
What's more, a bank or a building society will usually give a mortgage to buy a property only if it has been professionally surveyed; and this the various bidders will have had to pay for as well.
In Britain, the vendor is responsible for supplying the survey, which is then binding in law. In this country, however, each possible bidder has to get their own survey, and pay for it - and, indeed, a single surveyor might well be paid separately by each of several different potential buyers for the one survey of the same building, each not knowing of the others' existence.
And it is all in vain. The engineers are paid for their reports, sometimes several times over for the single visit. The lawyers are paid to turn up at the auction. The auction occurs. The "guide price" is exceeded handsomely - by as much as 50 per cent in the Castleknock case above - yet no sale occurs. And all who bid, including the highest bidder, are left with two bills to pay but nothing to show for an afternoon's heart-stopping bidding, which should logically and morally have resulted in a sale.
It is all obviously wrong. Moreover, it is easy and simple to change. If the guide price became a legally binding reserve, this sort of nonsense would be ended at a stroke. But it is not ended. And presumably, this outrageous injustice is tolerated because too many TDs believe that one day too they might be the beneficiaries of auctions rampaging beyond the "guide-price" to the oil fields of Saudi Arabia far beyond. So nothing changes.
This is peasant fantasising at its most depraved: the Hospital Sweepstake-National Lottery culture brought to the housing market, in which homes are seen as a means of securing huge tax-free jackpots. A huge and often parasitical service industry has come into existence to run the three-card trick of the bogus auction, in which unfortunate fools pay to participate; and the only guaranteed winners are the sellers and those who are paid to be there.
It is Comical Ali-land; and it stinks.