Screen actress Brit Ekland walked onto the set of the Kelly Show and gasped. "Are there any women here?" The camera panned around the audience and we viewed the chat show equivalent of a DUP assembly meeting.

They weren't all there to ogle at the famous Swede. They'd come to light candles at the famous feet of Bestie.

Brit collected big name male trophies such as Rod Stewart and Peter Sellers in the same way George Best used to do women.

We never found out if Best ever crossed the path of Ekland on his well documented plunge into the world beauty market. But hey, this was about homage.

Kelly was one of those shows that cantered along on guffaws and back slaps and awe-inspiring deeds of skill on the football pitch, of stories about a man who lived his life like a Shakespearian tragedy. Greatness reduced to almost death by just one fatal flaw.

Kelly was a tribute, which in football terms means that you pack the studio with as many minor celebrities as possible willing to say the most embarrassing things imaginable on camera. Adrian Logan, Malcolm Brodie and Jackie Fullerton obliged.

There were stories of best beating Scotland on his own and of jersey's he'd given to sick kids in hospitals. One of the former kids was in the audience and arrived with a Northern Ireland shirt still bearing the turf scuffs of Windsor park.

"It's never been washed," said the now healthy adult.

"Didn't need to be. I never sweated," quipped Best.

Ekland was joined in the studio by fellow east Belfast giant and retiring troubadour Van Morrison, who, Kelly assured us more than once, agreed to do the show at the drop of a hat as soon as they told him the central theme would be the former Man United great.

Best sat lean and healthy looking beside his young wife Alex, who could have been Ekland 20 years ago.

Best sparkled conversationally in that anecdotal, the-greatest-footballer-tortured-genius sort of way. Best has never been a believer of less is sometimes more. But you know what? The audience didn't want modesty.

They wanted Best nutmegging Pele; they wanted him hopping out of his E-Type and back heeling in a lob from the half way line; they wanted stories of hat-tricks and red cards and how Matt Busby bent the rules for his world beater. They wanted self parody from the prodigy. And that's what they got.

Best used to play the way he now tells stories. Morrison hardly ever speaks but he plays music as Best once did football. Morrison has dipped his toe into the beauty queen market. Best, it appears can never stop.

But it wasn't all laughs.

"How do you replace the buzz?" asked motorcyclist Robert Dunlop, whose legendary brother Joey was killed this year and who also suffered near fatal injuries several years ago at the Isle of Man TT.

The question eerily came across as though Dunlop himself was looking for answers.

His brother could not stop and died as a result and Robert, despite serious injuries, is still racing between the hedges. Best had no answer.

"I've been doing it seriously for 25 years," he said of drinking.

"I've had one slip since I've started (coming off booze) . . . in February and I was ill . . . a few glasses of champagne. I've new drugs from the US now and the actual craving has gone away."

Removed from London because of his illness, he has recently bought a house in the Ards peninsula. There are less temptations, it seems, on the eastern Irish seaboard.

The fine line between temptation and stimulation, however, was never addressed.

"It (the liver) was just about gone, it's still not right," said Alex.

"George had a yellow face, yellow eyes. It was serious."

And they breezily believed her in a way that suggested that they didn't really believe that Best would ever die.

It was death as a subject for light chat show entertainment.

Ekland arrived with a broken leg, Best with a broken liver. Ekland was in a panto, Best playing the bleachers like a theatre, melting another audience with the longest running story in town.

It was one of those nights. Celebrity names and celebrity lives with Kelly's relentlessly jovial manner keeping the thing bubbling along, startling nothing along the way.

We know that rugby league tried to sell itself in Ireland with three World Cup matches staged in Windsor Park, Belfast and Tolka Park, Dublin.

On Saturday Ireland faced England in the quarter-finals of the competition at Headingly.

No proof needed there that the game flourishes as clubmates faced each other under radically different banners than usual.

Curiously the Irish rugby league side, who made a dignified exit, have been forced to argue their Irishness for the past three weeks in a way that Irish soccer players or rugby union players have never had to do.

If Ray Houghton heads in a goal against England, that's green enough. If Dion O'Cuinnegain captains a Six Nations Irish team in Twickenham, his South African accent softens to our ears.

The irony is that many of the Irish rugby league players could have played for England and made more out of the World Cup than they have done with Ireland while many former Irish soccer players took up the passport because they wouldn't have gotten on the English team.

Being Irish, it seems, is rather hard to define as Irish captain Terry O'Connor now understands.