Like the Wall Street crash of 1929, the collapse was sudden, steep and ugly. There was no soft landing. The artificially inflated bubble that is Eddie Hobbs’s television reputation burst into vaporous smithereens before our eyes. For the countless naive souls who’d invested so much trust in his grossly overvalued stock, a great depression must surely follow.
The collapse of the Hobbs bull market was triggered by the opening instalment of 30 Things to Do with Your SSIA (RTE1, Mon), an astoundingly cheap, smug and patronising production that desperately wanted to be funny but was never anything but laughable. By show’s end, Ireland’s best-known pedlar of stand-up financial advice looked as amusing and helpful as a bounced pay cheque.
With last year’s Rip Off Republic, his breakthrough polemic about the banditry prevalent in our booming economy, Hobbs became an accidental national hero, revered by housewives and reviled by cabinet ministers. The new three-part series is a jaded attempt to repeat this feat, offering an only slightly reheated blend of would-be satirical japery and ostensibly rigorous economic analysis.
Using a countdown format, Hobbs presents 30 suggestions for maximising the benefits now accruing to many citizens from the government’s subsidised savings scheme. Along the way he reiterates his familiar warnings about the dangers of over-hyped fads, such as soft credit, timeshare apartments and the supposedly fail-safe investment of east European property.
By revisiting so many of his well-worn themes, Hobbs allows us to see through the threadbare bottom of his tiny bag of tricks. The self-styled little guy with a tight grip on his wallet has become an insufferable bighead with a loose grip on reality. Those looking for a genuinely fail-safe investment should buy shares in Hobbs at market value and then sell them on at his estimation of their worth.
The biggest delusion under which he labours is the belief that he’s a comedian. Throughout Monday’s programme he delivered his script in a jocose parody of his natural Cork accent, his voice infused with a ho-ho-ho as though he were firing off devastating wisecracks with the relentlessness of a belt-fed mortar. His jokes, however, were uniformly atrocious. Not just punch lines, most of his gags lacked reference points. “Elvis didn’t take out an SSIA, so why should I?” he quipped, apropos of, eh, nothing.
Even more cringe-inducing, however, were the candid camera stunts in which he purportedly attempted to highlight the public’s financial credulity. Fitted with an acrylic wig and buck teeth, he took to the streets to stage some of the lamest and most pointless hoaxes yet seen on television. Once again the writing was weak and frequently lay down to take a rest.
Hobbs knows about what he cares about. He can illuminate the intricacies of mortgage repayments like nobody else on television. His vox pops, in which he talked about money in his real voice, revealed an often quick-witted character. But he is not a showman. By trying too hard to sell a botched script, the booming economist came over as terrifyingly dull, shrill and repetitive. If he is to rebuild his broadcasting career after this fiasco, he should realise that in order to go on saying the same thing, one must learn how to say it differently.
Change of any kind is clearly unwelcome in Killinaskully (RTE1, Sun), the knick-knack, Paddywhack sitcom that returns for a new season. Created primarily as a showreel for the burlesque comedian Pat Shortt — the star, producer and co-writer of the show with Mike Finn — Killinaskully has achieved remarkable popularity, primarily among people who evidently love cartoons but believe the animated variety are far too gritty and complex.
Criticism of the series as a hospice for feeble gags and moribund stereotypes is routinely dismissed by its perpetrators as toffee-nosed cosmopolitan condescension — as though the demand for well-written comedy was somehow a conspiracy of the east coast liberal elite.
If the show truly is, as its apologists claim, an organic expression of the real humour of “hidden Ireland”, it would surely have developed a distinctive, convincing personality by now. In truth, however, the programme’s depiction of a modern Irish village is derived largely from imported and outdated sitcoms. Its setting could easily be mistaken for the wartime France of ’Allo ’Allo or the conservative provincial England of The Vicar of Dibley.
Killinaskully is not devoid of laughs. But you could do yourself a mischief holding your breath until the next gag happened along. The series is among Irish television’s most tightly formatted entertainment packages. The homely, hokey nature of the production is not proof of its authenticity; on the contrary, it’s the very essence of a slickly streamlined brand.
Sunday’s instalment revolved around the arrival in the village of community broadcasting. Predictably, almost every tired old yarn about Oirish radio hams was dutifully rehearsed, including the one about the DJ who reads out a congratulatory request for an elderly lady he believes is “seriously 111” but who turns out to be seriously ill. Cue the creak of coarse country braces as Ireland’s rural populace bend double with helpless mirth.
Once you’ve seen one episode of Killinaskully, you really have seen them all. No character, plot line or quip ever springs free from the clichéd script to offer an element of surprise. Despite the programme’s success, and the growing confidence of cast and crew, it still retains the aura of a school drama production designed principally to impress the participants and their adoring families.
There was a similar air to the Dail proceedings surrounding Bertie Ahern’s much-anticipated act of public contrition that was broadcast live on Tuesday afternoon (RTE1). For the second time in a fortnight, a televised confrontation with the taoiseach was billed as both water-cooler entertainment and watershed politics.
Unlike the grand theatre of his Six One interview, however, Tuesday’s showdown was bad panto. The peevish bluster of Ahern and his opposition interlocutors ensured the occasion soon descended into knockabout farce.
The accused insisted he had done nothing wrong and then apologised for doing it. His accusers, meanwhile, contended there were still questions to answer, but waffled instead of asking them.
Perhaps Killinaskully is not so far removed from reality, after all.
