Irish TV has a long and storied history of being shite.

For such an educated and intelligent population, our TV output is more embarrassing than Twink after a couple of vodkas. Anyone over the age of 18 will have grown up with tedious cretins like Twink, Pat Kenny, Daniel O’Donnell and Bibi Baskin as mainstays of the country’s most watched channel. Now, in 2006, they’ve either been replaced or joined by equally tedious cretins like Ryan Tubridy, Bláthnaid Ní Chofaigh, Anna Nolan and Derek Mooney. All, without exception, dull thirty-somethings acting like dull 50-somethings.

Want a job in RTE? No problem. Just act twice your age, get excited by anything involving a prize and develop an interest in lounge music.

“If a show can’t be aimed at 50-year-old women, it’s not worth doing.”

There’s almost certainly a placard on the RTE1 programme controller’s desk with the above motto on it.

Recipes, beauty tips, fashion, quiz shows and mindless celebrity tidbits. The antithesis of good television and the lifeblood of RTE1. In a company oblivious to the real world, premature ageing and unadulterated blandness are the only things considered beautiful in RTE. The Granny Channel strikes again.

But sometimes… just sometimes… an idea comes along that blows everything else out of the water and reveals muppets and fakers for exactly what they are. Compare the following four chat show moments:

• Pat Kenny asking Bibi Baskin what she’s been up to in the last ten years.
• Ryan Tubridy asking Rachel Allen if she was good at Home Economics in school.
• Anna Nolan asking Derek Mooney what’s the best thing about presenting You’re A Star.
• Podge and Rodge asking Foster and Allen how they’ve gotten away with playing such shite music for so long.

All four really did happen. And we know which one we’d rather watch.

Three horrible moments of plastic TV drivel and one moment of something funny and real. RTE have called The Podge and Rodge Show “a phenomenon” because its ratings are over 400,000 per show despite a near-graveyard time slot. It might well be a phenomenon in RTE terms but it shouldn’t be.

After years of sycophancy and pandering to people who don’t even like television, it’s only logical that a show that does the complete opposite would be a huge success. The Podge and Rodge Show isn’t successful because of huge levels of originality or creativity. It’s successful because it’s a show that’s completely in touch with the people. It’s utterly genuine and totally honest. It’s a slap in the face to the dinosaurs who give us Tubridy and The Afternoon Show.

If it achieves nothing else, The Podge and Rodge Show has, at the very least, been a startling wake-up call for Irish TV. Proof that we can do better than bland, soulless programmes, hosted by humourless corporate puppets. And thanks to a couple of actual puppets, Irish TV might just have a very interesting future.

Amazing what happens when you take a break from granny-centric programming.

Check out the always excellent TViscrying.com for more good Irish TV critique and cartoons.