A new Ireland

Druid Synge runs some marathon theatre on the Aran Islands, chefs battle it out for the Masterchef crown and the Irish public's first foray into stocks and shares goes a bit wrong

Even as an earnest young rebel infused with a love of the abstractions of advanced mathematics and Mother Ireland, Eamon de Valera gave a pretty clear clue during the Easter Rising about the type of future state he craved. Alone of all the leaders in charge of positions, he banned women from his garrison. Women had their place, and his later constitution made sure that they knew it. I don't know if he ever had nightmares about what life would be like if these fierce creatures were not controlled, but if he did then quite possibly the strong, uncontrollable women he imagined belonged to JM Synge's plays.

It is little wonder that his fellow Sinn Féin members rioted during Playboy, because Synge's women are frighteningly flesh and blood and they never feel stronger than when brought to life under Garry Hynes's direction. Art Lives: Might Talk – A Journey with DruidSynge (RTÉ 1, 10.15pm, Tuesday) charted Hynes's ambitious plan to stage a tour of all six of his works. It opened with a relaxed field trip by cast and crew to the Aran Islands where so much of Synge's work was inspired. That was basically the last time we saw anybody relax for the next hour. Filming in a cramped Galway space, this intimate documentary gave a great sense of the intensely pressured world of the rehearsal room where the meter is constantly ticking, and where everyone is aware of time running out.

The documentary was rather flat however until we reached the opening night of all six plays, where it superbly intercut between the action on stage and the tension and tight turn-arounds backstage. It gave a sense of the dynamics of a theatre production, the sheer nerves in advance and sheer exhilaration afterwards.

You might think it difficult for anything to match the nail-biting tension of six plays opening at the one time, but that would only be if you never saw three would-be chefs competing in the same kitchen. Masterchef Goes Large (BBC 2, 6.30pm, weekdays) is a sort of culinary Pop Idol, but with braver judges – very few Britney Spears wanabees carry meat cleavers as part of their everyday utensils. With a musical score straight out of a suspense thriller and the sort of hushed commentary you would expect for open heart surgery, it keeps viewers on the edge of their seats wondering "if Ken's poached halibut in milk can keep him in it" or if Kim's "fusion food" has blown it. As an after-dinner spectator sport there is nothing quite as relaxing as watching somebody else's cooking being criticised, and people take their dismissals with exceptionally good grace. I do notice one of the judges is starting to limp, however – it could be gout brought on from too much rich food, but then again it might be a few pins stuck in the leg of his photograph, hanging in the kitchen of some disappointed contestant.

I doubt if such voodoo works however – otherwise the entire board of directors who oversaw the scandalous fiasco of the Eircom floatation would have lost all power in their limbs long before now. The police might have had some difficulty drawing up a list of suspects as half a million Irish people all shared a similar motive. A new series of Scannal kicked off with Eircom – Did you get Burned (RTÉ 1, Monday, 7.30pm) and a vast proportion of the nation gave a multiple rendition of Molly Bloom's famous closing word. Not everybody got burnt of course, and among the lucky ones were a surprising number of Eircom directors who turned out to have none or virtually no shares. Dick Spring, for example, claimed that he simply didn't have the money to buy any, but a lack of money didn't stop most Irish people as every bank and financial institution bent over backwards to get into the feeding trough by offering loans.

I don't wish to pry into the viewing habits of our politicians, but one suspects that Mary O'Rourke went for a bracing walk somewhere quiet at 7.30pm on Monday because pictures of her tolling the bell in the New York stock exchange to launch the floatation are unlikely to feature on her Christmas cards. The fiasco only occurred in 1999 but it already seems like another more innocent world where the nation was whipped up into a frenzy of share buying, with ordinary people bombarded with advertisements asking "Are you Joining In?"; a national crusade to make us buy what we already owned. Over the previous decade, Irish telecommunications had been dragged into the modern world and were becoming the envy of many countries – now we lag towards the bottom of the European list for broadband rollout and collectively claim that we will never be fooled again. But that's what we always say, isn't it?