TELEVISION: Never send a pro to do an amateur's job

From German cowboys on horseback to Finnish Orcs stealing the show, Dermot Bolger wonders at the bizarre circus that was this year's Eurovision song contestWhat would you say to a man in a well-cut suit on one knee in the middle of a frenetic aerobics class? I suppose you'd say, Brian Kennedy, one day the memory of this will pass. Back in an era of economic deprivation, Ireland won the Eurovision with such bankrupt-threatening regularity that Father Ted used a skit where we deliberately sent two amateurs into a professional arena to ensure that we could not win it again. This year we reversed the joke by sending a competent professional into an amateur arena to make sure we didn't win. Not that we had any hope – our previous successes were kickstarted by a patronising feel-good bias towards Ireland from prosperous neighbours in a smaller Europe. Irish charm carries little weight in Belarus, Ukraine or the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia.    

The 51st Eurovision Song Contest (RTÉ1 & BBC1, Saturday, 8pm) is like a mad elderly relation that we cannot stop inviting to family occasions. This year it was captured by the Orc vote, proving that Tolkien's monsters from Middle Earth haven't gone away. The German votes were announced by a cowboy on horseback; the gay Dutch announcer tried to proposition the male compere, suggesting that his favourite number might lurk somewhere between 68 and 70; and Poland's votes were announced by a newscaster who appeared about to proclaim the end of the world. RTÉ cannot stop showing it but, in an effort to extract some benefit, it might reclassify it from entertainment to educational – school children can at least learn about the physical geography and political history of Eastern Europe by simply watching the voting process.

Some novelist will eventually concoct a theory that the Eurovision is a coded message first devised by Leonardo Da Vinci in 1487 to unify a Europe ruled by Orcs and women whose skirts won't stay on, but until then we must endure the more bizarre hypothesis put forward by Dan Brown. Both The Da Vinci Detective (Channel 4, Saturday, 7pm) and The Culture Show (BBC2, Saturday 8.10pm) set out to rescue Leonardo da Vinci's reputation from Brown's conspiratorial clutches. In The Da Vinci Detective, art expert Dr Maurizio Seracini probed the real mysteries behind many of Da Vinci's masterpieces, while The Culture Show scrutinised the crazy conspiracy theories that formed a backdrop to Brown's book. My favourite is the notion that the background to his painting, The Virgin on the Rocks, actually represents 20-foot stone penises, which would prove, if nothing else, that Da Vinci wasn't above a bit of boastful male exaggeration. Fiction is fiction and fair play to any author who can make a living, but the terrifying thing about The Da Vinci Code is that alarming numbers of people take it seriously. The good news – if you're Finnish – is that the same people believe Orcs represent the future of music in Europe.

It was far from Orcs that the characters in Testing Time, Teddy Boy (RTE 2, Saturday, midnight) were reared. This short film, directed by Kevin McCann and co-written by McCann and Roozbeh Rashidi, was an unrepentant and unremitting piece of Cavan bleakness, homing in on a deliberately repellent, dour and suicidal farmer, Teddy Monday (played by Noel McGovern) as he emotionally tortures his family, starves his bloodhound and struggles to hold his bitter existence together. The integrity of the production was never in doubt, nor was the authenticity of the physical and mental desolation. But it seemed familiar territory and in the end this viewer would have liked it to deliver that bit more light and dark to make it truly memorable.