An irritating champion

Eddie Hobbs is, by popular acclaim, the consumer's champion. He is a good-guy who is on our side. Every assertion that he makes on Rip Off Republic (RTÉ 1, Mondays, 9.30pm) has the ring of inescapable truth. As a nation, we are being fleeced and somebody should say it. So why then is Rip Off Republic among the most annoying pieces of television I've seen this year?

Rip Off Republic is filmed before a live audience in the Helix Theatre – where everything is filmed these days. In one of his early novels, Ian McEwan has a character watching daytime television with his child. He begins to marvel at the similarity between children's shows and the afternoon live audience shows that follow: the adult audiences in the studio are as desperate to please the presenters – and as willing to unquestioningly do the most inane tasks in the eager hope of being praised – as the toddlers in any playgroup.

The format of Rip Off Republic has that same cloying and rather smug relationship between the audience and Eddie Hobbs, who feeds them facts from the stage.

The facts are incredibly valid. In an American Express survey of holiday destinations, Ireland proved the second most expensive. A roll of camera film that costs €6.17 in Ireland costs €1 in South Africa. The same bottle of Factor 15 Sun lotion that costs €15 here costs €1.69 in South Africa. The greater Dublin area has 35 per cent of the population but only 9 per cent of pub licenses. If they were evenly divided per head of population, Dublin should have 3,400 licenses, but it only has 818.

Jackie Healy Ray was talking shite when he said that the smoking ban in pubs, "cannot be operated and that's the hard fact of the matter". Spokespeople for the licensed trade talk shite when claiming that more licenses will lead automatically to increased drunkenness – as was seen from Hobbs' visit to Athy, which has the highest number of pubs per head of population and no reputation for constantly partying like the world was going to end.

All these facts are true, but many are so blindingly self-evident and widely-known that there is something patronising about Hobbs' stage delivery of awkward laugh lines like "a donkey with a glass eye up his bum could see there was a problem with this system" or his baby-talk references to "Mama Harney" looking after us.

His Michael Moore-esque visit to Athy to check for drunkenness among morning shoppers was genuinely funny and, by fluke, one of these he stopped was a nun who works in rehabilitation with alcoholics. Like him, she dismissed the notion that more pubs automatically lead to more drunkenness in a community. But her stark observation that the level of alcoholic abuse in a community was a register of the level of pain within that community stood out for being one of the few comments on the show that was not made for effect in a tone of knowing self-righteousness to make an audience laugh. It was the simple truth – and the simple truth is often most effectively told in a simple way.

A simple observation about the success of Dublin's Temple Bar is that pioneering artists like Brendan Forman, who first began to establish it as an alternative quarter, can now not afford to live there. It is nice however to think that many of the writers who helped to make Kinsale an alternative and, in time, very fashionable hub outside Cork are still living in the area.

pOn Wednesday, Derek Davis continued his examination of life in this now trendy village in Kinsale Tales (RTÉ 1, 7.30pm). It's a programme that gives the impression that although Kinsale is interesting, it is not quite as special or as interesting as it likes to think that it is. In fact, despite the best efforts of Davis, not much really happens in Kinsale. Last week an American who runs a trinket shop there told of putting her mother's ashes in a hanging basket outside the shop and how her mother's ashes keep getting stolen. However she seemed to find the whole episode far more hilarious than I suspect many of the viewing public did: their interest and sympathy may have begun to wane around the third time the hanging basket was stolen.

Also in Kinsale, a "customer from hell" sent back his main dish to a chef in one restaurant several times, but despite the programme's hints that the chef was about to explode into a tantrum of fury, he merely sounded annoyed. Kinsale Tales is nicely-made, relaxing summer fare, but the charm of the Cork bourgeoisie does wear off and personally (at the risk of being in a minority of one), for true tantrums and passion I'd sooner watch six weeks about the life of Cobh Ramblers.