No joy in the hood

Channel 4 churned out yet another top 100: this time it was funny moments. Neither those, nor Des Bishop's final Joy in the Hood, were particularly funny, to the disappointment of Dermot Bolger

Who says there is no such thing as a bad review? Try telling that to 1980s pop sensations The Thrashing Doves, whose career was ended not by someone damning their limitations but by a guest critic on a televised youth culture pop show praising their sense of rhythm and style, their catchy lyrics and general music excellence. Unfortunately for them this devastating verdict – which meant that a bright future awaited in the local job centre – was delivered by a guest critic who happened to be the then British prime minister Margaret Thatcher.

With an eye on the youth vote in a forthcoming election, Thatcher even tried to sway her body in time to the beat. This presented the viewing public with the gravity-defying spectacle of every body part moving except for her heavily-lacquered hair which remained stiffly stationary, showing – to paraphrase a later famous remark – that it was not for turning.

While undoubtedly a seminal moment for anorak students of forgotten 1980s pop, this hardly seems to me to rank among the funniest one hundred televised moments of all time, but then again very few of the moments in 100 Greatest Funny Moments (Channel 4, Sunday 9pm) did. There must be an entire compilation department within Channel 4, possibly funded under some EU recycling directive, which peers into the same small rattlebag of old clips every few months – rather like chefs in a greasy café peer into indistinguishable pots of soup – and ask "what will we call it this time."

So once again we have Jerry Springer interviewing a man who cut off his own penis, bimbo weathercasters having fits of the giggles and the diminutive (vertically) Sam Fox unable to read the words on the telecaster at the 1989 Brit Awards. DIY addicts who have done everything else around the house and are upset about missing the man who cut off his own penis needn't worry however. He hasn't got the sack and will be appearing to you on a compilation show on Channel 4 very shortly.

Clips of bimbo weathercasters were – to paraphrase Mr Joyce this time – general across Ireland on Saturday night with It Shouldn't Happen to a TV Weather Forecaster (UTV 11.35pm) which was obviously complied by a Real or Continuity splinter faction from Channel 4's compilation team. In Bernard Farrell's early play Canaries (set on the Canary Islands, which will probably be bombed in George Bush's forthcoming war against bird flu) one central character pretends to be a meteorologist in the belief that this is the profession which mesmerises women most. I am old enough to recall a time when an orthodox weather forecast consisted of Gerard Fleming in a woollen jumper winking, but Saturday's programme opened up a world of floating weather-maps and collapsing sets where a cyclone moving in from the South West was likely to turn out to be a streaker with an uncanny resemblance to Sam Fox. All I can say is that the immaculately clad Charles Mitchell would have refused to smile at any of it.

I'm not sure if he or anyone else would have found much to smile at in the closing programme of Des Bishop: Joy in the Hood (RTÉ 2, Sunday 9pm). This limped to a halt in St Eugene's Parish Hall in Derry with some of the least funny material of the series which this time did not escape the boundaries of its deliberate parochialism. Previous routines mined from Ballymun and Limerick were rooted in the mental and physical divisions of disadvantaged areas too, but possessed a freedom to equally insult all. Not all the stuff was funny, much of it relied too heavily on coatings of unearned vulgarity as a war-paint to hide its limitations behind. But it was always raw. One of the fascinating things about 30 years of conflict in Northern Ireland (and there has been little to fascinate amid that tedium) was the comparative absence of jokes. Because while you can laugh away even the most shocking once-off events with a savage punch-line, no punch-line can shift inertia.

The local comedians did their best, tip-toeing carefully around any possibly of being viewed as sectarian, but ironically the funniest lines came from a rather downcast Des Bishop who confessed after the experience, "I still feel like a tourist in Derry... I don't feel like part of the community in any way."

The humour came in the sudden awful realisation – and I speak here as a working class Dubliner – that he must have come away from the meaner streets of Limerick, Cork, Ballymun or Tuam with the mistaken impression that he – or any other outsider parachuting in – could ever be instantly accepted as part of those communities or viewed as anything other than a well-meaning tourist on safari. I wish him well in whatever next innovative television venture he embarks on.