Big Brother, the Bible and the boom

Channel 4's trickery fails to impress, while RTÉ's retrospective on Ireland's economic boom is a timely revisit of old ground. By Dermot Bolger

If Big Brother (Channel 4, all nights, 9pm) is the ultimate ship of fools drifting rudderlessly across the waves, then there is an ever-growing flotilla of small craft chugging along in its wake on Big Brother's Big Mouth (Channel 4, most nights, around midnight) where the preening Russell Brand must realise that his comic gifts are about as sharp as Shirley Temple Bar's are when presenting Telly Bingo.

However, for genuine inanity and deliberately grating, smart-assed presentation, Tricks from the Bible (Channel 4, Friday, 11.05pm) takes some beating. It featured Ant and Dec-style whiz-kids Barry Jones and Stuart MacLeod piss-taking their way through various re-enactments of Bible scenes.

Their magic was fine, if unexceptional compared to the various television magicians who regularly flit across our screens. All magic essentially is a stunt and you need a special stunt to make yourself stand out. Theirs was to take the piss out of stupid Christians. This is hardly brave or, in contemporary Britain, original. If Channel 4 wanted to be brave and innovative it might try taking the piss out of some other religions, but, as this is hardly likely, it was a case of mocking the usual suspects.

Not that recreating biblical fables, like Lot's wife being turned into salt, is blasphemous or offensive in itself. But as this relatively mundane trick would make for dull viewing, they wheeled out some practising Christian first to read a bit of scripture before taking the piss.

The show's climax involved getting two girls to sit down at a dinner table from which plagues of frogs, flies and locusts were unleashed into the confined space as the terrified girls screamed and begged for them to stop. Presumably the producers figured they might as well also appeal to that section of the viewing public who get a voyeuristic buzz from seeing goodlooking girls scream.

Barry and Stuart's tricks seemed positively amateurish compared to the extraordinary stunt of keeping an economy moving relentless forward when two-thirds of all the jobs for men are now created in the construction business and (with the tax yielded from construction) two-thirds of all the jobs created for women are in the public service. RTÉ's loose series of programmes, under the title The Time of Our Lives?, dates the start of the economic revival to 1986, which is a handy 20-year starting point for a retrospective look at what has changed.

It could be argued that no navel has already been so gazed at, but the changes are so remarkable that the tearful scenes at Knock Airport in George Lee's thoughtful Boom (RTÉ 1, Thursday, 10.30pm) really felt like they belonged to another country. However, it was a country that might not have felt as distant in Donegal where manufacturing jobs are quickly disappearing as we move from an economy that made things to an economy that builds things on borrowed credit.

Little that Lee said was new, but his analysis was pertinent and timely in an era where if we were choc-ices we'd eat ourselves and where we are currently €70,000 in debt for every man, woman and child.

However, just in case we get too caught up in the present, The Irish Tenors and Friends (pictured) has a strong sense of just what television felt like 20 years ago. Viewers with pacemakers may rest assured that they will never be safer.

? More Nationwide (RTÉ1, Wednesday 21 June) features Dermot Bolger's return to the locations in Donegal that inspired his recent novel, The Family on Paradise Pier