Television Heroes - Yes Minister/Yes Prime Minister

I know I've championed Yes Minister before, but I've decided to repeat myself, just as Ukrainian telly people plan to do with an updated remake, and just like our telly stations should be doing with old episodes. The supreme example of how to ridicule politics, with its lazy, vain politician Jim Hacker (Paul Eddington), and its devious, appearances-obsessed civil servant Sir Humphrey (Nigel Hawthorne), Yes Minister set the tone for great satire. Its scripts generally involved powerful people sitting around talking each other into knots of inaction (The Thick of It, even at its best, is just Yes Minister with hand-held cameras, walking down corridors, and curse words), and the writing team featured cynics from both the right (Sir Antony Jay) and the left (Jonathon Lynn) who lamented a democracy mired in bureaucracy, careerism, and spin. Does this sound familiar? Well, we've never really done politically satirical sitcoms in Ireland (Arthur Mathews' Val Falvey TD looks like it'll be more a surreal romp than a satire) so maybe we should look at remaking our own version. (Yes Taoiseach?)

Television villains - Consumer Content Supremacists

If you go to conferences about the internet and social media these days, someone in a sports coat will tell you that 20 hours of "consumer generated content" are uploaded onto YouTube every minute. He'll then insist that this doesn't bode well for the future of television. What he won't mention is that 19 hours and 55 minutes of that footage involves badly-shot video of dogs having sex, drunken teenagers shouting, blowhards giving unsolicited opinions about things that don't matter, and people falling over. For the most part (and there are noble exceptions) consumer-creators are not making The Sopranos; they're not even making Ear to the Ground. All that's really happening is that the mode of delivery is changing, and telly producers are no more threatened by amateur content than novelists are by copy-book scrawls. Once the networks get the hang of delivering programmes online (and they're getting there), I can't see a world where people will want to watch Snuggles the Dog humping a cuddly toy more than they want to watch The West Wing.