Blending Ingle

I had promised to stop giving out about Ireland's most pointless journalist, and I was doing well, really I was.

Then my attention was drawn to this new horror. No, not her girth. I mean the fact that Newstalk have given Roisin Ingle airtime outside of the wittering women's hour that is the Orla Barry show.

Fair enough, it's scheduled for during my nap between breakfast and the early cross-channel soccer game on a Saturday, so I haven't suffered having to actually listen to the show, mercifully.

But it was bad enough to read that preposterous biog that you just know she wrote herself, thinking it was witty and self-deprecating.

Share my pain, people. Welcome to the bottom of the Irish journalistic barrel:

Weekend Blend with Roisin Ingle is a lifestyle show that combines chat and fun, with a presenter who’s young and fresh and who doesn’t take herself too seriously.

Fresh? Like a melon that gives slightly when you squeeze, do they mean? And what the fuck's a 'lifestyle' show anyway?

'This week, we've got David Norris, Michael McDowell and the O'Hailpin hurlers around the table and they'll be discussing the difficulties of being gay, fascist and Fijian in today's Ireland.'

Lord only knows.

The show will feature a lively cookery slot with Ireland’s top chefs, with tips and advice listener participation.

You heard that right, folks. Live cooking on the radio! Because you wouldn't, y'know, want to actually see whatever this week's refugee from Guibauld's or Locke's was making or how he made it. Much better to fantasise about what it tastes like while Roisin wolfs it down.

A panel of fresh voices will chat about the week’s highlights and lowlights – it will be anything but dull.

I don't believe you. It will be worse than dull. It will be a swill of fictionalised inanity revolving around Roisin's fantasy life, just like her columns are.

We intend to step out of the studio a lot – meeting characters from all walks of life. We want to reinvent the art of story-telling by forming our very own writing club. Watch this space.

Jesus wept! Their own writing club. God only knows what madness will come of that. An assortment of suicide notes and counselling session transcripts masquerading as poems, and interminable yarns about misunderstood singletons in Dublin who meet Mr Right, in the stylee of Cecilia Ahern.

Only worse, if you could imagine it.

But there's more. There's the biog:

Four years ago, she began writing an increasingly popular column in The Irish Times Saturday Magazine with material culled mostly from her own life. She writes important-sounding stuff about relationships, Reality TV and her mother-in-law-in-waiting’s Incredible Bleach Obsession mainly to disguise the fact that she doesn’t have enough opinions on lofty matters of State to fill a page each week.

A little truth in advertising at last!

Last year she put all of the best columns together, wrote an introduction and called the resulting book ‘Pieces of Me’.

Got to get the plug in where you can. Before the publisher pulps all the copies, that is.

Roisin used to like lazy Saturdays but now much prefers getting up at 7am to prepare for her Saturday morning show on Newstalk. Honestly!

Sometimes it seems as if a flock of migrating birds would display more of a sense of individualism and creativity than the entire Irish meeja. It's like the Dail - once you're in, it doesn't matter how crap you are, how many mistakes you make or indeed if, like my other bete noire Eamon Dunphy, you show up to work drunk or cost your employer a fortune through being wrong.

Once you're in the circle, you've got a job for life.

Think back, those of you who can recall, to the times when Saturday morning radio was utterly essential listening in this country. When Dermot Morgan was the only man in Ireland brave enough to take on that total crook Charlie Haughey, and won every week.

A compare-and-contrast exercise of then and now could not be more illustrative of just how far we as a nation have fallen since those heady days, especially in terms of the quality of our media.