Poison Pens 3: Speaking with forked tongues

So, you're an Irish tabloid editor and Grainne Seoige has finally managed to have that fella removed from her nice RTE couch and replaced with her own sister.

You run the only evening national paper in the country, so you're guaranteed to have the first review of their new show.

But if it's bad, and you slam it, you'll never get access to either of the photogenic, units-selling sisters again. And if it's bad and you don't slam it, then the readers will see through your vapid puffing of poo.

So, like the RTE producers who gambled on the sister act, you hope and pray it works.

Then it doesn't. It's a car crash, unwatchably bad. How do you review it?

Well, if you're the Evening Herald, you pan it and puff it all at the same time! Genius!

Front page today bills their TV critic Pat Stacey's review inside on page three. And Pat pulls no punches - "one great, big, private joke", "the Seoige sisters absolutely drip with smugness", "like being smothered with a pink blanket at a pyjama party", "a ramshackle mess", "catastrophically bad."

Well, that's the end of the Evening Herald running any 'exclusives' about the Seoige sisters for the next century or so, right?

Wrong. Because thirty pages in is where the Evening Herald destroys its own (admittedly greatly diminished) integrity by hedging the bet.

Their 'columnist' Sinead Ryan is one you can always rely on for vapid girly frothiness. There's not a subject on Earth she can't trivialise with her shallow insights.

And of course, she's got an opinion on the Seoiges that she just has to share with us - "super, sassy and sexy", "a winner", "fab combination", deserving of a "prime time Friday or Saturday night slot."

So, what is the casual reader, who missed the Seoige show, to make of the Evening Herald's reviews?

Is the show catastrophically bad or a fab combination? Is it like being smothered with a pink blanket or deserving a prime time slot? Is it somehow both, in the self-contradictory world of the Evening Herald?

And is the Evening Herald a newspaper with opinions and reviews that can be trusted, or is it a self-contradictory bag of shite?

We're all experts now

I've been watching some Irish television.

Yes, the weather really has been that bad.

On Monday, I caught the blogosphere's art guru Sinead Gleeson on the Seoige and O'Shea show. That's the one on in the afternoon, where flustered guests try not to stare too hard at Grainne's legs and bosoms (see above), while Joe O'Shea stutters at them.

Sinead was on as an expert guest, but she wasn't talking about Ireland's arts scene. No, she was on to discuss how people in Ireland today have so little idea of geography that they'd be lucky to find Tallaght if there weren't big signs on the M50 carpark to tell them.

No offence, Sinead (who, for those who missed it, is surprisingly foxy for an internet geek and art wonk), but when did you become (as billed) a 'social commentator' with special interest in secondary school geography education? Is there a night class you can do in that?

Needless to say, Sinead performed admirably in her role. But I am getting fed up with all sorts of people being rolled out on telly purporting to be experts in things they're not. Can anyone be a telly expert now? Are daytime viewers so moronic that they actually still consider talking heads to be authorities on anything?

Actually, don't answer that. I was one of those soldiers on Monday afternoon. Damn rain, I really need to get out more.