We're not celebrities, get us out of here

Last week we posted about the truly awful RTE reality show, Celebrity Farm. This is Irish television at its mock-worthy worst. But somehow, the show got big ratings. Which makes us wonder how they are calculating the ratings. Maybe people just wallowed in its awfulness. Or maybe they knew how to make the best of a bad thing and find a laugh somewhere. Take for instance the show's nod to the new diverse modern Ireland -- one of the contestants, Kevin Sharkey, was black. Kevin got turfed off the show and hasn't stopped slamming it since: the voting was rigged, the farm is shoddily managed [the owner of the farm is suing]. Kevin vented on one of the Friday night talk shows, which was going up against the other Friday night talk show on which the winner was announced. The "winner" of a RTE reality show turned out to be a star on a RTE soap, so maybe Kevin has a point.

But whatever excuses one can make for the public, or even the contestants, we don't know what to do with this John Waters column from today's Irish Times. For our thousands of readers who don't know who John Waters is, he is the fomer Mr Sinead O'Connor, and perennial contender for the title of World's Worst Columnist. Try to believe (as Daily Howler would say) that he penned this drivel:

In the near future, the concept of Celebrity Farm will reveal itself as crude and rudimentary, because it will have opened a door on to something else, from where the true possibilities of television will become clearer. And soon thereafter, a half-hour of seeming banality may tell us more about what we are really like than 30 years of Late Lates [RTE's Friday talk show].

It's pointless tearing our hair out. It is as ridiculous to attack Celebrity Farm for lacking substance and depth as to attack the Pope for being insufficiently Jewish. This may not just be the future of television, but the future of drama, life and everything.