“Infamy, infamy – Panorama has it infamy!” is the catchline on the eagerly issued rant from the Ryanair press office. Except it isn’t a rant at all, of course, but another work of comic genius. Point number 11 on its counter-claims to Panorama’s Monday night show on BBC1 goes like this: “Panorama claimed that ‘O’Leary is a bully’ – this is clearly false when the whole world knows that O’Leary is a kind and gentle, caring and thoughtful, sensitive and saintly human being widely beloved by all Ryanair’s 6,5000 people and” – you guessed it – “its 66 million passengers.”

Yesterday, O’Leary went on Newstalk’s breakfast show to, ostensibly, unleash the full flow of his no-frills indignation on the BBC, but like the press releases and the claims that Panorama did a “hatchet job” on the airline, this is nonsense. Anyone who watched the show, titled Why do people hate Ryanair?, will know that it was probably the most favourable bit of coverage the airline has ever had from a broadcaster like the BBC, for whom being seen to be balanced is paramount. At the end, viewers would have been left mystified as to why exactly people do love to hate Ryanair, not convinced that it’s a hateful company.

Time was when Ryanair passengers who came a cropper showed up on television it was to complain that Ryanair’s complaints policy largely seemed to involve sticking their fingers in their ears and screaming “no refunds” on a loop. But Panorama featured a family who actually managed to get a refund for a Ryanair screw-up at Stansted airport, we were told. Wow – this global recession must have turned O’Leary soft. Even the design of the website has been changed to make it easier to avoid accidentally buying travel insurance, Panorama said, which must surely be disappointing news to knowing flight bookers who take pleasure in outfoxing the website’s quirks.

The programme also generously featured two young pro-Ryanair travellers, one of whom had a penchant for drop-of-your-hat trips from the UK to Dublin for 2p – and even had his own handling fee-free Visa Electron card – and another who related how he had flown to Stockholm, Brussels and a plethora of other European cities that he never would have been able to afford to see were it not for Ryanair. Even Ryanair’s love of flying to secondary airports was treated with the humour that this old news deserves.

Panorama’s problem, journalistically, was that ”Ryanair has revolutionised travel for the masses” has been slightly less done to death than “Ryanair sucks”, so their “agenda” clearly leaned towards the former. The real scoop was that O’Leary dropped his deadpan act for a fleeting moment. The show ended with reporter Vivian White and the Ryanair boss both collapsing into laughter during an on-camera standoff: O’Leary was still chuckling as he walked away. It was all excellent free publicity.