When the smoke clears

TV Review: During a discussion on gay marriage on Questions and Answers, Michael Healy-Rae, son of Jackie, gave the country a chilling vision of a future in which the population has been turned gay by the apocalyptic virus that is liberal legislation.

A possible future in which people will wander the country, ravenous "to engage in that activity", without any consideration for their duties towards procreation. He perhaps feels it would be wise that we sleep on our backs in the meantime, just to be safe.

Showing that he's no irrational traditionalist, Healy-Rae proclaimed that he had no problem with people getting up to "that type of behaviour" in the privacy of their homes. However, he had the look of a man for whom even having to conjure up a euphemism for "that type of behaviour" means planting an image in his mind that will keep him awake for a week.

However, it might have helped Healy-Rae considerably if he hadn't said all of this while wearing the sort of fetching black leather cap last seen on the head of the biker in Village People. Micheál Martin was beside him on the panel and looked a little hurt that Fine Gael TD Olivia Mitchell chose to have a go at his tepid but positive response rather than at Healy-Rae, who by this time had had his say and was passing time, perhaps by picturing himself with a handlebar moustache.

Otherwise, of course, it was a good week for Martin, if an unusual one for the news bulletins. For instance, when Tuesday's RTÉ News at 9 p.m. reported the cancellation of a May Day concert in O'Connell Street, RTÉ put itself in the rather odd position of declining to give itself a statement or use a spokesperson to comment on an RTÉ-organised event. If it had really wanted to bury the story the State broadcaster should have put it out on Monday, when the smoking ban choked the news. However, having snubbed RTÉ so obviously this week, surely RTÉ will struggle to get any favours from RTÉ in the future. It's important to keep in with these people, you know.

After the smoking ban came into effect, Prime Time took a peek through the saloon doors to confirm that, yes, you're not going to believe this, but it had not resulted in the corpses of dutiful bar workers being strung from the ceiling fans. There were a few dissenters, most obviously from those who had resorted to sharing their cigarettes with the night's chilly air. One man's claim that "the country is destroyed" was the conclusion of a considered rant that had included mention of wheelie-bins and, I think, because alcohol and cold may have somewhat flustered his speech, penalty points. Elsewhere, when a party of nine English men said that they wouldn't come back here, you felt like offering to help them with their luggage.

A notable feature of most of those piping up in opposition to the ban was just how terrible they looked: skin older than the rest of them, yellowing eyeballs, voices like peeling wallpaper. From the bar stool, many had noses like wizened strawberries. Perhaps the Government weighed up the issue with even more premeditation than previously supposed. If you are going to alienate a section of the electorate, it must help if those voters are likely to die a lot sooner than the rest.

By the way, I asked Shane Hegarty if that last remark was not an insensitive one to make, but he declined to provide a statement or a spokesperson.

Passer By was two hours long, but it was over after 15 minutes. Here, James Nesbitt played Joe, a man whose life fell apart when he walked away from a woman being harassed on a train by two men and later discovered that she had been brutally assaulted. That came early. It opened with Joe in his job as a nurse. He was popular and authoritative. On his way home he allowed himself to be intimidated by two suited louts, and to leave the woman to their devices. As Joe stepped from the carriage he was hesitant on the platform, which allowed him to take in the weight of the moment and to feel pre-emptive shame rush through his conscience. He watched the train move off, saw the woman in her seat and her would-be attacker propping his leg as a barrier. Stephen Marchant's script could have halted right there because it had already said almost all it needed to say, and dark insinuation and grim probability would have lingered in the gaps in the imagination.

But it had almost two hours left to go, and so Joe plodded down the road to personal and domestic disintegration, the resentment and guilt fermenting behind his low-slung eyelids. Meanwhile, this was paralleled by a storyline in which his son - whose reaction mirrored that of his father - was being bullied at school.

Joe looked for ways to redeem himself but was offered no succour from the rape victim (Emily Bruni), who took it all with far more resolve than he. Her attackers walked free from court because, as she explained, "she was too composed, not enough of a victim". Yet it was Marchant who was really demoting her victimhood. The victim's refusal to allow Joe to co-opt her grief was not matched by Marchant, who blessed him with noble angst.

The drama eventually keeled over with the imbalance. Passer By needed a way out, so Marchant delivered what he and the audience really wanted: a good kicking. Just as the script was suggesting that violence could never bring redemption, it jabbed suddenly with a pint glass, giving in to the satisfaction of vengeance. Joe found the rapist in a pub, glassed him and then gave him a furious beating on the street outside. Throughout this, a group of men watched but did not interfere, clumsily reinforcing Marchant's message about the weakness underlying masculinity. The women, presumably, were at home, cosy in their moral certitude.

Even though he was sleeping on a park bench only a couple of minutes from the credits, Joe ended up back in the loving arms of his family. More than that, Marchant succumbed to the obvious temptation of giving him a second chance in a postscript.

A man shoved a woman on a train platform. Nesbitt looked at them. We waited for his next move. The picture froze and the credits rolled. Marchant had asked an interesting question. Would you be prepared to live with the consequences of casual cowardice? But having decided that there are no easy answers, he found it more comforting to just pretend that there are.

There was nothing special whatsoever about Channel 4's Selling Houses Special. A semi-d was given the usual makeover job, being turned from something that looked as if some sort of dirty protest had been carried out on the premises into an ultra-chic dwelling that might have fallen softly from an IKEA catalogue. What the programme did do, however, was confirm the evolution of the Makeover Parasite: those who do nothing with their own house/hair/body in the happy knowledge that television will come along and do it all for them.

This programme featured an estate agent and a gardener tackling a house that its owners had been unable to sell by virtue of the simple fact that they were far too lazy to bother doing anything to it. This house had broken windows, a half-finished kitchen and a lawn that seemed to have developed a form of horticultural alopecia. They had a bed in the sitting room and plastic barbecue furniture in the living area. Lady of the house: "I read an article about bringing the outside in . . . "

Under the guiding hand of the experts, the property was given the full works in jig time. Thousands of euro-worth of furniture was brought in. A carpet of new grass was laid out on the lawn. The owners then sold the house at full asking price in three days. You couldn't help but resent every penny they made. You knew that as soon as the camera crew left they would be wiping their chocolate-covered fingers on the white sofa and dabbing their mouths with the ends of the silk curtains. Then they would buy a new place and let it go to seedtoo, because it is now easier to get a television makeover team to come to your house than it is a carpenter.