Little box of horrors

You could only feel sorry for Rageh Omaar (BBC News). The BBC reporter had been in Kabul since last Thursday, he and his camera crew the only western broadcasters to have entered the city since the US bombing began. He was filing excellent reports from a city in black-out and under attack. He was under constant watch from the Taliban and was often forced to film secretly. Last weekend, a nervous young fighter pointed a gun at him and threatened to shoot him.

On Monday night, he watched that same young fighter scrambling to find a truck to get him out of the city. On Tuesday morning, the second western broadcaster came marching into the city, and was kind enough to bring an entire army behind him. Your kids will ask you about it one day. "Daddy, who liberated Kabul?" John Simpson, son. John Simpson liberated Kabul. He was a big man with a big stride, so it was no bother to him.

Apparently, Simpson rang the BBC press office as he marched down the road and into the city, to give them time to get the word out. Maybe Rageh should have greeted him from atop a tank or while raising a Union Jack above the abandoned Taliban headquarters. He didn't force the point, but he wouldn't be human if it hadn't stuck in his throat just a little that his big scoop had been scooped. On Wednesday night's Newsnight, Omaar - still sporting the beard the Taliban insisted he grow - told Jeremy Paxman of how he had watched the Taliban leave the city the night before John Simpson (sorry, the Northern Alliance) turned up. "The night before!" he emphasised with a note in his voice that hinted at lost opportunities. Don't worry Rageh. There's likely to be plenty more wars where this one came from.

Steve Coogan starred in Dr Terrible's House of Horrible, a homage to the Hammer Horror flicks popular in the 1970s - but it might have given itself a chance if hadn't been written using 1970s humour as well. The whole thing was such an exercise in the double entendre that it speedily knackered itself out. If you tuned in at the beginning and heard the young bride tell her husband, "I love the feel of your ring on my finger," before turning over to something else, you saw pretty much the entire episode in that one moment. Actually, you probably saw the entire series to come.

In the first instalment, Lesbian Vampires Lovers of Lust, Coogan played the dashing-but-dim husband of a virgin wife, booking into a castle inhabited by the lesbian temptress (Ronnie Arcona) and her oh-so-camp vampire assistant (Ben Millar playing him like Count Larry Grayson). This gave scope for double entendres to allude to buggery to saphic love and everywhere in the narrow crack between - sorry, but you watch half an hour of this and you begin to see the world in them.

Coogan's army stories had a weary familiarity to them. "A large Turk surprised me from behind . . ." The camp vampire admitted he had been in the army too. "I was in the Gay Hussars." "Officer?" "Private. But I was responsible for the officers mess." And on and on it went. Steve Coogan isn't wholly responsible for this particular mess - the series is written by a novice comedy writer Graham Duff - but his company produced it, and he's starring in it.

Coogan, of course, is responsible for Alan Partridge, maybe the most enduring comedy creation of the past decade. His production company has also given us the excellent Marion and Geoff and Human Remains. But earlier this year, when he starred in his first movie, The Parole Officer, cinemas were forced to open windows it stank so much. Now he's starring in Dr Terrible's House of Horrible, a series that makes "Carry On" look positively Wildean. Partridge's sports-casual blazer and the keys to the Ford Mondeo had better be within easy reach.

Regular watchers of The Blizzard of Odd will know that Dr Terrible's House of Horrible doesn't help itself by trying to parody a genre essentially beyond parody. Colin Murphy's weekly trawl through a world full of bad television and movies long ago dug up the classic horror soft-porn flick, Vampiros Lesbos - you don't need to be Spanish to figure out that title - and it gave a far funnier reading of the genre than did the cucumber down Steve Coogan's britches. The thing about The Blizzard of Odd is that it is always far smarter than it lets on. "We suspect that they source the wigs first and the sketch ideas second," Murphy this week said of Bull Island. "The trick is not to let the wigs write the script." Watch Bull Island, and you'll see exactly what he means.

The Blizzard of Odd is one of five Irish-made comedies that ran back-to-back on Monday night this week, scarily looking like somebody in there has a plan. The evening became even more impressive when this week they dropped to four. The Cassidys has finally sunk into oblivion. In its place, Network 2 scheduled Father Ted, probably as a continuation of the Irish theme, but maybe as a comfort to viewers. There, there, they're saying. It's all over. It won't be coming back.

The Jason Byrne Show is Network 2's latest comedy venture. As a stand-up comedian, Byrne is infinitely likeable. At his stage shows, there is something about the galloping energy of his performances and his manhandling of the audience that is difficult to resist. But there's only a whiff of that in his TV show, as if the cameras act as a filter screening out the infectious, loveable Jason Byrne and leaving behind a sweaty, shouting guy instead. He has a habit of laughing at his own jokes that builds like a wave through a live audience, but which quickly becomes irritating when you're sitting at home just wanting him to hurry up and tell a joke. The sketches are short, but not short enough that you don't start getting itchy with your remote- control finger.

The chat-show element is fitful, too often floundering in the misdirected anarchy. On Monday, he interviewed puppets Podge and Rodge and it had all the zest of a year-old lemon. It's like watching television in which you're not always sure if you're in on the joke. The audience is laughing. The host is laughing. So why amn't I laughing.

But just when you're scanning the TV listings to see what's on the other side, he'll come up with something to prick up your ears. When the soap parodies ("Eastlonders", "Fair Enough City") are wearing thin, there's "Ruin na Ros", in which the three characters struggle hopelessly with half-remembered pidgin Irish. There was a neat joke about him wandering into the Winning Streak contestants' dressingroom, to be greeted by the moaning of the damned.

And he conducted an interview with singer Naimee Walsh using a schoolground origami game that will have brought a rush of nostalgia to 1980s schoolkids everywhere. Sometimes the kinetic, infectious puerility sneaks through the filter, but it needs to be getting past a bit more.

It's not just RT╔ that has the franchise on dodgy comedy. Channel 4's It's A Girl Thing is a sitcom written by PR executives and marketing strategists. It's Girl Power with the price tag hanging out the back. It's Off The Rails: The Movie.

In this series - cobbled together, it would seem, using toupee tape and a few sequins - four girls, portioned up precisely into the different body types, live their lives through the clothes they wear. "In an ideal world, I'd like bigger boobs," said one of them to camera, a sentiment, one would think, not necessarily limited to girls.

The lines in the script come straight from the columns of the advice page in Just Seventeen. "Though the magazines say the bigger figure should never wear horizontal stripes, I think I look quite good in this," says the One with the Big Bum during a particularly reflective moment. "Everybody knows that if you put nail varnish in the fridge it goes on really smoothly," says the Stumpy One in a quite moving soliloquy.

In between divulging fashion tips, the four act the ladette, fight for the bathroom, bitch about other women and generally live their lives as if they'd been raised in the wild by The Spice Girls. "This is how it is," the continuity announcer promised before the show and again after. If he's right, the species is doomed.

tvreview@irish-times.ie