Dangerous business, this television reviewing. Giddy at the notion of actually being paid to watch the box during daylight hours, I switched on at a weekday lunchtime - and plunged headlong into Wipeout, a programme of whose existence I had hitherto remained serenely unaware.
Wipeout is a quiz show which moves with all the agility of an incapacitated sloth. It is hosted by Bob Monkhouse, whose smile appears to be held in place with a light covering of Clingfilm, and its contestants, while perfectly amiable, are clearly not chosen for their quickfire wit or encyclopaedic knowledge of the wild side of life. (In fact, they're probably chosen because they can get the morning off work without anybody noticing). The questions, too, are of a suitably sedate vintage; an affinity with punk bands or sci-fi films wouldn't stand you in much stead in this company. "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds!" Bob will declare, his clingfilm crinkling gently under the studio lights . . . and off they go, flogging Lucy to death, picking scraps of lyrics off a wobbly board in order to earn pitiful sums of money which are frequently snatched away again with, for Wipeout, startling speed. No matter how much you were being paid to watch Wipeout, it could never be enough: but it's on every day, so - in the real world - people must actually be watching it for free. Which is a truly frightening thought.
Chastened, I switched off and decided to review something I really do watch, instead. This is always a mistake, not least because it involves owning up to God knows how many articulate, intelligent newspaper readers that you are - in the real world - sad enough to habitually spend Sunday nights in the company of the fictional football club known as Dream Team. Still, if the crowds which besieged Tolka Park recently when Fletch, Linda, Monday Bandele and the rest of the Harchester United gang arrived to pretend to play Shelbourne FC in a fictional UEFA Cup tie are anything to go by, at least I'm not the only one. Imagine: people who have serious doubts about whether friendly matches against Man U and Celtic are worth the hyped-up entrance fee, scrambling to get tickets to see a bunch of actors pushing the ball around, however artistically.
But then if life tends to imitate art, football - and, in turn, football soap - has an uncanny way of imitating life. In Dream Team, Harchester's top scorer, Karl Fletcher, is on trial for murder and, in last week's episode, he was pronounced guilty. As anybody who has watched Dream Team for three consecutive episodes knows only too well, Fletcher is far too stupid to commit a murder - but he was convicted all the same, largely because he looks guilty. Which, you might fondly imagine, is something that would never happen outside of a second-division television soap. Unless, of course, you happened to recall the words of the judge who decided to give the Leeds United defender Jonathan Woodgate 100 hours of community service rather than a three-year jail sentence, largely because he looked miserable: "Your suffering is etched upon your face . . ."
Just as well judges don't get to referee football matches. But at the end of the day, the blokes who play for the Dream Team are effortlessly outclassed by the girlies who - you might fondly imagine if you switched on during one of the show's innumerable press launches or post-match parties - were added purely for decorative purposes. The girlies are, needless to say, gorgeous. Most of them are either models (the goalkeeper's wife) or ex-models (the chief executive) or aspiring models (the chairman's Aussie daughter), but they are all tough nuts and, as characters, considerably more complex than the men which, admittedly, isn't saying much. But it's the girlies who, in Dream Team, do all the things the boys don't - raise children, square up to addictions, pay the bills. Cry, even. This appears to be traditional in footie drama. Years ago, there was a series called The Manageress in which Cherie Lunghi did much the same thing on a much lower dress budget. Why? And will we, one day, see a telly soap which features a female football team surrounded by interesting, funny, loyal, tough, gorgeous men? Dream on. But don't forget to tune in next week, to find out whether Harchester's chief executive Lynda Block actually did commit murder, as she manfully claimed in court last week, or whether she is unwisely trying to get Fletch off the hook.
Men behaving manfully were, meanwhile, the subject of Shackleton Agus Scott, which, it quickly became clear, was going to be more a case of Shackleton versus Scott as the programme honed in on the rivalry between the two Antarctic explorers and made an hour-long documentary out of it. In a week where at least four prime-time programmes were devoted to what might loosely be termed matters exploratory - BBC 2's Secrets of the Ancients, in which Sir Robin Knox Johnston and a group of jolly people in woolly jumpers set out to sail from Norway to Shetland using Viking navigation techniques; ITV's Black in White, in which Brian Black set out to examine the accumulation of chemical pollutants in the Arctic archipelago of Spitzbergen; and Arctic Adventurers: The Voyage of the Nautilus, in which Channel 4 set out to rescue the reputation of the Australian aviator and submarine pilot George Hubert Wilkins - this Telegael take on a very English subject was easily the most intriguing, and possibly the best.
It began as a somewhat impish revision of the race for the South Pole, with Ernest Shackleton in the role of "Irishman to be proud of" and Robert Falcon Scott as, and this is a direct quote, "the classic tight-arsed English naval officer of the Victorian age". But then things took a strange turn as the Irish interviewees began to show an unexpected sympathy with the doomed Scott. Who would ever have expected to see Eoghan Harris, of all people, proclaiming his admiration for the British naval officer who "was in love with Antarctica just as Pearse loved Ireland"? Post-Celtic Tiger Ireland has, it seems, more in common with the shy, stiff-upper-lipped Brit who failed, than with the outgoing Irishman who has been adopted as a management icon by US business institutes.
The delightfully subversive notion of Scott as adopted Irishman would, by itself, have made for compelling television. But Shackleton Agus Scott was, into the bargain, beautifully written, cleverly structured and tightly edited. It talked to all the right people, from writers to Arctic historians to modern explorers; it moved seamlessly between English and Irish; and it benefited hugely from the presence of Helen Shackleton, whose quiet comments and pink polo-neck added the sort of feminine perspective which is almost always absent from these boys' own tales. It looked good, and sounded better, having ousted the bland swathes of Gregorian chant - which are so in vogue at National Geographic - in favour of Holst, Debussy and Wagner; stirringly suitable stuff.
It was ironic, however, that in their determination to focus on their two heroes, the makers of this otherwise first-rate documentary fell into the trap of painting Roald Amundsen as a villain straight out of Viking central casting. The portrayal of the Norwegian team which beat Scott to the South Pole as a bunch of uncouth yobs who dressed in skins and ate their dogs is unfair, untrue - and unshakeably Anglo-centric.
Nobody beats the English when it comes to amiable eccentricity, as Trouble at the Top demonstrated when it tracked the efforts of one Torquil Silvanus Matthew Septimus Riley-Smith to set up Europe's first 24-hour gay radio station.
An impoverished aristo in spiv's clothing, Torquil seemed to have only the haziest notion of what "gay" might mean, let alone why a couple of brokers from Canary Wharf would bother to bankroll his attack on the airwaves. But he battled on, coining his own catchphrase - "Yoo-hoo" - to rival Budweiser's "Whassup?" and producing a stream of tacky publicity ideas, including the use of Adolf Hitler's image superimposed on a picture of a Gay Pride march. This last suggestion got him ejected from the brokers' office with unseemly haste.
"I think it went down," said the indomitable Torquil cheerfully, "a bit like a shit sandwich." There'll always be a Torquil - and as long as there is, the Wipeouts of this world will be forgiven.