The return of panel bleating

TV REVIEW:The X Factor TV3 and UTV, Saturday Living the Dream RTÉ1,Sunday Dragons' Den BBC2,Monday Who Do You Think You Are?BBC1, Wednesday

BEMUSEMENT, REVULSION, shock and smothered hysteria were just some of the emotions on display last Saturday night, as the television juggernaut that is The X Factor rolled back on to the screen, proclaiming the change of season more convincingly than a freshly turned calendar. It's that time of year again, when every karaoke singer who has ever slaughtered a Celine Dion number, or slowly crucified Rick Astley, comes crawling out of their earphones to audition for silken Simon Cowell and his harem.

Once again, pop mogul Louis Walsh (the most faithful, if disabused, of the Cowell menagerie) maintains his seat on the judging panel. Walsh, like an occasionally favoured, if wrinkled, sock has long been a receptacle for Cowell's irritated distaste, and whatever may transpire between the two producers off camera, their professional antipathy appears to be intact for the new series.

Walsh is joined, once again, by Australian (deep breath) "actress and singer" Dannii Minogue. Last year, Dannii, sister of the more talented Kylie (let's not even go there), provided the glamour on the judges' bollocking block, a role somewhat diminished this season by the arrival of new girl Cheryl Cole, who has been brought in to replace the well-ironed Sharon Osbourne.

Cole is the role model for the aspirant pre-teen wannabe these days. A tottering Wag (when she married Chelsea footballer Ashley Cole, OK magazine shelled out €1.9 million for the pics) she's a member of the dizzyingly successful girl band Girls Aloud.

Cole herself hit the celebrity jackpot when she successfully auditioned, and was eventually chosen for, the winning band on Pop Stars: The Rivals. But even the well-seasoned Cole looked a little stunned by her virgin appearance on X Factor.

Some of the more colourful auditionees, such as the lanky-haired "church coordinator" wearing a 1970s patchwork waistcoat who warbled "my body's just too beautilicious for you, babe" with all the evangelical fervour of a garden slug, almost drove her to wrinkle her alabaster boat race. In fact, she was compelled to experiment with a myriad of new facial expressions before finally settling on gobsmacked horror.

X Factor is a magnificently resilient beast, the cockroach of the TV schedules, impervious to all the intellectual pesticide you can throw at it. The more it is barracked, the higher the ratings. But if the thought of watching Simon Cowell's well-tended abdominal muscles and perky pecs contract with self-congratulatory loathing under his jersey knit is just more than you can hack this autumn, stay away from your set tonight. Nee-aaa-rr, farrrr, wher-e-vvver you arrrrre, X Factor takes no prisoners.

WITH THE COUNTDOWN to the Christmas number one already beginning, and the autumn schedule creeping in with the newly covered schoolbooks, that other indolent television staple, the stressed-chef kitchen-sink panto, was also on offer this week in Living the Dream, yet another reality series from RTÉ. One is tempted to ask if there are the ingredients for anything else in the national broadcaster's musty pantry.

Touted as an opportunity for Irish families to test their dreams of making a new life abroad before actually taking the plunge, the series kicked off with Cork pub owners Liam and Bernie Murphy travelling to New York to work with Cork-born chef Damien Brassel in his East Village restaurant, Knife and Fork.

The Murphys, solid, unflinching, hard-working, with three successful pubs around verdant Glanmire serving good robust bar food, had a naive notion that they might like to trip the light fantastic in the Big Apple and operate a Michelin-star-worthy restaurant.

Brassel, a temperamental, one-man-band perfectionist and former head chef at Conrad Gallagher's Peacock Alley restaurant, reluctantly allowed the couple to trifle with his truffles and get their mitts into his urban sweetbreads.

After a brace of tetchy culinary skirmishes, the Murphys managed to prevail over Brassel's scepticism and got to serve their stuffed quail to some gothically skinny New Yorkers before returning to Ireland with their ambition sated.

Desirous now of nothing more than the rural idyll (and thriving business) they had briefly left behind, they appeared happy to leave Brassel to his chic restaurant, his happening city, his great big piston-wielding motorbike and his fancy Manhattan ways.

The programme was fine and dandy TV candy if you couldn't think of a single other thing you might like to occupy your diminishing lifetime with, but there was a tedious familiarity hanging over the proceedings.

The stakes in Living the Dream are too low to make an impact, and in reality the only creature in the programme to experience a life-changing moment was the young calf who formerly owned the well-seasoned sweetbreads.

ANOTHER OF Conrad Gallagher's former protégés, chef Niall Harbison, with his business partner Sean Fee, turned up on Dragons' Den looking for a hundred grand to invest in their sexy and apparently pretty successful venture, iFoods.tv.

For the techno slouchers down the back (and I include myself among your number), Harbison and Fee have created a kind of foodie Facebook, an online business which allows one, free of charge, to access step-by-step video guides to preparing good and interesting food.

Harbison, whose culinary credentials include having been head chef for Bill Gates's 50th birthday bash on a private Tahitian island, apparently had a Eureka moment when cooking for some other famished luminary on a luxury yacht (as you do) and, with childhood friend Fee, set about realising his i-dream.

It was all going swimmingly for the engaging Irish duo as they faced the wrinkly dragons: Fee sautéed the targets and seared the financial projections, while Harbison whetted their appetite with his energetic culinary skills. And then, like a collapsing baked Alaska, the pitch plummeted, as the entrepreneurs had to admit that there was another online recipe business out there with an almost identical moniker.

Suddenly their prospects were about as palatable as yesterday's gloopy spaghetti.

"The competition is squatting on your doorstep," the drooling Dragons told the boys as, one by one, they reluctantly regurgitated their initial enthusiasm.

Although they walked out of the Den without a cent, Harbison and Fee's profile has been raised massively by their snappy and confident appearance on this hugely popular show.

"There are things we can't talk about yet," stated a satisfied Harbison on his post-show blog, clearly salivating over the prospect of future goodies.

"WE ARE THE temporary custodians of our genes, [which are] ultimately very democratic." Floppy-haired, gung-ho and happily "stupefied", Boris Johnson, London's thoroughly Tory new mayor, was ruminating on the magnificent game of hide-and-seek with his forebears played out in an exceptionally glitzy episode of Who Do You Think You Are?.

The Beeb's genealogical series, which helps well-known faces uncover their antecedents (and which famously reduced Jeremy Paxman to tears), struck boorish gold in a crumpled suit when it dispatched bouncy Boris to retrieve his family history, much as one might send an excitable mutt into the woods after a gnarled and juicy stick.

Family snaps showed Johnson as a somewhat beautiful blond boy on horseback at the Exmouth farm of his Granny Butter, a woman who, despite her arduous rural existence, believed herself to be the product of such a spectacular genetic heritage that she taught her grandchildren to eat crisps with a knife and fork.

Boris himself understood his gene pool to include a smattering of Turkish/Jewish and a sprinkling of aristo French, with a couple of solid Brits thrown in over the generations. It was a gene cocktail which, despite his rootedness in Britain, had left him feeling like a blow-in.

The programme followed him to Istanbul for a compelling investigation into the death of his paternal grandfather, a politician and journalist who was stoned and stabbed to death, before being hanged from a tree for his political opposition to Ataturk.

Undeterred, Boris, like a great yellow bloodhound, all flailing limbs, baggy coat and barking enthusiasm, proceeded to dig up the family skeletons in western Europe. And it was on the trail of his Granny Butter's salted past that he unearthed information on an episode of illicit blue-blooded fornication, proving him to be the great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandson of King George II of Britain and Ireland.

Although his genetic claim to the throne is not unique (he reckons he shares it with about 1,000 others), it is somehow not hard to imagine Boris inhabiting the gilt-framed portraits of his royal ancestors, even if he is merely the shaggy thing panting in the corner with the dead pheasant in his mouth.

tvreview@irish-times.ie