IF YOU were to put Glenroe and Usual Suspects up against each other in a battle of the TV ratings in Ireland, Mick Lally would gun down Gabriel Byrne quicker than you could say: "What's the world coming to atall, atall".
No matter that Byrne is one the country's hottest Hollywood properties; as far as domestic television habits are concerned, only the occasional Christmas blockbuster, papal visit, World Cup quarter final or Late Late Toy Show can eclipse the popularity of the long running rural soap, which this week celebrated the 200th occasion on which an episode was watched by more than one million people.
As Miley Byrne and Pat Barry respectively, Mick Lally and Gabriel Byrne once upon a mountain traded lines in Glenroe's predecessor Bracken, itself a series which spun off from the arrival of the character of Barry in Leestown shortly before the demise of The Riordans in 1978.
Such continuity adds a satisfyingly authentic sense of history to the characters and places dreamed into being by Wesley Burrowes, the man with the Midas touch in Irish television drama for more than two decades.
In Bracken, Pat Barry was the brooding sex symbol and Miley Byrne the wide eyed gom, but the former went entirely to the bad afterwards, being lured away to Amerikay where, when last we heard, he'd fallen in with a rum lot and met a grisly end in a dockside massacre.
Miley Byrne, by contrast travelled little farther than he could physically see. Down from the mountain to the village of Glenroe came himself and the da - the latter, played by Joe Lynch, shedding the somewhat sinister air he'd cultivated in Bracken and re emerging as the country's foremost likeable rogue.
That was in 1983: 13 years layer Miley and Dinny are still going strong, the humour, frustration and occasional poignancy of their typical father son relationship still an essential element of the Glenroe story.
Although Glenroe acknowledges the standard soap conventions with a steady supply of births, deaths, marriages and affairs (five weddings, three funerals and 13 pregnancies to date, for the statistically minded) like Coronation Street its enduring themes are firmly character driven and frequently distinguished by witty dialogue.
Dick Moran's love life or Cormac's pursuit of Biddy may be the potboiler that keeps the fans returning to the edge of their seats on a Sunday night; but no less crucial to the impact of any individual episode will be a little scene where Miley muses about mushroom discolouration - Dinny palms off a bogus free range egg on another unsuspecting city slicker.
The moderate rhythm of life in Glenroe also means that when the plot takes a genuinely dramatic turn - as in the recent case of the rape of a young woman - the effect is all the more shockingly credible because in the fictional village, as in real life, such horrors are, thankfully, anything but commonplace.
The worst soaps, like EastEnders, trade on an inexhaustible arsenal of trauma, pounding the viewer with one emotional bombshell after another, but overkill is not part of the Glenroe vocabulary.
Indeed, a certain air of what the dear, departed George might have called Mylesian innocence still permeates proceedings, which may explain why there was such public outrage over the series's one and only flirtation with on screen sex, even though it was hard to tell whether it was Cormac's or Fidelma's bare back which briefly rose from beneath the sheets.
In a television age when the weather forecast is just about the only guaranteed nudity free zone, one suspects that it wasn't the flash of flesh which shocked middle Ireland; it was that the flesh was being flashed in Glenroe.
Then again, an extra 100,000 viewers did tune in for the next episode, so should the ratings ever show any sign of flagging, be prepared for the unprecedented sight of Dinny and Teasy in the altogether.
Although Glenroe avoids sticking placards in the viewer's face, it has neatly worked some pointed social commentary into its story lines, most notably with its treatment of the relationship between travellers and settled people, when the character Blackie Connors was wrongly suspected of perpetrating a violent assault.
But, of course, Glenroe is escapist entertainment, too, never more so than when actor Alan Stanford's departure from the cast required that the audience join in the charade of believing that his character, George, had tragically gone missing while on a bird watching expedition in Peru.
This despite the fact that George's dulcet tones could be heard all over Ireland advertising all sorts of interesting products at all hours of the day and night.
But then this is where, in common with all other soaps, Glenroe really does take leave of reality: nobody in the place ever seems to turn on a radio or television, atall, atall.
And if they did, it would be only to see who's runner up in this week's TAM ratings.